December 30, 2003 (link)

6:13 PM

I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds that commercial incredibly annoying.

Current music: "Kerstlied van de jonge reiziger"

(Comments for December 30, 2003)

December 21, 2003 (link)

10:13 PM

Hey, who got here searching on "kayak bassoon glockenspiel"? Are you looking for the same Sesame Street songs I am? And did you find them? Drop me an email or leave me a comment and say hi!

12:55 PM

By way of Memepool, I've just discovered Cigarro & Cerveja. I wasn't too impressed at first, but then I discovered such moments of brilliance as this, this, and especially this. It's still quite hit-or-miss, especially the early ones -- but anyone who can write something like "Financial Planning", "The Lecture", or "Just Friends" is worth checking out.

Current music: The Columbia World Library -- Venezuela Vol. IX

(Comments for December 21, 2003)

December 20, 2003 (link)

4:26 PM

He's Bilbo! Bilbo Baggins! (Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate...)

Current music: Litmus0001 - "Crosseyed"

(Comments for December 20, 2003)

December 18, 2003 (link)

11:19 PM

Heh:

I was once eating dinner with Woody Shaw at a home in Edmonton, Alberta, when someone wisely or unwisely put on the album Iron Man by Eric Dolphy, Shaw's first recording date. Shaw nodded enthusiastically through Dolphy's only solo, but abruptly stood up and went to the bathroom when his own started...When his "Iron Man" solo ended, Shaw came out of the bathroom and grunted, "Well, that really wasn't as bad as I remembered it."

11:14 PM

Also, the DeKalb subway station...! I've been there a bunch of times, and had no idea.

It sounds like Rosewood is the disc to get.

11:07 PM

And here's the answer:

Jazz producer George Wein said Shaw led a hard life and said he felt some sense of relief that Shaw's troubles were over. "That's a blessing," Wein said after Shaw's death. "The poor man was blind, the poor man was a narcotics addict, the poor man lost his arm, he had more tough luck than any human being I've ever known."

That's about what I figured, from the "personal problems" euphemism. A shame.

10:41 PM

Two questions about Woody Shaw, for anyone who can answer them:

• There seem to be a lot of biographical allusions to "personal problems" that kept him from enjoying greater success, but other than the fact that he went legally blind, nothing I've yet read quite spells out the specifics. In this interview from 1986, Woody himself says "I got rather involved in a couple of things that kept me away from my playing, and I even became a very miserable person for a while." And then there's what Lester Bowie said: "I think of Woody as one of the great neglected talents of this century. He also had a bad run of luck...Woody was like a great many musicians. He was trained in music but not in life, and the reality is one must deal with both. It was very sad to see the way his life developed, but if we can take what he did with his music and observe what happened in his life maybe we can learn to carry on in the spirit of this person." What happened?
  
  
• Back when I used to read old issues of Down Beat as a kid, I was very intrigued by descriptions I've read of Woody's playing (something along the lines of "harmonically advanced, uses more leaps and large intervals in his solos than most trumpeters do"). I've now heard a couple records with him on it (Joe Zawinul's self-titled, mainly) and haven't connected so much with what I've heard. This doesn't worry me -- it took me a couple tries to "get" Miles Davis -- but if anyone has a recommendation for an album to check out to hear Woody Shaw at his best, I'd love to hear it. Right now I'm listening to Dolphy's Iron Man for the first time; I wasn't so taken with Woody's solo on the title track, but liked "Mandrake", which seemed to be a more focused articulation of his ideas. (Yes, I know he was only 18 when he cut this record.)

By the way, I'd heard the story, but not in this detail (scroll down), and I hadn't known his vision had failed: yikes.

Current music: Eric Dolphy - Iron Man

8:16 PM

"Ten Sales Opportunities Lost" -- or, ten albums I'd buy in a snap, if only they were available for the buying:

1. Kraftwerk - Ralf & Florian
   
   I don't know whether this is their best album, but I sure do like it. Alas, Kraftwerk insists on pretending that their career began with Autobahn, and have yet to authorize a CD reissue of their first three albums (though "Tanzmusik" was on a best-of, I think). Fortunately, there's a clean bootleg CD of it, but...
   
