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Day 120. Beethoven and Marais.

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

I’ve had little time to properly rip some discs the past couple of days. Busy working on finishing up a recording project, and today was also Celia’s 5th birthday. We started the morning out with ‘Birthday’ by The Beatles (don’t think she would like the Sugarcubes as much yet, though I might be surprised). I’ve also been making sure to keep up on some exercise, and I will be releasing a small piece of software soon that accesses your iTunes library, and let’s you make mixes that are keyed to your running pattern. I’ve been running / walking to Led Zeppelin the past couple weeks, and for the most part it works nicely. Though some tunes a poor choices in hindsight. ‘Achille’s Last Stand’ is fine for running AFTER the first 40 seconds of fade in droning guitar. ‘When The Levee Breaks’ = worst running song ever??? But the best cool down song is five minutes of walking home to ‘The Lemon Song’ and playing air bass.

So I went ahead and added some purchases from the past couple of months tonight. These included a couple discs of music for viols by Marin Marais and Pollini and Abbado’s set of Beethoven piano concertos. The Marais is wonderful music, and can sound quite different to ears that haven’t heard much viol music. The viol (viola da gamba and friends) has a more nasally sound, not quite as resonant as the cello. It also is a little slower to speak. Much of the music also tends to have longer, more sweeping lines (this is a generality I probably shouldn’t make, but I think most people who have heard music for viols would probably agree with me that this is the music it played best), and can be very lyrical and emotional. One of this discs though is a set of suites, and some of it really moves. Some of the articulations (which even survived in French music to the present day) are quite snappy, even surprising after hearing such long drawn out attacks in slower movements.

The Pollini set was a big surprise to me. I don’t dislike his solo Beethoven sonata recordings, but don’t really like them much either. Mostly, I was indifferent about them. But the concerto recordings were done close to 20 years after the other recordings, and as a pianist Pollini has grown amazingly. He may be one of the best living pianists today. And Abbado, as he was nearing the end of his time with Berlin, had also grown and learned probably as much from working with such an amazing orchestra as they learned from him. These recordings are wonderful pretty much all around. I’m going to throw on the fourth concerto right now I think before I go to bed… or maybe the middle movement of the ‘Emperor’. Either way, I know it will be a good way to end the night.

Tags: Beethoven, Marais, Pollini
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Day 119. Wild and Wooly, Funk Blast! and I.R.S. Records ‘On The Charts’.

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Grabbed a few collections tonight, two that came out from the Experience Music Project here in Seattle, and a demo disc that I.R.S. Records put out in 1994 to celebrate 15 years of ‘being on the charts’.

The EMP discs I got with some weariness. EMP represents to me most of what I think is wrong in the world. It is an expensive ‘museum’ of Paul Allen’s memorabilia collection that is a headphone / PDA guided tour of, well, Paul Allen’s stuff. And the building is the biggest architectural disaster of Frank Gehry. I love his work usually, but this monstrosity is just hideous. And to top it off, when you go to the top of the space needle and look DOWN on it, the roof has had no design attention paid to it. No, if I was putting a building, especially one that is supposed to be interesting to look at, next to the Space Needle, what would I make sure to do? I would make sure it looked damn good from above. Anyways, the aesthetic problems, as well as the audacity that Paul Allen has to basically put his money into building a museum to store the stuff he has bought, then to charge an arm and a leg to close yourself off to the museum experience tells me that there would probably be problems with mix discs that the same place produced. The surprise is, they are actually pretty good. There are some small problems here and there, but they are, for the most part, pretty right on.

One set is a chronology of rock in the northwest called ‘Wild and Wooly’, and charts 50s garage bands up to Murder City Devils. The Wailers and The Kingsmen are represented, as is Mudhoney’s ‘Touch Me I’m Sick!’, a pre-Nevermind Nirvana track, Sleater-Kinney and some power pop from The Posies. My favorite moment on the disc though happens near the beginning of disc 2… Queenryche leads into Green River (followed by a torrent of grunge). It is almost like a baton is passed, and the music of the ‘90s takes over. The second set called ‘Funk Blast!’, and it earns my ultimate respect for starting out with not one but TWO James Brown songs. THEN it goes onto The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’. Pretty bad-ass way to start a funk chronology. War gets a track, Funkadelic, Chic, Ohio Players, Parliament… most of what you expect. But once it starts, the two discs are playable pretty much from start to finish. This set may be one of Tamiko’s top 10 most played discs actually. Pretty solid set… especially considering the EMP sins discussed above.

