Music – Page 23

Midweek Music Break: The Musical Sister

October 3, 2012 by John 4 Comments

I’ve always admired — been in awe of — families with a history of hands-on musical skills. I’m not talking here about famous musical families like the von Trapps, the Partridges, the various Hank Williamses, and so on. And I don’t mean simple (or involved) appreciation of the art.

No, I mean the families with casual stories like, well… Stories about taking violin lessons while growing up in Brooklyn, from a little old lady on the corner who lived next door to a little old man who gave trumpet and accordion lessons, etc. Or about singing in a church choir as a kid, and going on to a successful career in music.

Among the four of us kids (as we still think of ourselves, a half-century-plus later), none of us has ever shown much inclination to participate in music. My brother and I can rightly be considered fans of music, but — except for monkeying around with harmonicas — have pretty much held the practice of it at arm’s length. The Elder Sister? I honestly must say I know almost nothing about her musical tastes or interests. (In the car, she’s likely listening to a talk show or an audiobook.) It’s not hard to imagine her favorite musical sound takes the form of a fanfare heralding her entrance into a room. (He said, grinning-ducking-and-running.)

As for The Younger Sister: ah yes. In her case, maybe the appropriate title isn’t “the musical sister,” but rather “the musicals sister.” Because from the time she was only yay high (as we used to say), she has loved musical theater.

I’ve sometimes mentioned, here at RAMH, her childhood habit of listening over and over and over to the original cast album of My Fair Lady — how I’d learned every word of those songs, long before I ever really “got” the story. To that, though, one would fairly have to add:

Oklahoma! (and any other Rodgers & Hammerstein production)
Fiddler on the Roof
Gigi
West Side Story
anything in which Shirley MacLaine danced (a Juliet Prowse phase also took up part of the timeline)
…and, well, really pretty much any production whose cast members sometimes burst into song and dance.

She visits RAMH fairly regularly, and I will confess to baiting posts occasionally to draw her attention. Mentioning Fred Astaire will do it. Ditto Judy Garland, or Gene Kelly, or… well, you get the idea.

But beyond music in comic (or tragic) scripted contexts, she also has fixated over the years on a handful of recording artists (Barbra Streisand, especially). I thought of this last week when I heard that Andy Williams had died; I’m not sure, but The Younger Sister may have had a distant crush on Williams. (I believe she thought he was cute, and/or had been charmed by his soft, slightly high-pitched laugh — never far away on his TV variety show.) Here’s a mini-playlist, about 10-1/2 minutes long, of some of Williams’s most popular singles:

[Below, click Play button to begin an Andy Williams mini-playlist. While audio is playing,
volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This mini-playlist is 10:24 long.

[audio:emily_andywilliams.mp3, redrosesforabluelady_andywilliams.mp3, daysofwineandroses_andywilliams.mp3, moonriver_andywilliams.mp3 |titles=’An Andy Williams mini-playlist’|artists=Andy Williams]

(Boy — is that old-fashioned or what? The classic mid-1960s “easy listening” arrangements, I mean, complete with strings and backup singers.)

As a bonus, here’s another interpretation of “Moon River” — arguably the first interpretation — by Audrey Hepburn, accompanying herself on guitar, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I believe the tapping noise at the beginning is writer Paul Varjak — played by George Peppard — at his typewriter, about to be distracted, probably for life, by the thin, lilting voice of his neighbor on the fire escape.

[Below, click Play button to begin Moon River (Audrey Hepburn). While audio is playing,
volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:35 long.]

[audio:moonriver_audreyhepburn.mp3|titles=’Moon River’|artists=Audrey Hepburn]

Happy birthday, Sis. It’s not my fault it’s a day late; it’s your fault that your birthday came too early this year to be considered “mid-week”!

The Universes through the Keyhole

September 28, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Not just any old astronomical photograph. (Click to enlarge.) See
the note at the foot of this post for more info.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Fall

Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

(Edward Hirsch [source])

…and:

The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think… The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul.

(David Foster Wallace [source])

[Read more…]

Just One Story

September 14, 2012 by John 5 Comments

[Image: Christina’s World (1948), by Andrew Wyeth… the back story of which
startled the heck out of me when I first learned it.]

From whiskey river:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time . . .

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were… and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

(Donald Miller [source])

…and:

Forgetting someone is like
forgetting to turn off the light in the back yard
so it stays lit all the next day.

But then it’s the light
that makes you remember.

(Yehuda Amichai [source])

[Read more…]

Saturday Night Music Break: David Byrne/St. Vincent, “Who”

September 8, 2012 by John 9 Comments

David Byrne has never shied away from collaborating with other interesting musicians. Case in point: his new album with Annie Clark (a/k/a St. Vincent), Love This Giant.