   
2. Group 1850 - Paradise Now
   
   There's been a bootleg reissue of this great Dutch psychedelic LP (which I talked about here), but never a legit CD. I hope the master tapes haven't been lost?
   
   
3. Deep Chill Network - Cyber Sleep 1
   
   As it says on the website, "deleted from the Dark Duck Records catalog, never to return". But why? The excerpt of "Stage 1 (CS 1)" they used to have on MP3.com (before MP3.com disintegrated!) was great -- probably my favorite of all the tracks I've heard from them. I'd gladly put down $15 to hear the complete song, but to whom would I give the $15? I've never seen it used...
   
   
4. Pink Floyd - BBC Sessions
   
   OK, the 1967 sessions have mostly been erased or lost. And the 1970 performance has never really been a favorite -- it's good, but I'm not a big fan of the "Atom Heart Mother" suite, which dominates the setlist. But to leave the 1971 show unreleased -- which has the greatest version of "Echoes" ever...well, that's just silly. The record companies would jump at the chance, guys, and you'd make a lot of fans happy: why not do it? The shows get broadcast every year or two anyway, so it's not like they're not out there in non-bootleg form.
   
   
5. Beach Boys - Smile
   
   This one's marginal, since it was never released in the first place, but still -- if I could get an official version of one of the bootlegs, I certainly would. And even if I could afford to buy the 5-CD box set that has some of these tracks, it isn't the same as hearing the album in something like its intended sequence. Maybe we'll see this one yet, depending on Brian Wilson's plans.
   
   
6. Daevid Allen - Good Morning
   
   I'm sure Daevid would love to see this one in print again, but it doesn't appear that Caroline Records agrees -- which is a shame, since this is the best solo album I've heard by any Gong member. The glass masters for the original CD reissue must be around somewhere -- surely it couldn't cost that much to repress it. Perhaps the Caroline execs want to sell a few more copies on Ebay for $40 a pop before they authorize a new pressing?
   
   
7. Hukwe Ubi Zawose - The Art of Hukwe Ubi Zawose
   
   JVC's world music division put out a 40-track compilation in the early '90s with "Sote Tulifurahia" on it, and I'd love to hear the whole thing. Most of those JVC World CDs seem to have gone way out of print, unfortunately; I've seen one or two used copies of The Art of Hukwe Ubi Zawose around, but...
   
   
8. Atom Heart - Dots
   
   This is a really lovely ambient album, one that isn't quite like any other I've ever heard. It's nuts that no one's ever licensed this for re-issue -- it was the second release on Atom Heart's Rather Interesting label, and I don't think he pressed more than 1000 copies. It's impossible to find used, and probably goes for at least $50 on Ebay. Asphodel got the rights to Flowerhead, so why not spring for Dots too? It gets cited over and over again as one of the great early '90s ambient discs, and I'd think people would buy it. (In fairness, it's available on EMusic.com.)
   
   
9. Various Artists - The Sullivan Years: Rock Classics
   
   I want to get my hands on this set -- a compilation of live performances from the Ed Sullivan show, as you've probably guessed -- because I want to have a copy of Vanilla Fudge's incendiary version of "You Keep Me Hangin' On". A few years back, VH1 rebroadcast this performance while I was home from school for the winter; when I got back to school, I found out that three of us -- myself, Foz, and someone I don't recall -- had all separately been stopped in our tracks when we saw it. The album version is very good, but the live one was breathtaking: I'd never heard a note by Vanilla Fudge (and with a name like that I doubt I was much inclined to seek them out), but after seeing them play, I could understand why (as I've subsequently learned) people used to speak of them in the same breath as Led Zeppelin. (Besides the fact that they went on tour together, of course, and that unfortunate incident with the fish.) Alas, this compilation appears to be out-of-print; I once saw a copy on half.com, but stupidly, didn't snap it up...
   
