Spreading confusion over the internet since 1994
Music notes from all over
“Bach Edition: Complete Works (155 CD Box Set)” (Brilliant Classics)
One wonders if 155 CDs is really enough Bach. That’s like $0.50 a disc. Reading the reviews on Amazon, the quality seems hit and miss, but then I don’t know enough Johann Sebastian Bach to reliably judge. What the hell. I’ll let you know…
A few interesting links collected June 26th through June 29th:
Publisher Larrikin Music is suing Song BMG Music Entertainment and EMI Songs Australia for compensation from the royalties the song earned its writers, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert.
Larrikin claims the flute riff was copied from the refrain in a 1934 children’s song, Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Melbourne music teacher Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition.
The song about the kookaburra, a kingfisher native to Australia, has become a Girl Guides campfire standby throughout the English-speaking world.”
Isn’t it a little late to be suing 1980’s hitmakers? Like 20 years too late? Lame. The song was published in 1934 – isn’t it in the public domain by now?
I tend to think of it in terms of there’s social records and personal records. I love the Clash, it’s very social. If you had 20 people over on a Friday night and you’re all drinking beer put on a Clash record and it’s great. Lying in bed at 9 o’ clock on a rainy Sunday morning you want something that is more personal, and, as much as I love social records, it’s those personal records that I tend to really cherish. I listen to a lot of classical music, a lot of quiet electronic music, everything from Nick Drake to Leonard Cohen. I mentioned Sigur Rós, some Radiohead songs, songs where you really feel the artist, whether they are or whether they aren’t, but you feel as if the artist is making themselves vulnerable through their work.
ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) has discovered a new business model: demanding payment for ringtones. Would be very surprised if the public ridicule of their new bold assertion doesn’t ring out from every quarter. Ridiculous.
[ASCAP’s] latest move is to claim that legally purchased ringtones on mobiles phones, playing in public places, represents a public performance for which it is owed royalties. Songwriters and music publishers already are paid royalties on ringtone purchases, but ASCAP is claiming that buying the file is entirely different than “the performance” (i.e., the phone ringing).
In the EFF’s response to ASCAP, it notes that copyright law makes a specific exemption for performances made “without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage.” ASCAP counters that even if that’s true, only the owners of mobile phones can make that assertion, but the mobile operators (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc.) still need to pay up for performance rights because they are commercial entities, even if the use of the phones is not. The EFF goes on to point out how this reasoning does not mesh with the law, the case law, or the intended purpose of copyright.
On top of this, even if, in some bizarre, twisted interpretation of the law, a ringtone playing on a phone was a public performance, how would it be the mobile operators’ liability to pay? That would be like saying that Apple should pay ASCAP royalties because songs it sells on iTunes could potentially be played through speakers publicly somewhere. Perhaps I shouldn’t be giving ASCAP ideas…
[From ASCAP Now Claiming That Your Mobile Phone Ringing Is A Public Performance | Techdirt]
Morons.
Some additional reading June 15th from 08:19 to 13:13:
I forget where I first heard of the formerly-based-in-Chicago band, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, but I bought their CD recently1. The disc arrived a day or so before this New Yorker review by Sasha Frere-Jones, which begins:
The first time I encountered the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, I was walking through the Times Square subway station toward the No. 1 train. It was hard to miss the sound of eight men playing brass instruments—two trombones, four trumpets, one sousaphone, and a euphonium—while a ninth man added drums. The men stood side by side, swaying, looking a bit like James Brown’s Famous Flames. As I listened, the sousaphone player locked in with the drummer, the trombones played what sounded like a bass line, and the rest of the horns circled and echoed the main motif. Certain genres sprang to mind—a New Orleans second-line band, say, or big-band jazz—but the music wasn’t jazz, exactly. The songs set small, compact melodies against a steady hip-hop beat, and everyone played simultaneously and continuously. The band had eliminated one of the dreary commonplaces of jazz, that class-recital rhythm of soloing—you go, I go, and so on, until the main melody returns.
