vintage

There’s no Tunesday today, and there probably won’t be for a couple of weeks — I don’t want to just toss a song online without actually having a reason and writing a reasonably good post about it. I’m in the crunch period of school: you might remember that nasty strike that hit York University this year, and it’s because of that strike that my semester has been extended. Everyone else is finished school but I’m just getting into the final papers. And boy, am I getting into them.

I have five papers to write in the next three weeks, so I don’t know that I’ll have too many words left over at the end of the day. Things are going to be a bit slow around here. I’ll try to post whenever I can, but just a heads-up that it will probably be a bit boring until I get these giant things out of the way.

In the meantime, Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs begins Thursday! Man those televisions!

I just want to post a little note about a recital I attended today at the University of Toronto’s Walter Hall. It was put on by The Aldeburgh Connection, named for the town in England where Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Eric Crozier founded a music festival that still runs today. You might recognize Britten from his operas Peter Grimes and Death in Venice, among other things; Pears was his life and artistic partner, as well as the Aldeburgh Connection’s founding patron.

The afternoon was the final one in the AC’s Sunday series of concerts, all of which feature afternoon tea at the intermission, and included soprano Allison Angelo, baritone Jason Nedecky, and pianists Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata, as well as two students from the University of Toronto’s opera studio. Here’s what they say about it on their website:

As all of you know, the cup that cheers but not inebriates is one constant feature of our Sunday concerts. We discovered, surprisingly, that many songs focus on the theme of tea and, as a result, we have been able to create an anthology which also includes references to other events of the afternoon and to the eastern homelands of the tea-bush. Musical sources range widely, from Roussel and Debussy to Donald Swann and Vincent Youmans.

I highly recommend the AC’s performance — the whole afternoon was cheeky and full of laughter, gaiety, and other things that most people do not generally associate with “classical music” (more accurately Western art music, as nearly all the pieces on the program date from the Romantic and Modern periods, but that’s something for another day)! Between pieces they also featured humorous readings by both pianists, Stephen Ralls and Bruce Ubukata, including excerpts from Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, part of a “very pink” manual called Taking Tea, and also a hilarious staging of the tea-party scene from Alice in Wonderland. Performances were all masterful, and incredibly collaborative — the communication between the performers was magnificent, and the three piano duets (including a great arrangement for four hands of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) were delightful changes of pace.

One of the best moments of the program came near the end of the second half when Nedecky sang Donald Swann’s hilarious “Have some Madeira, m’dear!” — the audience was roaring with laughter throughout, partially due to the lyrics and partially to Nedecky’s theatrical performance. Angelo, for her part, was beautifully lyrical and agile, particularly in her performance of Erik Satie’s “Le Chapelier” (from Trois Mélodies de 1916) and in the tutti rendition of “Tea for Two” (Youmans) in the finale.

Who knew tea could be this interesting? I will certainly be checking out the Aldeburgh Connection further and I suggest you do too; their season is coming to a close, but I’ll keep an eye out and post their next schedule when it becomes available. Browse the past Sunday concert programming here.

I just want to mention that I’m well aware of how unorthodox my track of the week list is — most of them aren’t new releases or promotional for upcoming material, and that’s pretty strange in the music blogosphere. But I figure there’s enough people doing that right now that you can find it if you want to (Matt over at i (heart) music is excellent at that), so my job here is to pick out some old stuff you might not have heard, or maybe that you’ve forgotten about.

This one probably falls into the latter category: it’s a track from Hawksley Workman (born Ryan Corrigan)’s first album, For Him and the Girls, released in 1999. Since then, he’s gone on to win Juno Awards for Best New Solo Artist and Best Video, started a record label and put out albums by Serena Ryder, and recorded a duet with Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard. He’s released ten albums, one of which includes the continually famous “Jealous of Your Cigarette” (2002), and has toured everywhere. It is hard to not have heard of Workman — he’s all over the place.

