Midweek Music Break: Rising Appalachia, “Swoon” and “St. James Infirmary”
My brother and I (and The respective Missuses) have, quite independently, developed great fondness for the Asheville, NC area. It’s one of those little pockets of the universe where elements of climate, scenic beauty, services, and culture have all somehow come to pool together in a broth of magic.
When he recently returned from a visit there, he shared a couple of musical discoveries. They included a group with the (to me, at first) unpromising name Rising Appalachia. Before I actually checked them out, I figured it to be a bluegrass/New Americana/mountain-music collective, maybe. What a surprise, then, to find in Rising Appalachia a duo — sisters, raised in the South — with a taste for music almost independent of genre:
- “world, folk, soul” (Wikipedia)
- “They grew up playing traditional Appalachian music and soul, kind of gospel styles of music. They play banjo, fiddle, guitar, and single two part female harmonies.” (David Block, who works with them on a joint project called the Human Experience)
- “…poetic harmonies, soul singing, spoken word rallies, banjos, fiddles, organic bass and groove rhythms, and community building through SOUND. With an array of incredible collaborators, they are joined by everything from jazz trumpet to beat boxing, Afro-cuban percussion to Appalachian fiddlers, poets to burlesque and circus art.” (Their own site)
- “Appalachian-swamp-string-sister soul album complete with live percussion and bass beats, lyrical magic and spoken word, trumpet and cello wails, and double vocals-double banjos-double fiddles. Crunk-folk as well as soothing songs to heal the global soul.” (Promotional copy at various sites (e.g., CDBaby, re: their Kickstarter-funded new release, Dirty Filthy South)
…all of which bumped them, in my mind, from “unpromising” to “unlikely.” What the heck were they, anyhow?
Herewith, to illustrate the classification (non-)problem, a couple of selections from 2010’s The Sails of Self. First up, their video for “Swoon” — whose lyrics focus not on the one swooning, I think, but on the one provoking that response.
[Lyrics]
I really like that the heart of that song switches from the overt “I seduce you” message to one more personal to the protagonist, if not the songwriter: I don’t know what it is about me, I just know that I love this sound. In a PBS interview with Billy Collins which I caught last night, he spoke of how the poet is never alone when writing a poem — at a minimum, s/he is always in dialogue with the form of the poem. This line in “Swoon” cracks open a door into songwriting and lets us see a similar conversation taking place in that medium.
Below, they put a reverb-drenched, swirling-voodoo-priestess jazz spin on a classic, “St. James Infirmary”:
[Lyrics]
If you look around the Web for photos of Rising Appalachia, you’ll encounter a lot of silvery bangles, apparent body piercings, bandannas and scarves, and (temporary) tattoos and other body art. Other than in performance, these photos often feature them in run-down urban settings like old factories, warehouses, and chain-linked dirt lots full of big corrugated-steel shipping containers. Maybe they’ve adopted this witchy-punk-queen aesthetic just for promotional purposes; I don’t know. But it’s of a piece with what seems to be their musical persona: a haunting mix of old and new sound, and of interior mental state and outer form.
Hat tip to The Brother for passing along the word.
Midweek Music Break: Melodía Pegadiza, Part 2 (Pérez Prado’s “Patricia,” and the Mambo in General)
[Image: Pérez Prado, in the imaginative eyes of the Mexican cartoonist (Saul Herrera) calling himself “Qucho.” I found the image on the Web right away; Qucho, only with some hunting. And I’m not sure this image appears even there, on his blog.]
It’s been a few months now since I posted the first of these Midweek Music Breaks on Latin-music earwigs from the 1950s. That post dealt with “Blue Tango,” by decidedly non-Hispanic classical composer Leroy Anderson. This week, we take a look at one of this genre’s hits penned by the self-styled “Mambo King,” bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado.
First, an (apologetically pedantic) aside about that name: Dámaso was his given name; Pérez, his paternal surname; Prado, his maternal surname. Thus you’ll find many references to him as simply “Pérez Prado” — which “feels,” at least to a native English speaker, like a first/last name combination. For all I know, this was common during his lifetime. Maybe he even got used to it: when someone shouted out “Pérez!” on a street corner, maybe he turned his head more readily than when they called for Dámaso. But really, it’s never quite correct to refer to him as plain-old Prado — like the Spanish national art museum. Speaking from experience, this is harder than it sounds. Nevertheless “Pérez Prado” is right — just like the dark-and-stormy-night author is never called simply Lytton but always Bulwer-Lytton.