Several months later, I saw the band again, in front of the Whole Foods in Union Square. As I snapped a few photographs, mostly to remind myself to figure out who they were, one of the trombone players walked up to me. “You can’t take a picture unless you buy a CD,” he said, smiling. He held out three albums in slimline cases, each titled “Hypnotic Brass Ensemble” and featuring an identical black-and-white photograph of the band, beneath a field of color—one red, one orange, and one green. I bought all three (ten bucks apiece), and the trombone player slapped me on the back. “Support live music, people,” he called out, stepping in line with his bandmates. “Bring back real music before it’s too late.”
With the exception of the drummer, Gabriel Wallace, the members of Hypnotic are all brothers. Their father is the jazz trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran, who was a leading figure in Chicago’s black avant-garde-jazz community in the fifties and sixties, and was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra. In the spring of 1965, Cohran and about forty other musicians gathered in his living room on Chicago’s South Side to form the A.A.C.M. (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a nonprofit that supports black artistic expression in local communities. “We had lived through the greatest decline of professional musicians in Chicago and wanted to do something about it,” Cohran says. Some of the best-known members of the A.A.C.M. include the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, and the Pharaohs, whose members eventually formed Earth, Wind, and Fire.
[Click to continue reading Serendipity: Musical Events: The New Yorker]
Even better. The album is quite good. If I wasn’t lazy and pressed for time, I might have elaborated on the thought that their sound is jazz music you could dance to. Mr. Frere-Jones concurs, albeit more eloquently:
Footnotes:The music that Hypnotic plays might best be described as highly composed instrumental hip-hop. If it is jazz, it’s closer in spirit to jazz from a hundred years ago: accomplished and energetic music parcelled out in short songs designed for dancing. It stays in key for long stretches, and moves in easy-to-follow periods. In a typical Hypnotic song, the shifts in key and the emergence of themes happen against a sound of massed horn parts that provide a sense of solidity. The music stays rooted to the cycle of the beat and the riff, and the players don’t leave the center behind to leap around as they might in hard bop or free jazz. Unlike the musicians in the avant-garde community that Hypnotic grew up in, these players have no interest in dissonance or “out” passages of squeaking and skronking. They keep their compositions lean and their harmonies broad and varied.
Guitar Music From The Western Sahara
If you think you’ve heard all the great electric guitar styles in the world, think again. This Saharan sand-blizzard of fine-crushed glass will grind your face to a bloody pulp. Group Doueh play raw and unfiltered Saharawi music from the former colonial Spanish outpost of the Western Sahara. Doueh (pronounced “Doo-way”) is their leader and a master of the electric guitar. He’s been performing since he was a child playing in many groups before finally creating his own in the 1980’s.
Doueh says he’s Influenced by western pop and rock music especially Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. His sound is distorted, loud and unhinged with an impressive display of virtuosity and style only known in this part of the world. His wife Halima and friend Bashiri are the two vocalists in the group. Saharawi songs are from the sung poetry of the Hassania language. The music is based on the same modal structure as Mauritanian music, however, Doueh’s style is a looser appropriation infused with a western guitar scope, one that relies, in his words, as much on Hendrix as it does traditional Sahrawi music. It also adds a playful pop element that rarely filters through in this region. Doueh has turned down countless offers from Morocco and Europe to release his music but he decided to offer us access to his homemade recordings and photo archive for this amazing debut release. This is a CD reissue of the sold-out LP edition and comes with great photos of the musicians and liner notes by Hisham Mayet.
[From Group Doueh: Guitar Music From The Western Sahara CD SF030 Reissue]
Right-o. Face-melting is apt: this music has not been filtered by Auto-Tune that is for damn sure. Hypnotically listenable, full of inventive trills, but not for the faint-of-heart, or those put off by lack of musical fidelity.
A few interesting links collected June 3rd through June 6th:
You can’t blame Tiller’s assassination on this, of course. It was over ten years ago. But it underscores the fact that the culture wars are inherently political and that you can’t separate the conservative movement from the fringe. It’s a seamless system.