The I.R.S. disc is fun as well, though definitely something meant for in-store play as a way to sell older re-issues. It did get me ‘Mexican Radio’ and ‘The Future’s So Bright’ though without needing to buy discs by Wall of Voodoo and Timbuk 3.

Tags: Compilations
Posted in Rock / Pop, Tamiko | No Comments »

Day 118. Brahms.

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

One of my favorite quotes about Brahms’ fourth symphony comes from Ravel. I can’t remember it exactly, but a friend of Ravel’s asks if he is going to go to a performance, and Ravel says something like ‘why would I go listen to that silly waltz?’, his friend says Ravel must be confused, there is no waltz in the fourth symphony. Then Ravel says ‘sure there is’ and starts to sing to melody to the first movement in 3/4 DAAA-da, DAAA-da, DAAA-da etc. etc. Whenever I hear the fourth now, I almost always think of how Ravel must have sung this (probably quite a bit like a couple of his ‘Valses nobles et sentimantales’).

Tonight I ripped the Bernard Haitink box set of the symphonies along with a number of other orchestral works (including both serenades!). The box is part of a set of boxes covering most of the romantic and some classical symphonic repertoire that Phillips put out featuring Haitink and the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. Most were done in the ‘70s, and they pulled together complete sets of Brahms, Schumann, Mahler, Beethoven and others. Many of these recordings now show up as budget discs, and as a result they are often overlooked, but they are wonderful performances. Haitink is such a great musician and conductor, and paired with one of the best orchestras in the world in a wonderful concert hall, it is hard to go wrong. The boxes are hard to find now (and I’m still searching for the Mahler and Bruckner sets), but many of these sets can be pieced together as single discs and double-disc sets. Not a bad way to build up a good overview of symphonic literature!

Tags: Bernard Haitink, Brahms
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Day 117. Buxtehude (and finally getting around to Beethoven and Bach)

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Not much time for ripping CDs tonight (still catching up from the other night actually), so I am throwing onto the computer a couple of collections I have purchased over the past year. They are two (that’s right, two) COMPLETE sets of the organ work of Buxtehude. Why two? A couple reasons… first, they are both played quite well (Rene Saorgin and Ulrik Spang-Hanssen are the two players) and one of the fun things about organ music is how different performances can be just based on tone color. Organists often prepare pieces with their own choices for stops, and one thing I like to do is hear the same piece played by two different players to see what they do with it. And if that isn’t geeky enough, I also like to hear what different organs sound like. More then just about any other instrument, the organ can be likened to modern day astronomy. When you look at stars, you are seeing what they looked like in the past, and with organs, you get one of the few instruments that really holds their original quality. You can get a sense of how different areas used different tuning systems, and you also get an instrument that, more then any other, needs an entire building as its resonating body. So there can be big differences between performances and recordings.

Of course, some of the same things can be said about just about any recording of classical music. And if you start to throw in jazz standards, live rock recordings and covers, it really can be said about all music. Music can and should be performed by many people many times. It was always a little disheartening to me when people would come in and ask for ‘the best recording of blah blah blah’. There is no best recording, but here… take five recordings and see if you can figure out what it is about a piece that makes it what it is. It’s hard in some ways, but very fun as well. I completely understand the want for the best recording of something though, especially if you are just starting to explore a genre and want to get the best impression possible. Plus, the whole endeavor is expensive. I was very fortunate to be in a situation where I was given a large part of my collection, and the parts I did have to buy were discounted. But for the customer wanting just ‘the best’, I’m not really sure if such things exist. What I do know is that whatever recording you hear first, for the most part that is how you will learn most of a piece, and you will judge all other recordings and performances based on those impressions (so in some ways get any version, and for the time being you will think it is the best version of the piece around).

Now – getting a group of people together who do know a work and multiple versions of it is lots of fun… there is argument and agreement, and the quibbling over details small and large. And these kinds of conversations really made up usually about a quarter of any given shift working in the classical room at Tower in Berkeley (where there were usually a few customers who came in for an hour here and there throughout the week). They were a blast. And I learned a lot about music this way. I learned a lot about what people listen for, and in turn what I could or should listen for. It was some of the best ear training I had while earning my music degree, and it certainly shaped how I think as a composer.

