etnobofin

It is a rare and exciting day when you hear a musician of the calibre of Eddie Palmieri in concert. One of the founding fathers of New York salsa and a great innovator in the Latin jazz of the 1970s, Palmieri brought his Afro-Carribean All-Stars to New Morning in Paris last Friday, and they blew the roof off.

Eddie Palmieri, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

Two hours of music stretched out over a pair of sets, suffused with humour and generosity. It was hard to suppress a giggle when Palmieri threw a quote from Salt Peanuts into one of his famously overblown solo passages. The grinning complicity between Palmieri and his bass player, Luques “Salsa” Curtis was evident throughout the gig.

Brian Lynch, Concert Pique-Nique, Reims France, 17.07.2010. Image: Eulsteph

The presence of trumpeter Brian Lynch in the touring band was a particular pleasure – an incredibly technically accomplished player, Lynch has been a regular collaborator with Palmieri since 1987, and directed the Grammy-winning album Simpàtico in 2006.

The music traversed Palmieri’s jazz catalogue (including tunes from Simpàtico and 1990′s Palmas) and included a steaming Latin version of Monk’s In Walked Bud, a nod to one of Palmieri’s own stylistic influences on the piano.

Palmieri apologised that the band wouldn’t be playing his salsa hits (Vamonos pa l’Monte, Cuidate Compay…), because of a lack of vocalists in the group. But with the energy on show last Friday, nobody went home disappointed. This is a gig I’ll remember for a long time.

Every so often, it’s worth checking in with Alan Wilkis, an artist/producer who’s been featured several times on this blog . You can read a little more about his music in my previous posts here and here and here.

Beavering away in his Brooklyn laboratory, Alan seems particularly busy at the moment producing remixes for all sorts of people. I particularly liked his latest project, a remix of Phantogram‘s “Mouthful of Diamonds“:

Once again Alan takes some unlikely raw material (in this case, the trip-hoppy, slightly industrial-sounding Phantogram original) and given it the “Wilkis Polish”: he turns it into a little drop of Orangina-flavoured dance pop that says “There’s a party in my iPod and everyone’s invited!“

I get a lot of messages in my blog inbox from bands and promoters wanting me to review and post their new music.  There’s simply too much to listen to, and since this is not just a “music” blog, I tend to only post stuff when I really like the music and if the artist’s message is nice, and particularly if it’s personalised.

This week I got one such nice message from Paper Swords, an folk-rock quintet from Southern California, which has been quick off the mark into the studio – according to their biography they only formed this year! Here’s a little taste…

The band consists of Ryan Myers (vocals, guitar, banjo, harmonium, piano), his brother TJ Myers (drums), Patrick Grant (bass), Russell Fletcher (trumpet, banjo, guitar, harmonium, vocals), and Teresa Ramallo (vocals, piano/keys, guitar).

If you like rich orchestrations and interesting songs, they’re worth checking out.  They do a particularly nice job of meshing TJ’s angular drumming with more traditional “folk” instrumentation – in this way they remind me a little of Laura Veir‘s erstwhile backing band Saltbreakers.

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a sucker for time signatures, so I have to recommend their song Bethseda, which is written in 21/8: but you’ll have to buy their EP “Wax Moon, Wane” to hear it! As a statement of intent, the EP is very impressive – hopefully there’ll be more music forthcoming soon!

A couple of sample tracks are available via their website, otherwise go to iTunes to pick it up.

Paper Swords – Wax Moon, Wane [Buy on iTunes]

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.

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

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).

The part of parenthood that Dr Spock never told you about

In between pretending to finish my dissertation, I’ve discovered a low-cost summer activity that doesn’t involve going outside and sweating: catching up on half a decade of television. After 4 years of not having a TV at home, I’ve realised there are actually a few good things I’ve missed.

So I borrowed the first four seasons of Weeds off a friend, and have been working my way through it. I’ve been pleasantly surprised. If Weeds is a sitcom, the “situations” are twisted, and the “comedy” even more so. In Seinfeld, we laughed at Soup Nazis and George’s lack of luck with the ladies. In Weeds, people get shot dead and dissolved in baths of acid – and we still laugh.

Growing shedloads of pot in suburbia – what could possibly go wrong…?

In case you haven’t seen it, basically, Weeds is a show about suburban mom Nancy Botwin – after her husband dies suddenly, she turns to dealing marijuana to her friends and neighbours in order to make ends meet. But her efforts to support her family via a modest weed-pushing operation rapidly fall apart as alcoholic friends (Celia), idiot accoutants (Doug), DEA agents and couch-surfing brothers-in-law (Andy) foul her every move.

There’s something refreshing about a TV comedy that tracks the slow disintegration of a suburban family and their hangers-on. Weeds is very much a show for our time: at the end of season 3, (screened in 2007, just as the credit crunch was beginning to hit), the Botwins’ identikit suburb of easy-credit homes burns to the ground (something to do with Mexican mafia revenge, biker gangs and Nancy with a petrol can… oh never mind).