[Honest Jon’s Records
The July 2009 issue of Uncut has a small feature on Honest Jon’s Records, and one of their famous patrons, Damon Albarn1. There is also a 16 track sampler of songs put out on the Honest Jon label, some incredible stuff.
“Palace of the Winds” (Hisham Mayet)
Browsing Honest Jon’s Outernational page, discovered at least a dozen albums I want, and a film called Palace of the Winds:
‘Intimate and dreamlike… exploring the music of Saharawi culture from Guelmim in Southern Morocco to the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.’
Desert blues, right up my alley.
Also have already downloaded
“Sprigs of Time: 78s from the EMI Archive” (Various Artists)
Honest Jon’s has spent the last eighteen months delving through more than 150,000 78 rpm records in the extensive EMI Archives at Hayes, Middlesex. The results of this trawl can be heard on the Hayes Archive series, an epic 12 albums covering early recordings of music from Iraq, Turkey, Caucasia, the Lebanon, Greece, Iran (including sides made in Old Street, London, in 1909), Egypt and the Belgian Congo. The 12 volumes will be released according to the standards of HJ’s esteemed London Is The Place For Me series – with full notes, translations where possible, and wonderful artwork. A giddy summer sampler will run organ rolls from Georgia alongside Tamils impersonating motorised transport in 1906, Kabyle music from Algeria into the songs of Bengali beggars, mambos from 1950s Beirut against the Imperial Palace Band of Japan in 1903
“Open Strings: 1920s Middle Eastern Recordings – New Responses” (Various Artists)
Forgotten masterpieces, out-of-this-world improvisations from the 1920s; and dazzling commissions by Sir Richard Bishop, Six Organs Of Admittance and co. ‘Dextrous, frenzied, fearless… awesome’ (Plan B).
and have ordered several others. What a great find!
“Guitar Music from the Western Sahara” (Group Doueh)
Sahara desert rock is one of my favorite genres, check out all these great titles from the Sublime Frequency label (a division of Honest Jon’s).
Footnotes:Seems like I’ve been a fan for nearly as long as the band has existed, but I guess that isn’t true. Probably 23 years ago I bought my first Sonic Youth album, from the used record section at Waterloo Records. Truth be told though, their last dozen releases have been meh, but I keep hoping the next will spark some connection.
‘Bands are usually a young man’s game,” says Thurston Moore, the guitarist with Sonic Youth for nearly 30 years. “Historically, they don’t stay together. We never had any animosity towards each other. I guess we never felt like we hit a wall with what we were doing. We never really had any ambitions for reaching a certain goal. We never had a hit we had to repeat.”
“Lots of bands don’t survive that kind of spike in popularity, or ego, or finances,” agrees fellow guitarist Lee Ranaldo. “We came into this feeling fairly serious about ourselves as artists and this is our medium, which happens to involve a collaborative group – it’s just never gotten boring or rote. It’s still incredibly fulfilling and interesting.”
Sonic Youth played their first gig 28 years ago this month, at the Noise Fest in New York City. Few bands stay together for that long, and fewer still remain so vital. The quintessential New York art-rock group have survived and flourished both through a rare internal democracy (Ranaldo likens their composition process to “making a group sculpture”) and, it seems, by simply being too busy to become disaffected. Sonic Youth’s discography is a sprawling affair, now encompassing 16 official studio albums, various compilations and a slew of self-released, more experimental releases.
All four core members (Moore, Kim Gordon, Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, who have recently been joined by former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold) work extensively outside the group, producing poetry and visual art, solo albums and collaborations with other musicians and artists, and running record labels
[Click to continue reading Art-punk band Sonic Youth talk to David Peschek | Music | The Guardian ]
Am looking forward to getting my copy of The Eternal on June 9.