If you have been reading my entries here and there, the idea of two complete Buxtehude sets probably isn’t really that far-fetched. Especially considering that I also ripped my third (of five I think?) set of Beethoven symphonies as well (the John Eliot Gardiner set) and Anner Bylsma’s second set of Bach cello suites (on Sony). I think I have six versions of the cello suites – and on top of that, I know at least two of those are by Anner Bylsma! It fun to hear the differences between the two Bylsma sets (surprising even!) but if you are familiar with Beethoven’s symphonies and haven’t heard Gardiner’s recordings, I really recommend you grab at least one of them to listen to. The fifth will sound like a new piece to you, but if I had to choose one, I’d say give the third a listen. The playing is extremely precise (a little cold even in parts), but the tempos (very strictly the ones Beethoven marked down later in life) and the use of period instruments make these sound quite different then the large, romantic orchestral performances that were the norm of the 40s and 50s. In other words, this isn’t your grandfather’s Klemperer or Furtwangler. And while in some ways, these period instrument recordings would seem to owe quite a bit to the early 19th century, they are also the product of musicians who have probably seen more then their share of modern scores. Dynamic range seems a bit exaggerated at times, but it works very well with this music. In some ways, it took a group playing instruments that are two hundred years old to make Beethoven sound new again, and overall the results are great fun. I just wouldn’t recommend them to someone as the first set of symphonies to hear.

Tags: Anner Bylsma, Beethoven, Buxtehude, J.S. Bach, John Eliot Gardiner
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Day 116. Arvo Pärt, Beethoven and Bach.

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Tonight I grabbed a stack of Arvo Pärt, along with another set of Beethoven symphonies (the Gardiner box or rad) and Anner Bylsma’s second set of Bach cello suites. Still ripping the Beethoven and the Bach, but they will be fun to have on.

Arvo Pärt is one of my guilty pleasures. I’ve mentioned before that the girls both had some of his music for bedtime music as they were babies learning to fall asleep. And I can say that for the most part, I like and have learned quite a bit from him. As I heard in a composition lesson once, ‘his music is the REAL minimalism… Reich and Glass are just repetitive. And while listening to his music, I can really hear how this is true. When I first heard Pärt, while working at Tower, his music was often connected to New Age music, and found a bit of an audience there. As such, I wrote him off. There was certainly no need for music in my life that attracted Yanni fans. But after hearing ‘Tabula Rasa’ (the concerto for two violins, strings, prepared piano and percussion) I gave pretty much his whole body of work another listen, and the more and more I heard the more I found it worth hearing. Looking back now at how I tend to think about harmony, dissonance and melody, the more I see relationships in my music to what I have heard in Pärt’s. Not that my music sound like bells, or really anything like his, but there are many things I do in my music that I wouldn’t do if I hadn’t contemplated some of his approaches.

The big one for me is the use of quiet, and space to let moments resonate and decay. There is so much beauty in how sound disappears, and really so much activity. I also learned how important it is to consider the space a performance (or a recording) occurs in, as they will shape the quality of the sound so much. When I listen to recordings of Pärt’s music, I become intensely aware of the feeling of its location and spatial quality. The last piece I had performed (Risonanza) takes particular notice of these qualities. And more and more, I am looking for ways to make live electronics simulate and place instruments and their sounds into different acoustic environments (even within the physical structures of the instruments themselves!). So when I hear Pärt talk about the major changes in his compositional style, and the intense contemplations he made into the sounds of bells and how they sound, I still think about how magical that kind of contemplation on sound can be. I would love to see more composers do the same, and think that this will be one of the most important aspects of music to me throughout the rest of my career. It seems so obvious! But as anyone who has been to a new music festival can probably tell you, it is a rare thing.

Tags: Arvo Pärt, Beethoven, J.S. Bach
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Day 115. Some mix-discs.

