Monday, January 31, 2011

Jennifer Koh


Here's the violinist Jennifer Koh, accompanied by Reiko Uchida, playing the first movement of "String Poetic" by Jennifer Higdon.  Higdon also arranged this for flute and piano as "Flute Poetic."  Aside from the "inside the piano" keyboard effects, this sounds to me like a fairly conservative neo-romantic sort of piece, not that there's anything wrong with that...  I've only heard Koh once, a long while back, and I remember that at the time she had a really spectacular instrumental technique, though perhaps not always the most sensitive tone.  She has an interesting repertoire, and she's currently doing a recital series at the 92nd Street Y featuring unaccompanied Bach alongside 20th century works.

You can see Jennifer Koh interviewed by Eugenia Zuckerman here.

Clara Rockmore

Here's the famous Theremin virtuoso playing Saint Saëns's "The Swan."  And here she is in an explanatory video that also features Robert Moog, who made Theremins as well as inventing the synthesizer:

You can download Rockmore's Theremin method here.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

V. S. Ramachandran

This guy's gotta new book out.  An "Ames Room"... hmmm...

Ladysmith Black Mambazo


I just heard Ladysmith Black Mambazo's manager, Mitch Goldstein, say on the radio that he was the one who suggested that the South African a cappella group sing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" on their new album, Songs from a Zulu Farm.  I wonder whether that might, perhaps, be considered a little bit patronizing and infantilizing?  Would the conductor Valery Gergiev's manager suggest that he record "Three Blind Mice"?  Would Radiohead's manager suggest that the band cover "Itsy Bitsy Spider"?

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Milton Babbitt

Milton Babbitt has died.  Among his students were Stanley Jordan:


...Charles Wuorinen:

... and Steven Sondheim:

Here are The Bad Plus playing Babbitt's "Semi-Simple Variations":

Here's an hour-long documentary about Babbitt.  And here's a nice long interview with him from 2001.  Some choice quotations:

• "Anchor Steam was the one beer that was there all through the years.  A lot of people don't like Anchor Steam; they don't like the flowery aspect, but that's a matter of taste."

• "I don't even know what hip-hop is, to be honest with you.  Do you understand hip-hop?  What is all this scratching of records?"

• "I don't think ['serious music'] will survive in any form that I would regard as serious."

Sylvie Guillem

This is quite something:
Very expressive vertebrae...

Happy 90th Birthday, André Hodeir

A week ago the great musical polymath André Hodeir celebrated his 90th birthday.  Bon anniversaire!  Here he is playing jazz violin in the early 1940s.  Among his many books are Hommes et problemes du jazz and La musique depuis Debussy, translated into English as Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence (1956) and  Since Debussy (1961).  Selections of his translated writings on jazz were reissued a few years ago in a single volume.

One his most interesting compositions is "Jazz et Jazz," a work from the early 1950s that combined musique concrète with improvisations by a jazz group featuring the pianist Martial Solal.  You can sample a small snippet here.   Here's Hodeir in the 1950s talking about the music he wrote for a Jacques Cousteau soundtrack.  And here's some footage of him in the early 1970s.

He's featured at 41:50, and various other points, in this documentary on jazz in France from the early 1990s.  And here he is, just last year, in a documentary about Django Reinhardt (at 1:50):
Hodeir was exactly ten years and four days younger than his friend the jazz discographer, journalist, historian, and promoter Charles Delaunay, who would have turned one hundred this month.