After years on Geffen Records, Sonic Youth return to an indie label with their sixteenth studio album. “The Eternal” is a supercharged rocker, recalling aspects of the Evol-Sister-Daydream Nation holy trinity, but with cleaner, louder production and more straightforward momentum. With Pavement’s Mark Ibold joining on bass, and producer John Agnello back at the controls, “The Eternal” takes the melodic songwriting of 2006’s “Rather Ripped” and slams down the accelerator pedal. Initial pressing in a 4-panel wallet with two printed inner sleeves; one containing disc, the other a sticker and card with credits. Subsequent pressings are jewel case. Double LP hyper-deluxe HQ 180 RTI vinyl analog in heavy duty Stoughton gatefold sleeve, printed inner sleeves, and MP3 coupon.
Odd, and only coming out now because of the book.
Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager, according to a new book by one of the guitarist’s former roadies. James “Tappy” Wright has claimed that manager Michael Jeffrey confessed to making Hendrix swallow sleeping pills, because he hoped to collect on his client’s life insurance policy.
Jeffrey feared being replaced with a new manager, Wright writes in his book Rock Roadie, and decided Hendrix was “worth more to him dead than alive”. Jeffrey was allegedly the beneficiary oo the guitarist’s $2m life insurance policy (worth around £1.2m in 1970).
According to Wright, Jeffrey told him about the crime in 1971 – a year after 27-year-old Hendrix was found dead in a London hotel. “I had to do it, Tappy,” Wright claims the manager said. “You understand, don’t you? I had to do it. You know damn well what I’m talking about … We went round to [his] hotel room, got a handful of pills and stuffed them into his mouth … then poured a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe.”
[From Jimi Hendrix murdered by manager, claims roadie | Music | guardian.co.uk ]
Probably a lie, but who knows. There have been all sorts of allegations about Michael Jeffrey controlling and manipulating Hendrix, so there could be truth here. And of course, Jeffrey allegedly died in a plane crash in 1973, so nobody can refute the tale. It wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion, hearsay is admissible evidence.
Jeffery has received almost unanimous criticism from biographers of Hendrix. Several have alleged that Jeffery siphoned off much of Hendrix’s income and channeled it into off-shore bank accounts, that Jeffery had dubious connections to US intelligence services (it has been reported that insiders often claimed that he worked for MI5, British Secret Intelligence and that he had connections to European organised crime). When Experience bassist Noel Redding inquired as to where Jeffery was going with briefcases of the bands money, he was asked to leave [the band].
“Secret, Profane and Sugarcane” (Elvis Costello)
According to the print edition of Rolling Stone issue 1080, Elvis Costello has stopped working on the Hans Christian Andersen opera he started in 2005. Some of the songs are getting used in a new “roots” acoustic bluegrass record, recorded in Nashville.
Though Costello releases music at an incredible pace – close to 30 studio albums since 1977 – this record was unexpected, even to the artist himself. “Two years ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make any more records,” says Costello, who released the freewheeling rock set Momofuku and hosted the talk show Spectacle in 2008. “It wasn’t much fun anymore.” But a stint opening for Bob Dylan as a solo act in the fall of 2007 got Costello excited about making an unplugged album. “Nobody was coming to hear me, so I could test out new songs,” he says. “The audience applauded, and then I was gone.” Most of the Sugarcane material, including a few songs he wrote for an unfinished opera about Hans Christian Andersen, was road-tested on the Dylan tour and then fleshed out with a full band at North Carolina’s MerleFest in 2007 and San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in 2008.
Burnett assembled the band of top roots sidemen – including dobro player Jerry Douglas, mandolinist Mike Complon and singer Jim Lauderdale – and also fed Costello ideas for tunes. “T Bone sent me Robert Johnson’s ‘From Four Till Late’ and a Sidney Bechet record,” recalls Costello. “And he said, ‘Can we write something that jams those two ideas together?'” The result, “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” is an “I’ve Been Every where”-style blues ramble that wryly mocks loose women from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Ypsilanti, Michigan. “I played that one with Dylan every night,” says Costello, who will tour with the Sugarcane band this summer. “And I was amazed at how much applause you can get for impugning the reputation of a city’s womanhood from the stage.”