   
10. Gong - Live at Bataclan 1973
    
    Tim Blake probably doesn't want this one reissued, but I sure do! Spirited performance, very ambient (as it were), and first-rate stuff for those of us who like Gong's spacy side best. A battle over royalties means it's unlikely this one will get out again, but if it ever does, they can count on my $15.

And an honorable mention for video/DVD release:

11. Pink Floyd - Live in Brighton 1972
    
    Note to David Gilmour: if you want people to believe you when you say there's nothing of significance left in the Pink Floyd vaults, and that you never got a good recording of a live Dark Side of the Moon, then it might be a good idea not to let the makers of the recent DVD about Dark Side videotape you in your studio listening to a complete, unreleased concert from 1972...let alone watching one. We've got two tracks from this show, "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", on VHS as part of the Superstars in Concert video. How about letting the whole thing out, and donating the profits to charity?

Current music: Ai Phoenix - The Driver is Dead

(Comments for December 18, 2003)

December 17, 2003 (link)

11:52 PM

About, oh, seven years ago now, I made a couple of Miles Davis mixtapes for a girl I liked a lot. I happened upon the tracklist a few days ago, after having misplaced it for quite a while:

(Thanks to Miles Ahead! for refreshing my memory on where "Autumn Leaves" came from -- I had the date written down, but not the disc.)

I'd meant to write about these two tapes a while ago, though I don't remember why or what the occasion was. Maybe I just wanted to talk about the time and love I put into it -- how I meticulously planned it so that not a second more of tape was wasted than absolutely necessary; how I chased down my friend Jay to borrow his Milestones CD, because I wanted her to hear how beautiful the title track sounded and all the library had was old vinyl; how I carefully made cover art out of pictures of Miles I'd downloaded from the web...I'm sure you can imagine it all. (And, to preempt what a handful of you are probably thinking, know that there's a special circle of Hell reserved for people who mock the Lovingly Made Mixtape. Sure, it's a cliché -- but so are most things that people do for each other out of love and fondness.)

Or maybe I wanted to talk about how, when I gave her the tape, she never seemed as excited or pleased as I'd hoped. (Perhaps I was looking forward to talking with her about it, about music I really loved; in fairness, that's a lot to expect of someone.) Or maybe I wanted to write about what happened a while later, when I mentioned to her in passing that when I was making the tapes, since I noticed that there were some gaping holes in the chronology of the tracks I already knew and had, I went looking for stuff I hadn't heard (from 1961-1964) to round it out, just a track or two. I remember how she turned to me, with that reproachful look I later came to know so well, and -- in a first-rate display of Completely Missing the Point -- said to me something like "You mean you put tracks on the tapes you'd never heard?" This was delivered in the same way you might say to someone "You mean you stole the money from your son's piggybank and spent it on pornography?" Leave it to G. to take something done in a spirit of thoughtfulness and care and make it seem like...I don't know what, really. (One might say: she was all too good at accusing.)

But no matter -- these things are long gone. And sometimes, when you do something for someone out of love, it doesn't matter whether the person is worthy of it, or (to be a little more fair) whether the person is able to give back to you in the same spirit. (And that makes me think of: "Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.")

I'm glad I made the tapes, I'm glad that I loved her when I did (and vice versa), and -- though it proved a costly lesson -- I'm glad to be a little wiser now than I was then. And I'll quote one more British author:

If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last. But surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
-- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

I'd forgotten whose quotation that was, before I reached for the journal where I'd written it, many years ago: it's all too apposite that it turned out to be that author, and that book.

Current music: first, "5/4 song bounce [mix 121703]"; then, Sleepbot.

(Comments for December 17, 2003)

December 10, 2003 (link)

12:15 AM

Also, I realized I'd never linked to this. "Bherhirst"? "Diazg"? And, especially, Al Pol / Al Phol / Al Phool? What's going on here? (The weird mutations do give credence to the idea that there's some kind of wordplay at work.) And what's the B-side?

Current music: Giacinto Scelsi - Aion

(Comments for December 10, 2003)

December 7, 2003 (link)

3:33 PM

(Another thought: "Jesus Diaz", with the H a mistake for the Spanish J?)