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

So tonight when I took Celia downstairs to look for some CDs, out of (what I think is) nowhere, she asks ‘Daddy? Do you have a tape player?’ Now, I’m a little surprised that she would even know what a tape player is, but don’t think too much about it and say ‘yeah, but I think Popi has it…’ and I keep looking for CDs. Then she picks a tape up and says ‘then I think you should do this one tonight’ and it is a mix tape from over ten years ago from my friend Charles. Then it occurs to me… ‘Celia… how did you know that was a tape?’ and she says ‘I just know’, then she turns around and heads upstairs (and I can tell she is quite pleased with herself). Then, there in my hands, is the ONE redeeming reason for cassette tapes to exist. The mix tape. Really, what a horrible medium. The sound quality was horrible on these things (especially compared to records!), over time the sides would start to bleed together, but that was only if some tape machine didn’t eat the damn thing first. All those moving parts as well made for many points of failure, and then there were the compromises manufacturers had to make to get more time onto them (thinner film or added weight which would lead to MORE chances for the thing to get eaten). But by the early ‘90s the 90 minute tape seemed to be pretty ideal for friends to share music with each other (still well before file sharing and mp3 reached any popularity, and CD burners were still VERY expensive, as were the discs to burn onto.

So, 12 or 13 years after the fact Celia finds a mix tape from Charles. And this reminds me that it is also time for me to get my yearly mix disc going. Charles and I worked together at the Tower in Berkeley for a couple years in the mid to late ‘90s while he finished his undergrad degree in English. We became pretty good friends, and have kept in touch here and there. Actually, I really need to write to Charles and see what he is up to. I miss talking to him. But one thing both of us have done, pretty much since we have known each other, is pulled together mix-tapes (then mix-discs then mix-downloads that we know will fit onto a disc) just about every year. We share them with other friends as well, and though Charles may not know this he is one of the main reasons that I still make them. The other reasons are that for Tamiko and me it has filled the role of re-exploring our music collection about once a year, and the other is my friend Colin. So, while I know that other people do listen to some of my mix discs, Tamiko, Charles and Colin are the three people who I really feel a need to impress. This last year, I had a little making up to do in the mix disc department (Mira being born shut down the mix disc making for a year for obvious reasons… ‘Wow… I’m tired and Mira and Celia are asleep at the same time! I can start making a mix-dis… >snore<‘).

So this year I pulled together three discs, and released them as downloads over the course of three weeks. The first was an homage to the first mix-disc (post-tape compilation) that I got from Charles in 1999. Charles’ 1999 mix-disc was called ‘Wood and Smoke’ and pulled together an amazing collection of quieter acoustic tunes, with some choice cuts from The Spinanes, Smashing Pumpkins and Neil Young. ‘Wood and Smoke’ also established the ‘double-album mix-CD’ format for Charles with the sound of a needle dropping, followed by five tracks (about 20 minutes) repeated four times to give the impression of four sides to a double-album. I absolutely love that Charles includes the needle drop, and that each side is thought of as a whole… the tracks expertly arranged into their own little entities. Charles told me a couple years back that I’m his only friend that really appreciates this effort, and I was shocked. I told Charles his other friends didn’t deserve to get copies of his mixes. Anyways, my first of three mixes paid homage to ‘Wood and Smoke’ with ‘Tinder and Soot’. ‘Wood and Smoke’ is probably the most played mix-disc that I have, and I had to see if I could do something just as good with the ‘rules’ that Charles seemed to lay down. I like ‘Tinder and Soot’, but after about 10 listenings I don’t think it stands up as well as Charles’ original.

The second mix-disc of last year was really for Tamiko. She commented to me once (quite accurately) that women singers make WAY too few appearances on my discs. Looking back at my compilations over the years, she was dead on. I hate to say it, but if I was analyzing my mix discs from the outside, it would even appear that the appearance of a woman singing wasn’t exactly token, but a female voice’s appearance was rarer. It was usually a highlighter, a rare enough occurrence so that when it happened, it took on a special significance on its own. A Yo La Tengo song with Georgia singing was common, but other then that there was just an Ella Fitzgerald song or someone soulful or Nico here and there. So ‘Black Dress On’ was, as Tamiko put it, my ‘chick disc’. All female vocals, starting of with Hildegard leading into Ronnie Spector singing ‘Be My Baby’ followed by Sonic Youth (‘Kool Thing’). Unlike ‘Tinder and Soot’, the more I have listened to ‘Black Dress On’ the better it has gotten. I actually think it may be the best mix-disc I ever made, and there is little that makes me happier then throwing it on and watching my girls dance around the living room.

