Nonalignment Pact

Week 97: Hurricane Music

noreply@blogger.com (Carlos Anaconda) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:34:00 +0000

Temporal, temporal, alla viene el temporal, que sera de mi pueblito, cuando llegue el temporal (Hurricane, hurricane, here comes the hurricane, what will be of my town, when the hurricane arrives.) --From the lyrics of a traditional and very upbeat and danceable Puerto Rican plena .

I’ve lived most of my life in the path of hurricanes. First in Puerto Rico, then in the U.S. (Houston and now North Carolina). I’ve prepared for a lot of hurricanes and have sat through a few. And I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had to evacuate my home, and never suffered any loss of a friend or relative's life or even any major injury or great loss of property because of a hurricane. For that I am grateful, as I have seen close up what they can do. Hurricanes are terrible natural disasters and are not to be taken lightly.

That being said, I love music and have music going in my head most of the time. Which is maybe why I don’t’ feel I need to specifically mention music or a musical artist or recording in a post on this blog to feel that the post includes music in it. This post however, will be about actual recorded music, and how recorded music has often kept me company during hurricanes, even as we sat in awe at the power they can wield.

I spent the first half of my life in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, when a hurricane is coming, there is not a lot of places to run to, most hurricanes are bigger than the island. So what one does is build a solid house that a hurricane can’t easily take down.

My family’s house, as are many houses in PR, is made of solid concrete, all the walls, even between rooms inside the house, are about 6 inches of solid concrete, top to bottom, side to side, two stories. I had never seen drywall until I came to the U.S. On top of that concrete box you add a solid concrete roof and you have a house that has stood through 50 years and quite a number of hurricanes. Even the windows are built to stand against hurricanes. All the windows are what we in PR call miami windows, not sure why. They are made of aluminum and I don't think they are made in Miami. With miami windows, you turn a handle one way and the blinds open to let in the cool ocean breeze, you turn it the other way and you are in an almost hermetically sealed concrete and aluminum box.

But even in a house as solid as that, a hurricane is no fairytale wolf, huffing and puffing at your door, and the prospect of sitting in a house while the wind is pulling street signs from the sidewalk and sending them flying through the air at insane wall piercing speeds is not exactly comforting. And then of course there is always the possibility of flooding.

So when a hurricane is coming, we prepare the best we can, batteries, water, candles, canned food, etc etc, and then we sit and wait for the storm. Usually this is not done alone. Family and friends that live within walking distance might come over. And basically you sit around, play dominoes, drink beer, rum and cokes, play music, listen to the radio and wait and wait and wait.

At some point the wind and rain become too strong to have any doors open or sit on the porch, so everyone goes inside and we close doors and windows. You crack open the windows on the side of the house away from the wind, otherwise the pressure inside can turn the house into a bomb. Then everyone goes back to playing dominoes or talking or whatever they were doing. When the lights go out, candles are lit, and we switch to the battery radio. When the eye of the hurricane arrives people come out of the houses, and a kind of musical chairs game takes place where some people return to their homes for the second half of the hurricane, and new ones show up at ours. Everyone checks the damage outside, but it’s as if the extras in a Hollywood ghost town were walking out from behind the fake facade of the buildings. It's very surreal. Then there is that weird feeling in your muscles and bones, the pressure of the hurricane spinning around you makes it feel as if the wind was sucking itself in. And yet you know it will only last a few minutes. Then you see the other side of the storm approaching and everyone hurries back inside, and before the wind starts blowing from the other side, you close the windows that were open on the one side and crack open the ones on the other side. And you sit down for more dominoes, more rum, more music and more waiting.

There is a lot of waiting during a hurricane, waiting for the lights to go, for the water to go, for the telephone to go, for the roof to go. So as I grew older and technology became available in the shape of boom boxes and cassettes, I started to make tapes for hurricanes while I waited.

The cassettes were a combination of hurricane staples and songs specific to that particular hurricane. The staples are songs like the Scorpions’ Rock Me Like a Hurricane, REO Speedwagon’s Riding the Storm Out, and The Doors’ Riders in the Storm and a number of Spanish songs like the above quoted Temporal.

Here are a couple of playlists I found on line that are mostly built on staple hurricane songs:

Waiting for the Hurricane

Songs for Hurricanes

Of course there are better staple songs than those. The Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground is a great hurricane record with all its heavy rain imagery, for example. Black Sabbath’s first record is also a great hurricane record, though in a different way than the Violent Femmes, much more brooding and dangerous. But the classic staples have their place too and its always good to see people that wouldn’t be caught dead listening to the Scorpions finding humor and joy when Rock Me Like a Hurricane comes on.

The staple songs have to be there, but it is the songs specific to each hurricane that make the playlist and that hurricane musically memorable.

