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If I ever think that music has lost its power to move and excite me, I find some Frank Zappa. Here he is in concert in Barcelona in 1988, playing one of my favourite Zappa instrumentals, Watermelon in Easter Hay. Music like this proves Zappa wasn’t just a Stravinsky fan – he could write with glistening simplicity too.

Chris Lydon’s interview this week on Radio Open Source is with composer Yehudi Wyner. It’s a fascinating hour spent with an American “classical” composer  – he spends time discussing his influences, the way he approaches composition  and deconstructs some of his works on the piano.

Image: Boston Globe

As with many 20th century American composers, Wyner is open to the influence of “popular” forms on his work – particularly gospel and jazz. But as Stravinksy and Ives did with ragtime and marching band tunes, Wyner’s compositions refract these sources through his own personal tonal lens.

Wyner has been writing music since since his childhood in the 1920s, so he’s learned a thing or two about how creativity happens. I particularly liked his description of the compositional act – and the responsibility that comes with inspiration:

“When you stumble on these thickets of interesting material, you’re confronted with the most terrifying task of all, which is somehow living up  to it, continuing it, recognising not only that nugget is of value, but that nugget is of no meaning unless it’s in a proper context, unless it’s really enveloped in understanding and development.”

Wyner’s insight could apply to all creative acts – writing, painting, creating a business, raising a child. Most of us only experience very short and occasional moments of true inspiration. The real work of creativity is how we put context and create flow around these small original ideas.

I commend this conversation to you – the music is wonderful, the conversations surrounding it are enlightening, and Wyner’s critique of contemporary popular music is penetrating without being bigoted.

Garrison Keillor – The News from Lake Wobegon, February 4th 2010

This is radio at its best: Garrison Keillor delivers one of the wittiest homilies on 1 Corinthians 13 that you’ll ever hear. Well worth 14 minutes of your life.

As usual, Keillor tells his story with the sort of humour that is only found in small towns in rural Minnesota. This was performed at the Prairie Home Companion show last week that was cinecast in HD nationwide across America.

The News from Lake Wobegon is available as a weekly podcast.

The Café de la Danse in the Bastille district was full to capacity last night for Laura Veirs‘ first show in France for a very very long time. It’s a slightly odd venue – terraced seating make it feel like a high school auditorium, and the fact the audience had to sit on the floor added to the impression of being on a class trip.

One way to keep the costs of touring Europe to a minimum is to ensure that half your band is the support act. The show resembled a showcase for the Pacific Northwest’s indie-folk scene, opening with short solo sets by Nelson (of Old Believers) and Eric Anderson (Cataldo) before they both joined Laura and Keeley Boyle (also of Old Believers) onstage as a quartet for the main event.

To my ears, Nelson’s solo songs lacked lustre and gazed largely shoe-wards. But Eric’s set picked up the pace a bit with some well structured songs and clever melodies: his band recording Signal Flare is well worth checking out.

Laura’s set rolled out in an atmosphere of relaxed bonhomie, without ever quite catching alight. It seems a challenge for anglophone artists to really cut through to French audiences, although the audience sure liked the music, and even taught Laura (6 months pregnant with her first child) how to say “Je suis enceinte.”

The set-list understandably centred on material from the new album July Flame (see my earlier post). Carol Kaye was an unexpected choice of opener, but it worked well.  And the immediate follow-up with The Sun is King and Where Are You Driving (two of my personal favourites of this new crop of songs) kept this particular audient happy.

The quartet provided a remarkably rich sound, with all four musicians rotating between bass, guitars, banjos, percussion and keyboards – and when an extra layer was required (for example on To the Country), the crowd was split in two to sing the backing vocals. The Paris audience played along with the game, although they preferred clapping along when Laura and Keeley stretched out on hoedown based around Cluck Old Hen.

Songs from earlier in Laura’s career were spread out through the set, including a solemn version of Spelunking, with its disturbing and slightly desperate plea (If I took you darling/to the caverns of my heart/would you light the lamp dear/and see fish without eyes/and bats with their heads hanging down towards the ground/would you still come around?).