The last disc ‘Born To Gaze Into Night Skies’ follows my more typical mix-disc formula. Lots of genre jumping that attempts to connect what seems to be unrelated music into the musical consciousness that is my musical world. This can frustrate Charles all to hell at times, but I insist that it all works. This would be my radio station if I had one. Why not go from Iron & Wine into Sly and the Family Stone? Throw in some Kenny Burrell, Marc Ribot and The Five Stairsteps, and while the music may hop from genre to genre, it’s all good.

So, these were the discs I put on the server tonight, along with the other mix-discs of mine that I have made over the past 10 years or so. I’ll need to dig out the tape deck and get the ones that Celia wants as well sometime soon, though I wonder if it would be easier to just find the tracks and re-create it that way… but then the tape hiss would be missing, and if Celia is going to get the true experience of what a mix-tape was, that part will be needed. Better start digging around for that old tape deck…

Tags: mix discs
Posted in Celia, Rock / Pop, Tamiko | No Comments »

Day 114. Paganini.

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

After playing the Beethoven violin sonatas a bunch today, Celia really seemed to be getting into violin playing. I put on some of the Paganini violin / guitar duets after breakfast (wafflepalooza for dads) this morning and Celia really liked those as well. She also learned the word ‘violinist’. So I went downstairs and dug up the rest of my Paganini for tonight. And as I started to listen to more and more of his work (I have a stunning amount of Paganini CDs it turns out) I started chuckling to myself more and more. There really are time in his music that are just simply ridiculous. Like – how in the world did anyone think of putting that many notes down at one time for a single instrument to play ridiculous. Like Bugs Bunny playing Liszt with both hands and ears ridiculous… and that is when I made a connection. Celia (and Mira) are going to love this music. It is fun, flashy and just a little silly sometimes. At others, it is operatic. Sometimes very serious, and sometimes SOOO serious that it becomes comic again. Music historians have often compared the early romantic period virtuosity of Paganini and Liszt. It broke away from the classical restraint that so much music of the late 18th and early 19th century sometimes had, and pushed the virtuosic into another realm altogether. So it is no wonder that this music would show up in Looney Tunes, which both of my daughters have taken a serious liking towards. And the fast, joyful playing of Paganini’s violin, I imagine, doesn’t strike Celia as too different from the music she has been hearing in those cartoons.

Of course, as a musician I also find this work fun from the technical standpoint. It really is pretty crazy at points, and having tried to play some of it I appreciate how amazing any of these players are. Even more astounding to me is that, even in Paganini’s music that seems to be just for light entertainment (the violin and guitar duets, or the guitar quartets), I’m surprised at the demands placed on the players. And while so much of the writing is flashy and showy, it is also very musical. Technically it is amazing, but that is only after it is amazing musically.

This is a point of frustration to me with so many composers today, especially in academic circles. There seems to be a need (or expectation) that music should be challenging and difficult (to play as well as listen to). And I certainly think new work should push the art along. But often what I hear that is challenging isn’t that engaging. There are composers who explore complex approaches to composition but want the work to sound un-complex (then why do it???) and there are others that want to write something that just isn’t playable. Just because we can compose out of time, subdivide rhythm into impossible ratios and pitch into minute distinctions doesn’t make the music good. However, if the music is good and requires that such demands are made, then that is a different story. In Nono’s string quartet ‘Fragmente Stille, An Diotima’ there is a wonderful chord that happens about 2/3 of the way through the piece, and I know that Nono knew it. It lasts longer then just about anything else in the work (including the long rests), and when I was doing an analysis of the piece I was surprised to see how it was built. Within the piece, it is a moment of clam beauty. On the page, it is built with quarter-tone dissonances which, from the sight of it, should be jarring. But within the context of the whole work, it is a shimmering moment of beauty that had to happen. I have no way of knowing for sure how he came up with this chord, but it is the perfect one. And it is challenging to play and tune. It is technical complexity that comes from a musical need, and I see a connection between this and the demands Paganini placed on his performers. To make it worse, the result of these passages needs to feel effortless. Virtuosic performers can make it sound like their fingers know where they are going, but virtuosic musicians will make it sound like there is simply no other way to do it.

Tags: Paganini
Posted in Celia, Classical | No Comments »

Day 113. Beethoven and Brahms.

