Category: Music

Remix albums aren’t normally my thing; generally I end up wishing the remixers had left well enough alone. The exception to my rule has been Verve’s excellent Verve Remixed series, which has treated the source material—killer jazz cuts from Verve’s deep vault—with respect while shining a fresh new eye on the performances. Now the same treatment has been applied to works from Impulse!, the revolutionary jazz label that Verve started managing when Polygram and Universal came together, and the results are consistently mindbending.

It helps that the Impulse! catalog is so good. It’s sometimes known as the House that Trane Built, after John Coltrane, its most famous musician, who recorded some of his most famous albums for the label. But you won’t find remixes of A Love Supreme on the disc—Coltrane’s sole appearance is on the album’s last, and only non-remixed track, a beautiful reading of a poem that Coltrane wrote with musical accompaniment from his son Ravi Coltrane on sax. The album focuses less on the avant garde perspective that Trane brought, staying instead with the more melodic contributions of artists like Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Oliver Nelson, and Pharoah Sanders. There’s a fair amount of Latin jazz on here as well, both through Diz’s influence (he contributes an Afro-Cuban “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac” that is nicely swung by remixer DJ Gerardo Frisina) and through artists like Chico O’Farrill (playing with Clark Terry).

But it’s hard to buttonhole a collection that crosses genres this exuberantly—one freewheels from Diz’s “I looked over Jordan and what did I see/an Eldorado comin’ after me” to a searing remix of Archie Shepp’s “Attica Blues” by The Chief Xcel of Blackalicious, a trance-inducing take on Pharoah Sanders’s “Astral Traveling” by Boozoo Bajou, and—my personal favorite—a sublime reimagining of Oliver Nelson’s great “Stolen Moments” by Telefon Tel-Aviv. I’ve always loved the latter composition—the absolutely iconic melody, the group performance by a first-rate horn line—and thought it a shame that the only contemporary reimagining was the version that United Future Organization did for the Red Hot + Cool compilation a few years back, which to my ears was chirpy and a little soulless. Telefon Tel-Aviv deftly redresses this wrong by re-envisioning the work as an orchestral masterpiece heard through a distant radio station, with strings tuning up and then faintly carrying the famous lines through static and synths. It’s the highlight of a generally excellent collection.

Originally posted at Blogcritics.

Now this is what Blogcritics does at its best: White Stripes Nation, a group blog series that performs critical readings of various seminal White Stripes songs in the context of a manifesto for Jack White as Dictator-For-Life. The first post is beautiful, on a par with the Onion’s classic Clinton Threatens to Drop Da Bomb on Iraq:

Greetings, Comrades. This is a communique from Generalissimo AlbertoBarger regarding the present crisis. The current administration is anabject failure. The Bush regime is weak, and incapable of DecisiveAction. Doing the denial twist in the cold, cold night is insufficient.The People demand change. A state of emergency exists.

Therefore, martial law is hereby declared. A directorate of The People has taken over, and a new executive has been chosen.

We must have a real leader, someone with a track record of realachievement who could impart the required principles of leadership andtradition. On careful examination, The People see that there’s only oneperson fit for the task, a man of achievement equal to the job- a manwith a genuine sense of geometry and theology.

Jack White has been appointed El Presidente for Life…

Go see what other magic Al Barger (er, Generalissimo Alberto Barger) and Legendary Monkey have wrought. ¡Viva la revolución!

There is a long stretch between the earliest known polyphony—the works of Perotin and the other masters of the Notre Dame school—and the next high point in the 15th century with the works of Ockeghem, Obrecht, and others. In between lie the Black Death, the birth of the Renaissance, and other major cultural developments, of course; musically there is a school of early polyphony called the contenance angloise, literally the “English guise,” so named because the composers on the Continent who adopted the English techniques were said to be putting on an English face. Without the composers of this school, the course of the evolution of Western music would be dramatically altered. With this background, this recording of the works of John Dunstable, foremost composer of the contenance angloise, takes on historic significance.

