Unpopular Music - November 1, 2020

At the risk of appearing productive, we have another mix this week. It's actually a playlist I started months ago, but never finished. I was going to give it the title "Mostly Classical", but, not having done the math, it turns out just "More Classical Than Usual". And, of course, like "jazz", "classical" ends up labeling a lot of music that doesn't really sound like each other anyway, and, well ... you've seen all my "genre" posts, haven't you?

There was another stub of a playlist that got tacked on the end, which, repeats an artists from the first, and ends with a couple of pop songs. I was planning to use one to mark my and Robyn Hitchcock's shared birthday, and the other marks how I felt during primary time, and how I'm likely to feel the next couple of weeks (but hopefully not the next four years,)

image source

See the playlist after the break...

Unpopular Music - October 25, 2020

This first offering in a while offers mostly new acquisitions to the Unpopular Music library. While my July Bandcamp binge fit together nicely, if I may say so myself, my later purchases did not.

So this playlist grew very slowly. We start out with some upbeat, and eventually a bit noisy, jazz, followed by introspective, contemplative, perhaps a bit ruminative sounds, wordless vocals appearing more than once. I even remembered a Van Halen track that can hang with Bill Frisell and Mary Halvorson. We end up back in the jazz zone before closing off with some cheerleader pop. Enjoy.

image source

See the playlist after the break...

Credit where credit's due

Back in March, I posted a rant about how Arkiv Jazz, in its weekly marketing email, was promoting Women's History Month with a promotion almost exclusively featuring singers, at the expense of the ever-growing number of talented women instrumentalists and composers. 

In this week's email, they are promoting and album by the all female all-star group Artemis, centered around the veteran pianist Renee Rosnes and also featuring Unpopular Music favorites Anat Cohen on clarinet and drummer Allison Miller. The newsletter also features some of the band members' various solo albums and other projects. The musicians' gender is not referenced anywhere. 

Bill Frisell on genre

 In an interview posted at Grammy.com centered around his new album and other topics of the day, Bill Frisell touches on one of my recurring topics, and unsurprisingly, we are in total agreement.

 

On Harmony, you interpreted songs ranging from Pete Seeger to Lerner and Loewe. On Valentine, you draw from a similar well — there's a Hal David and Burt Bacharach song sharing space with a traditional hymn. To you, how does American folk music connect to the Great American Songbook?

I've always had a problem with how we put [them in separate categories]. I know we need words to describe things and we have to talk about the music, but when we put these labels and names on it it always has the effect of making it smaller than what it really is. To me, they're all part of one thing, whether it’s Beethoven or Monk or Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix or Morton Feldman. It's all music and it all fits together in my imagination.

Unpopular Music - July 12, 2020

8/1 - addendum to the playlist

 

For today's offering, we have mostly selections from this month's Bandcamp binge (on the day they were waiving their fee for the artists and labels), plus a couple of other recent additions to the Unpopular Music Library. When listening through the recent purchases, I found some similarities across the selections (which were somewhat arbitrarily chosen) and many potential segue points. Current events are somewhat indirectly invoked.

This mix is a little less jazzy than usual. It starts off atmospheric, electronic, and rhythmic, before a bit of a spiritual jazz interlude, a more atmosphere, before ending with exuberant, and the a bit more calm pleas for peace, love, and understanding.

image source

See the playlist after the break...

June 2, 2020

These tracks have been sitting in a folder waiting to be assembled after last month's Bandcamp binge. (On the first Friday of each month Bandcamp is waiving their cut so all proceeds go to the musicians and/or labels. This is happening again this coming Friday June 5.) There was also a mini-binge after hearing some other Lee Konitz tributes. It's kind of percussion-centric and occasionally long-winded, but with the usual variety.

image source

See the playlist after the break...

Sonny Rollins Settles the Score

I've heard some bitchy arguments lately about songs that have been "stolen" from other songs, usually from someone who wants to claim moral superiority over the song thief. One I've head a couple of times recently revolves around how John Lennon wrote "Norwegian Wood" after hearing Bob Dylan's "Fourth Time Around." (One of the rare times Bob doesn't get called the thief.)

Ever the sage elder statesman, Sonny Rollins settles this in an essay from the New York Times.

