imminent eminence

Rome is a love letter to the lush, swinging sound of a vanished era of Italian film history. Ennio Morricone is the best-known composer to emerge from it but there were numerous others too, such as Piero Umiliani and Piero Piccioni, who serviced the needs of Italy’s thriving popular cinema, churning out scores to romantic melodramas, horror films, spaghetti westerns, erotica and the pulpy crime fantasies known as gialli.

From Roman Holiday, a write up of the upcoming release of Rome by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi, in the weekend edition of the Financial Times.

free with tempi

Photo by CubaGallery

In an age before mechanical repetition, before constant noise, before continuous acceleration, did people have a different sense of time? Pianists today are nowhere as free with tempi, as improvisatory yet structured, as subtle.

Shirley Apthorp in the Financial Times writing about Chasing the Butterfly, new recordings of Grieg -- that rely on old takes by Grieg.

ever after

Black and white guitar strobist
Originally uploaded by Merit Attention

Ask any engineer how to flatten a tension curve, which is what EverTune does, and 9 out of 10 of them will say you should use a spring-and-lever system like the one I designed.

Cosmos Lyles, Engineer, Musician & Inventor of EverTune, "a guitar bridge that keeps the instrument from going out of tune no matter how hard its strings are strummed or bent," in The New York Times 10th Annual Year in Ideas.

fried rice is nice

Quite possibly the best mix tape ever created. Courtesy of @yourperil circa 1995. Recently resurrected.

one-to-one

Illus: One to One via GoesAry

In a studio, where the pickup is close to the piano, you can achieve a very similar effect to that which the listener enjoys at home. The relationship of the piano to a microphone which is, let’s say, eight feet away is very similar to the relationship between the listener at home and his speakers. There’s a one-to-one aspect in both situations. But no such relationship exists when one is sitting on a stage, like the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow, and projecting a Bach Partita to the first row of seats and to the top balcony simultaneously.

So the result was that the record made in the summer of 1957 [just after Gould concluded a far-reaching European tour] is a very glib, facile effort, because a series of little party tricks which just don’t need to be there had been added to the piece. Now the interesting thing is that, at the same time, I also recorded the Sixth Partita, which I had played very rarely in public. I did play it once in the Soviet Union, and, I think, maybe once or twice in Canada and the States prior to that tour, but no more. Then I recorded it, and that’s a good recording. No party tricks.

Pianist Glen Gould in an 1975 interview in Toronto, reprinted by the inimitable Lapham's Quarterly.

I read Gould's account of why he preferred to record in a studio compared to performing to an audience a little while back, and it's rattled around in my brain relentlessly, alongside William Gibson's observation (as cited by mrtn) that blogging while trying to write a novel is like "boiling water with the lid off".

The collected cacophony of these two is probably why I haven't blogged the stories that are shouting for my attention now, the hard ones, the ones that have been sleeping a long time and now seem ready to run. But it is why I booked a room of my own, as a birthday present to myself, where for four days I plan to write.

With the lid on.

It won't be enough, but it will be a start.

Video: Glen Gould plays J.S.Bach's Partita #2

getting's another

The thing that set OK Go apart from their perfectly serviceable opening acts last night at the Metro (The Booze and Earl Greyhound); that sets them apart from any live performance I’ve seen recently, is that these guys know how to play.

I don’t mean instrumentation, although they have that down -- I haven’t yet met an OK Go song I didn’t like -- I mean they know how to PLAY.

Like puppies.

You’ve seen the treadmill video, and the Rube Goldberg contraption that recently went viral. Both have that something that goes on when they take the stage. There were no treadmills last night, no dominoes or paint guns (although the confetti blaster drove the crowd nuts), but that same spirt of fun turned everything they touched to gold.

The intimacy of the space of the Metro made a difference of course; we landed prime balcony seats, so we could be geezers and sit on our bums while the rest of the crowd crushed in tight on the floor. Their playing to a home town crowd also contributed -- OK Go gave their first CD release party at the Metro, and opened for folks like OMD on the same stage -- and they seemed happy to be home in Chicago. But it was more than that.

They were having fun, and they let us in on it. Like the best kind of far away friend who shows up for a weekend and fills the house with laughter and long nights and all kinds of catching up. Or that time when you were 10 and you spent whole summer afternoons choreographing dance routines with your big sister until you achieved perfect synchronicity.

They did that thing all of us should be doing every day when we get busy with our work, whatever work it is that makes it all matter. They did that thing Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls flow.

Jesters, artists, seers. They remind us.

Thanks, guys. Needed that.


OK Go's Facebook snapshot from the Metro, Chicago
Saturday 17 April 2010

p.s. OK Go is on tour, OK? Go!

el is a sound of joy

El Is A Sound Of Joy, Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra »

simple pleasures

Kafka was a slightly strange man. He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly.

