Thelonius Monk Quartet in Paris, 1969, playing “I Mean You“. Charlie Rouse on tenor is particularly strong on this performance: melodic and concise, never overpowering Monk’s composition. He reminds me a little of Dewey Redman… in fact, it would’ve been awesome to hear Redman play with the Monk Quartet!
Thelonius Monk (pn), Charlie Rouse (ts), Nate Hygellund (b), Paris Wright (d)
Salle Pleyel, Paris: 15th December 1969
John Dankworth passed away on Saturday. Here’s a recent performance of his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing, still going strong at 81 at the 2008 North Sea Jazz Festival, and only hung up his saxophone in December.
This clip epitomises a lot of what Dankworth’s music meant to me – his close partnership with his wife Cleo Laine (one of the great voices of the 20th Century), his penchant for tight, witty ensemble writing, and his consistent ability to connect with a wide audience well beyond the regular jazz public.
When I found this on YouTube, I knew I had to post it… it’s the opening sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. I’ve never seen a film quite like it before or since, and the first 7 minutes set the mood perfectly – mysterious, subtle and playful, drawing you into Alexander’s world.
Alexander is played by Bertil Guve, and Grandma Ekdahl by Gunn Wållgren (who was suffering terminal cancer throughout the filming). The music at the start is the 2nd movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 44.
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
Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg seem a strangely appropriate duo: America’s pop wunderkind of the 1990s teaming up with the daughter of one of France’s most famous performing artists.
Heaven Can Wait is the first single off Gainsbourg’s new album Master’s Hand, but it sounds like a Beck song through and through. And the video is completely fabulous:
Although officially it’s on a Charlotte Gainsbourg disc, Heaven Can Wait sounds almost like a return to form for Beck. He’s frankly showing a little of his age in this video, but the music contains some of the hallmarks of his classic period: honky-tonk beat-making, lyrical bricolage and a story of misfits played out under the sun of East Los Angeles.
The video even contains sly visual clues to Beck’s earlier work (and the visual is almost as important as the music with Beck). See if you can spot:
(Don’t know if I should confess that Mellow Gold was the first CD I ever bought. Given that the first cassette I bought was Arrested Development’s 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of…, I’m not sure if my taste improved. But I do own all of Beck’s albums. Including the pre-Geffen indie obscurities).
Arte continues to throw up some amazing documentaries. Last night it was the Dutch-produced film Autour du monde à bord du Zeppelin – Le journal de Lady Hay. It compiled footage of the August 1929 circumnavigation of the globe by the airship Graf Zeppelin, with narration based on the journals and letters of the sole woman on board, Lady Grace Drummond-Hay.
The round-the-world trip was in part sponsored by William Randolph Hearst, who negotiated exclusive newspaper rights for the trip for English-speaking countries. The journey left from Lakehurst, NJ, passing through Friedrichshafen, over Berlin, Russia and Siberia to Tokyo, and then onwards over the Pacific to Los Angeles before flying eastwards via Chicago back to Lakehurst.
It was a grand and risky adventure: supplied with erroneous maps, the airship had to dump tonnes of ballast to climb over the Stanavoy Mountains in Siberia. Encountering a storm over the Pacific, the zeppelin lost radio contact for two days. Newspapers around the world reported that the ship had crashed.
Lady Drummond-Hay’s on-board companions are equally colourful. The Soviet representative is enraged when the captain Hugo Eckener abandons plans to overfly Moscow due to adverse weather. A stowaway is discovered: a young man trying to fly to Hollywood to become a movie star. And she constantly records the awkward relationship with her erstwhile boyfried, the journalist Karl von Wiegand.
However what is most remarkable about the film is its vision of the planet midway between two World Wars. As the airship flew over Berlin, the passengers witnessed violent scenes in the streets below: Germans protesting war reparations. The Berlin flyover was intended to celebrate German engineering prowess, but instead, Lady Drummond-Hay records her shock at the political violence. A few years later Germany turned to fascism, and swastikas were painted on the Graf Zeppelin’s tail.
Graf Zeppelin over Basel, Switzerland, 1930
(Casas-Rodríguez Collection, 2009 – Creative Commons)
Retrospectively, this voyage marked the end of an era, a grand gesture summing up the excess and progress of the 1920s. Six weeks after the Graf Zeppelin triumphantly circled Manhattan at the end of its circumnavigation, the Wall Street stockmarket crashed. The world entered an economic depression that was really only resolved by a second World War.