In truth — I am so out of the loop musically anymore — I’d never heard of Annie Clark (as herself or as St. Vincent). She’s been around for several years now, playing, singing, and recording with several indie bands as well as on her own. She and Byrne crossed paths at a couple of concerts, and their first actual contact was arranged by a charity project interested in seeing them together in a benefit performance… a performance in a bookstore. Over the course of some months, they toyed around with with some ideas — among them, how best to deal with the acoustics in such a small space. Clark, it seems, came up with the what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? idea of using a brass band as the principal accompaniment.

Sadly, no one has yet put together that bookstore performance; happily, Clark and Byrne have given us a song, and now a video, like this one. In the video, Byrne — channeling his familiar dancing-stork soul through the body of, say, the later Dan O’Herlihy — comes across a lovely, apparently helpless young lady lying in the road, and proceeds to pepper her with question marks. She answers only with one of the most difficult questions of all, and one that Byrne’s character himself manages to leave out (and disregard):

[Lyrics]

“Who” is the first song in the track listing. From reviewers who’ve heard the entire album, I understand that Byrne and Clark sorta-kinda take turns on lead vocals as they work their way through Love This Giant (which will be released in the US on Tuesday, 9/11). So far, I’ve heard only one other single, the second and rather perkier track, “Weekend in the Dust”… in which — yes — Clark does the vocal honors. The horns are still there, too, especially a big old saxophone and/or tuba:

[Below, click Play button to begin Weekend in the Dust. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:07 long.]

[audio:weekendinthedust_davidbyrne_stvincent.mp3|titles=’Weekend in the Dust’|artists=David Byrne + St. Vincent]

[Lyrics not yet available]

Midweek Music Break: Benny Goodman Orchestra, “One O’Clock Jump”

September 5, 2012 by John 1 Comment

Count Basie wrote this iconic Big Band number in 1937, and played it as his theme song for half a century. Almost every other band of the time recorded its own version; the one presented here made its appearance at the Carnegie Hall debut performance of the Benny Goodman Orchestra, in January, 1938.

Over the course of its six-and-a-half minutes, the performance is apparently structured as a series of solos (we’ll get back to that apparently in a moment), by piano, tenor saxophone, trombone, clarinet, and, well… something else:

You might be curious what the “jump” in the title refers to. Wikipedia provides several hints, without fully answering the question:

Jump music — more properly, jump blues — “was an extension of the boogie-woogie craze.” (An example of boogie-woogie music previously covered here was “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar”… featured, of all things, in a whiskey river Friday post in 2010.)
“Jump accomplishes with three horns and a rhythm section what a big band does with an ensemble of sixteen,” and
“The tenor saxophone is the most prominent instrument in jump.”

In Goodman’s version, saxophonist Babe Russin does play a central part. Easily the longest solo comes from Goodman’s clarinet, and Jess Stacy on piano and Harry James on trumpet stake out their own territories with characteristic assertiveness.

But — and here we get back to that apparently mentioned a few paragraphs ago — the real star of the performance is the rhythm section. You may not even notice it through much of the song, although it’s always there, pumping the whole thing along. But at around 5:09 it takes the stage almost exclusively, in an astonishing, all but exhausting run of something like thirty* cycles (bars?) of nothin’ but rhythm, the clarinet and other instruments simply twining around in embellishment.

Just for comparison, here’s one recording by Basie’s own band. It’s shorter and faster, but unmistakably the same song:

___________________________

* I’ve counted them several times, but keep getting swept up in the music and losing my place. Thirty is the number which crops up most often, heh.

P.S. No, the image at the top of this post doesn’t really have anything to do with this song. But I cracked up at the title. The singer pictured at the bottom right is Ruth Etting, who recorded one of the very earliest versions of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (as featured at the bottom of this post).

Alternative Seeings

August 24, 2012 by John 1 Comment

[Image: Rembrandt, Portrait of Jan Six (etching, 1647). You can trace this etching’s progress through
several other versions — six, actually — using a little slideshow at the site of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.]

From whiskey river:

Entrance

Whoever you are: step out of doors tonight,
Out of the room that lets you feel secure.
Infinity is open to your sight.
Whoever you are.
With eyes that have forgotten how to see
From viewing things already too well-known,
Lift up into the dark a huge, black tree
And put it in the heavens: tall, alone.
And you have made the world and all you see.
It ripens like the words still in your mouth.
And when at last you comprehend its truth,
Then close your eyes and gently set it free.

(Dana Gioia (after Rilke), from Interrogations at Noon)

…and:

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

(Elie Wiesel [source])

[Read more…]

You Gotta Look If You Wanna See

August 3, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Image: conceptual design/sketch of the Look-See Tree, by Ally Reeves (2007). For more
information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Dear Reader

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish — my echo, my twin —
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can’t help traveling together.