Although she didn’t play Parisian Dream (from 2005′s Year of Meteors), there were a few nods to French culture: Rapture, which references Monet and his gardens at Giverny, as well as Sleeper in the Valley, a new song inspired by Rimbaud‘s Le dormeur du val. The gesture was appreciated, but I think the audience would have equally liked another hoedown instead.

I may be getting old, but there’s one feature of gigs in Paris I really appreciate: they start early, and finish early – I was home by 10.30pm, in time for a good night’s sleep before orchestra rehearsal. An evening with Laura Veirs is an evening well-spent, and there are few things on stage more beautiful than a pregnant woman with banjo.

This week’s back-and-forth on the RER has been accompanied by the new Laura Veirs album, July Flame. The ice and snow of the past few weeks has largely disappeared, and this rich, summery music seemed to bring a little warmth to the air.

With its electric guitars and rich sound pallette, the title track belies the simplicity of the rest of the album. Laura’s previous album Saltbreakers felt like a “band” record, with plenty of layers, vast electrification and a triumphal, full sound thanks to the production of Tucker Martine.

By contrast, July Flame is stripped back, and the songs benefit from it. You’d have to go back to 2003′s Troubled by the Fire to hear Laura Veirs songs in a similarly “simple” setting. The approach is epitomised by Carol Kaye, a tribute to the eponymous bassist, the “Everett, Washington girl” with “10,000 sessions” to her name – a song which, cannily, features no bass:

And on the occasions when the orchestration gets fancy it’s always groovy, rather than lush: the gorgeous Wide-Eyed and Legless is woven together with clever string arrangement, and Summer is the Champion fair stonks along (what’s that? a drum kit AND horns?).

Where Are You Driving and The Sun is King are as good songs as Laura has ever written. And what’s even better, she’s playing in Paris at the end of the month. It’s one show I really don’t want to miss.

Laura Veirs & The Hall of Flames / Old Believers / Cataldo
29 janvier 2009: 20h
Café de la Danse
5 Passage Louis-Phillippe 75011
Métro Bastille

More student howlers, to round off the weekend…

“Jazz has the technique of classical music, the feeling of blues, and the hope of children everywhere.”

“I know what troubles musicians now when I watch and listen to them play.”

“My ties to jazz were through Bleeding Gums Murphy, a character on TV show called the Simpsons. It comes on at 8pm on Sunday nights.”

“I was surprised to find out about the different styles of jazz like hard, be, and post bops.”

“I thought that jazz was a certain amount of instruments that you played and was composed for you, not believing that it was their improvisation and the jazz musicians who made up the music on the spot doing what they wanted to do with the tunes. I know this is hard to explain but it is true.”

“When I try to play jazz, I mess around with the instruments pounding out random notes that were just me making nonsense up and it sounding like a big pile of crap.”

“Jazz is more profound when it doesn’t help pay the bills.”

“The first thing I learned in jazz history that happy birthday is the most played jazz classic. You want to hear happy birthday in swing BAM! You got it You want to hear happy birthday in classic jazz BAM! You got it. You want to hear happy birthday in be bop BAM! You got it. It’s great! The second thing I learned is free jazz is where its at. I think that I could be a free jazz musician cause it all sounds like a drunk 7 year old jamming down on some notes and making the sweet sweet music fly. Free jazz was defiantly the best part of the class but unfortunately you didn’t play free jazz enough. My one suggestion for your next class is that you start out every class with a 5 minute free jazz intro. Over all and all, I defiantly learned a lot in jazz history class.”

“Hip hop and pop are fine, going out for fame and bling bling. Jazz has been around for a while, is out of style, but can really sing.”

“Jazz musicians sing and play music because they can’t contain their passions. Their music starts in the soul radiates out in every direction.”

“Jazz is a very dynamic kind of music. Loud and Soft.”

“Swing makes you want to get up and dance and free jazz just makes you want to get up.”

“If any kind of music can calm a hectic day, its cool jazz. If you feel like going out and dancing, however there is ragtime.”

“In conclusion, jazz is music.”

“Jazz has come from the fields of New Orleans to my 2pm class, and beyond.”

“Unlike other forms of music, jazz is listened to by old people as well as us.”

“I learned what intros and outros were in this class. Now I look for them when I go searching for good music.”

“I went to do my (jazz) listening report at the house of blues.”