What I heard of Momofuku wasn’t all that interesting, but perhaps this new album will be more fun to listen to.
I have no idea of the context of this video, which mostly consists of a young woman in a plexiglass box writhing and go-go dancing to the Sonics song, Psycho. Dancers from 1965 crack me up, but The Sonics are great in any context.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6Fjo6VXTg
One of my favorite new albums discovered this year1 is Steve Earle’s tribute album to the late great Townes Van Zandt [wiki].
“Townes (2CD LTD Deluxe Edition)” (Steve Earle)
In a certain mood, Townes Van Zandt songs are like no other songs, with their melancholy poetry and blurred edges of a life lived to extreme. Van Zandt was the sort of artist who devoted his whole being to his music, at the expense of his body, his comfort, and his family.
Joe Hagan wrote a piece about Steve Earle’s relationship with Townes Van Zandt in a recent issue of Rolling Stone, but unfortunately, as far as I know, the article is not available online. I have a scanned PDF I could send you if you want, but here are a few paragraphs transcribed from my dead-tree edition:
Steve Earle and the Ghost of Townes
The country rocker almost died emulating his damaged mentor, Townes Van Zandt. On a new tribute album, Earle looks back. By Joe Hagan[From : Rolling Stone Issue 1079]
[quote]
IN 1972, STEVE EARLE OVERHEARD A man talking about a birthday party being thrown for Texas country legend Jerry Jeff Walker in Austin, where Earle was living. He crashed the party and, around 2 a.m., in walked the tall, lanky form of Townes Van Zandt, wearing a white buckskin jacket with fringe on the arms. “He started a craps game and lost every dime that he had, and that jacket,” recounts Earle.
…
From Van Zandt, Earle absorbed poetry, literature, fingerpicking styles and a sophisticated lyric sensibility, all while getting into legendary misadventures. Once, while visiting Van Zandt at his cabin in rural Tennessee in the late Seventies, Earle was bragging about his burgeoning gun collection when Van Zandt, exasperated with his young acolyte, loaded a single bullet into his .357-caliber Magnum, spun the revolver, pressed it against his temple and pulled the trigger. Earle was horrified – and angry. He “beat the hell out of” Van Zandt and left. “It was the only time I ever got physical with him,” he says. “It took me a long time not to be angry about it.”
According to legend, Van Zandt came by to check on Earle during the height of Earle’s heroin addiction, asking him if he was using clean needles. When Earle said he was, Van Zandt replied, “OK, listen to this song I just wrote.” “And that was the first time I heard ‘Marie,'” says Earle. He covers the song on Townes.
I sincerely hope that Steve Earle either finds a way to release these audio anecdotes, or works them into a film or a book, or something.
Earle recorded the album in his Greenwich Village apartment, working 11 hours a day for a week. With the “record” button on, Earle maintained a rolling, Van Zandt-inspired meditation, relating impromptu stories and stray recollections about his mentor. The recording engineer, Steve Christensen, told Earle he felt like he was “listening to something I shouldn’t be listening to,” because it seemed so personal. Which is when Earle says he “realized that’s what the criteria is, that’s how I don’t fuck this up.” (He hasn’t figured out yet what he’ll do with the recorded anecdotes.)
If you have never listened to Townes Van Zandt, you are in for a real treat, as a lot of his back catalog is available on CD. I’d suggest dipping your toe with a greatest hits package, and then jumping right into the box sets. There is a quite decent film called Be Here to Love Me (a documentary composed of snippets of Townes Van Zandt) available at Netflix or Amazon, I’ve blogged about it before.
“The Late Great Townes Van Zandt” (Townes Van Zandt)
“Our Mother the Mountain” (Townes Van Zandt)
“Texas Troubadour” (Townes Van Zandt)
“Townes Van Zandt – Be Here to Love Me” (Margaret Brown)
A weirdly wonderful film promo from Funkadelic, circa 1973, found on YouTube. Yes, I would hazard to guess there were a lot of drugs involved.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp4pgMOugbo
(via @joem500)
from the album of the same name.