(Billy Collins [source])

…and:

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see?

Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”

The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up — mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale — the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.

Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

(Annie Dillard [source])

[Read more…]

All Too Knowing

July 6, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “Roller Coaster Tycoon Conspiracy” (click to see punchline; original here)]

From whiskey river:

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge.

(Stephen Colbert, playing it straight for once [source])

…and:

We may ask, “What is wisdom?” It is our life itself. We not only have that wisdom, we are constantly using it. When we are cold, we put on more clothing. When hungry, we eat. When sad, we cry. Being happy, we laugh. That’s wisdom. The seasons change, the stars shine in the sky, it’s all wisdom. Regardless of whether we realize it or not, we are always in the middle of the Way. We are nothing but the Way itself.

(Taizan Maezumi [source])

…and:

What Is There Beyond Knowing?

What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me? I can’t

turn in any direction
but it’s there. I don’t mean

the leaves’ grip and shine or even the thrush’s
silk song, but the far-off

fires, for example,
of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning

theater of light, or the wind
playful with its breath;

or time that’s always rushing forward,
or standing still

in the same — what shall I say —
moment.

What I know
I could put into a pack

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,

important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass
and the weeds.

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: The Eyes of War, the Marches of John Philip Sousa

July 4, 2012 by John 8 Comments

[Image: the Jersey Joes, on parade (somewhere) in the 1940s-50s. Twenty years ago, I’d have said this was too blurry or grainy. Now, I think it’s just about perfect.]

You could hear them for a full minute before they came into sight. A couple of blocks away, still, the horns sounded a little tinny; the drums were a muted, basso sort of approaching rumble. As they got nearer, each breath of the brass grew both fuller and more pointed, and you could hear not just the rattle of the snare drums’ skins but the slight ticky-ticky-tick of the sticks against the chrome or stainless-steel rims…

…and then they were there, suddenly.

You’d read (so you thought) all about The War, and you’d seen the movies and TV shows about it. You knew what they looked like in their service garb back then — ten, fifteen, twenty years before: rumpled khaki or olive uniforms, the helmets dirty dinged and battered and maybe camouflage-netted or even bullet-holed, the boots like something you’d see on a dirt farmer’s feet, their hands grimy, their chins unshaven, maybe a smear of grease or mud or something worse (the photos were all black-and-white) across a cheek or forehead, their eyes the eyes of men who’d never stop wincing at the sound of a backfire. You could trace a direct line to their old uniforms from the uniforms of the Revolutionary War marchers in that Spirit of ’76 painting.

And you’d seen them as they looked since then, too, still in uniforms perhaps (but with the logos of gasoline retailers, grocery-store chains, public utilities and bus companies swapped in for the medals and insigniae of rank), still with the smear of grease across a corner of their faces, weekend Budweisers clenched in the hands which once gripped rifles, wrenches, binoculars, and maps.

All of which made their transformation on this muggy South Jersey July morning remarkable: crisp black cotton uniforms; brilliant black boots with white laces; white helmet liners; white gloves; clean and clean-shaven faces; and a distant look in their eyes… These uniforms had nothing to do with the Spirit of ’76 guys’ clothes, but these eyes came straight from those faces.

And always, always with the music, pounding, rattling the windows of the stores as they passed, vibrating through the soles of your feet, and making it impossible to remain seated on the curb.

—

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: The Staple Singers, “Slippery People (Club Mix)”

June 27, 2012 by John 3 Comments

Wake-you-up music, even — or especially — if you (unlike me, alas) have just gotten out of bed and stumbled to your computer:

[Lyrics]

This isn’t the first appearance by the Staples here at RAMH. (I mentioned Pops in a comment a long while ago (although — note to self — I have still not posted that clip!), and Mavis got a solo here, singing Randy Newman’s “Losing You.”) As for “Slippery People,” it first appeared on the Talking Heads’ great 1983 album, Speaking in Tongues. (It was also released as a single, and a music video, taken from their 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense. The lyrics linked above match these versions more closely than the Staple Singers cover.) The comment about Pops Staples even took place in the context of a Talking Heads film.

But clearly, none of these people required my help: the Staples and the Heads were destined for each other. Witness today’s song, mid-’80s techno-R&B-disco funk welded seamlessly to New Wave rock.

(The clip, by the way, comes thanks to the good graces of the indispensable Aquarium Drunkard.)

Update (1:10pm-ish): While we’re talking about icons of the 1980s… You probably know that Norah Ephron died yesterday at age 71. Ephron crafted some of the best romantic-comedy scripts of that decade and the one following, maybe ever (When Harry Met Sally, anyone? Sleepless in Seattle?) The New Yorker has opened up their vaults and made the following freely available:

Ariel Levy’s wonderful profile of Ephron, from 2009
A selection of Ephron’s writing for the magazine