Carmell Jones

Although I don't think this live 1970 performance by Oliver Nelson of his big band chart "Down by the Riverside" is quite as good as the well-known 1965 studio version with Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery, it's a great opportunity to see the under-recognized trumpeter Carmell Jones in action:
Jones, who played on Horace Silver's famous Song for my Father, made quite a lot of recordings in the U.S. during the early 1960s before moving to Europe for fifteen years or so—this concert took place in Berlin.  He starts his solo about a minute-and-a-half into this video clip.  Burnin' it up.  His Jazz Impressions of Folk Music album is worth a listen, too.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Marsalis and Clapton: Rock and Roll

Wynton Marsalis once seemed disappointed that jazz trumpeter Miles Davis "decided to go into rock," but evidently Marsalis has changed his mind, since he's decided to tour with Eric Clapton.  It would be nice to hear them kick it on "White Room":

Or, perhaps somewhat more likely, since the gig is being advertised as a blues session, they might rock out on "Crossroads":

But probably they'll mainly stick to promoting Clapton's recent album, which includes a cameo appearance by the trumpeter.  Marsalis has certainly come a long way from the Hummel Trumpet Concerto:

...and his Linus and Lucy tribute, "Joe Cool's Blues":

... and then there's those concerts with Willie Nelson:

'course, Marsalis probably doesn't approve of some of Willie Nelson's hobbies.

4'33''

I'm reading Kyle Gann's book about John Cage's 4'33''.  I guess you gotta credit someone who can write a 200-page book about a piece of music in which nothing happens, but nonetheless some of it seems like padding to me—there's a lot of pages devoted to a potted biography of Cage and short sketches of some of the people who influenced him and his famous silent piece, from Luigi Russolo to Daisetz Suzuki and Robert Rauschenberg.  But I'm learning a lot too—like the fact that Cage literally spent several years thinking about this piece, occasionally mentioning it in lectures, before he actually wrote it.  Or that the Korm Plastics record label released a CD containing nine different versions of it.  Here's a performance by David Tudor, who gave the premiere in Woodstock, NY in 1952:
I especially liked Gann's succinct comparison between 4'33'' and Erik Satie's famous "Vexations" (a short piano piece to be played 840 times in a row) and "furniture music": "instead of playing nothing and asking people to listen to environmental sounds [as Cage did], Satie played music as environmental sound, and begged people—in vain!—not to listen to it!"  And, although Gann wasn't the one to discover it, it was intriguing to find that 4'33'' was anticipated in a 1932 strip cartoon drawn by someone named "Hy Cage."

It's a pity the "Cage against the machine" campaign failed...

Yoko Ono


I've just been flipping through Yoko Ono's book Grapefruit.  I can't help but think that she would have been able to devote much more of her life to this sort of very interesting art had she not ended up with John Lennon and spent so much time hanging out with celebrities and joining in on the chorus on "Bungalow Bill."  Nothing against "Bungalow Bill," but I don't think it's half as interesting as, for example, her "Beat Piece" from 1963: "Listen to a heart beat."  Or a film like this, from 1965:
On the other hand, if she'd never married Lennon—or even stayed married to Toshi Ichiyanagi—I guess not so many people would have heard of her and been exposed to her own work, so maybe it was a reasonable move strategically from that standpoint...   Still, it would have been nice if a bigger crowd had shown up for this performance at MOMA last year:

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Lena Horne

...aged about twenty-six, in the 1943 movie Stormy Weather:

...and on the Rosie O'Donnell Show fifty-four years later:

Sarah Bernhardt


Here she is playing Hamlet in 1900 (or 1899?), when she was 56 years old:

And here's a recording from 1903 from Edmond Rostand's "La Samaritaine":

Some more photographs:


And here she is in Brooklyn, New York in 1917:

You can download Bernhardt's autobiography here.



The Milkmaid


You can explore Johannes Vermeer's mid-seventeeth-century painting "The Milkmaid" here, and you can also read about it on the website of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  It was loaned to the Met in New York for an exhibit last summer.  The image above really doesn't do it justice, but it gives you a general impression of the work itself.  Look at the beautiful detailed weaving patterns on the basket hanging by the window and the bread basket on the table.  And see the way the blue cloth drapes over the table's edge?  Evidently the object on the floor in the bottom right-hand corner is a foot stove.  I especially like the way she holds her right hand while tilting the milk jug... it visually gives a sense of the weight she's carefully bearing.