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Tonight I grabbed a few discs from the back of the shelf. Anne-Sophie Mutter’s complete Beethoven violin sonatas with Lambert Orkis, as well as her recordings of the Brahms sonatas with Alexis Weisenberg, and a collection of Renaissance music. I remember quite well the hype of the Mutter/Orkis complete Beethoven. They spent a year touring, performing the complete set over two nights at each venue, and the recordings were going to be the culmination of the work. The recordings were also all live (which I was particularly excited about… I love live recordings). In the classical music world, you often don’t have a set of discs anticipated for months, but these certainly were. I got a promotional set of them, and while I won’t say I was disappointed, I was certainly underwhlemed at the time. I don’t remember why, I just remember thinking… ‘eh’. And while I remember that feeling, I can’t think of what recordings before then that I would have suggested. No matter… but this is the reason these discs found their way to the back of my shelves rather then the front (where the Menuhin/Kempff discs lived). But listening to them tonight, I am finding them much more interesting. I would even use the word enchanting. I put on the A minor (number 4) before I started typing this, and it is great. Perhaps I just needed to be older or to know these works better, but I am excited to listen to this set again now. The last movement of the A minor is amazing (I’ve played it three times now). I love how much her bowing and tone color can vary, and Orkis’ playing is very dynamic. Most of all, the two really seem to be breathing together. Now this is something that I definitely appreciate more now then I used to. Not that it used to bother me, just that it wasn’t something that I noticed as much as I do now. Anyways – I know what I’ll be playing tomorrow morning as I make waffles with Celia for father’s day breakfast.

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Day 112. Johnny Cash.

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

After Johnny Cash died (a mere few months after his wife June did), Tamiko and I were caught by Sarah Vowell on ‘This American Life’ telling ‘The Greatest Love Story of the 20th Century’. You can hear it here as Act III (about 45 minutes in… but you really should listen to the whole episode… it’s ‘This American Life’! what a great way to spend an hour). About halfway through the story (which we heard sitting in our car, waiting for the story to end before we got out) we were leaning on each other’s shoulders. By the end I think we were both getting teary. Sarah Vowell’s story is beautifully done, and I still get choked up hearing it. And of course, June and Johnny Cash’s story and the music and influence they had on country music (and rock, and punk, and folk music… etc. etc.) is not just a great love story, but a story of life, joy, grief and music. My friend Colin sent me and Tamiko a postcard some time later. June and Roseanne are on a big front porch, June holding her autoharp, Roseanne holding her guitar. Both are listening to each other, and a younger boy stands to one side. On the other is an older Johnny Cash, watching and listening to his girls. It’s a beautiful picture that I would like to believe was a chance snapshot of their life. I know that can’t be the truth, but I would like to think it is.

But what probably impresses me most about Johnny Cash and his musical life is what he did over his last decade. In 1994, he sat down in his living room with nothing more then his Martin guitar and recorded an album with rap / metal producer Rick Rubin. The sound is stripped down, yet produced with a bit of a harshness. As his age progressed and health deteriorated, he continued to make recordings for Rubin and American Recordings. The thing about these discs that amaze me is how as Johhny Cash’s voice starts to break and weaken, the music seems to zoom in closer and closer on what it means to be human, and how music is an integral part of our lives. To hear someone taking that music with them as their body begins to fail them, as they move closer and closer to death, takes bravery. A little after June died, Johnny mentioned that she urged him to keep recording as long as he could. Johnny said it was June coming down from heaven to give him the courage to keep singing. It’s hard to explain, but hearing the physical limits of Johnny Cash in his last recordings seems to me to reveal that he isn’t afraid of where he is or where he is going. There is not shame of a warbly and cracking voice in these songs, I can only imagine that there is acceptance that this is what happens to a body that has lived the life that he has. Johnny died about four months after June did, and I’d be surprised if there was any fear at that moment for Johnny, but a sincere and strong belief that he was about to see the love of his life again.

20 years ago on June 15th, Tamiko and I started dating. Unlike June and Johnny, we were lucky to find each other early in our lives. I was explaining to a friend that as far as my memory goes, I can probably think back to about when I was 5 or so. At 35 now, I have about 30 years of memories, and over 20 of those (2/3 of my life so far!) include me and Tamiko as friends, lovers, exes (briefly), husband and wife and parents. I love the story of June and Johnny Cash, and I know that Tamiko and I had the same thought go through our minds when we heard Sarah Vowell’s story… it sure is amazing to find love.