If memory serves, this was the first Parliament/Funkadelic album I bought – a gatefold LP from Westbound Records on heavy, archival vinyl. I even remember where I purchased it: a funky little record store next to Mad Dog and Beans and Les Amis on The Drag near the UT campus in Austin. Sadly, all three of these fine establishments, who have a cameo in the film, Slacker, are defunct, replaced by a Starbucks, a Subway, and a crushing sameness, so common to America in the 21st CE.
“The Velvet Underground & Nico” (The Velvet Underground, Nico)
Like a lot of musical obsessives, The Velvet Underground was essential listening when I first began exploring music.
Jonathan Jones had the good fortune to check out John Cale’s exhibit in the Venice Biennale. Sounds like an interesting exhibit, but of course, The Velvet Underground’s history is always on the agenda:
It sounds at first like an electronic whine, a build-up of noise in the amplifier. Then there’s Lou Reed’s voice, young but hardened: “When the smack begins to flow, and it shoots up the dropper’s neck, and I’m rushing on my run, then I feel just like Jesus’s son.” Behind it all, there’s that strange keening, humming note. Listen to the Velvet Underground’s Heroin on headphones and you realise it’s not feedback after all, not a synthesised warble, but the rich timbre of a violin playing a single note, held for a disturbingly long time. It’s the darkest thing in the darkest of songs. If Reed sounds as if he’s made a pact with the devil, then the musician who plays that buzzing fiddle – John Cale – must be the devil himself.
and doesn’t sound like any feel-good reunion between Lou Reed and John Cale will ever occur
Andy Warhol produced the Velvets’ first album and designed its banana peel cover. No figure in modern culture is more misunderstood than the Velvets’ manager, and nobody speaks up for Warhol more eloquently than Cale. He won’t hear a word against Andy. The Factory, he insists, was a true underground – “it was outrageously creative and vital” – and Warhol cared about, and properly curated, the Velvets. A rare bit of footage Warhol shot in the Factory shows Cale fiddling with the amplifier, while Reed strums and drummer Maureen Tucker knocks out her steady, dry beat. Warhol listened carefully, and remembered it all. “He was the one who’d remind us of an idea we’d forgotten.”
Cale is still smarting from what he sees – amazingly – as the tragic waste of the band. Warhol took them to the west coast, he tells me. While they were away, Bob Dylan’s manager took out a lease on their Manhattan venue. This was part of Dylan’s feud with Warhol, whose world is caricatured in lyrics on the 1966 album Highway 61 Revisited. Then Reed sacked Warhol and Cale. A new manager, says Cale, “appealed to Lou’s desire for glory”. In the years since, Reed and Cale have occasionally got back together – but from the furious way he talks, I’d say any further reunion was unlikely.
All through the solo career that followed, Cale has returned again and again to his Welshness. He has recorded Dylan Thomas poems, and in the early 1970s composed a nostalgic Thomas-inspired song, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. And apart from the Thomas obsession, there is a lyricism to his music, one that struggles with his severity and evokes all those years in the Welsh Youth Orchestra.
If you own just one Cale solo album, Paris 1919 is my favorite.
One of John Cale’s very finest solo efforts, Paris 1919 is also among his most accessible records, one which grows in depth and resonance with each successive listen. A consciously literary work – the songs even bear titles like “child’s christmas in wales,” “macbeth,” and “graham greene” – paris 1919 is close in spirit to a collection of short stories; the songs are richly poetic, enigmatic period pieces strongly evocative of their time and place. Chris Thomas’ production is appropriately lush and sweeping, with many tracks set to orchestral accompaniment; indeed, there’s little here to suggest either cale’s noisy, abrasive past or the chaos about to resurface in his subsequent work – for better or worse, his music never achieved a similar beauty again.