Nam June Paik's "One for Violin Solo"

Here are three different performances of Nam June Paik's classic Fluxus composition, "One for Violin Solo," premiered in 1962.  I would recommend playing them all simultaneously.

I must admit that I would love to see this work performed by Woody Allen's ex-step-mother-in-law, Anne Sophie Mutter...

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Carlos Gardel

The tango king sings "Tomo y Obligo" in 1931:
For more on Gardel, read Simon Collier's book.  And if you have time, it's worth watching Robert Farris Thompson's lecture on the African roots of Tango.  And if you have even more time, read Thompson's book.

Aretha Franklin

I've never agreed with the conventional wisdom that Aretha Franklin's best work was her most popular—the late '60s pop tracks on Atlantic Records, like her well-known album I've Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You.  I think her absolute best singing was recorded in church.  The early recording of her at the New Baptist Bethel Church in Detroit, when she was only fourteen years old, is truly remarkable:

And I think my favorite of all that I've heard is the famous "Amazing Grace," from 1970:
Christopher Small writes about this breathtaking ten-minute performance in his book Music of the Common Tongue.  It's worth listening carefully to how she holds the audience in suspense with the pick-ups to the big downbeats, especially at the beginning of each chorus—an amazing exercise in creating tension and release, expectation and fulfillment.

But I also love Aretha's early work for Columbia records, at least the bluesier and funkier tracks—less so the Dinah Washington-like jazz and ballads.  Check out "Soulville," recorded when she was still just twenty.  One of my favorites is the original version of "Today I Sing the Blues," recorded with the Ray Bryant trio in 1960, when she was eighteen, but I can't find a decent version online to link to.  Try to find the original recording, not the re-issued version with an overdubbed organ track.

Of course, you really can't understand Aretha without knowing a little bit about her father, Reverend C L Franklin, who was one of the most famous preachers of his day.  Historian Nick Salvatore wrote a great biography of him.  Here's one of his sermons:

Different Dances

Sylvie Guillem (modern dance):

Romanian batuta dance:

Abdoulaye Camara (trad. Guinean):

Martha Graham's Appalachian Spring:

Savion Glover tap dance:

Maria Tallchief and Rudolf Nureyev:

James Brown:





Georges Aperghis


This performance of Les Guetteurs de Sons by Georges Aperghis is worth watching all the way through...

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Mary Ellen Bute


Here's a very short film about the experimental film animator Mary Ellen Bute (1906–83).  Seems like there's a whole story here that's not really been told very thoroughly.  Her "Synchrony No. 4," with Bach's D-minor organ toccata as its soundtrack, predates the work Oskar Fischinger did with the same music for the opening sequence of Disney's Fantasia:
The same year that Fantasia came out, 1940, Bute was collaborating with the Canadian Norman McLaren on "Spook Sport":
And also in 1940, McLaren did his "Boogie Doodle," with music recorded by the pianist Albert Ammons the previous year ("Boogie Woogie Stomp," from the very first Blue Note Record sessions):


But I digress... (!) Anyway, here's a short online article about Mary Ellen Bute with a filmography.  I was interested to read about her work with Joseph Schillinger.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Keith Jarrett... and what to expect at a concert


So yet again, Keith Jarrett has berated his audience mid-concert for coughing and using electronic gadgets.  I have some sympathy for him, since audiences seem to be getting noisier and noisier, but I wish he'd deal with it more decorously.

More interesting are the issues this raises about the formal and informal transactions involved in professional musical performances.  Does an artist have the right, ethically or contractually, to a certain standard of audience conduct, and is the audience, in return for its ticket purchases, entitled to a certain standard of behavior from the performer?  I've no idea whether these sorts of things are ever specified in artist's concert contracts.

I can well imagine that performers might sometimes request a nonsmoking environment, or a certain level of security so that they don't have to take matters into their own hands (e.g Amy Winehouse punching unruly fans).  But I somehow doubt it's common for someone's contract to include a "no coughing" rider.  Maybe Keith Jarrett could consider one...