There’s an axiom that says there is no such thing as “original” music. After what we could consider to be the first sound, from a spiritual perspective — “om” to some, “amen” to others — it’s all the same. Musicians borrow different parts and make them their own, but there’s nothing really new, nothing that hasn’t been done before. Claude Debussy and Johann Sebastian Bach may sound different, but what they did was all there already, in a sense.

No. 1 for May 10, 2020

Band Geek plays Close to the Edge

At the end of an engaging profile by Alex Ross, centered around his recent live-streamed performances from his home, the pianist Igor Levitt says this

“When I started doing these house concerts, I realized that every single problem I had ever had with the performing world suddenly disappeared. I never really cared about acoustics. I never cared that much about the quality of the piano. All I wanted to do was play. The important point about these concerts is not how they sound but the fact that they happened. Everything is getting reduced to the essential thing of being there and playing.”

Ross' essay shows that this attitude applies not just to Levitt's recent lockdown performances to the pianists entire career, his choice of repertoire, and his outlook on life.
 
The truest musical experiences involve performers and audiences engaging with the music as it is presented to them. It's not about the acoustics, or the quality of the piano. The setting and the medium don't really matter. Even compromised or distorted media can create a meaningful musical expression.

Yesterday toward the end of a long day of internet surfing, I came across a group called Band Geek playing a note-for-note recreation of Close to the Edge, the eighteen-or-so minute piece that takes up side one of Yes' 1972 album of the same name. It's kind of a ridiculous piece of music. It's majestic and pretentious and grandiose. The idea that a rock band would supersede its proscribed function and produce a quasi-symphonic monstrosity generated the band and its music both praise and derision since its creation. I, for one, love it. If one wants to play it, one cannot make a trip to the music store to pick up the score as you would to pick up a volume of Beethoven's sonatas. One must transcribe it from the recording and find a bunch of similarly-minded colleagues to pull it off. It's by necessity a labor of love, with the reward of not an arena of adoring fans, like Yes had, but making a video in you basement which gets a surprising (to me, at least) amount of views on YouTube.

What's the point, you may ask. The point is that it happens. They played it and recorded it, and at some later point in time I watched it. At the end, the bass player says "I'm so happy." I was happy, too, and I was happy for him.

No. 1 for April 24,2020

Beethoven's String Quartet No. 9 in C major, Op. 59, No. 3

As played by the Budapest String Quartet from Beethoven - The Middle String Quartets, In Concert at the Library of Congress: 1940-1960.

I pulled this set out arbitrarily the other night and this recording from 1946 jumped out at me.

After a crappy day of working from home, and my now regular Friday post-apocalyptic grocery store experience, this was was I went to to ease myself into the evening.

RIP Lee Konitz

Another week, another hero gone, another loss to the pandemic.

I came to Lee Konitz relatively recently. I'd known him since first learning about Birth of the Cool as a teenager, but really only started to dig in over the last decade. A half-dozen or so years younger than Charlie Parker, Konitz had Bird's melodic and rhythmic complexity, but burned at lower flame. "Cool" was the label, but he deliberately displayed a warmth which his mentor Lennie Tristano deliberately lacked. Like Jim Hall, he was always "modern," but never "avant-garde."

Konitz mostly made a career of improvising over the standard standards (Body and Soul, All the Things You Are, and the like) sometimes with his own melodies in the Parker/Tristano tradition (for example Subconcious-Lee is set to the harmonies of What is This Thing Called Love,) often eschewing the melody all together.

Here's a short tribute, an arbitrary selection of favorites spanning 62 years.



I also wrote this when I saw him live back in 2014.

See the playlist after the break...

RIP Hal Willner

The pandemic has taken a number of musicians I've respected and admired, Manu Dibango, Bucky Pizzarelli, Ellis Marsalis among them. The one that's hit me most to the bones is Hal Willner, the brilliant producer and musical thinker, whose cross-genre compilation albums were a bedrock influence on the Unpopular Music webcasts.and on my musical outlook in general.

I posted this about two-and-a-half years ago, and that's the way I feel now.

Here's a small sample of his work. A lot of these tracks have been presented in various Unpopular Music programs, but bear repeating. The first half is the brighter of the two.




See the playlist and notes after the break...

Don't Just Sing

not on sale at ArkivJazz

For not the first time, I received an email promoting ArkivJazz' celebration of Women's History Month which only promotes recordings by singers. Yes, these are some of the finest ever singers, and representatives of the art form (Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Billie Holliday, Nina Simone)¹, but this singular focus overlooks the other roles women have played in jazz over the years. It's like having a women's career day and only featuring nurses and secretaries. And in 2020, this is totally inexcusable.

