In recognition of two wonderful posts by Mangan and Sarsfield concerning Miles Davis’ Porgy and Bess, and Nina Simone, here the two are together. A live performance in 1960 of I Loves You, Porgy, starting with a little of “Dey’s so fresh an’ fine”.

Some important facts to remember: Miles’ tunes were the result of Gil Evans and Himself reworking George Gershwin’s songs from his Opera. Porgy and Bess the Opera was first performed in 1935, Miles Davis’ recording came out in 1958, Kind of Blue came out in 1959, and Nina Simone is performing this in 1960. She is 27 years old.

Seven years ago I had the delight of witnessing the Bill Frisell 858 Quartet perform eight works of synchronicity and abrasive, discordant marvel, one for each of German painter Gerhard Richter’s eight abstract works. The paintings are ugly and barely agree with themselves, yet they hold you and suspend your disbelief until they permanently reverse your position to praising the beauty and pastoral dissonance in each.

Composer and Jazz guitarist Bill Frisell was asked to create music to accompany the pieces, and he did so faithfully, molding a score for still images that captures the kinetic energy, the strained pull of pigments against each other, and the metallic dis-likability that fuses gently into a pleasing picture. The quartet musicians are Bill Frisell on guitar, Eyvind Kang (a personal favorite) on viola, Jenny Scheinman on violin, and Hank Roberts on cello.

Listen, view, and enjoy.

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Posted in music, visual

On Christmas morning, 2006, the hardest working man in showbusiness died. Every year, when returning to mistletoe-mistle-legs and eggnog forays into stockings of chocolate and midnight mischief, I always dig out some Mr. Dynamite, the father of soul, to commemorate his passing and celebrate family ties in a funky, funky way.

This year, as maybe it ought to be every year, my memorializing is centered around “Live at the Apollo, Vol. II” (1968). His transition from Sam Cooke-like R&B heart-squeezing wheezing into hard funk, rollicking perfected sexual music, is a gut-telling you to get down and enjoy yourself, god damn it.

Of all the stand up tracks, the one that gets me time over time is, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” If you ignore the superannuated chauvinistic quality of the piece, then the raw, the bitter, and the brass — it all sums to a purple explosion of passion and compassion for your trodden wife or woman or girl. He coaxes the essential bit of it: Baby, if I called you, tell me, would you answer?

Below is some youvideo from the show, though the recording quality is shameful compared. For the full record, take this slow road: http

Ian Bostridge attended the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where he received an Masters of Philosophy in the history and philosophy of science. Then he went on to attain his Ph.d of Philosphy from Oxford in 1990 focusing on the significance of witchcraft in English public life from 1650 to 1750. He went on to publish in 1997 an Oxford Historical Monograph, “Witchcraft and its Transformations 1650 to 1750″ as a post-doctoral fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Then he decided to become a singer.

As a singer, Dr. Bostridge has impeccable accuracy, an overwhelming facility for dynamic control, and a piercing straight tone that flutters into an almost mathematically equal vibrato.

Dichterliebe is a song cycle composed by Robert Schumann, set to the poetry of Heinrich Heine. This song cycle is known for its setting the piano as the voices’ equal: their relationship is cooperative instead of accompanimental. Many songs of the cycle begin with the voice but end with a postlude in the piano where the thoughts presented by the voice are summed up, expanded upon, and grieved over. I’ve provided the first four songs of Dichteliebe, just click on the title of the piece. I chose the first four because the poetry was intended by Robert Schumann to serve as a narrative for the voice and the first character climax of the cycle happens at the end of song four – read the poetry carefully as it ends much differently than it begins. English poetic translations come from Paul Hindemith at at www.recmusic.org/lieder, you can purchase the entire cycle on iTunes or Amazon, performed by Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake.

I was lucky enough to attend a small masterclass a few years ago, taught by Mr. Erik Friedlander and his Topaz Quartet. I sat in the front row, alone, and watched as he did intentional, semi-sexual things to that cello, pulling out full-grown brilliance. He harmed me with his genius; I am now some warped jazzer, and find myself slipping between the two stools of improvisation and composition — a stretch too wide for most, except of course, Erik Friedlander.

Though he hangs by the intersect of traditions, his arrangements are harangues on the void and on genre creation, rather than identification. He is offering a number of tracks for free download on his website, as well as an unreleased record based on Isabella from The Decameron. Moody and complex, desert-like and dripping, Friedlander’s art sets you solidly on adventure.