Pérez Prado cut something of an exotic figure on the mid-20th century American musical landscape. Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1916, he started out studying classical piano. By the 1940s, he had moved entirely into popular Cuban genres, specializing in the rhythm called the mambo.
What exactly is mambo, anyhow? Unfortunately, most of the descriptions of it are cast in terms of other styles which — presumably — you already do know enough about to discuss intelligently. One Joseph Levy, about whom I can report pretty much nothing at all, seems to have taken a special interest in Pérez Prado. At his site, he says of the mambo:
Prado’s conception of the mambo began to develop in 1943. He later said that four, five, and sometimes six musicians would often play after hours jam sessions on the tres (a small Cuban guitar) and the resultant cross rhythms and syncopation give him the idea. Jazz writer and critic Ralph J. Gleason reported that “Prez” talked to him about the mambo as being an Afro-Cuban rhythm with a dash of American swing. According to Prado, the mambo is “more musical and swingier than the rhumba. It has more beat.” He also explained, “I am a collector of cries and noises, elemental ones like seagulls on the shore, winds through the trees, men at work in a foundry. Mambo is a movement back to nature, by means of rhythms based on such cries and noises, and on simple joys.”
…The mambo as we know it today is actually a rhythm whose tempo may be slow or fast, and almost any standard tune can be set to its tempo. The saxophone usually sets the rhythm pattern and the brass carries the melody.
That reference to “cries and noises” and the squawks of seagulls may allude to Pérez Prado’s own style of band leadership. Often, you can hear him grunting aloud as though to punctuate the rhythm; sometimes these grunts are actually exultant variations of the imperative “Dilo!” (“Say it!”) and sometimes they seem — at least to me — just, well, grunts.*
Pérez Prado’s departure from Cuba is sometimes described as though he’d been ridden out of town on a rail, for tainting the purer strains of local music with foreign jazz elements. Well, maybe. Maybe the musical establishment of mid-twentieth-century Cuba was fiery, conservative, nativist; maybe people really did (still do) work themselves up into a frenzy of distaste over such matters, and not just in Cuba. What seems more likely, given what we could later tell of Pérez Prado’s ambitions: he just felt too constrained by a narrow — oh, say, island-sized — popularity, and left on his own. Whatever the case may be, when he left, he left for Mexico. And except for his big but fairly brief success in the US, from then on he seemed to present himself as a citizen of Mexico rather than Cuba.
His first introduction to US audiences came via across-the-border radio broadcasts from Mexico. He had a big hit there with a number called “Que Rico del Mambo,” which was repackaged and -recorded by American bandleader Sonny Burke as “Mambo Jambo.” That song’s success first brought Pérez Prado to the US.
“Patricia,” in 1958, was the last of Pérez Prado’s releases to reach #1 on US charts. To characterize it as infectious (as I, at least, am tempted to do) is to gloss over the recording’s supreme oddness. The orchestra’s swing is punctuated not so much by its leader’s vocal cries — it doesn’t seem to feature any of them — as by weird little bursts of horns and percussion which almost suggest to me a burp, or the compressed-lips Pppppbbbfffflllt! of a raspberry/”Bronx cheer.” But the tune itself seems to pinpoint a moment in time, in pop culture, captured by Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita:
[source]In [1960], even the composer Nino Rota would turn to mambo, reworking “Patricia” (Perez Prado) for the La Dolce Vita soundtrack. The song is used on several occasions, including in the “orgy” scene… As [the character of Nadia] prepares to take it all off, an inebriated guest calls for some “Middle Eastern music.” But in a truly exotica moment, the hi-fi needle falls into the groove of “Patricia.”
If you’re not familiar with that scene in the film, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
To celebrate her recent divorce from Riccardo, Nadia performs a striptease to Pérez Prado’s cha-cha [JES: ???] “Patricia.” The drunken Marcello attempts to provoke the other partygoers into an orgy. Due to their inebriated states, however, the party descends into mayhem with Marcello throwing pillow feathers around the room as he rides a young woman crawling on her hands and knees.
(Ah, the early Sixties…) Of course, you can see this scene on YouTube, starting at around 3:55 into that seven-plus-minute clip.
