A slightly belated tribute to Billy Taylor, who passed away this week after a long long career, as reported by A Blog Supreme. Several years ago, I attended a series of “jazz appreciation 101” talks by Dr. Taylor, given in Kennedy Center rehearsal space. He was a welcoming, generous teacher. One of the things I remember is his observation that you can learn a lot about jazz harmony just by mastering Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”
Category: Music
Some quizzes: 2
With just a little guessing, I scored a semi-respectable 18 of 25 on the 10-minute drop-the-needle challenge to identify jazz classics. Which means I missed some really easy ones. But I’m not man enough to take the full 111-song challenge.
(Link, and a hint, via A Blog Supreme.)
Some links: 48
Another option for DIY sound designers looking for scene transition music: Rumblefish’s Music Licensing Store. I haven’t priced the fees, but the prospect of pre-cleared music “for any project” would benefit community theater directors looking to take a play into the competitive festival circuit.
Bloomsday: 2010
In honor of Mr. Bloom’s walk, a link to notes on Luciano Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), spoken-word electronica from 1958 that uses the text of the overture to the “Sirens” chapter. Alas, no licit streams or MP3s of the piece appear to be available.
Muscial necrophilia
Via Aaron Cohen, guest blogging at kottke.org, a delicious diatribe that I’d found and lost and now find again: Pat Metheny critiques Kenny G:
…he did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks (holding long notes and playing fast runs —never mind that there were lots of harmonic clams in them)…
Still looking for Chase at the iTMS
Five genres on my iPod not likely to be found elsewhere, as assigned by me:
- Irish Soul (The Commitments)
- New Swing (Joe Jackson, Swing Out Sister, Meaghan Smith)
- Electrofolk (Beth Orton, Snakefarm, Nels Cline)
- Brass Fusion (Chicago, The Ides of March)
- Alien Pixie (Björk, Laurie Anderson, Radiohead)
Slippery
In the European classical tradition, the piano, with its twelve precise divisions of the octave—inflexible, immovable—has dictated musical thinking for several centuries. Once developed, the piano quickly became a machine of almost tyrannical influence throughout the Western world. Its division of the octave into twelve intervals, each mathematically equidistant from its neighbors, forces one to regard pitches as discrete entities, like nations with strictly policed [borders]. A piano-generated melody goes from point to point with no expressive sliding in between. This is not a fault—Bach and Mozart built their entire work on the notion—rather, it is a stylistic choice. Since the advent of the black-and-white keyboard… Western instrumental music has had to state itself according to the twelve discrete, individual pitches of the scale, resulting in a more limited universe of emotional expression.
—John Adams, Hallelujah Junction, ch. 10, “The Machine in the Garden”
The B feature
Via Arts & Letters Daily, Lucie Skeaping recaps what we know of 17th century jigs, bawdy theatrical afterpieces.
Were jigs recited over the tunes, did they contain song interludes, were they through-sung like mini-operas, or did all three of these at various times apply? Of the 12 surviving English jig texts roughly half contain specific tune titles printed at various points alongside the text, that is, the names of popular ballads or dance tunes of the day.
Onh honh HONH
Still a lot of Curve
My iTunes signature (courtesy of Jason Freeman) has changed a little bit since the last one I made, in 2005, but not that much. The caveat: songs purchased through the iTMS are not included in the mix.
Nipped and tucked and buffed
Carrie Brownstein puts in a good word for flubs in recorded music.
Voices, guitars and drums are really expressive instruments for the same reason that they’re really inexact instruments: [You] can’t coax the same note or beat out of them exactly the same way twice, even if you try.
Any stage actor could tell you that, and ruefully.
She mentions, as an exemplar, Denny Doherty’s early entrance for a chorus of The Mamas and Papas’ “I Saw Her Again.” Heck, I always figured that he meant to do that. It was effing brilliant.
O.F.
Via The Morning News, John Adams gives tips on getting through the first rehearsal:
Be flexible and take every opportunity to talk to the players. Sometimes you can make an on-the-spot change that will make an instrumentalist’s day. Other times, although you realize that what you’ve written is in fact awkward and unreasonable, the player will be affronted if you offer to simplify or revise a phrase or a passage. They assume that if something isn’t working it’s their fault. Composers are geniuses, right? For them it’s their burden to somehow make it work, and they do not realize that it’s the composer who needs to get it right.
Many actors I know aren’t quite so accommodating toward playwrights.
I also must quote this bit, relating to the many, many details of the composition process:
[Is] it mezzo forte or mezzo piano? (Or maybe pianissimo, because they’ll play it loud in any event?) Why aren’t there more gradients available? (Stockhausen tried: zero to ten.) Is pianissimo in the brass still going to cover the clarinets? And you always forget about mutes. It says “mutes on,” but you’ve declined to say when to remove them. Is it true that Schoenberg thought “mezzo” forte and “mezzo” piano were for sissies who couldn’t make up their minds? Maybe he was right.
Tripping Wires
Brandon Gentry looks back on the production of a mighty fine CD from 1994, ¡Simpatico! by local band Velocity Girl. Alas, there are no quotes from singer Sarah Shannon in the piece.
Coalescing at the University of Maryland in the late ’80s, Velocity Girl specialized in winningly sharp indie pop steeped in resonant major chord melodies and spry, agile rhythms…. Focused and concise, the best Velocity Girl is some of the best indie rock D.C. – or any other city – can claim to have produced in the last 20 years.
John and Robert are somewhere smiling
Alex Ross falls under the spell of the Make Music festival in New York:
It was in the spirit of the day to be charmed rather than annoyed by the accidental music of the city: the beeping of a bus’s wheelchair lift during [Terry Riley’s] In C; the syncopated barking of a dog energized by the drumming of Loop 2.4.3.
Close reading
Rob Kapilow deconstructs Stephen Sondheim’s war horse “Send in the Clowns.”
Sometimes the people we think we know best are the people we know least.