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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.

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

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

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:

• The hemp rope guitar strap (from the interior album artwork on Mellow Gold)
• Guy in a horse mask (a Human Jackass partly made his Odelay tour of 1997 such a gas. Still the best concert I’ve ever seen.)
• The goat skull that’s another reference to cover of Mellow Gold

(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).

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.

Psalm 23 (for Toby) (arr. Rowley)
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

Back when the world was a little younger than it is now, I sang in the chapel choir at my prep school. Recently, an mp3 conversion of a 1991 recording of the choir (complete with tape hiss) has fallen into my hands. Hearing this music again provoked reflection on an important phase in my musical education.

Surprisingly, 18 years later, the cassette doesn’t entirely make me cringe. We were a pretty decent choir – nowhere near the standard of King’s Cambridge, but entirely respectable for a bunch of 10-to-13 years olds. A few flat kiwi vowels rather ruin the Latin of Fauré’s Ave Verum; the phrasing and timing of consonants is a little haphazard, but overall, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s strange knowing that all those unbroken voices now belong to men who are fathers, engineers, lawyers, marketing lecturers and dentists, living in half a dozen countries. One of us has even served tours of duty in Afghanistan. At one time we were all choristers.

My four years in the choir were entirely formative. First of all, we learned performance discipline. We had four 8am rehearsals on weekday mornings, and four sung services a week (3 weekday chapels and 1 Sunday service), all year outside school holidays. In later musical projects, that sense of committment remains: if you’re in the band, you’re part of a team: turn up to rehearsals, and do the gigs. No excuses.

Benjamin Britten – There is no rose from Ceremony of Carols (Op.28)
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

For me, one piece we performed stood out from the rest of our repertoire – Britten’s There is no rose from his Ceremony of Carols. It sounded deep and ancient, a hint of a wider musical world that we might encounter in years to come. At 13 years old, singing Britten somehow seemed serious work, like we were actually performing real music, whatever that was.

Hindsight is treacherous. The imagination has a habit of creating links to the past that perhaps aren’t there. But I can’t help believing that a big part of my love for music finds its roots in endless winter mornings spent in chapel, all those vocal exercises, the routine of robing and the inexorable rhythm of the Book of Common Prayer.

We probably didn’t completely appreciate what we were doing at the time, but almost two decades later, all that singing starts to make sense.

Stephen Sondheim – Send in the Clowns
Performed by the King’s School Chapel Choir – Auckland, NZ, November 1991

The last time I was a regular commuter, (other than getting to work on foot), I had a car and battled down New North Road in Auckland every morning. That was five years ago, so being in Paris and catching the train every day (either métro or RER, depending on strikes and my mood) is a novelty.

One of the few advantages of commuting is it gives you time to listen to music, if you’re inclined to take your mp3 player with you. This is pretty much what everyone does in Paris, unless they’re reading Frédéric Mitterand’s La Mauvaise Vie or a copy of 20 Minutes while the graffiti whizzes past outside.

Somehow I’ve ended up with a bunch of new electro-dancey type stuff on my iPhone playlist, and so my trips through the bowels of the City of Light have been accompanied by whiteboy disco. Apparently it’s what the kids are into these days. Allegedly.

Download Ali Love - Diminishing Returns (Extended Mix)

Ali Love sang on the Chemical Brother’s single Do It Again from a few years back. He’s now launching a solo career. The vinyl single of Diminishing Returns is due out in the UK on 16th November. The video is here.

Schwayze – Get U Home (Alan Wilkis Remix)

Meantime, our friend Alan Wilkis is back with a remix of Schwayze’s Get U Home – it’s currently the most re-tweeted track on Hype Machine. Other artists asked to remix the tune include Paul Oakenfold, Italy’s The Bloody Beetroots, LMFAO, and Travis Barker, (I’ll pretend I’ve heard of all of these names, in a vain attempt to prove I’m still plugged into whatever scene I’m supposed to be plugged into). So Alan’s moving into the big league now. Just remember, you probably heard him here first.

So that geeky looking dude on the RER at Les Invalides station in the morning, trying not to dance? If it’s not Stéphane Guillon coming home from Radio France after his breakfast show slot, it’s probably me.

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.

So it turned out that my temporary landlord in Paris is a trumpet player. And a very good one. And I was invited to his gig last night on in a basement on rue Palestro. Although I’d been told they were going to play “electro-pop-jazz”, I really had little idea what to expect, but I was not disappointed!

Image: Anne Lacomb

Ici et Lui (Here and Him) is a duo formed in 2006 by brothers Thomas and Pierre David, who both have been on the scene for quite some time (their biographies talk of previous recording contracts with Universal, various prizes from musical schools and regular gigs with orchestras and artists around Paris).

Their suprisingly effective set-up involves Thomas on guitar (a Telecaster) and Pierre on trumpet, with both brothers sharing duties on vocals, samplers and effects pedals. The performance itself, in a basement bar that squeezed in about 20 people, crossed so many stylistic boundaries that it could really only be called “music”, in the broadest sense of the word. And although it’s definitely not comedy music, Thomas and Pierre’s dry stage humour worked really well in the intimate of a Paris cellar.

Highlights included “a homage to chanson française” using melodies based on (I think) a whole-tone scale, a cover version of Desmond Dekker’s Shanty Town (complete with Jamaican English sung with French accents) and a short lecture on composer Steve Reich’s theory of voice melody.

Image: Emmanuel Schmitt

It was all slightly surrealist. They sample the continuity announcer from Radio France Inter, slip in some beatboxing, sing in Japanese, and play some mean unison bebop lines (the album includes a lo-fi hip hop version of Charlie Parker’s Ornithology).  Boris Vian would’ve been proud.

Their album pop electro jazz has just been released this month (available from, among others, iTunes and fnac.com). But Ici et Lui’s live show should definitely be seen. They play every first Wednesday of the month at Les Cariatides in the 2nd arrondissement. Free entry!

Ici et Lui on myspace

Ici et Lui + guests
Wednesday 4th November and 2nd December
20h30
Les Cariatides
3, rue de Palestro
Paris 75002
Metro: Etienne Marcel