Anyhow, here’s “Patricia,” as recorded by Pérez Prado’s own orchestra in 1958:
Momentary Pastures
[Video: if anyone’s having a moment right now, it’s Welsh folk singer/songwriter/harpist Georgia Ruth,
who just won the Welsh Music Prize for her debut album — which, like this opening track, is also
called Week of Pines. Regular readers of RAMH will understand that one of the things which appealed to
me about the album was its mix of English- and Welsh-language songs.]
From whiskey river:
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you — sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
(Lauren Oliver [source])
…and:
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering backfrom the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhereexcept underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castleof unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. ThisI try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumnflares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay — how everything lives, shiftingfrom one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
(Mary Oliver [source (and elsewhere)])
Midweek Music Break: Trainsong (A Playlist)
[Image: still from Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 film, Mystery Train (highly recommended!)]
A lyrical burst from Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960, by Peter Doyle, in discussing Elvis Presley’s recording of “Mystery Train”:[source] I can’t think of any mode of transportation that’s inspired or just plain been referenced by more music — instrumental or vocal — than trains. (Walking? Maybe horses. Maybe.) Plenty of fun songs celebrate the automobile in general, or specific cars. But cars have got a looooong way to go to catch up to trains, and I don’t believe that’s just because trains have been around longer. Cars are instruments of solitude, of friendship, of family, as much as they are instruments of travel. But trains speak of greater distances, of community; you yourself don’t even have to be aboard, just within earshot.The first words — “Train I ride, sixteen coaches long” — “back announce” the electric guitar and bass figures mimicking the sound of a train in the distance. The song is thus placed within that large body of songs — hillbilly, country, R&B, jazz and popular — that deal with trains. Songs about railway people, engineers, hobos, brakemen, or songs that chronicle train wrecks or celebrate particular rail lines. Songs in which voices or instruments mimic the minor third sound of train whistles approaching and passing by or that make use of rhythm to simulate the mechanical sound of the steam locomotive; songs that begin with a shouted “All aboard!” Songs about ghostly trains, trains to hell, gospel trains to heaven, trains that take all day to pass by, trains that take away the singer’s beloved, or (less often) bring her back. Eerie night trains that symbolize freedom to jailed singers, last trains to anywhere, trains heard in the distance, trains that take the jubilant singer away and then trains that promise to take the world-weary singer back home. Trains from which the singer is existentially excluded and trains that call individuals together into religious, social or political collectivities. Lonesome trains, blue trains, honky-tonk trains, trains of love…
The first trainsong* I ever learned was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which starts out conventionally but — at least as we sang it in elementary school — devolved into a surreal narrative about someone named Dinah, who may or may not have been in the kitchen, and… was it…? strumming on a banjo? Huh? (Later in life I might have seen a double entendre in that line, but I didn’t know about such things in the mid-’50s.)
It didn’t make a lot of sense to pick just one of these songs today. Instead, I put together a little playlist of fourteen of them — ones I had in my own music collection. They don’t have anything else in common; one performer (Gordon Lightfoot) appears twice, and they range in length from twenty-two seconds (John Hammond, from the Matewan soundtrack) to 7:05 (Lightfoot again). Total length is somewhere around fifty minutes.
I’m not saying these are the only ones I might have included — just in keying in that sentence I thought of a couple more — but I had to get them online sometime while the term “midweek” still fit!
| # | Title | Artist | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Mystery Train | Junior Parker | 2:26 |
| 02 | Chattanooga Choo Choo | Glenn Miller | 3:29 |
| 03 | Steel Rail Blues | Gordon Lightfoot | 2:50 |
| 04 | Just Like This Train | Joni Mitchell | 4:25 |
| 05 | Orange Blossom Special | Johnny Cash | 3:06 |
| 06 | On The Tracks | John Hammond | 0:22 |
| 07 | Waiting For The Train To Come In | Peggy Lee | 3:09 |
| 08 | Train To Birmingham | John Hiatt | 3:39 |
| 09 | Downbound Train | Bruce Springsteen | 3:38 |
| 10 | Last Train To Clarksville | The Monkees | 2:47 |
| 11 | Take The “A” Train | Duke Ellington | 3:01 |
| 12 | Railroad Wings | Patty Griffin | 4:02 |
| 13 | Canadian Railroad Trilogy | Gordon Lightfoot | 7:05 |
| 14 | Mystery Train | Elvis Presley | 2:29 |
* No, I don’t think that’s a real word. But if I had to make up a word to go there, it works, doesn’t it?