The last thing you want to deal with when you’re on the run from the Mexican mafia..

Illegal immigration, Mexican drug wars, euthanasia, police corruption, narcotics (lots), and sex (even more): life is complicated in Schwarznegger’s California. We’re a long way, geographically and spiritually from Saturday evenings with Bob Saget or the amiable but inane antics of Friends.

If occasionally the storylines lacks energy, the series is kept alive by a dynamite script. Andy spouts unlikely slacker wisdom at crucial moments, Nancy’s best enemy Celia goes postal every few episodes, and Shane (borderline sociopath and Nancy’s 13 year-old son) makes the most of being on cable with a dirtier mouth than the rest of the cast combined. And could you imagine Clifford Huxtable having this conversation (NSFW) with Theo?

Celia is actually stabbing Nancy in the back in this photo

But the show belongs to Mary-Louise Parker, who plays Nancy. Her character, who has the best of intentions but no business plan, seems only capable of digging her family into deeper trouble. Although her problems are of her own making, you feel truly sorry for Nancy, and somehow responsible for her predicament as her world teeters on the edge of the abyss.

So, Weeds has been well worth staying inside for. Maybe TV isn’t completely useless. I’ve heard The Wire‘s worth seeing too – anyone have some DVDs I can borrow?

Florida as a whole doesn’t hold a lot of appeal for me: a vast flat strip-mall full of beaches, theme parks, swamps and cops in pastel polo shirts driving Ferraris. But there is one place amidst this general tawdriness that geniuinely impressed and inspired: Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

A Saturn V is immodest in size, brutally functional in its design and arrogant in intent. Seen up close at KSC, it’s a completely wonderful machine, the engineering backbone of the single most impressive technical feat in the history of our species.

Here’s me standing next to one of the Rocketdyne F-1 first stage motors. A Saturn V had FIVE of these puppies, each one of them developing more thrust than an entire space shuttle:

On the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, there’s been debate about whether humans should go back to the Moon, or further. A counter-argument often used is that manned spaceflight is a waste of money, and that we should be focusing our attention, resources and energy on solving problems on Earth first.

Such reasoning is flawed. The opportunity cost of not going back to the Moon or to Mars is NOT prolonged starvation, war or global warming. Cancelling the $100 billion ISS would never result in that $100 billion being spent instead on AIDS research or education in African countries.  And aerospace engineers wouldn’t suddenly turn their enthusiasms towards creating new forms of clean energy.

But there is a pot of money and a set of expertise that could profitably be turned to space exploration: defense spending. 

A 20% cut in the US defence budget ($515 billion in 2009) would fund current NASA activities ($18.7 billion) six times over.  And most of the contractors who might lose business through defence cuts (firms like Lockheed, Boeing and BAE) would be exactly the firms with the technology and skills to bid for work in an expanded space programme.

This is not just an American effort, however. The same level defence cuts applied across Europe, Japan, Russia and China, and the subsequent redeployment of brain power and manpower could be transformative for the world economy.

By rights, a space programme should be a politician’s wet dream. High-value jobs. New technologies. Adding to the knowledge economy. And it’s not just jobs for scientists and pilots…there’s thousands of factory floor jobs involved in stitching spacesuits and running wiring through space capsules. The French for fiscal stimulus package is “plan de relance“. Relance – re-launch.

Like Robyn Gallagher, I’d love to see men and women walk on the Moon or Mars during my lifetime. A Mars programme will certainly have to be an international project. The Americans did it on their own with a Saturn V, some chewing gum and a pocket calculator in 1969. In the 21st century it’ll be even better, because we’ll all be along for the ride. To infinity and beyond!

Apollo 17 photos from NASA / Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

Alan Wilkis – Snuggle Up to Nail Down
From Pink and Purple EP [Buy] [CD Baby]

Last year we reviewed Alan Wilkis‘ slightly eccentric début album Babies Dream Big, and adored its big-tent mix of pop stylings. In 2009 the Brooklyn-based musician and producer is back with an EP entitled Pink and Purple, a deep dive into the synthesised swamp of Reagan-era soundscapes and electrolysed beats.

Wilkis always sounds like he’s having a great amount of fun, whether its dressing up as Rick James backed by the Nintendo Sisters on Snuggle Up to Nail Down (complete with ridiculous-but-appropriate autotuned vocals), or filtering percussion through a DeLorean’s flux capacitor on the EP’s title track.

On N.I.C.E., Wilkis’ white-boy disco fiend is out on the town looking for his material girl, and everything on the scene is pitch-perfect: the swirling synth pads, the rap outro and “Ooh boy, show me whatcha got” female BVs. You could argue that it’s pastiche, but these days, pastiche counts as modernism. And with music as wilfully wrought as this, Wilkis takes it to another level.

Perhaps Wilkis’ choice of 80s schtick sounds a little insincere on the sub-bossa ballad Time Machine, but when Pink and Purple focuses on filling the dancefloor, the EP works very very nicely indeed, and comes across as a more coherent work than his 2008 album. Check it out on Wilkis’ site, or listen on MySpace.