Conversely, do audiences have a right to hear a performance of a certain standard?  I know musicians' and writers' recording and publishing contracts often specify that their work has to meet a certain, vaguely specified, standard, but it's rare to hear of concertgoers asking for a refund because the show wasn't what they expected, unless, for example, that they suffer tangible physical harm (like the Princeton professor who sued the Smashing Pumpkins for damaging his hearing.)

When you buy a concert ticket, I guess you're kind of taking a gamble and it's up to you to know that Keith Jarrett might act obnoxiously, that Martha Argerich might not show up, or that Sonny Rollins might have a bad night.  Just like when you order a meal at restaurant there's no quality guarantee.  So I suppose it's just up to the event organizers whether, for the sake of good publication relations, they choose to offer refunds to dissatified patrons, like they did when Steve Martin didn't tell many jokes (or something) at the 92nd Street Y... even though the event was a charity fundraiser.

But what about when the performer or concert producers know in advance that the audience probably isn't going to get what it expects (c.f. Dylan at Newport '65)?  Should they, to be ethical, have issued a warning?  And, more to the point, should Keith Jarrett's concert promoters start issuing disclaimers about his deportment?

Twyla Tharp


Philip Glass wrote the music for Twyla Tharp's In The Upper Room back in the 80s.  It seems like Glass's music wouldn't give a choreographer as much to go on as music with, shall we say, a bit more substance.  I guess the choreorapher could either find that liberating or frustrating.  At any rate, it's interesting to think about how little of the dance seems to relate directly to the music beyond the general mood.  Try watching the same dance while listening to some completely different music...

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp came along at a time when visual art was changing incredibly fast, and in many, many ways at once, and somehow he was the guy who realized that art doesn't need to be about what you do or how you do it; it can be solely about what you're trying to say, and what it means.  Here's what the critic Clement Greenberg had to say about Duchamp.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

La Monte Young


La Monte Young is, I think, a decent candidate for the most important classical musician of the last fifty years (whether or not he's a "classical" musician).  Here he talks about what became known as "minimalism."  He's much more comfortable with the term than many of the other composers (Riley, Reich, Glass) who've been labeled with it.  I can't help feeling that, in terms of his public profile, Young has always been his own worst enemy.  There's the famous story about how he missed out on a chance to have his music released by Columbia Records in the 1960s because he wanted to record himself singing by the seashore and, when the initial recording didn't come out too well, he chose not to release anything at all rather than consent to the record company's suggestion that he overdub the singing over pre-recorded sea sounds.  I can't help but comment on his sartorial and tonsorial aesthetic...  He's a very down-to-earth conversationalist who's very good at explaining his music clearly and accessibly—completely at odds with his outlandish appearance.  And the world would probably be a much saner and more interesting place if more of us followed his example and didn't care about what anybody else thinks...

Anyway, check out The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Step and B flat Dorian Blues.

Oscar Peterson



It's worth comparing this live 1964 version of "C Jam Blues" to the studio recording the Oscar Peterson trio recorded for the album Night Train a year or so earlier.  I think the studio version, which is only about three minutes long, is superb, but this nine-minute concert performance adds a whole solo-piano introduction, a few more breaks when Ray Brown (bass) and Ed Thigpen (drums) enter, and a much longer solo by Peterson once things really get going.  Although Peterson was always popular with the public he doesn't get enough credit from certain musicians and writers.  I guess, as is often the case, people are sometimes disappointed that he doesn't do things that he has no intention of doing.

Here are a couple of aspects of this live performance that I think reward a close hearing: listen to where Peterson places his accents within some of those long melodic lines.  The dynamically emphasized notes add a whole additional layer to the musical texture.  And listen to the pick-ups that Thigpen plays at the end of each four-bar break; each time he finds a different way to launch the groove when Ray Brown enters.  Thigpen was a very subtle and inventive thinker.