Midweek Music Break: Jo Stafford, “You Belong to Me”
As a generation, Baby Boomers are notorious for imagining that the world started, revolved around, and ended with them and their peers. The first hit recording we ever heard of a given song thus became the reference version, the one to which all others would be compared — usually to the others’ detriment. We had no history with earlier or later versions, and since we were the high point of pop culture (especially in the US), the other versions might as well not exist. (And if they did, they were frank rip-offs.)
Even knowing this about my generation, I admit I was surprised to find out — just a few years ago — that The Duprees were not the original artists for this song.
…which news, well, didn’t bother me that much. Because I’ve never gotten past one very important moment in The Duprees’ version: the concluding, drawn-out you… be-long… tooooo-oo… me-eeeeeeeeee. It sounds — has ALWAYS sounded — horribly flat to me. I always assumed they must be singing the song as actually written…
But no.
You may complain that I should not compare a 1960s doo-wop group who started out (as the saying goes) singing on Jersey City street corners with the vocals of a coloratura soprano, trained for opera, who just sort of fell into Big Band and later jazz. Maybe it’s not fair. And maybe I should apologize for that.
But gawd, this version just kills the one I grew up hearing…
[Below, click Play button to begin You Belong to Me. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:06 long.]
[audio:youbelongtome_jostafford.mp3|titles=’You Belong to Me’|artists=Jo Stafford]
Now that I’ve read up more about the song…:
It was written in 1951 or ’52 by one Chilton Price (nee Searcy). Price was a record librarian for radio station WAVE in Louisville, Kentucky at the time, but she had aspirations as a songwriter. Not entirely unfounded aspirations, I should add: in 1951, she’d offered up a song to country bandleader Pee Wee King and his lead singer, Redd Stewart. Called “Slow Poke,” the song was King’s first and only #1 hit single. Because King and Stewart had done so much to promote the song — Price said she didn’t know anything about the music industry — she freely offered them joint songwriting credit.
Scroll ahead a few months: now Price had another song which she thought the fellows might be interested in. This one was a wistful tune about a pilot returning home from service in World War II, and — written for a woman singer, obviously — was called “Hurry Home to Me.”
This time around, King and Stewart took a more active role in the song’s composition. It’s not clear who’s right and who’s wrong; Price herself told Nick Clooney in 2002 that it was her words and her tune, while Pee Wee King’s autobiography, Hell Bent for Music, says:
Chilton wrote complete songs, and they were beautiful, but since she doesn’t sing, she didn’t know how they would sound… Redd and I took her songs and played them, singing and humming, changing words and notes here and there until we’d get a version easier to sing. At the time it was hard to get war songs recorded, so we gave “Hurry Home to Me” a new name and changed it into a kind of universal song about separated lovers.
Regardless of which version you believe, what seems beyond debate is that Price quite happily shared writing credit with King and Stewart on “You Belong to Me.” (In that Clooney interview, she conceded the issue quite charmingly.)
Jo Stafford didn’t record the song first. That honor went to a country singer named Sue Thompson, in 1952. And “You Belong to Me” didn’t just sit around on the shelves afterwards; by mid-1952, both Jo Stafford and Patti Page had recorded hit versions. From then on, it never really languished; it’s one of those pop songs which seems to get picked up by every (yes) generation. It’s been covered by Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Bob Dylan, Jim Reeves, Connie Stevens, Eddie Vedder… But it was Stafford’s recording which really broke out first, going to #1 in both the US and the UK. (Even The Duprees couldn’t push it that high, only getting up to #7.)
Midweek Music Break: Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell (and Patti Scialfa), “Spanish Dancer”
This is one of those weeks in which the world feels too much with us. For distraction’s relief, I can’t quite bring myself to turn to something frothy like bubblegum music. But I figured I could do far worse than to check in — finally — on Emmylou Harris’s newest album, Old Yellow Moon, with Rodney Crowell.
It probably marks me as the lamest sort of Harris fan to admit that I’d never heard of Crowell months ago, before this album started to get promoted. Heard of isn’t the same thing as heard, of course, and as it happens I’ve indeed heard a good deal of him: he was a charter member of Harris’s backup band, the Hot Band, back in the 1970s. And he’s written numerous songs for her. (She picked one, “Bluebird Wine,” to open 1975’s Pieces of the Sky, the album which more or less launched her career.)