Even without the historical setting, this recording earns its musical significance on its own merits and on superlative performances by the Clemencic Consort. The ensemble, comprising three male voices and Dr. René Clemencic on a reproduction positive organ, is superbly tight, and the polyphony is rich and vibrant. In fact, the musical ideas in the polyphony, including the use of Gregorian melodies as a cantus firmus on which the piece is built, are consonant with the work of composers who flourished a hundred years or more later. It is difficult to remember that this music, which sounds as though it came from the height of the Renaissance, was written within fifty years of the plague’s devastation. Dunstable’s work is thought to be influenced by contemporary understandings of astronomy—one of the few surviving artifacts that attests to his existence (many of his scores having perished during the Dissolution of the Monasteries) is a note in his hand in a book on astronomy at Cambridge. Whatever the source for his inspiration, his music is presented on this recording with warmth and humanity.

Allegro Music is reissuing a number of other pivotal recordings from the Arte Nova label (this recording was originally released in 1995), and on the basis of this performance the rest of the series is certainly worth checking out.

Originally published at Blogcritics.

I crossed a mini-Rubicon on Thursday: I finished ripping both my classical and my jazz discs. (Somewhat ironic, in light of the Sony Boycott Blog activities—but I haven’t bought many new CDs, if any at all, in the last year.)

New totals for the losslessly ripped files: 355 artists, 441 albums, 130.64 GB for 5584 tracks, 19.4 days of playing time.

WSJ: What if we give it away? The Journal’s free article today covers Harvey Danger’s experiment in giving away content, and in the process provides a concise description of the business model for bands today, as well as why it doesn’t usually work:

CD sales aren’t a great money-maker for most bands: Absent a huge hit album, a band’s best chance to make money is through a combination of publishing royalties, concert-ticket sales and merchandising — all driven by the hard work of creating and keeping a dedicated fan base that will buy not just a current CD, but back-catalog albums and future releases as well. The problem is that takes time and patience labels increasingly don’t have.

“The time frame for success is a lot longer than what a label will give you,” [Harvey Danger guitarist Jeff] Lin says.

The band’s solution—to use the music itself as the free promo for the CD—is insightful, taking advantage as it does of the classic “viral infection” model for marketing experience goods. If you get the barriers to experiencing the music as low as possible, you “infect” as many possible listeners as possible. And it appears to be working, within the limits of the band’s terms of success.

Of course, the question is, what’s the incentive for users to buy the CD once they have the music for free? Here the band is smart, offering a custom bundle with a shirt and other hard goods for listeners who buy from the band’s site.

The model works for Harvey Danger even though they don’t plan to tour. I can only imagine how well the model would work for a band with Harvey Danger’s name recognition—or even a fraction of it—that does embrace touring.

Nice stuff on Jeff Lin’s blog about this, too.

According to News.com, Sony is going to release a patch for the rootkit DRM mechanism (created by First 4 Internet) that it has been installing on customers’ computers. The patch is available on Sony BMG’s site (though as of this writing not linked from their home page) and will be available through major antivirus manufacturers.

Well, that’s dandy. But it doesn’t address the main problem. Yes, it makes the DRM software visible and eliminates the $SYS$ hidey-hole that could have provided cover for numerous other infections on compromised systems. But it doesn’t eliminate the core issue, which is that an audio recording is modifying the computer systems on which it is played, patching device drivers and otherwise modifying the operations of the machine.

As far as I’m concerned, this doesn’t change anything. They still aren’t getting a red cent from me.

Oh, and the best part? If you go to the update page, it only works with IE…

Courtesy the Times Online, I now have a new set of obscure music to hunt after, the contents of John Peel’s record box at the time of his death. The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” has been mentioned in so many articles about him, I’m surprised that it hasn’t been reissued in download friendly form. Other surprises: Cat Power’s “Headlights” b/w “Darling said sir,” three records from Eddie & Ernie (who?); three from Nilsson; .

Less surprising than affirming: Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” Pavement’s “Demolition Plot,” Sam and Dave’s “I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down,” a foreign pressing of “Come Together” b/w “Octopus’s Garden” AND “Something,” and 10 different White Stripes records (some with multiple copies).

Like I said, quite a shopping list.

Read this article at Mark’s Sysinternals Blog about how a Sony copy-protected CD installed a rootkit on his system, and the lengths he had to go to to get the normal functions of his PC back. I’ll wait.

