Grape Lane

Sundry links

It is quite likely that my posts will be few in the next couple of weeks, as I'll be moving literally across the country to take a new job. So, I'll leave you with some diverse links and recommendations:

My new favorite blog.

A fantastic interview with the composer Ned Rorem. See his comments on Bob Dylan; great stuff.

A piece from Kinoeye on Kieslowski's early documentaries.

Two of the best albums I've purchased in the past year- Orchestra Makassy, Legends of East Africa (a long awaited re-issue), and Tinariwen's Amassakoul. Both are soulful and funky. If they don't move you, you're dead.

Ships from the ever-inventive Danielson is out, but listen to "Things Against Stuff", a beauty from 2004's Brother is to Son. Available on the same label, Dan Zimmerman's "Either/Or", from the album Great/Small.

Finally, old photos from the Reykjavik Museum of Photography (Ljosmyndasafnreykjavikur).

Bonga: Maiorais

For my review of the latest album from the legendary Angolan vocalist Bonga, click here. (Courtesy: Sacramento News & Review.)

Ways of looking

The rumbling continues to grow amongst arts critics/writers/journalists (and amongst those that take interest in their work) surrounding the "state" of their milieu. None of the questions are new, (Who’s qualified? Does objective criticism exist? How important is detachment?), but the questions have gained an added urgency due to the exponential growth of arts related blogs and online journalism.

With sites like Pitchfork remaining influential despite proven unreliability, the urgency to delineate standards (and credentials other than fan-dom) seems well warranted. Even amongst pop critics, who have often (but not always) been content to forgo discussions of theory and standards and just write, the need to discuss the means of their evaluations is finally surfacing.

(Image: Edvard Munch, The Storm (1893); courtesy of the MoMA.)

En clignant l'oeil...

Another unashamed Satie-ophile: please check out an excellent piece by Kyle Gann (from artsjournal.com).

Postulez en vous-même.

May 17^th marked the 140^th anniversary of Erik Satie's birth. So, what comes to my mind when I think of his music? Wit. Humor. Precision. Squirrels climbing up my leg. Be patient, I’ll get back to that. Now, I’ve never made it a personal tradition to celebrate any remembrance of the artists and thinkers (what a dreadfully generic term) that I admire, but I’ve always had an affinity for Satie, his music and his style.

Every musician who's worth a damn is familiar with his name, and I can safely say that nearly everyone else has at least heard his music at some point another, whether they know it or not. Have you ever seen any of these films: About Schmidt, Chocolat, Being There, Another Woman, The Royal Tenenbaums? No? My Dinner with Andre, True Romance, Badlands, Henry and June, What Lies Beneath? Ok, ever been in a new age store, or, even more disappointing, in an elevator? Than you’ve heard a piece by Satie. And I say “a piece” because out of Satie’s whole repertoire, only a handful will ever be heard wafting from a public speaker. In fact, in all of the films I mentioned, the same four pieces were used.

Satie, like all artists, has his detractors. Some feel his music is trite; that there is good reason that it translates as well as it does to the world of muzak. Many point to the brevity of his pieces, many of which are short by today’s pop standards, as a sign of laziness, insinuating that his avoidance of intricate exposition and development was not so much a stylistic choice as it was a lack of skill. Well, the majority of his compositions are short, but it’s their compact nature, the tightness of the musical ideas, that gives them their (much beloved) ephemeral quality. Far from being terse musical non-sequiturs, Satie’s compositions are often quite dense, and are certainly meticulously plotted.

Some critics have expressed the opinion that Satie, whose life and music were loaded with idiosyncrasies (his tiny flat was crammed with more than 100 umbrellas when he died), was more a performer than a composer; sort of proto-performance artist, which, to a point, may bear some truth, but I never get the impression from the music he wrote that it was just a sideline. Unfortunately, I have found that reliable, engaging information on Satie and his music is sparse, especially on the web. In hardcopy, I do highly recommend Roger Shattuck's "The Banquet Years", an excellent, and very entertaining, study of the nascent avant-garde in France, circa 1885-1914.

Oh, yes, about the squirrel. I was working on a very small short film with a friend of mine, set to the tune of Satie’s Je te veux. We were shooting in Boston’s Public Gardens, when a rather well fed grey squirrel climbed up my leg. He wasn’t skittish, and it didn’t appear that he had mistaken me for a tree. He simply climbed up and stared at me for what felt like a rather long minute or so, and then jumped off and ran away. What he was trying to tell me I’ll never know.

Sharp, pointy things

"Angular" has to be one of the more interesting adjectives so often found in music reviews, and not only in reviews of rock artists, it's a favorite when discussing modern orchestral works, or any time Thelonious Monk's name comes up (where it's a fitting descriptor). It’s an abstraction of course, to use such a very visual/physical adjective to describe something as intangible as music. Personally though, I believe it works quite well, despite the apparent incongruity of its usage (let’s see how many geometric references I can fit in here…). Listening lately to two favorites from 2005, I’ve found it to be a very precise description.