The selection I’m featuring today was written and first recorded by Patti Scialfa for her 1993 album, Rumble Doll. It’s not a story song, exactly, but it implies a full story — one featuring a bad-boy heartbreaker as the narrator’s downfall (emotional if not in other respects). Here‘s Harris discussing Scialfa, and this song, with NPR’s Terry Gross:
She is an exquisite writer. She writes about the female heart, the poetry of being female, in a way that it just — every singer-songwriter female artist that I know loves this record. It never got the attention it should have. I suppose she will always be overshadowed because she’s, you know, Bruce Springsteen’s wife. But it doesn’t take away from the art, you know, her artistry.
…This particular song has been on my wish list to record ever since I first heard it. And I don’t know, I just put it off and put it off. It didn’t seem right for the project. And after a while, I admit I thought, well, how can I at the age of, you know, 65, sing, “Oh mama,” you know, talking to my mother, which actually is a reality in my case because my mother is still very much alive.
But it’s universal. You know, it’s that vulnerability that you feel when you know that you could fall, and you know how vulnerable… that you are. But it’s something that you cannot resist, and she just puts it in a way that is so beautiful, and the melody, too. And I actually really love — I love Rodney’s harmony on it.
The rendition of it here is haunted not just by Crowell’s harmonizing in the choruses and bridges, but by Harris’s classic foreground voice. There’s a thing which harmonica players do, called “bending the note,” and Harris offers up something similar here: her voice quavering, trembling on the brink of but not quite breaking.
About those harmonies, by the way: Crowell’s chief role in the Hot Band was as a harmony singer, so he and Harris have been blending their voices easily, naturally, for decades. But Harris frankly concedes that she doesn’t know exactly what harmony is (from The Tennesseean (2/24/2013), quoted on her “News” page):
How do you sing in harmony?…
Let’s ask the most prominent harmony vocalist of our time, one whose voice has blended elegantly with Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson, Keith Whitley, George Jones, Solomon Burke, Elvis Costello, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Roy Orbison, Mark Knopfler, Gram Parsons, Little Feat, Dan Fogelberg and three out of five ironically mustached East Nashville hipster baristas.
Let’s ask Emmylou Harris.
“I really don’t know,” says the Country Music Hall of Famer…
Come now, Ms. Harris. That’s like a member of Congress not knowing how to create gridlock, or a Goo Goo Cluster not knowing how to be delicious, or Taylor Swift not knowing how to make the “Oh, my God, I’m totally shocked!” face.
“Really,” Harris swears. “I’ve never studied intervals or parts. Whatever I’ve done came from total ignorance and fearlessness. For me, it’s whatever isn’t the melody.”
Whatever isn’t the melody. I — totally ignorant but hardly fearless I — will have to remember that.
Here’s their take on “Spanish Dancer”:
[Lyrics]
And, for comparison, here’s an entirely unofficial YouTube video over Scialfa’s own version:
Unseen in September
[Image: Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) :: 1950 :: Jackson Pollock, by Chris Van Pelt on Flickr]
From whiskey river (excerpted there; this is the whole poem):
Three Songs at the End of Summer
A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.Across the lake the campers have learned
to water ski. They have, or they haven’t.
Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone
suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!”Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.*
The cicada’s dry monotony breaks
over me. The days are bright
and free, bright and free.Then why did I cry today
for an hour, with my whole
body, the way babies cry?*
A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket…
In my childhood
I stood under a dripping oak,
while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,
waiting for the school bus
with a dread that took my breath away.The damp dirt road gave off
this same complex organic scent.I had the new books — words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend — and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.
(Jane Kenyon [source])
…and:
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.
(Alan Watts [quoted various places (e.g. here), apparently from a book called The Way of Liberation])
Midweek Music Break: Dúo del Sol, hello Kaleidoscope
[Image: Dúo del Sol — guitarist Tom Farrell and violinist Javier Orman*]
Probably because of this Midweek Music Break series, a couple of years ago I started to receive, via email, promotional announcements about new performers (or new albums by old performers) — even or especially, performers whose work I’ve never covered. The first time this happened was shortly after I music-broke with a band called Harlan Pepper; the group is from Hamilton, Ontario, and so — coincidentally — were the other performers alerting me to new releases. (I don’t know much about Hamilton, Ontario, but I know it’s got an uncommonly high concentration of musical talent and ambition.)