Alice Herz-Sommer of London, formerly of Prague, who is 106 years old and the last living friend of Franz Kafka. As reported in I Look at the Good in Haaretz.com.

Imagine: To travel to a very nice place outside Prague. To sit on a bench. To listen to Kafka tell you a story.

(Imagine that.)


Sommers also speaks of how music saved her life »

harmonic convergence

It's very sweet. When they're doing this singing thing, they're reaching their legs across to the other one, trying to do footsies.

Medical entomologist Gabriella Gibson of the University of Sussex and the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich commenting on her mosquito research in Science.

Gibson found that two variant mosquito types -- which are visually indistinguishable -- find others of their type through the music they make:

Gibson and colleagues collected larvae of the two forms in Burkina Faso and raised them in the lab. Then they stuck a short piece of wire to their backs with beeswax and brought them within a few centimeters of another bound mosquito of the opposite sex. The pair flapped in place while a microphone recorded their "music"; mosquitoes sing by speeding up or slowing down their wing beats, which changes the frequency of their high-pitched whines.

The mosquitoes harmonized--but only with mosquitoes of the same form. A pair of two M or two S mosquitoes aligned their wing beats so that the female beat her wings twice for every three beats of the male's wings. Like a bowed violin string, the beating wings also created higher frequencies, which match when males and females are harmonizing. "If they're of the same form, they'll stick with each other with this harmonizing just for seconds on end," says Gibson. "If they're the two opposite types, they really won't come together."

A mating pair of mosquitoes in harmony (audio) »
Not »

oll raigth

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

This video is maddening -- almost entirely because the Italian who strung together a pop song from American-sounding nonsense (sometime in the 70s, it seems) pulled off the tonality so perfectly that I spent all my time listening trying to make out what they're saying.

Via @yourperil.

just like the ones I used to know

We have learned to be a little sad and a little lonesome, without being sickly about it. This feeling is caught in the song of a thousand juke boxes and the tune whistled in streets and homes, 'I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas.' When we sing that song we don't hate anybody. . . . Away down under, this latest hit of Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace.

The poet Carl Sandburg, referring to how Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas' captured the spirit of life in the U.S. in the early years of WWII. Cited in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

According to the WSJ Irving Berlin's White Christmas is the best-selling song of all time: "Guinness World Records puts its sales at more than 50 million copies, with album and other sales taking the total above 100 million."

can't you see

Photo: Pablo Casals, 1954 by Yousuf Karsh

Years later, when this portrait was on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I was told that an elderly gentleman would come and stand in front of it for many minutes each day. When the curator, by this time full of curiosity, ventured to inquire gingerly, “Sir, why do you stand day after day in front of this portrait?” he was met with a withering glance and the admonition, “Hush, young man, hush - can’t you see, I am listening to the music!”

The photographer Yousef Karsh, via his website, which came to me via @duckunix. (thank you)

gloomy sunday

Video: Paul Robeson sings Gloomy Sunday

I’ve sat in on classes where people are talking about the ’30s and about civil rights and about Martin Luther King, and there’s this gap, as if this man never existed. He’s one of the giants of the civil rights movement, and no one knows.

Joan Landzberg, who witnessed the Peekskill Riots at 13, speaking in today's New York Times of performer and civil rights advocate Paul Robeson who was the headline act of the concert that kicked off those riots.

According to the Times:

Born in 1898, the son of a slave who became a minister, he was the third black student admitted to Rutgers University. He became the dominant college football player of his time, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, was class valedictorian and earned a law degree from Columbia University.

He almost single-handedly legitimized black spirituals and folk music as an art form and became perhaps the world’s most famous concert singer as well as a renowned actor. His performance in “Othello,” on Broadway in 1943, was one of the most celebrated of his time. He was befriended by Jawaharlal Nehru, Noel Coward, Sergei Eisenstein, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Emma Goldman.

He became a pioneering and uncompromising human rights advocate. He spoke out against segregation decades before the civil rights movement began, and was a fierce opponent of colonialism when that was barely an issue.

It's fairly certain Robeson's Communist sympathies are the reason he doesn't appear in our histories.

Tomorrow night there will be a musical celebration of Paul Robeson in Peekskill, NY hovering quite near the anniversary of those riots (which the People's Weekly World has written about at length).

Robeson Celebration
September 4, 2009 8:00pm
Paramount Center for the Arts
Peekskill, NY
An Evening with Friends, A Celebration of the Legacy of Paul Robeson
A benefit concert featuring David Amram, Roy Haynes, Ty Jones, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, Kenneth Anderson, Beth Lamont, Jon Batiste Band, Ray Blue and more special guests

flip me the bird

I've developed a dangerous crush on Chicago musician Andrew Bird. It started when I caught his Eugene tethered to a Chris Ware animation. It grew when I downloaded his Armchair Apocrypha and Noble Beast CDs.

