Tagged: music

September 22, 2010

Shuffle #1: Chet Baker, Neko Case, George Winston

I’m no Apple fanboy, but I love my iPod. Being able to carry in my pocket more hours of music and radio shows than I could listen to in a week would have been a science fiction dream for me back in 1985, when I lugged around a Walkman knock-off and had to choose carefully between Asia, Men At Work, and Kansas cassette tapes.

Making play lists is a little less fun, though, than compiling a mix tape was; with a nearly limitless palette, there are no constraints to force creative choice: finding just the right song to squeeze into the last three minutes of a Maxell 90-minute tape is not dissimilar to rounding out a sonnet with just the right couplet. So I usually let the iPod’s inner daemon select my songs for me.

I have either eclectic tastes, inconsistent tastes, or no taste at all, so some strange juxtapositions pop up. Here are three songs that the iPod picked today:

“I Remember You,” Chet Baker, from “Let’s Get Lost”
Chet Baker’s ravaged voice, sweet horn, and eternally boyish looks made him one of the tragic-pathetic figures of mid-century jazz. No one could swing a saccharine lyric quite like Chet; my favorite songs of his are the ones that are the sappiest, subtly undercut by his playful rhythms.

“Deep Red Bells”, Neko Case, from “Blacklisted”
Don’t listen to this one in the dark. There’s no scarier serial-killer song out there, and the spare arrangement with Neko’s full-throated voice makes it that much spookier. We never see the killer, and only glimpse pieces of his victim; it’s the imagistic flashes–handprints, engine oil, speckled fawns–that stay with you after the song is over.

“Too Much Between Us,” George Winston, from “Autumn (bonus track)”
When I was starting to make the transition into listening to jazz, George Winston was an easy bridge, with his recognizable melody lines and evocative emotionalism. I wasn’t surprised to find that he’s done a few prog-rock covers, like this Procol Harum song that shows up as a bonus track on an anniversary edition of “Autumn.” One of the great things about listening to ’70s prog-rock in the ’80s was that you could get a lot of it in the cut-out bins; I wore out my “La Historia del Rock” Procol Harum compilation tape while mowing the lawn, and both this tune and “Conquistador” still stand out. George Winston does it justice: a little syrupy, but haunting all the same.

October 7, 2009

Ronnie Scott’s, 1989: my (literal) brush with fame

Hugh Masekela A recent article in The Guardian about the 50th anniversary of London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s reminded me of my own visit to the Soho music venue in 1989, the club’s 30th anniversary year. It was one of the best performances, jazz or otherwise, that I’ve seen, and a memorable adventure all in all.

I was a student at Queen Mary College, living in the Redbridge suburb of South Woodford; British professors set a very low bar for American students, so I took advantage of their deflated expectations and explored the city every chance I got. While in Soho, I stumbled on Ronnie Scott’s, which one of my professors back home had mentioned, and I saw that Hugh Masekela was going to be playing soon. It was a couple years after his album “Tomorrow” had come out, the era of divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime and growing interest in “world music,” and “Bring Him Back Home” was on my personal soundtrack.

I couldn’t interest any of my friends in going to see Masekela, but my roommate and one of our English friends decided that they’d go to a seedy “bed show” in the neighborhood and joined me on the Central Line ride to Soho. We parted ways near Ronnie Scott’s, they giggling like schoolboys and me anxious to hear a musical legend.

It was standing room only at the club, and I found myself a dark corner with a not-too-bad view of the stage. My entertainment budget took quite a hit from the cover charge, so I had to ration the two bottles of Newcastle Brown I could afford very carefully. The first bottle lasted through the opening act–I recall it was a London quartet, doing a bop-inspired set–and I made my way to the bar for my second bottle before Masekela was scheduled to start.

As I stepped up to hand over my last wrinkled notes for a beer, the man in the queue in front of me suddenly turned around and bumped into me. He was a short man, solidly built, wearing a dark jacket; he mumbled “Excuse me” in a melodious South African accent and disappeared into the crowd. I got my drink and went back to my corner. It wasn’t until Masekela took the stage a few minutes later that I realized that it was, in fact, South Africa’s great trumpet player who had collided with me at the bar.