“Jazz has taught me a lot about the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.”

“I thought of jazz as a thing of the past, something old African American men listened to on old record players while sitting on their front porches smoking cigars.”

“Steve Turre has taught me that sea shells should be left on the ground instead of his mouth.”

“Over the course of the semester my knowledge of jazz has gone from nothing to practically nothing.”

“Even though I probably won’t listen to jazz after this semester, it has given me a greater appreciation of movies.”

“My favorite person to study was Sonny Rollins. He knew that he had to throw his saxaphone off the bridge when he heard how good Charlie Parker was.”

“Jazz to me was the shoo opps. From groups in streets downtown in the olden, golden days.”

“Happy birthday: That song is just amazing to me.”

“My all-time favorite jazz artist to listen to was Buddy Baldwin, AKA the jazz king. I think I’m going to go out and buy a couple of his CDs.”

“I was surprised to find musicians with such odd names such as Vilage Von Guard.”

“Jazz is not as popular with all of the adolescence going around.”

“I like jazz more in books than on cds.”

“I remember coming into class with no facts but a whole plate of bullshit to dish out.”

“I found myself learning about Blues, Early Jazz, Dixieland, Swing, Be Bop, Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, Free Jazz, Third Stream, Japanese, Post Bop, Fusion, Smooth, Modern Jazz, and the list goes on.”

“Call and Respond is where one musician plays and the other one tries too hard to figure out what he’s doing.”

“The people in Dixie Land originated jazz music.”

“Jazz is now a part of me from 2pm-3:15pm every Tuesday and Thursday.”

“Jazz started in the fields where they used hand-me-down instruments and wore hand-me-down clothes.”

“If Wynton Marsalis said jazz was dead in the 1970′s, what was he playing at the time?”

“Weather Report was the final big band back in the day.”

“My girlfriend and I both agreed the next morning that jazz-club food was something we could’ve done without.”

“Jazz agitates me.”

“I like jazz, but I need something else besides rhythm, melody, and harmony.”

“I had no clue that so many (musicians) used drugs. Thinking about that, there is no doubt that they are living the life I dream of.”
“They are spending money on things that they don’t really need or even want.”

”I noticed that there weren’t many jazz women in our textbook until I looked to see that the author was a guy. All guys are sexist, women bashers, who don’t ever give us our credit.”

“The part I most enjoyed was studying and appreciating slavery.”

“Its hard to imagine where Winton Marsalis gets his ideas from.”

“I’d like to see midgets getting bribed in every jazz club. Not just with Birdland. I’m of course talking about the jazz club, not Charlie Parker.”

“We’ve had our share of good times and bad times over the semester. By bad times, I mean my tests.”

“Count Bassie WAS the swing era.”

“This class increased my intelligence with aptitude.”

“Duke Ellington had the ability to turn jazz compositions into pure magic.”

“Swing died in World War II when the soloists took over.”

“I could go on and on about jazz, but I won’t.”

“Tony Williams was my favorite drummer because his group, Lifetime, is the same name as my favorite channel that I watch.”

“How do the musicians know what to play when their eyes were closed the whole time? And what was with the piano player talking while played his solos. His musician friends must have been thought he was crazy.”

“I technically wasn’t in your class but I was happy to be along for the ride.”

“I was in jazz band in high school but we didn’t play jazz music.”

“Dizzie Gillespie was the one who jammed on the drumss.”

“I thought doing our listening report would be a painful sort of torture.”

“I was bummed out at the beginning of the semester because I thought Louis Armstrong was going to be one of the guest lecturers.”

Jelly Roll Morton and his band, discussing their new release BloodSugarSexMagix

I received these by email a little while ago. They are (apparently) quotes from American students in a college jazz history class, extracted from the essay topic, “What I learned over this semester in jazz history.” These are all (apparently) genuine responses, completely unaltered.

They are all 18+ year old students; not high school or middle school age kids. None of them are music students; they all took this class as a gen. ed. credit.

———–

“Free Jazz is an era that I wished I had never learned about.”

“Free Jazz. Wow; what a sound it makes. An awful, horrible sound. I don’t see how that can actually be called a sound. My 5 year old nephew could pound on the piano and make the same sound! He may even make a better sound. To be honest, that sound is one big mess.”