Back? Confused? Let me summarize:

1. By inserting this Sony CD in his computer, Mark’s computer was infected with software that installed hidden processes, modified his CD drivers, and tricked the OS into hiding any directory that started with the sequence $SYS$.
2. Using the features in this software (commonly called a rootkit), the Sony DRM could monitor how many times it was being played and limit the burning of music contained on the CD to another disc. However, it also makes the user’s computer vulnerable to other infections.
3. When Mark tried to uninstall the software by deleting it, his CD drive completely stopped working.

Over the line? Sony obliterated the line long ago. This is egregious. As one Slashdot poster points out, this inverts the argument about P2P networks being hives of spyware, trojans, and viruses. We no longer have to go to P2P networks to infect our computers; they now get infected by music produced by the major labels.

As if that wasn’t enough: first, Sony’s artists, such as Van Zant, whose CD infected Mark’s computer, have nothing to gain and everything to lose from this DRM madness. Second, technically Mark is now a criminal for undoing the damage that Sony did to his system, thanks to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA.

As of this moment, I’m boycotting all Sony products—music, movies, video games, electronics. And I call on others to do the same. It’s simple. If you treat me with disrespect, I stop doing business with you; if you treat me as a criminal, I call you on it; if you ship a product that disables my computer, it’s war.

Because make no mistake, this is war. More to come; watch this space.

During the Thursday night opening performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s modern oratorio A Child of Our Time, I started to understand the piece a little better. I had been struggling to interpret the libretto in light of the circumstances of its composition—specifically, as a response to the tragic story of Herschel Grynszpan, the young Polish Jew whose assault of a Nazi official gave the Nazis the excuse for the Kristallnacht pogrom. And certain aspects of the libretto make sense in this context, particularly the action of the second part of the oratorio. This, the story of the Boy who, frustrated by continual persecution, shoots the official and is imprisoned after a violent retaliation, appears as close to a retelling of Grynszpan’s tragedy as possible.

But this section is surrounded by meditative passages on the nature of good and evil and the duplicity in men’s hearts, of the love of parents for their children and of winter and oppression. Most puzzling of all is the identification of the slain official as the Boy’s “dark brother” and the ultimate rejection of the Boy—“He, too, is outcast, his manhood broken in the clash of powers.” What is Tippett getting at?

After last night’s performance, I think the key is in the mysterious introduction to section III:

The cold deepens.
The world descends into the icy waters
Where lies the jewel of great price.

These lines from the chorus, coming on the heels of the Boy’s imprisonment, suggest a continual worsening of the situation actually brings about something valuable. What is the jewel of great price? Judging from the penultimate chorus, “I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole,” Tippett’s drama is aiming not at social justice but at self knowledge and a deeper understanding of mankind. The Boy’s fate, his lack of redemption, suggests that Tippett condemns him for descending in his despair to murder, and believes that only through embracing his shadow, his dark brother, can he reach the “garden” that “lies beyond the desert”; only through rapprochement can he be healed.

As a response to Kristallnacht, this seems an inadequate, if not astoundingly naïve perspective. Indeed, Tippett in later years commented that while this sort of reconciliation may be possible among individuals, it appears to be impossible among nations. But separated from this specific conflict as a statement for the growth of a man and of mankind, it is a powerful message.

Ultimately the tension between the dramatic exigencies of the Boy’s story and the reflective, meditative lesson that Tippett attempts to draw in the final sections is responsible for the work’s philosophical incoherence. But it is a fascinating, if doomed, struggle between light and dark that forces the listener to ask how else one could respond to events of such horror. And today, as we all engage in our individual assessments of the horrors, wars, persecutions, and failures of humanity of the years since the oratorio premiered in 1944 and in the last five years in particular, it reminds us, just as does the story of Rosa Parks, that the individual’s response to this darkness is the most important thing of all.

A realization that came during the orchestra rehearsal with the BSO for Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time today: in a highly complex, chromatic choral work with shifting meter and uncertain melodic lines, it is perhaps unwise to ask the chorus to sing the text “We are lost.”

Otherwise rehearsals are going well. The performances (tomorrow night, Friday afternoon, Saturday night) should be excellent. And working with Sir Colin Davis is a treat.

My first BSO concert of the season is coming up: a performance of Sir Michael Tippet’s oratorio A Child Of Our Time under the direction of Sir Colin Davis. The work, a response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particularly Kristallnacht, in the days leading up to the Second World War, alternates highly chromatic and difficult choral passages with settings of African-American spirituals. While on first blush the description sounds too “high concept” for comfort, the choice of spirituals is appropriate: the texts of the spirituals evoke images from Old Testament (i.e. Jewish) history as a response to slavery, particularly “Go Down Moses” and “Deep River” (“my home is over Jordan”), and the juxtaposition of the spirituals with the texts about persecution brings things full circle.