Aap Ki

Consternation

IZA (reprise)

I’d never heard Kerouac’s voice until recently. A friend of mind, in response to my post of Radiohead’s Idioteque, brought me a DVD of things he deemed brilliant. In addition to a bunch of other Kerouac recordings (where I found out, quite shockingly, that Kerouac has a falsetto laugh), I found Steve Allen’s recordings of Jack reading with a jazz group. Its quickly become one of my favourite things to listen to. Admittedly, the concept is pretty dated – to have poets or authors read over music – but if anyone can pull it off, its Jack Kerouac. I hope this inspires someone to revisit the beats; they’ve become a pop culture cliche, but there really is so much richness there.

Sample: Readings From On The Road And Visions Of Cody

Album: Jack Kerouac & Steve Allen

As the weather slowly winds itself up for winter (and your ears are hurting with raw dawn bike rides), that summer chaos recently gone by(e) is now irritating, those adventures in unknown cities are difficult; holistic simplicity is here to introvert you.

“It is enough to play a single note beautifully.”

Arvo Pärt is a post-modern minimalist composer, but nevermind that — his art is beautiful. Like church bells and numinous silence, this intimate work sends a steady finger through the human voice, uplifting and sedating you with all the purity of refracted lights. The church recording is a quiet one, so turn up the volume and listen for the scratch and hiss, the pigment overdraping.

Enjoy.

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Claude Debussy was a french composer during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Musical culture now labels him as an impressionist, though he despised the term when applied to his music. Like most composers who we remember, he started as a piano prodigy and attended conservatory, but unlike most composers we remember he fought against the system. He battled his professors with unusual dissonances, outrageous chord parallelisms, mixed meters, and music without a “key” center. Where in impressionist art, smudgings and blurs allude to shapes, Debussy’s “impressionist” music alludes to the point, and his use of rhythmic shifting has a way of setting up the audience, and then disappointing them with a minor cadence.

The Music Animation Machine was developed by Stephen Anthony Malinowski. He has done a miraculously good job at documenting, explaining, and allowing his work to be accessible by anyone. The time line of creation for the Music Animation Machine can be found here, you can create your own musical animations by downloading his freeware software and importing your own midi files by going here, and an explanation of why the colors are the way they are can be found here. For more pieces you can purchase DVDs of his Music Animation Machine at high quality, or see his profile on youtube for a large number of works.

In music school, students are trained to hear in both pitch-relations and time-relations – we recognize aural shapes and patterns in beautiful music just as a geologist would recognize subtle changes in sediment below a stream  bed. What the Music Animation Machine has created is a visual representation where non-musicians can hear and see like a musician trains to.

This is the indie era. The American ethea of individuality and enterprise has coalesced into our generation’s jazz, rock ‘n roll, punk, hiphop. Our future children (as well as our startlingly present ones) will typify their parents through our stories of having seen Grizzly Bear or Ponytail or the Decemberists. Whether they are disappointed in us old fogies, or awed by our revolutionary part in a major musical movement, that’s just what’s happening now: Independent music is the way and eternal damnation to the heretical establishments of classical music or (heaven forbid) heavy metal.

In the tradition of this frequently damnable collective, I present to you: Kayo Dot. I would term them “free-metal” if not for the genius of Toby Driver’s highly orchestrated, expansive compositions; the songs sprawl fruitfully yet fitfully through genres and moods, always settling somewhere left of tragedy, south of melodic. Their first record, Choirs of the Eye, has never been duplicated (except by theirs truly), and is a prodigious adventure through instrumentation and flow. While intimate and hideous and beautifully distant, Kayo Dot is never jarring or angular. Bleeding from part to part, without repetition, with perfect grace, this is just the kind of record you aren’t supposed to listen to.

A Pitcher Of Summer

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(image credit: Jake Kobrin)

As I make the long drive up and between cities, my ipod stays on shuffle. I pray to the shuffle gods to bring me good things, but frequently they don’t, so 350 skipped tracks in, I can settle on a tune. There are few sounds that stop me dead, that stay the finger and ordain me listen.

The voice of a small child with progeria, (wrinkled lullaby)? The painful joculations of an Appalachian primordial dwarf moonshiner? If you plan on becoming a fan of Joanna Newsom, prepare to defend yourself. Her voice is lovely, like a song or secret from your grandmother, yet most turn themselves away. This is terrible: let us not overshadow with our tastes the timbre over content. Truly, her lyrics shame me as poet and her music humiliates me as musician.

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