“With swing, it’s kind of up in the air for me. I must say I tried like hell to keep up with it.”

“My favorite jazz has a bluesy, Mexican feel to it.”

“Though Jazz started in New Orleans, it traveled all around the world picking up and dropping off things along the way.”

“One thing that confused me was Jelly Roll Morton. Did he play with the Red Hot Chili Peppers? I didn’t think that they were around back then.”

“Jelly Roll (Morton) bridged the gap between piano and ragtime.”

“My grandpa likes it, but I think scat stinks.”

“Chick Corea, Dizzie Gillespie, Bix Biderbeck, and the monk created the first cool group.”

“I wished Don Cherry would put his trumpet back in his pocket.”

“There is not enough space in my head to fit all that I learned.”

“This class taught me about a lot of things that I never knew about.”

“Some of the big jazz musicians we learned about were: Lous Armstrong, Duke, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Cillespic, T. Mark, Ken Barns, Buddy Baldwin, Jellyroll Mortin, Sydney Bichai, Fats Waller, Earl Hines, and many many more.”

“Coming into class on the first day, I assumed there would be a boring professor standing in front of the class droning on and on about jazz. Here’s where it started; this is who played it; and here we are today; blah, blah, blah. I now realize that my assumption wasn’t all that wrong.”

“I assumed that jazz had started in the African-American community only because it fulfilled a multi-cultural course that I was required to take.”

“I really enjoyed hearing the big band, Frank Foster’s Arrangement.”

“I learned in this class that, contrary to my mom’s opinion, Kenny G is a joke. A really non-funny one.”

“I fell in love with that tune, Stablemates. It really hits home.”

“Jazz musicians don’t play for women any more.”

“I learned that going to jazz concerts gets me in good with my girlfriend.”

“I learned a lot about Be Bop, Swing, Drugs, and Fusion.”

“I found new respect for Miles Davis. He was adamant about not using drugs when everyone else was trying to get him to try some.”

“I liked hearing the Original Dixieland (Jazz) Band, and how they were the original Dixieland band.

“You might want to mention to future classes that jazz brings true romance to a scene.”

“I’m glad I took this class, because I feel more comfortable to talk about jazz in its awesomeness.”

Put it back in your pocket, Don.

“Drugs caused many artists their careers in many ways.”

“Jazz is a style of music that is almost very sober.”

“I figured jazz started in the 1960s, but to my surprise, it started back in the late 18th century.”

“Smooth jazz now just plain old angers me.”

“A lot of the things that I learned were facts that I never new about, not only in jazz, but in life as well.”

“I got really excited by the tenor sax, soprano sax, baritone sax, but not so much the alto sax.”

“I can’t believe that blacks had time to invent jazz if they were hanging out in the whorehouses with Jelly Roll Morton.”

“A lot of black jazz musicians were very talented, which probably came from them not having anything else to do.”

“When blacks and whites finally decided to get together to make jazz, it was a big hit.”

“Lennie Tristano and Lee Konitz were two guys who would sit down and enjoy cool jazz.”

“Going to the club gave me jazz sensations.”

“I hear the hard-bop jazz influence on bands today such as Matchbox Twenty and Dave Matthews Band.”

“James Crow worked to bring the slaves together with the creoles.”

“Learning jazz has helped me beat my mom at Jeopardy. She had no idea who a blind pianist from Toledo, OH was for $800.”

“I learned the definition of supreme technical virtuosity is to play like Louie Armstrong.”

“Charlie Parker was a famous jazz musician who played saxophonists.”

“Getting 81% (on a test) is all well and good until you see that dumb guy next to you who picks his nose getting 91%. I then started studying and coming to class.”

“I asked the drummer what the names of the names and styles of the tunes that he played but he didn’t seem to know.”

“TV has become more jazzy to me now.”

“Studying jazz has been a coming out party for me.”

“I loved the vibrational solos of Clifford Brown.”

“When I think of tradition and instruments, I think of Fiddler of the Roof.”

“I learned a lot from the different guest speakers in class, whether they were an experienced piano player, a director of music at a major motel, or a guitar player with an oddly placed hankerchief in his pocket.”