Like I said, though, this track goes back to his beginnings. It’s pretty straightforward, and feels shorter than it is (it clocks in at exactly four minutes), but it’s immediately likeable. Best enjoyed on a moving vehicle of some kind, preferably at night: it’s a calm and quiet evening travel sort of song, and Workman’s almost-Martin-Tielli voice is perfect for it. And the lyrics are just awwww.

Tunesday 18: Safe and Sound

The weekend. The glorious, glorious weekend. That may have been one of the longest weeks I’ve ever experienced, and I’m not keen to repeat it!

I guess I have some blog catching-up to do as a result of that week. Thursday (April 9) I had the immense pleasure of seeing Willie Nelson at Massey Hall, supported by the incredible Ray Price and the petulant Billy Bob Thornton with his band the Boxmasters.

I know we’re all tired of hearing about BBT, but I suspect this review wouldn’t be entirely complete without a mention of his conduct. We all know what happened on CBC Radio on the 8th, but for some reason, Thornton decided it would be a good idea to try to “set the record straight” at his second night at Massey Hall. He called Ghomeshi an “asshole” and pontificated on how one is expected to keep the promises that are made, forgetting about two things in the process: one, that journalism is about all the facts, not some of them; and two, that his band isn’t very good and decidedly would not be playing with such country legends as Nelson and Price if he were not Billy Bob Thornton, actor, as well.

Anyway, there was no tossed gravy, but I heard later that security intercepted a guy with a container of it intending to do just that. I wish they’d let it go! Either way, Thornton was booed continually during his speech to the crowd and the next day bailed out of the rest of the Canadian dates on the tour. He cited an ill bandmate, but he probably just can’t handle Canada.

Here’s a review from the Globe and Mail about the Massey show and about his behaviour in more detail, and here’s a column by Russell Smith that pretty much sums up the entire situation perfectly.

Back to the show: Thornton’s band is not all that great, and there were five guitarists. Overkill in itself, but four of them were playing identical Fender Telecasters, and one guy had a steel-string. This did nothing to cover up Thornton’s lack of imaginative drumming when he got behind the kit during their extendo-jam, and the end was very welcome when it finally arrived.

Ray Price, who is a whopping 83 years old, delivered a beautiful set with a large band sounding more intimate than I have ever heard twelve people sound. It felt like you really were back in “the good old days,” two-stepping and wearing big skirts. His voice is among the best I’ve ever heard, and the string section were scored like horns — I’ve never heard strings act quite like that before, and it was magnificent. If you ever get the chance to see this man perform, do yourself a favour; he’s done so much more than most of us could even hope for, and he’s still going strong.

Willie was great, of course. He performed with a very stripped-down ensemble, in total contrast to the acts preceding him: the focus was entirely on his voice and amazing guitar chops, and rightfully so. He brought Price back out to sing “Crazy” with him, which is probably the only way that song could be any better than it already is; other favourites included “Always On My Mind,” “On the Road Again” and a fantastic medley of the classics “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “I’ll Fly Away”. I’m not familiar with a large portion of Nelson’s repertoire (he has an eye-popping 77 studio albums, so I suppose that’s excusable!), but it seemed like the setlist was hit after hit after hit, with a couple lesser-known songs thrown in here and there. The crowd loved it, and he proved to us — not that we needed convincing — that he’s legendary for a very, very good reason. And he’s only seven years younger than Ray Price, which is pretty remarkable too.

I also saw familiar funnyman Jerry Seinfeld last night, supported by Tom Papa, who I’d never heard before. The latter was really funny — good, clean, PG-rated comedy (I realised with some embarrassment that most of the comedy I have been watching lately has been significantly more than PG), and a lot of observational stuff similar to Seinfeld. And of course, Jerry was hilarious — the crowd loved it, and he really gave them a good set. He mentioned the cast of Seinfeld’s upcoming appearance on Larry David’s new show Curb Your Enthusiasm, which should be an interesting reunion: apparently they’re recreating the show on CYE? I have no idea. Stay tuned, I guess!

And finally, two news announcements!