To describe a piece of music as "angular" actually functions on two levels, the simpler being as a description of rhythmic discontinuity. When the metrical flow of a piece of music is intentionally uneven, conveyed through oddly placed rests, highly staccato attacks, changes of time signature, or by the use of overlapping rhythms (through hemiola, polyrhythm, etc.), the term "angular" conveys a sense of the jagged or broken movement.

In describing any number harmonic functions, the term "angular" is more abstract, but no less apt. Often it implies a certain level of dissonance: chords with a little "bite", unanticipated substitutions, modulations, or cadences; not necessarily harsh, but certainly not "warm". The same also applies, but possibly to a lesser degree, to tone: metallic strings, reedy versus resonant voices. Popular opinion at the moment seems to equate an "angular" sound with the use of distortion, but this is an oversimplification, distortion being but a possible contribution to an "angular" style. There are a number of players whose style is clearly "angular" but who rarely use distortion, or use it sparingly, this was especially true of artists who came out of the New Wave era. Even a very legato player, i.e. Alan Holdsworth, playing with a clean tone can sound "angular" by focusing on the harmonic aspects like unusual chord choices or gigantic intervalic jumps.

The Detroit-based trio Javelins' unique sound fits the above mentioned criteria to a tee. They don’t wholly discount the use of distortion on last year’s No Plants, Just Animals, but their use of fairly clean, ringing guitar tone, especially when combined with high, open chords, is reminiscent of another "angular" sounding guitarist, Andy Summers of The Police.

The Joggers are another band whose guitar work, in particular, fits the "angular" description. The Portland, Oregon quartet released With a Cape and a Cane last September, but go back to 2003’s Solid Guild for some "Hot Autism".

(Egon is in the corner up there quite simply because I love his "angular" work.)

High-heeled sneakers

     Scenes from The 40 Year Old Virgin began replaying in my mind when I heard that Steely Dan will be touring this summer with their former band mate Michael McDonald. The pitch perfect mixture of outright mocking and back-handed reverence that was doled out towards McDonald in the film matches the mixed feelings I have about his music, which ranges from some classic material (especially his work with the Doobies) to the cheesy. Hopes are high though that he'll be performing his fantastic harmony parts in Dan tunes such as "Peg" and "Black Friday". Aside from Mr. McDonald, Becker and Fagen will be backed by a number of musicians from their recent recordings, including Freddie Washington on bass, and Keith Carlock on drums. I caught Steely Dan on their '93, '94, and '95 tours and haven't seen them since, can't wait to catch up.

Now

     No image quite conjures up the sounds of sparse, Morricone-esque neo-funk like a pair of espadrilles. Or, maybe, lime green leather mules. At least that’s what does it for the Spanish shoe brand Wonders. They hired the Malmo, Sweden based trio Now to record a promotional EP for their 2006 line, the seven tracks of which are featured as background loops at the Wonders website. Now’s label, Aa, describes their music as “minimal Krautfunk”, which is accurate if necessarily simplistic, as one might be tempted by such a description to picture skinny-tie clad, metronomic automatons, but Now’s sound is quite organic despite the heavy processing. They’re “minimalist” in the melodic sense, each track driven by a clean, rather easy, line, unencumbered by grand flourishes. Not that there is anything objectively wrong with a grand flourish; a deceptive modulation or working some modes or whole-tones into a solo can work wonders (no pun intended) for the right piece, but Now has the good sense (and taste) to know that’s not their gig, their gig is to render tightly constructed, yet spacey, moods, and they do it beautifully.

For some longer samples of Now's tracks, go to their Myspace page. The EP is also available through Now’s label Aa as a limited offer freebie when you purchase another album.

Grab your martini and Chesterfield Kings...

    Recommending the songs from Sondre Lerche’s Duper Sessions follows much the same rule as watching the Star Trek films: stick to the even-numbered ones (save tracks 7 and 11, how very Rat Pack). Not an exacting analysis, but said tracks feature the best match of artist to material. The material in question is a departure for the Norwegian singer/guitarist Lerche, Duper Sessions being a collection of crooner style tunes, mostly originals, but featuring a requisite, if nontraditional, rendition of Cole Porter’s Night and Day. Lerche’s voice is soft and easy and the playing, especially the piano work by Erik Halvorsen, is affective. This is no mere affectation by two-bit Vegas lounge fans, these guys dug a lot deeper than snare brushes and Freddie Green comping to pull off a classic style, if at times somewhat "lite".

Some reading

     If I may, I'll put aside the music for a moment to recommend some reading for those very few of us who are somewhat let down by the approach of Summer.

     Should you wish to revel a bit longer in melancholia there is no finer remedy than a little J.K. Huysmans. Turtle Point Press' 2005 edition of Huysmans' Downstream is a tiny but potent slice of fin-de-siecle nihilism, beautifully translated by Robert Baldick.

     Not as bitter, but just as ruthless, is Emile Zola's The Kill, set in Second Empire Paris. Modern Library Classics published this new translation, by Arthur Goldhammer, and the tale of the very tangled Saccard family tree remains shockingly explicit 135 years after its first publication. Enjoy!

(Still image from the short film Feud by Jonathan Kiefer, starring me.)