Clifford Brown: vibrational

A short musical interlude. Icelandic pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs wrote a piece today marking the recent birthday of Thelonius Monk: interesting to read the perspectives of a contemporary jazz musician on her relationship to Monk’s music.

She also found some really nice video clips to illustrate her article. I particularly liked this one – the Bill Evans Trio playing Round Midnight in Sweden in 1970. It’s rare to see acoustic jazz of this era filmed in colour, and still in such good condition. Eddie Gomez is the bass player, Marty Morell is on drums.

For an insight into Monk’s life, music and idiosyncrancies, Leslie Gourse’s biography Straight No Chaser is highly recommended.

Boredoms – Ant 10 (DJ Lindstrøm Remix)
From Super Roots 10 : Thrill Jockey 221 [Buy]

Super Roots 10 is the new EP from Japanese rock-noise-art band Boredoms. It’s finally released this month outside Japan, after months of speculation. It’s a freaking cool record, but I’m stumped if I know exactly why.

The music here tracks a noise-ambient-minimalism path chasing some kind of obsessive internal logic requiring overblown guitars, analogue synths, ostinato figures and platoons of manic percussion. The overall effect is like listening to 15,000 WalkMans plugged into a nuclear powerstation. For 40 minutes.

Any band that’s been around for more than 20 years (Boredoms was founded in Osaka 1986 by Yamantaka Eye) has very little left to prove. Boredoms are all about their stage performances, and it really is their extensive use of live percussion that sets them apart from any other band on the planet.

In many ways the 3 remixes and the original track here are extensions of each other: four movements in a greater work that just happen break easily over the two sides of a 12 inch dance single.

And this is definitely dance music, especially designed for dancing while throwing oneself joyfully against brick walls and leaping off bungalow roofs into thornbushes. Super Roots 10 should sound like shit, and yet somehow, it makes complete sense. One of the best releases I’ve heard all year.

At the end of the late screening of Inglourious Basterds on Wednesday night, the cinema erupted into applause. Now, maybe it’s a strange French custom that I hadn’t come across before, or perhaps the room happened to be full of rabid mordus de Tarantino that evening. But quite simply, the film didn’t deserve it.

Diane Kruger contemplates the flammable possibilities of nitrate filmstock

First of all, I’m not going to criticise Inglourious Basterds for being ahistorical.  The film is set in a fairy tale world that happens to bear a very passing resemblence to occupied France. It’s a little like watching Hogans Heroes and ‘Allo ‘Allo simultaneously, but with gruesome screen violence added in. I can accept this -because  if you’re incapable of suspending disbelief during a Tarantino flick, then don’t bother watching.

But Inglourious Basterds simply makes very little sense as a story. Tarantino is a master of slick and innovative narrative. But this film shambles along in overly long and occasionally irrelevant episodes, linked by massive leaps of logic that are neither explained nor plausible (yes, you can place your story inside an ultraviolent comic-book, but the story still needs to fit together).

Brad Pitt should be scalped for his performance, although the script gives him very little to work with. In fact, the script is mostly lumpen, although there is some post-modern fun to be had with  dialogue that transitions glibly between German, English and French (and occasionally Italian – providing Pitt’s only golden moment).

There some bright spots – a couple of scenes remind us of the tension and black humour of which Tarantino is capable. And the show is stolen by the European actors – Christoph Waltz struts around as a zealous and slightly camp jew-hunting Nazi, and Mélanie “Standing In for Uma” Laurent plays a convincing French-Jewish maiden bent on revenge.

War Films 101: A British officer in a German uniform is just asking for trouble…

Mr Tarantino is lumbered with a reputation based on his classic early films,  setting a high standard that is hard to live up to.  He is a genius – growing up in the 90s, I had to sneak in underage to see Pulp Fiction, the one totemic film of my teenagehood. And I had a Reservoir Dogs poster on my bedroom wall for many years (thanks Cameron!).

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino may have been trying to make a grand statement about cinema, fiction and history (the climactic scene certainly suggests so, as does Philip French). Tarantino doesn’t completely fail, but most of the time it seems like he’s just made an occasionally diverting film full of silly accents.

Yeah, you see, I told you so…