[Having now clicked through to the larger offer after writing what follows, I see that there are some non-singers included in the promotion, but only slightly less than one out of three, including a few of those listed below, but my main argument still stands.] 

The first two obvious choices are Mary Lou Williams and Carla Bley (who even has an excellent new release out.) Pianist Kris Davis, guitarist Mary Halvorsen, and clarinetist Anat Cohen are all widely considered current top players on their respective instruments, and fine composers as well. Other women non-singers I've featured on the webcast are Alice Coltrane, Allison Miller, Geri Allen, Co Streiff, Irène Schweizer, Dorothy Ashby, Eve Risser, Ingrid Laubrock, Jane Ira Bloom, Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, Linda May Han Oh, Tomeka Reed. and Sharon Freeman. Others who don't just sing are Annette Peacock, Karin Krog, and, of course, Nina Simone. While my tastes skew away from the conventional, other more mainstream artists include the pianist Helen Sung, saxophonists Grace Kelley and Mindy Abair, and the composer-bandleader Maria Schneider. I'm leaving out many deserving others. (For more on this, on Mixcloud, Magda Brand has an excellent nine part series featuring female jazz composers. (Start here, for example)

Unpopular Music - For McCoy Tyner

Also, you must watch this. This version has better audio however -

https://tv.nrk.no/se?v=FBUA07003275&t=2038s

The jazz world has lost one of its giants. McCoy Tyner, perhaps best known as the pianist from John Coltrane's “Classic Quartet,” also had a formidable solo career as well, becoming one of the most influential pianists is jazz history. Much has been said elsewhere (for example) about his powerful technique, his distinctive chord voicings and the way he could power a band while also providing its gravity that I won't go on. As a composer, he could bring those qualities to a variety of settings, from traditional African musics to big band, choral, and rhythm-and-blues.

What follows is an arbitrary, but varied selection. No apologies for putting in the hits, as they are some of the greatest hits, but there are some lesser known tracks here as well (from, unfortunately, some of my scratchier records, I do apologize for that.) As powerful as he could be, he was also a wonderful ballad player.

See the playlist after the break...

Number 1 for February 26, 2020 - Bill Frisell's Harmony at the Regattabar

Bill Frisell was in quiet, beautiful mode which is always a good thing. But the key functions of this group were turned over to the vocalizing of Petra Haden, Hank Roberts (also on cello) and Luke Bergman (also playing guitar.) Soloing was at a minimum. Roberts took one or two, I don't believe Frisell took one at all, mostly laying down lush accompaniment via his Telecaster and his array of magic boxes, leaning towards his country and folk influences, along with his taste or 60's pop songs.

Not to discount her own considerable talents, but in this context, Haden is not only channeling the legacy of her jazz legend father, but also that of her grandparents who led a popular family singing group (including young Charlie) in the early days of radio with songs like Red River Valley, done here a cappella.

This was applied to a first rate selection of songs – among them Stephen Foster's Hard Times, Lush Life by Billy Strayhorn, the Skeeter Davis hit The End of the World, On the Street Where You Live from My Fair Lady, David Bowie's Space Oddity (you know that any show that segues from Red River Valley into Space Oddity is right on in my book,) and the encore of Shenandoah, not only a folk standard, but a favorite of Frisell's idol and teacher Johnny Smith.

And despite living in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts for more than thirty years now, I believe this is the first time I've been led in a sing-along of We Shall Overcome.

Unpopular Music - February 16, 2020

Greetings!

Today I offer up a program of music I've been putting aside for a new playlist. When I stopped doing the weekly program, I've been trying to pick up the pace of putting all this music I've got lying around onto the old hard drive, and intended to make new playlists out of that material. That effort has not been entirely successful, but I think we've got enough freshness to make it worthwhile. It did come out a bit subdued, though perhaps right for a winter's afternoon or evening. (I took it out for a walk this afternoon to give it a quality assurance listen, and it worked out fine.)

I decided not to play DJ on this one, if only to shape the program rather than to hear my own voice. The program is divided into three sets, marked by somewhat longer pauses, the first ending around the 39 minute mark, the second around 1:19:00. In lieu of announcing, I did write some program notes below.

image source

See the playlist and the notes after the break...