Lady Grace Drummond-Hay is largely forgotten today, but in the 1920s and 1930s was something of a celebrity: a journalist and the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air.
As war correspondents in the Philippines in 1942, Drummond-Hay and von Wiegand were captured by Japanese troops and spent three years in a prison camp. Returning to New York, Drummond-Hay died in 1946 of health complications arising from her captivity. A movie could certainly be made of her life: this documentary is a fascinating starting point.
David Mitchell is one of the funniest people in Britain today – and very smart with it. His TV projects (Peep Show, Mitchell and Webb) and his now-established role as default panellist for radio and TV panel games (HIGNFY, News Quiz, Would I Lie to You?) have helped to build a comic persona very English in its essentials: self-concious and awkward, but possessing a logic of argument that never fails to reveal the absurdity of whatever he’s dealing with.
Generally, Mitchell’s Observer column is just funny: occasionally it contains some much deeper insights. This week, his column describes why his records collection contains just two titles (Phil Collins But Seriously… and Susan Boyle’s new album), and he posits a piercing summation of why we buy things:
These purchases… aren’t about taste, they’re about identity. We flatter ourselves that we buy things based on our judgment of quality and price, but that’s a secondary factor. Fundamentally we buy the sort of things that feel appropriate, based on the class we come from, the groups we aspire to be part of, or the opinions we find attractive.
Our purchases are tribal, neo-religious signifiers.
And, for those who haven’t seen it, possibly the best Mitchell and Webb sketch, ever, which deals with tribal signifiers in its own way. (Warning: contains Nazis):
I’ve only heard Stornoway play live once: it was midnight in a rain-soaked field last year just off the M40 near Aylesbury or Thame or somewhere. In any case, it was dark and wet. There were 15 people in the crowd and the band was almost drowned out by the rave tent next door. It was hardly an auspicious evening.
But something about their music must have stuck: possibly the strong melodies and their ability to look and sound like a folk-rock band without being a folk-rock band. I came home, bought all their mp3s (all eight of them), wrote a blog post, and now their song Here Comes the Blackout is one of my top-played tunes on last.fm.
So having followed the band for over a year now, it’s gratifying to see they’re building some solid buzz: they played Glastonbury this year, became the first rock band ever to play a concert in the Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (oh to have seen that gig!), and most recently appeared on Later with Jools Holland:
Although they’re not signed and have no album out yet, their song Zorbing is already an anthem on the Oxford scene. It’s a piece of music which typifies Stornoway’s approach: apparently ramshackle, amiably round-vowelled, but cleverly structured and very catchy. It’ll be interesting to see what 2010 brings for these chaps.
Sir Howard Morrison died today. He was one of New Zealand’s most popular entertainers for 50 years, and a man who used his talent and energy to advance the causes of his people.
A humourist, a musician, a quietly committed activist, he will be remembered for many things, but his performance of Whakaaria mai (How Great Thou Art, sung in Maori) will remain a treasured memory for anyone who heard it live or on television.
[Edit: for a more nuanced and detailed appreciation by a knowledgeable critic, Graham Reid's piece on Public Address is well worth reading]
Kua hinga he Kauri nui i roto i te waonui o Tane. Hoki atu ra ki o tuupuna Matua i Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pamamao.
Muchas apologias. Writing on the blog has been intermittent lately. The last week has been a blur of trains, meetings and sleeping in strange beds. And somewhere among all this I’m pushing towards handing in a thesis at the end of September. Things have been kind of busy.
If anyone wants a clue about what’s going on in Montpellier, read Ed’s blog, because I’m kind of out of the loop.
However, I was introduced to Le Quatuor last week – and thought it was worth sharing: four highly accomplished classical musicians who have turned to physical comedy… well, for laughs.
I think the entire performance on their DVD is funnier as a whole, rather than the few excerpts you can find on YouTube. I’m surprised they aren’t more known outside France: most of the jokes are physical or musical, and their dialogue-based sketches are carried out in a surreal mélange of German, Italian, English, French and Spanish (check out their music lesson sketch).
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