This week’s musical interlude is courtesy of the Miguel Atwood Ferguson Ensemble, performing Donny Hathaway‘s Someday We’ll All Be Free. This video was shot live a few weeks ago at California Plaza in Los Angeles.
Bilal Oliver does a fine job shadowing the original vocal style of Mr Hathaway on this song. He will have his own album Air Tight’s Revenge out in September… could be worth checking out.
This weekend was spent back in Montpellier, catching up with friends. On Saturday morning I visited the Marché des Arceaux with Ed Ward (read his Montpellier blog here).
With up to 80 local farmers and producers turning up each week, this is Montpellier’s premier source of fresh food in Montpellier – always worth a stop if you’re in town on a Saturday or a Tuesday!
This is the new video from The Mint Chicks for their song I Can’t Stop Being Foolish – discovered via a tweet from Paul Capewell earlier today.
The song is so-so, but the video’s great (if necessary, watch it with the sound turned off). Robots, mousephones and rainbow-powered jet-owls. What’s not to like?
It occured to me rather simultaneously that this sort of surreal humour is often greatly appreciated by musicians. One thinks immediately of Frank Zappa (most of his oeuvre could be classed as an extended audio-cartoon – check the film Baby Snakes his 20 minute mini-operas Greggery Peccary and Billy the Mountain), or even Spike Jones.
However, it was The Goons who took musical surreality to its illogical height. The Ying Tong Song reached #3 in the UK pop charts in 1956 – quite an achievement for a sound experiment involving differential tape speed and extensive use of foley:
Music was always an integral part of The Goon Show, with regular interludes by Max Geldray and his Orchestra and the Ray Ellington Quartet. However many of the best pieces of humour in the stories themselves were also musical (or sonic, at least).
“GRYTPYPE-THYNNE: He’s gone, He’s gone. Quick. Rifle his desk, photograph the plans of the male salami, telephone the Kremlin and mind that bust of Queen Victoria.
MORIARTY:Right.
GRYTPYPE-THYNNE: Meanwhile I’ll play two quick choruses of “When I’m Cleaning Windows” on my leather euphonium just to cover any noise, now get going.
MORIARTY: Right.
[FX: Hammer blows, sawing, breaking glass etc over Moriarty's grunts and Grytpype-Thynne impersonating a leather euphonium].”
In a different episode, the Goons ran off to Daytona Beach to attempt a new land speed record in a fifty-tonne brass-bound Wurlitzer, with all the appropriate musical sound-effects, (and a few subtle “organ” jokes).