Most of the writeups I get this way don’t encourage me to explore further, although I’ll usually give a listen for the first 30 seconds or so of the new video or free download. The bands often describe themselves in terms like this (not quoting anyone’s exact words, but this is the sense):
We’re just a bunch of four guys who’ve known each other our whole lives. We think music sounds best when it’s spontaneous and played from the heart. And the music on our first EP reflects that. We recorded it in a barn on Jimmy’s dad’s farm over an intense weekend of loud, soul-ripping throat-shredding sound…
They often cite the influence of bands I’ve never heard of (not really a surprise: I’m no authority). They’re always earnest, generous with their sample MP3s, and often (not always) young. I wish them all well, and apologize to any I’ve seemed to ignore: there’s just too much music to hear — way more than books to read, even — and I just don’t write about it often enough.
Still, there are exceptions. Here’s how Dúo del Sol described themselves in the email announcement of their first album, called hello Kaleidoscope (and released yesterday):
Both of us were accomplished classical players during and after college, touring and winning awards in that realm. The most obvious career choice would have been to stay the course, but something was missing.
Dúo del Sol freed us. It is the most rewarding thing we’ve ever done. Musically, we innovate from improvisation and obsess over the songwriting. Creativity is the norm and our lifestyle, and we explore any world that our muse takes us to… We’re both drawn to highly emotional, personal music. Dúo del Sol lets our shared classical training shine through, but we are not constrained by any preconceived blueprint.
The message included, of course, a link to their home page, and cited a review in a Los Angeles entertainment magazine. It also included this video, a “teaser trailer”:
That got my attention.
The duo had already released an EP when they held their successful, modest Kickstarter campaign to fund the album’s production. I didn’t know of them then, but I know I’ll pay attention henceforth. hello Kaleidoscope — as the video above hints — pretty much bursts at the seams with energy. Guitar and violin together is not an unusual combination, of course, and even not-an-authority I have heard them in jazz settings. But Dúo del Sol, with all its percussive, insistent Latin urgency, has already earned a place in my Favorites playlist.
About that “energy” and “urgency”: although the video suggests that the tunes on hello Kaleidoscope will bring you to your feet, pulse pounding, the album also attends to the quieter urgencies of the heart: you’ll find yearning here, expressions of things painfully absent as well as joyfully in attendance, and sometimes the one turning into the other. Here, for example, is “Louie” — which escorts you from almost twenty seconds of silent contemplation to a sort of quiet swing (which may further lead you, as it led me, to a sudden grin), and ties it all up with a prolonged, single sweet note of finish: a last swipe with a buffing pad at the polished musical surface.
And here’s “Cualquiera,” which puts them firmly back in move mode:
It’s kind of a tough pick, though. When I first started this post, I wanted to do a playlist which included all eleven songs. But I’d rather send you to Bandcamp — where you can both listen to and buy the whole thing yourself.
________________________
* It’s not just guitar and violin. They also manage to work cello, percussion, and even an accordion into their mix, and a couple of songs include vocals as well as instrumentals. But oh, yes — it’s the violin and guitar which you’ll remember.
So Little to Say, So Many Ways to Say It
[Image: “IM,” graphic by user “L.e.e.” on Flickr. The descriptive text below the work there says, FYI, I actually know 3 languages. This is the 3rd one =).]
From whiskey river:
We can set up a certain environment in which we have an agreement to suspend the rules — that is to say to meditate, to stop thinking for a while, to stop making formulations.
This means, essentially, to stop talking to yourself. That is the meaning of the word in Japanese — munen — that is ordinarily translated as “no thought.” To meditate is to stop talking to yourself!
We say, “Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness,” but we don’t follow our own advice. We’re talking to ourselves most of the time — and if you talk all the time you’ve got nothing else to talk about but your own talking! You never listen to what anybody else has to say, without a running commentary of your own talking. And if all you ever listen to is talking — be it your own or other people’s — you have nothing to talk about but talk.
You have to stop talking in order to have something to talk about!
(Alan Watts, What Is Zen? [source])
…and:
The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband — and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.
(Terry Pratchett [source])
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