I don’t remember the specifics of set list. “Grazing in the Grass” was performed, and a couple songs from “Tomorrow,” but most of it was straight-ahead jazz with a hint of South African rhythm. Masekela was animated, his distinctive playing bright and round, but he made sure the share the spotlight with the rest of his band. Even in my distant corner, the club had a warm and intimate feeling, and even if I hadn’t had that bar-side collision I would have felt that I had come close to one of the best players in modern jazz.

After the show, I made my way out of Soho and caught the night bus home; I recall it as a slightly-scary, dream-like tour through darker streets than I had ever seen before. It was well past midnight when I got to my room, and I was surprised to find my roommate already sound asleep. I put “Tomorrow” on my Walkman and lay on my bed, exhausted.

The coda came in the morning, when I saw the “bed show” aficionados at breakfast to compare notes. Their entertainment was a lot less than they had been promised: they paid a high cover charge and drank over-priced beers while watching an empty bed on a dark stage, images of bikini-clad women flashing on the screen above; after what seemed hours, a woman in a bikini came on stage, sat down on the bed, did some desultory and uninspired rolling around for a few minutes, then left with her bikini intact; then the lights went up and they were hurried out for the next group of ~~suckers~~ valued customers to take their places.

It would appear, at least in the Soho district, that there’s an inverse proportion of sizzle to steak. Ronnie Scott’s, dark and unassuming as it was, offered far more than the cover charge suggested it would. I look forward to taking in another show there some time in its next fifty years of magic.

September 17, 2009

Mary Travers, RIP

My parents were squares in the ’60s. When it came time to raid their record collection, there were no Jim Hendrix, Canned Heat, or Creedence Clearwater Revival albums to discover (those were in my cool uncle’s stacks). Instead, there were Time-Life classical sets, Herb Alpert, some show tunes, and lots of folk revival records. And of the latter, heavy on the Kingston Trio and Irish Rovers, it was the Peter, Paul and Mary records I loved the most.

What made those records so wonderful was Mary’s voice. It was so different from the Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell records: big and loud and round, a voice for ringing the rafters and raising spirits. It was a civil rights march voice, a union rally voice, stirringly put in service of some of the best songs of the era. Peter and Paul could do some tight harmonies, but without Mary they would have been an earnest shadow of the Kingston Trio.

Rest in peace, Mary Travers; may your voice continue to ring in Heaven.

July 10, 2009

remember me, but forget my fate

While setting up my garage sale yesterday, I listened to Kerri Miller’s interview with Dr. Ronald Mallett, a physicist who is seriously working on the problem of time travel. Mallett’s proposal, involving a ring laser, is less about sending people or objects through time, but more about sending information. That his work was inspired by his father’s early death, and that Mallett’s ideal message from the future would be a warning to his father to take better care of his heart, makes the efforts that much more poignant.

I wondered, though, if a message from the future would be that effective. Even if we could be certain somehow that the message really is from the future, should we listen to it? Are the interests of the future self congruent with the interests of the present self? Can the future be trusted really to know what’s best for us? What if some further future self were giving the present future self good advice that the present future self is failing to pass on to us?

If I could send a message to one of my past selves, I wondered, what might it be? Helpful words of succor to my teenaged self–assurance that things will get better–would certainly be ignored out of hand; my 40-year-old self is, after all, a grown-up, and so not entirely trustworthy. A suggestion to my 30-year-old self to buy Yahoo stock? A nudge to my 25-year-old self to take some Java classes? For the most part, I’m pretty happy with the general course my life has taken while flying blind into the future; perhaps things could have turned out better, but I’m not sure that would have resulted in more happiness.

We are always, of course, sending messages to the future, whether we know it or not, and nothing makes that clearer than setting up a garage sale. Garage sales are all about reading the past’s missives, sometimes with puzzlement. A few items I can explain: the too-small snowshoes and life vests are the inevitable result of the boys getting bigger, and the bedroom dresser made sense in the last house, less sense in the current. But other items broadcast reminders of failed projects, harebrained schemes, and odd enthusiasms. The farther back the message came from, the stranger it seems.