The first is that Phoenix have announced their tour dates (see them here) … and their Toronto date is at, yes indeed, the Phoenix Concert Theatre. I guess it would be pretty hard to forget the venue for this one. They’ll be here on June 15; check out the tour page for the rest of their dates.

The second is that the Calgary Folk Music Festival have been releasing their Leak of the Week for quite some time, and the lineup is getting mind-blowing. Already. The full lineup will be announced on May 14, but for the time being, I’m already getting excited: artists confirmed include Mavis Staples, Akron/Family, Bell Orchestre, Justin Rutledge, The Acorn, Mark Berube & The Patriotic Few, Glen Campbell, and Iron and Wine. And that’s not even the full list of leaks!

The festival runs July 23-26 and tickets will be available starting May 14.

Have a lovely weekend!

OK, this is probably an embarrassing post but I am too exhausted to care!

Juanes is a Colombian artist (Spanish-language) and his stuff is shake-your-butt-around-the-house danceable, which is all I care about sometimes. It’s super catchy and especially fun to sing along with if you don’t understand Spanish. He’s been around for quite a long time in various projects, but I only found out about him around 2004 or so — my Spanish professor used to play his records when we had class study/work time, and I have always maintained that learning a language is way easier if you listen to music in said language, so I’m sure that helped.

(According to Wikipedia he used to be in a metal band, which sort of rules.)

This tune is from his second record, Un Día Normal, which is the only one that I know all the way through. It’s one of my favourites — I challenge you not to dance. It’s impossible … that bass line is practically an order! Go forth and be joyful.

Tunesday 17: La Paga

Coming up: a review of Willie Nelson at Massey Hall (including Billy Bob’s remarks!) and some comedy commentary, maybe.

FIXED! I don’t care if it’s Thursday, this post is hitting the internet. SO THERE.

Anyway, it’s high time we featured some jazz around here, and so that is exactly what I’m going to do.

The David Braid Sextet is a marvelous collection of Toronto-area musicians led by David Braid (piano), Mike Murley (sax), John MacLeod (trumpet), Gene Smith (trombone), Steve Wallace (bass), and Terry Clarke (drums). They’ve released a few records together, and all the musicians are involved in countless other projects, as is the way of music. Murley teaches at York University, and Braid can often be found collaborating with another York prof, Matt Brubeck.

This is from their first record, conveniently titled The David Braid Sextet. I first heard it in about 2003/04, when I took a jazz studies course in Grade 10 in high school (knowing a decent amount about jazz for a fifteen-year-old, but still, not that much). We were promptly directed to lift the solos from this record, something that I had never really done in the jazz idiom before — and this Murley solo was not the friendliest place to start. I never did get the whole thing done, but I finished significantly more than I had expected, so I guess that’s something.

Anyway, it’s one of Braid’s originals and is among my favourites — great groove, great solos, totally singable. His writing is terrific. As far as I know the song has nothing to do with the anime, but I’ve never asked.

Tunesday 16: Cowboy Bebop

OK guys, serious uploader problems on my end (nothing to do with the server or WordPress, which is good, but that only means I can’t blame it on anything else) so no Tunesday this week. SORRY.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about it by now but Billy Bob Thornton acted like a world-class asshole on national radio today, and Jian Ghomeshi somehow managed to roll with the punches and the surreality and the general five-year-old behaviour. Check out the podcast here (in mp3 form) or, if you’re really brave, the QTV YouTube episode. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, about two months ago my good pal Barbara at Bad Tempered Zombie sent me a list of interview questions, which I promptly forgot about. (My apologies.) Now that I’ve dug them up again, I guess I’ll take a crack at telling the Internet something about the brain behind the blog. Results may vary.

1. Which language would you like to speak fluently?

Well, I’d like to be fluent in French, but I’m almost there — it’s been a few years since I really used it, but I was close to that level when I graduated from high school, so I’m sure I could get there pretty easily. I do kind of want to learn a language that would be ridiculous coming from me, like Czech or Swedish or something. Maybe German.