2:58 PM

Another one for JDB: I wish I had authentically new information about Y. Bhekhirst to share, but I did notice something kinda neat the other day. The liner notes to Hot in the Airport list him as "Y. Bhekhirst (H. Diaz)", right? Well, to quote Montel Williams, take a look at this: if you take the letters YBHEKHIRST, and reverse them, you get:

Now, if you apply a "ROT -1, +1" formula to it -- in other words, if you alternate between changing each letter to the previous (T -> S) and next (S -> T) one in the alphabet -- what do you get?

The first six letters are nonsense, but the last part is "DIAZ"!

If we then take the original first six letters and rearrange them a bit, we get KHRIST DIAZ, or perhaps H. KRIST DIAZ. Or maybe there's another algorithm meant to be applied to those six letters?

Is it a significant relationship, or just a bit of amusing randomness? Could Y. Bhekhirst's exotic name actually be the product of a self-referential game of wordplay? I don't know -- I can't entirely believe it's a coincidence, but I also have a hard time believing that it's not: one can find patterns in just about anything -- and the ability to differentiate between meaningful and non-meaningful patterns is a key part of sanity...

("Die Schwämme! Haben Sie schon die Ringe von den Schwämmen am Boden gesehn? Linienkreise... Figuren... Wer das lesen könnte!")

Current music: Mark Kozelek - "Duk Koo Kim" (studio version, from the Vinyl Films 10")

(Comments for December 7, 2003)

December 5, 2003 (link)

10:08 PM

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water:

"Didgeridoo", lyrics by Viola P. Dickerson, sung by Gene Marshall.

We begin in G major, and with a couple surprises: an electric harpsichord, I think, and what sounds like a melodica (or maybe a small chord organ/harmonium). One gets so used to the usual song-poem instrumentation (guitar, piano, bass, and drums) that it's always nice to get something a little different. Alas, any resemblance to Brian Wilson is purely coincidental...

Gene Marshall comes in:

Oh, come play a tune
On a didgeridoo

And right away, we've got problems. You can play a lot of stuff on a didgeridoo, but a "tune"? The thing plays one note! Granted, you can make Tuva-style overtone melodies, not to mention singing and playing at the same time, but still, one wonders if Ms. Dickerson has ever, y'know, heard a didgeridoo.

A funny instrument

Gene Marshall (that's not his real last name, by the way) kind of slide-whines his way into that word, Dean Milan-esque. Not to mention the prosody: "a FUN-ny in-stru-MENT".

That's found in the land

(Thanks to the rhyme scheme, I really expected that line to end in "zoo", which would've been wrong in a thousand and one ways.)

Of Aborigines
And places where they tent

Looking at it on paper, it looks like "they" is referring to the Aborigines (ahem, indigenous Australians), but something about the way the line is delivered makes it sound like -- well, in French, it'd be on ("places where one tents"). Which is both marvelously silly, and oddly correct. (One can't help but hope that the first draft was "places where they play hackysack".)

The background vocalists come quietly in, singing a foursquare version of Gene Marshall's melody (quarter-quarter-half, quarter-quarter-half):

Didgeri-, didgeri-
Didgeridoo
Now, all must gather round
To hear the beat of stamping feet
To sounds of the didgeridoo

At first I thought to myself, "I think Viola Dickerson is rather overestimating the entertainment value of the didgeridoo...it's not exactly an instant dance party." And then I thought, "Or maybe not -- for all I know, she's an anthropologist in the same league as Margaret Mead and Mary Leakey, and has attended incredible Australian aboriginal dance parties."

So I decided to do an Internet search...and if it's the same Viola Dickerson, it looks like she's been behind some interesting things! None of them Australian, but still...a Hall of Fame football player, a well-thought-of guitar instrumental, and a good recipe for figs. Not bad!

A didgeridoo is a long, hollow pole

Mr. Marshall/Merlino is not in pristine voice -- he sounds ragged and hoarse, here and throughout the song, though in a way it's oddly endearing.