His tracks have titles like Heretics and Plasticities and Scythian Empires.

I know, right?

This one's Imitosis. I invite you to bop your head with me.

daddy of reverb

I wouldn’t have been the inventor of anything except that, well, it’s not there. And if it’s not in the store then you just have to make it.

Les Paul in a documentary that Gibson Guitar put together to celebrate his 90th birthday.

By now you've heard that the musician and inventor Les Paul passed away yesterday at 94.

When Paul wasn't cobbling together a musical revolution on a broomstick and pitching it to Gibson Guitars, he was inventing reverb and multi-track recording.

His imagination changed our aural landscape; the music that he made possible changed our world.

Found this rough home video of Les Paul playing at the Iridium in 1997 -- that would make him somewhere in his 80s at the time. If you don’t want to hear him opine on hearing aids skip ahead to the 1.21 minute mark where he opens up and wails.

Video: Les Paul plays.

Thank you, sir, for a magnificent run. Because of you, somewhere there's music.

this growing old ain't for cowards

Video: John Mellencamp Live, Don't Need This Body
I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to John Mellencamp since he had a Cougar in his name and Jack & Diane dribbled off her Bobbie Brooks. I played that tape (it was a tape then) endlessly, maybe because it intersected with a whole new landscape in my young life that had its share of running off behind shady trees and doing what I pleased. But then I grew up and got all serious about my music and decided (I guess) that John Mellencamp wasn’t serious enough.

I didn’t mean to leave him cold. I just didn’t pay much attention to what he was up to.

I heard Mr. Mellencamp on Terry Gross this morning (it was a rerun) and was captivated all over again. By his gravelly grown old voice and the way he’d lick in a few chords while he was talking about a tune; the way he played things I’d never heard him play; the way he spoke about his politics, about America, about storytelling, about mortality.

Was captivated enough that I downloaded his latest release, which came around almost a year ago, and looped it while I was cooking up a mess of chicken soup this morning along with other assorted stuff that needs to be tended to before it goes bad in the fridge.

Maybe because this discovery comes hard on the heels of waking up not too long ago in the dark hours of dawn in a hotel room in Midtown Manhattan and feeling, for the first time really, how old I've grown; feeling each wrinkly soft spot like another ring on the tree. Maybe that's why I realized with immediate sympathy that I still love this man »

Mellencamp is touring with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson this summer in what appears to be a series of podunk stops all South of the Mason Dixon Line. Plotting now to see if we might be able to intersect one of Mr. Hoo's county fairs (of which he's so fond) with a roadtrip to the middle of nowhere to give a listen.

well mannered men

Page from The Wall of Fame: New York City's Legendary Manny's Music by Henry and Holly Goldrich

The Beatles, really, made the music business. They took it from where it was, a small family business, and made it gigantic. The first time they came in, it was George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and they wandered in during the busiest time of the day. They were quite noticeable; they were wearing multicolored, beautiful clothing. I wanted to help them myself, but the store was jammed, but we pride ourselves on our musician customers.

I told them I had nobody to take care of them right away, but to feel free to try out whatever they wanted. They were great, they hung around for an hour or so, signed autographs, and purchased several thousand dollars worth of accessories. They got most of their instruments for promotion, but they wanted to try effects and they sure did buy a lot of stuff.

(...)

After that, the Beatles came in quite frequently, and when they did, all of them were perfect gentlemen, never asking to be served first. They would sit down quietly, they signed autographs. They were completely marvelous people. I loved the Beatles. They had tons of class.

Excerpted from The Wall of Fame: New York City's Legendary Manny's Music by Henry and Holly Goldrich -- and I'm going to guess that's Henry Goldrich at the mic.

Manny's Music was bought out by Sam Ash some ten years ago, which meant Sam Ash merchandising within the old Manny's innards. The New York Times ran a piece this morning about Manny's pending makeover: the old Manny's with its wall of fame will be mothballed and a Sam Ash interior will go up in its place.

I found the Goldrich book via The Virtual Wall of Fame, a site with the pure purpose of retaining some of the old Manny's vibe, albeit through a questionable information architecture.



Also from the book:

Les [Paul] is a genius. He did things with a guitar that no one else could do. He made effects that no one else could, and whatever he did he had a touch of gold; he was really good.

Strange, but good.

p.s. Like I said: Ironic »

tintinnabulation is like this

a found poem

Here I am alone with silence.

I have discovered
that it is enough
when a single note

is beautifully played

The composer Arvo Pärt, who rocks the umlaut, found in Protesting This World in Sounds of Another, a musical review of his Symphony No. 4 (“Los Angeles”) that is described by the New York Times as a protest against Vladimir V. Putin, the current Russian prime minister and former president.

swan song

Video: Bush's Last Press Conference as scored by Henry Hey

Video: The Walkmen Four Provinces