One time I took a crack at learning Klingon in high school. It’s a functioning language! I guess I could probably do it, but then I’d just get beat up every time I stepped outside.

In all seriousness, though, I am good at picking up languages — grammatical quirks, structure, and all that sort of thing — so I kind of just want to learn as many as possible. They are fascinating. I am also fascinated with accents, which I would like to learn many of and then speak in a different one at work every night. Consider yourselves warned.

2. If you got a tattoo, what would you get and where would you put it?

Whenever someone gets a tattoo, all I can picture is saggy and wrinkly octogenarian skin with the distorted shape of the tattoo on it. Seriously, unless it’s going to look totally awesome no matter how badly I age, I don’t want it! Plus, you know, needles. And getting ink stuck under your skin. Yeah, I don’t think so.

3. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?

I don’t know if there’s one particular thing that stands out, but one of the most difficult to adjust to was shaving my head for cancer in Grade 10. You’d be surprised how terrifying it is to suddenly not have any hair — I couldn’t have cared much less about people mistaking me for a boy (it was pretty hilarious), but I was quite amazed at how much of a difference it makes. It really is like you have nothing to hide behind, and not just because you get weird looks from people, or the occasional whisperings of acquaintances wondering if you’re dying.

I credit this experience with giving me most of the confidence I have now. When you’re a perfectly healthy but bald fifteen-year-old girl, you have to be able to present yourself the way you want to, because people are going to assume all kinds of incorrect things — like you’re stubborn and rebellious, or you’re extra butch, or you’re halfway to dead. Luckily, I am none of those things.

I also went to a job interview with an inch of hair and army pants on, and somehow I got hired. I spent five years at the Stampede, including the final one as a supervisor. I like to tell that story because it means I successfully proved that my appearance didn’t match my interview, in a good way, and here I am now. Girls, if you can do it, shave your head. It is scary as anything — especially when they first turn on the razor, oh man — but it’s worth it for so many reasons, including the amount of money people will help you raise when you do it.

4. What do you think is the ideal age?

This is a loaded question! The ideal age I’d like to stay at? The ideal age to date? I don’t know if there’s an answer for any of these things … I’ve only been 20 for a month but it’s okay so far. 19 was good too. Five was probably pretty fun. Man, I can’t handle this question. Comment and discuss.

5. If you could have any view from your back porch, what would it be?

You can take the girl out of Alberta, but you can’t take the Alberta out of the girl — there’s something about the Canadian Rockies that I always miss and that I love getting back to. That’s Lake Louise, for the uninitiated — you know, “the cool, cool breeze”. It’s just as beautiful in the winter.

Other contenders, though, are things involving oceans, rolling hills, and big cities. Yeah, the last one is kind of the odd one out, but I’m not really an outdoorsy sort of person. I really like walking and hiking and being outside, but I’m not a mountain climber or a skier or whatever. I’m really into cities, too — exploring all their neighbourhoods, finding the best delis and record stores and places to walk around, and just getting to know a foreign place. The best way to do it is on foot, too — so maybe I’d like to see a brownstone walkup or an urban park outside my window. A love song to downtown.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s track of the day!

Seriously guys, books. Those things made of paper with nice covers that tell you stories. I think that lately they’re not getting the attention they deserve, so here I am telling you about three books that I have read recently and that you must experience. They’re not in any particular order; neither are they all new books, or classics, or any specific sort of book. They’re just good ones.

Discussion highly encouraged!

1. John Irving, The Cider House Rules (1985)

This is one of those books that feels like an old friend by the time you’re a third of the way through. Irving’s writing style is comfortable and familiar, and he adds sly little interjections all over the place that always made me laugh out loud while reading:

“I’ll bet you was bored,” Mr. Rose said to Homer, who lied–who said it had been interesting; eight hours of hanging around a cider mill are several hours in excess of interesting.