Tags: Johnny Cash
Posted in Folk / Blues / Country, Tamiko | No Comments »

Day 111. Thelonious Monk.

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

One of my favorite parts of taking jazz improv classes (which I really only did for a few years at the community college level) was that at some point in the semester we would usually end up watching the Thelonious Monk documentary ‘Straight, No Chaser’. It is a great documentary, and I think I saw it 5-6 times in school. (As a quick aside, the other film that would find its way into the curriculum of many classes was the James Baldwin documentary ‘The Price Of The Ticket’, which I also saw 5-6 times… I don’t say this in any way as a complaint… Both of these are amazing documentaries, and if there are any two films every undergraduate should see 5-6 times in the pursuit of their Bachelor’s degree these are the two). Monk’s story was amazing, and whether or not he had mental illness to overcome (never confirmed though highly suspected), there can be no mistake that he was a musical genius. The intricacy and complexity of his playing rewards multiple listenings. At first you may be drawn to the sharply angular melodies or sharp syncopations. After another listen or two, your ear may start to recognize bits and pieces of the original melody, displaced by octaves and stretched or shrunk on the fly. And one of the most amazing things I tend to find in Monk’s playing is his impeccable timing… he knows when to stop and let the others play (usually so he could stand up and dance). It may seem quirky, but just about everything he played was very musical and very deeply thought out, even if the amount of time allowed for the thought was only a few moments.

And though I say above that the documentary is an amazing thing to see (even over and over again), it is also a little depressing. After spending a few weeks learning scales and how to play over different changes (and taking your 2 chorus turn when you were pointed to) we would be shown this video. Why, oh why, would an instructor do this to us? To crush our spirits? Show us what can’t really be attained? Because there was at least once or twice that this happened to me. Here I’ve been, with my saxophone or guitar for a few weeks, trying to become a better jazz improvisor, and then I’m shown videos of Thelonious Monk operating at a musical level that I imagine no one in that room could operate at. But what I finally got out of that video is that while we certainly can’t be Monk, there really isn’t anyone else that can be either. I’m not sure if this was something we were supposed to figure out on our own or not, or even if our instructor that this, but I think the point was that if we are going to make any mark in music, we need to figure out what our voice is going to be, then practice our art every day after that.

The problem with that kind of thinking is that it seems like these are clear cut steps. And there certainly aren’t. The more I’ve thought about it actually, it seems like you are supposed to cycle through these steps many many times. If you don’t, you get stuck, possibly too smoothed out. Not that you shouldn’t try to refine what you do, but if you aren’t re-exploring all the time either, chances are you aren’t experimenting either. There is music among the Thelonious Monk discs I ripped tonight that spans over three decades. And what it seems to me that Monk was able to do was find an excellent balance between these two extremes. Monk sounds like Monk in the 40s and in the 60s. He gets to play with most of the greats (but at the same time the greats got to play with him). And you can tell that he is listening and absorbing what he is hearing, and conversing with them all.

For the past few weeks, there has been a double bass in the window of a pawn shop here in Tacoma, and every time I have driven by it I have been tempted to take a look at it and see how much it is. While I play other instruments, bass is still the only one I probably can see myself getting back to performance level with again (over a few years to be sure). But yesterday, it was gone. I have other stories about instruments that I have seen in stores (some even that I worked in) that one day just disappears. Now – I certainly don’t have the money to just plop down and buy good instruments (assuming this was a good bass… a stretch I’m sure), but at the same time a number of these opportunities have passed me by and I begin to realize how much I miss performing. I should start to think about how to do that again. And soon. Because I think one of the things my composing needs more then anything else right now is my ear hearing what others do first hand again. Hearing Monk again playing with John Coltrane helped remind me of this.

Tags: Thelonious Monk
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Archive for June, 2010

Day 120. Beethoven and Marais.

Day 119. Wild and Wooly, Funk Blast! and I.R.S. Records ‘On The Charts’.

Day 118. Brahms.

Day 117. Buxtehude (and finally getting around to Beethoven and Bach)

Day 116. Arvo Pärt, Beethoven and Bach.

Day 115. Some mix-discs.

Day 114. Paganini.

Day 113. Beethoven and Brahms.

Day 112. Johnny Cash.

Day 111. Thelonious Monk.

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