Rehearsals with the chorus have been good so far. We start orchestra rehearsals next week, and performances are at the end of the month (the Mozart Posthorn Serenade is also on the program), on the 27th, 28th and 29th. I hope some of my Boston area readers can make one of the shows.

It’s difficult for me to write an objective review of the new Long Winters EP, Ultimatum, because I can hardly bear to listen closely to the first track. It’s not that it’s bad—far from it—just wrenching. “The Commander Thinks Aloud,” which appeared in an electronically remixed form on Barsuk’s Future Soundtrack for America compilation, is a moving meditation on the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia from the point of view of the crew. It makes me think that John Roderick must have been doing the same thing I was that February morning in 2003: saying “no no no no no” to the radio and weeping for our future. The final coda, “The crew compartment’s breaking up,” is almost unbearable in its stately majesty.

The rest of the EP, coming two-plus years after the band’s sometimes rollicking, sometimes touching triumph When I Pretend to Fall, is consistent in gravity and musical excellence. The cover image, of falling sere leaves, is appropriate: this is autumnal music.

The melancholy of autumn is there in lyrics of the title cut, though it’s kind of a juvenile melancholy with echoes of Cummings and even Simon and Garfunkel: “No one can harness the rain/And I can make myself into rain/You’ll feel me on your cheek/And on your sleeve” is reminiscent of nothing so much as “Kathy’s Song.” The same echoes recur in “Delicate Hands,” which has one of the finer lines of regret I’ve heard in a pop song recently: “I want to feed you/butter-rum candy/But someone beat you/to me.”

The final two songs on the EP, live solo Roderick performances of “Ultimatum” and “Bride and Bridle” from When I Pretend to Fall, solidify the impression of a band in a more reflective place. The band has gone through a fairly tumultuous history in its five years, with an eight-member “emeritus” list on its official bio page (to be fair, many of them were touring members or producers only, and one—Sean Nelson—has his own band to look after. But Ultimatum makes the case that John Roderick in his own right is a substantial talent and that in the context of this band he can produce some genuinely moving stuff. A big impact from a short release. I’m looking forward to hearing the full-length, due out next year.

This review also published at Blogcritics.

PS: Shout out to the omnipresent Merlin Mann (of 5ives and 43 Folders fame), who also maintains the Long Winters web site. Small world, innit?

Item number 1: Seattle band Harvey Danger, of “Flagpole Sitta” fame, has released its newest album as free MP3 downloads from its website and via Bittorrent. Should be good stuff. (Via Slashdot)

Item number 2: Indie stalwarts Steadman have released their major label albums for free download from their website. (Via BoingBoing)

Finally, the 31 tossed-off-in-an-afternoon tracks of Van Morrison’s contractual obligation album, featuring such fine songs as “Ring Worm,” “Blow In Your Nose,” “Want a Danish,” “The Big Royalty Check,” and “Here Comes Dumb George,” are available for download at WFMU. Go nuts. (Again, via BoingBoing)

I bet you thought the CD Project was done or abandoned, didn’t you? No such luck. As the title says, I’m only about a third of the way through, and it just keeps going and going.

The milestone this week was finally completing ripping the contents of the first drawer of my CD cabinet. (I would have been there much sooner except for the fact that I’m simultaneously ripping the jazz in the third drawer.) This is the first visible sign of progress I’ve made to date, other than the mounting stats in iTunes. To wit:

• 180 artists
• 230 albums
• 2745 tracks
• 9:09:01:06 total time
• 61.49 GB

As before, this does not include the existing contents of my library. It also includes the removal of a small number of duplicates—apparently iTunes doesn’t recognize that a track has already been ripped if title, artist, or album name have changed since the track was first imported. As in, removing the word “the” from an artist’s name. Sigh. Fortunately only a few playcounts were lost when I went back and deleted the duplicate track.

Annoyances? The classical metadata problems also continue. This week, it’s going in, sorting by composer, and learning how many CDDB submitters think that Aaron Copland is Stewart Copeland’s brother. No e, people.