On top of that, his characters are beautiful and real — sometimes I feel like I’ve met them, or have seen them walking down the street — because they’re completely three-dimensional. Instead of creating an ideal character and then throwing in a few quirks to make them “realistic,” Irving paints vivid pictures of real people with real problems, dreams and ideas.

The story, too, is perfect. It’s written in such a way that you come out perfectly willing to believe that there was just as much happening before the book began, and that the story continued long after the words on the pages stopped telling it. I can’t find anything wrong with The Cider House Rules; it’s a magnificent story by a wonderful author, and it will stay with you long after you read it. I recommend buying a copy — you’ll want to re-read it often.

(Check out The Cider House Rules on Google Books.)

2. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

One of the reviews on the cover of this book describes it as “absolutely gosh-wow”. I think that sums it up perfectly, but it’s misleading at first — Kavalier & Clay is not really rife with battles and explosions and saving people in distress, at least not in the obvious way. There is a war, and there are explosions, and there sure are a lot of distressed people around, but this book has something else going for it too: Michael Chabon’s amazing way with words. It’s a story of two Jewish comic book artists in World War II era New York, and the way he writes it, it feels like you’re watching a comic book go by in real time. Never mind that there are no illustrations; he writes them. He writes the theme music, too, and the dialogues; he writes the split panels and the splash pages and the decorated onomatopoeia. I’ve never read anything like it.

There is so much hope and determination contained within the pages of Kavalier & Clay that it’s difficult to see it end, too. I’m divided on good books — sometimes the ending is just so satisfying, because everything floats into a beautiful finale and you sigh a little just reading it (The Cider House Rules, though the end lets the story continue happily on by itself, fits into this category). And sometimes, you can feel the ending coming from a little way off and you resist it. You read slower — or in my case, stop 40 pages before the end and don’t pick up the book again for a week because you don’t want it to end that much — and when you finally get there, it’s perfect, and soaring, and brings a tear to your eye. This is one of those books. Do not finish it on the bus; you will be trying extra hard not to laugh and cry and punch the air all at the same time. This is a masterpiece.

(The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001.)

3. Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (2007)

I lied a little when I said they weren’t in any particular order; I think I saved the best for last. I say this because only five pages into The Rest is Noise, I was already certain that it was going to be one of the best books I had ever read.

It did not disappoint.

This book is about music, history, and music history; but it is also about cultures, about the many lives and many dreams of composers around the world, and about the influences of everything and everyone on each other. Its subtitle is Listening to the 20th Century, and in its pages, that is exactly what Ross does: tells the history of the last century through its music, and the story of its music through its history. Chapter titles include “Dance of the Earth: The Rite, the Folk, Le Jazz“; “Death Fugue: Music in Hitler’s Germany”; and “Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties”. An entire chapter is devoted to Finnish composer Jean Sibelius; another to American composers “from Ives to Ellington”. One chapter, focusing on bebop, minimalism and rock all at the same time, is titled “Beethoven Was Wrong”.

This is not an ordinary book. Ross’ writing crackles and snaps with enthusiasm and incredibly vivid images. Conversations are reproduced novel-style; they are written so perfectly that I have found myself retelling the stories like I was actually present when Mahler and Strauss took a walk before the latter’s premiere of Salome, or like I was in the grocery store when Schoenberg went beserk in Thomas Mann’s general direction, proclaiming that “I never had syphilis!”. Suddenly, the musical explosion of the 20th century makes sense. We understand where the blues came from. We follow the rise of popular styles like jazz while Schoenberg was working to make his name known, and we realise how atonality developed alongside it. We discover minimalism’s effect on the Velvet Underground. Everything is in this book.

If you read one book this year, make it The Rest is Noise. Don’t read it in a week; read it slowly, as slowly as you can manage, and savour it. Listen to the pieces Ross talks about, as many as you can get your hands on. This is a book to experience, and it will make you realise how much you’ve missed. No matter how much you know about music, Alex Ross will give you something else to explore.

(Alex Ross is a music critic for The New Yorker; you can read his blog here. The Rest is Noise’s summary and chapter list can be found here. It was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.)