From six to ten feet long

Yes, that's what makes a great pop song: a completely banal description that sounds as though it were taken verbatim from an encyclopedia! Good show! (Anyone who contradicts me using "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas" as a counterexample will be fined $500. Anyone who commits the above violation, and doesn't know that They Might Be Giants didn't even write the damn song, will be drawn and quartered.)

To play with a beat

Again, I raise an eyebrow at Ms. Dickerson's portrayal of the instrument, but I'll give her this one. I've heard players come up with some pretty solid percussive patterns, and it wouldn't surprise me if the body of the didgeridoo itself is treated as a percussion instrument. (I'm no expert: I used to think it was pronounced "did-JAIR-uh-doo", though admittedly I was about 13 at the time.)

And it is quite a feat

You know you're hard up when you find yourself trying to hear it as "it is quite effete".

They blow to play their song

I'm not going to touch that one.

Didgeri-, didgeri-
Didgeridoo

And this is where it hits me:

Could this be the Lamest Song-Poem Ever? This thing is lifeless! No energy whatsoever, no sense of excitement, no intensity: nothing. It just plods away, measure after measure, totally banal, totally mediocre, totally blah. It's like they're not even trying, even by song-poem standards -- and that's a pretty high (low?) bar to meet. Given Gene's vocal fatigue, maybe this is the last song they recorded that day? Sure sounds like it.

And when they hear the sound
They gather round
Stamp on the ground
The sound of the didgeridoo

Why am I listening to this godawful song? At the very least, I could be listening to Abbey Road again instead. (Did I mention what a good disc that is? Yes, I did. I've been playing it over and over again, like I'm a kid. It's nice to know I don't have to be thirteen -- or twenty-one, even -- for a piece of music to hook me that completely. Of course, I'd heard a lot of it before -- especially the tracks that were on the 1967-1970 album -- but as a unified statement, it's almost totally new to me.)

And now we get an instrumental break. It's lousy. Come back, Gene, come back:

Oh, didgeri-, didgeri-
Didgeridoo

Shades of W. L. Horning on that "Oh"!

I remember seeing an African-American heritage festival that was shown on public television or cable access or something, about five years ago. They had this guy on, a professor in his fifties -- he looked a little like one of the grandparents from The Cosby Show -- who delivered a sort of spoken-word/rap piece about the didgeridoo. Pretty embarrassing stuff, heavy-handed and flat. The worst part: after talking about how to play it, he started describing how people didn't understand the instrument and regarded it with contempt -- which, since we're presumably talking about white European settlers in Australia, is probably true! But he then made up a shaggy-dog story about how the instrument got its name, that ended with something like:

"And so they looked at the man and said, 'Hey, would you redo that crazy sound? A-could-you redo that wild sound?'"

Get it? Get it? "Did you redo?" It was awful...just thuddingly lame...and was only made worse by the fact that he delivered the line in rhythm. The half-word here reminds me of that -- "Did ya re, did ya re" -- though it doesn't make me cringe in the same way.

And when they hear the sound
They gather round
Stamp on the ground

Now me, if I had an electric harpsichord, I'd do all kinds of great stuff with it. If I had a melodica, I'd play "Roland Alphonso" all the time. I don't have these instruments, nor do I have a didgeridoo. (I don't especially want one.)

To sounds of the didgeridoo

Speaking of which, perhaps the most scathing indictment of this song:

It doesn't even have a @#$#*% didgeridoo on it!!

Jeez, people, would it have been that hard to go get a length of PVC pipe and fake it? Sigh.

To the sounds of the didgeridoo
The sounds of the didgeridoo
To the sounds...

And at last, it ends, fading out so something better can take its place.

The verdict: Dullest Song-Poem Ever. (Ms. Dickerson, I know it's not really your fault.) I can't really believe that I just took the time to write a review for this, given all the stuff I have to do. But there it is. JDB, I hope you're reading this one!

Current music: Robert Wyatt - Cuckooland

(Comments for December 5, 2003) (3 comments so far)

Current reading:

Euripides III, ed. Richmond Lattimore and David Grene

Re-reading:

The Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula K. LeGuin

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