The machine I used to pick up most of the messages from the past was my old stereo. It’s for sale, and includes a tuner/amplifier (probably close to 40 years old; it was a hand-me-down from my father when I turned 12 and he upgraded), a high-speed dual-deck dubbing cassette player (ideal for the lost art of the mix tape), a CD player (circa 1988, when CDs were a strange new curiosity), and an 8-track player/recorder (free with purchase of any other component). (I’m keeping the phonograph; I still have lots of records, and a miniature system I can pipe the turntable through.) The stereo has been in my basement for eight years this month, unplayed, and there was a big box of tapes and CDs next to it that came up to see daylight for the first time in almost a decade.

I sorted through the tapes, and identified quite a few that can go at bargain prices. Ziggy Marley, Echo and the Bunnymen, Rick Astley, London Beat: they haven’t aged well. And then there was a big stack of CDs that came from the BBC Music Magazine: mostly workmanlike renderings of Schubert and Holst, with a few keepers but a lot I could part with at 50 cents (5 for $2).

For two days of sitting in the alley with my junk, I haven’t had much success. The neighborhood kids picked up a few items (some old baseballs, an Indigo Girls tape, a giant pocket watch that was some sort of corporate gift, a brass shamrock that may have been a wedding gift), but the problem with selling to them is that there’s a good chance things will drift back into my yard before long. I unloaded two porcelain buddhas and some children’s books that I don’t expect to see again, but I still had my large furniture and Flintstone mugs to move back to the garage.

While closing up shop, I listened to some of the messages from the past that were still accessible to present ears. Nick Drake (dubbed from a friend’s LPs–you can hear the pop and hum of the needle in the groove) still sounded good, and I was surprised at how much I still liked the 10,000 Maniacs. “Verdi Cries” (a beautiful, delicate, and evocative song; Natalie Merchant really has one of the best voices in pop) sent me to the real thing and the BBC CDs, and I took out “Dido and Aeneas,” recorded by the Taverner Choir. “Dido’s Lament” is surprisingly appropriate garage sale music, and also a good counterpoint to the dream of sending messages backward in time:

When I am laid, am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate,

Would that all of us–and our various accumulated objects–could be so lucky, our lives recalled for their happiness, and their more troubling messages to the future lost.

June 26, 2009

The city winks a sleepless eye

I’m in the right age cohort for Michael Jackson’s music, but I was never a fan. When “Thriller” was a monster hit on pop radio, I was listening to pompous art rock–”Asia” was the first record I bought with my own money, followed in quick succession by items from the back catalog of Yes, Kansas, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin. When making an album choice, I’d scan the track lengths, and if anything clocked in at under five minutes I’d dismiss it as insipid pop and move on.

By the time Michael Jackson had become weird, I was learning about jazz, and filling in the gaps in my knowledge of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. And it was the delicate, breathy rendition of Jackson’s “Human Nature” on a Miles Davis record that made me take another look.

I had already come around on Prince, another ’80s star I hated at the time, when I discovered that there was more to His Purpleness than meets the eye; “The Black Album,” which I bought from a street vendor in London in 1989, is still the nastiest funk, with a touch of jazz, this side of Bootsy Collins. And when I took another look at Michael Jackson, I found that there were things to admire in him as well: a great range of emotion and styles, an angelic voice, a solid understanding of showmanship. If we take him only from the records–especially from “Off the Wall” and “Thriller”–Michael Jackson leaves behind a legacy of pop craftsmanship that is simply unparalleled.

Alas, the music is overshadowed by the train wreck of his life. He was as much a victim as a beneficiary of fame in the modern world, a soul strangled in infancy and deformed by the spotlight that gave him life. It’s no wonder that the rumor went around that Jackson coveted the bones of John Merrick; he was as much a sideshow monster as The Elephant Man, perhaps even more tragically so.

He left a wake of damage himself, with real lives–I think especially of his three young children–warped by his fantasies. That he died on the verge of returning to the spotlight makes his passing that much more tragic and pathetic in equal measure.

When I listen to his music now–especially “Human Nature,” his version of which is actually (I’m slightly chagrined to say) better than the one by Miles Davis–I hear optimism, hope, and longing. Maybe someday the aura of celebrity will fade, the disturbing strangeness of his life dissolve into simple quirkiness (it worked for Salvador Dali and Gerard de Nerval), and his music can be appreciated for its joys alone.

Until then, he makes a good argument for the value of enduring obscurity.