When Frederic hit in 1979 we listened to a lot of Chopin. If I was going to get blown away by a hurricane, I would wish that it was while I sat on a piano playing Chopin, any Chopin. Of course I can't play any Chopin, and the odds of me learning to play any Chopin on the piano at this point are about as good me flying through the air while playing.

I love Chopin, and I also love Mahler, which is why I was actually guiltily excited when I heard there was a hurricane coming named Gustav. I bet that would make an awesome hurricane playlist. If the powers that be wanted to complete what I would consider my all time top three classical music hurricane playlists they would send a hurricane named Dmitri at some point.

But my all time favorite hurricane playlist so far has to be the one for Floyd in 1981. Not so surprisingly, the recorded tape sounds of Pink Floyd’s music cross-faded perfectly with the various sounds the storm was making outside, almost like there was another member of the band right out side the house. I was also fifteen, which might have been the perfect age to really enjoy this play between storm and band.

Most recently, in 2003, we sat through hurricane Isabel and like the old days we played music for the occasion. The playlist included all of the Unrest’s Isabel Bishop record, as well as songs by Isabel Parra and by association songs by her sister Violeta Parra (I don’t discriminate against the thinness of a given connection as long as it’s there).

So now we prepare for Hanna, and I’m wondering if this might be the time to give Hannah Montana music a shot, I hope not. What I am hoping to do is find a bunch of Hanna-Barbera cartoon themes: Tom & Jerry, Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo…. I do wonder what the Jetsons theme would sound like in a hurricane.

And then, we might also get Ike...

Of course after the hurricane it is de rigueur to play Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now.

Well, here's hoping Huracan is in a good mood and that Yukiyu watches over us.

Footsteps in the Light

noreply@blogger.com (Wednesday) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:07:00 +0000

"For her the Moroccans were backward onlookers standing on the sidelines of the parade of progress; they must be exhorted to join, if necessary pulled by force into the march. Hers was the attitude of the missionary, but whereas the missionary offered a complete if unusable code of thought and behavior, the modernizer offered nothing at all, save a place in the ranks. And the Moslems who with their blind intuitive wisdom had triumphantly withstood the missionaries' cajoleries, now were going to be duped into joining the senseless march of universal brotherhood; for the privilege each man would have to give up only a small part of himself--just enough to make him incomplete, so that instead of looking into his own heart, to Allah, for reassurance, he would have to look to the others. The new world would be a triumph of frustration, where all humanity would be lifting itself by its own bootstraps--the equality of the damned. No wonder the religious leaders of Islam identified Western culture with the works of Satan: they had seen the truth and were expressing it in the simplest of terms." - Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

Mr. Islam

I hadn't given much thought to Yusef Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) since I was about seventeen; that is until recently when I played his records for Clara. We own three Cat Stevens records (Tea for the Tillerman, Catch Bull at Four and Teaser & the Firecat) - bought at garage sales and thrift stores in the time since I stopped thinking about him. They've sat on the shelf un-played for years.

Cat Stevens, by way of the movie Harold and Maude (by way of my youngest aunt) had a huge affect on me as a teenager. I loved how powerful his music seemed yet so simple. His introspective mortality-obsessed lyrics designed for the would-be poets of adolescence.

In his former life, Yusef was all over the map spiritually but he was most definitely spiritual in an I-need-direction way so it's no surprise that he found religion. Back in the day though, he'd record a Christian hymn here (Morning Has Broken), name an album after some Zen teaching there (Catch Bull At Four) - Allah wasn't really in the picture.

Since Clara and I were on a Cat Stevens kick, I thought it only fair to give his recent work a listen. So I downloaded the song collection Footsteps in the Light. Here's the short and dirty review:

Yusef Islam has found life's meaning. That journey is over and, as the saying goes, the quest is its own reward. By that I mean there is not much rewarding for us at journey's end. His new chanting, dogma-driven work is too pious to be anything but pretty and dull (although Clara liked it just the same).

One thing I thought strange - his voice has softened, monk-like. So his career is like the reverse of Tom Waits. He went from raspy, deep and loud to soft and calm.

I do appreciate Yusef Islam's version of the Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. I spent two years of my youth living in the Middle East. I heard the Adhan many times a day as a kid, called out from the towering minarets in our village at dawn, noon and dusk. It was awesome and as a kid of course I attached no moral judgment to it. I would go out and watch our houseboy roll out his prayer rug and bow earnestly for the duration of the prayer. It simply sounded and looked cool as did the marching bloody self-flagellating Shiites during Muharram. The mosque sound system where I lived was not very good, so I also remember the Adhan as having a fuzzy crackled sound. Actually I looked for the Adhan online and found similar recordings to what I knew as a kid. Yusef Islam's version is the only studio recording I've ever heard (he drops in a wind track for affect).

Here is a translation of the Adhan.

And here is Yusef Islam as the muadhan.

Napcast - Lounge

noreply@blogger.com (stacey) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0000

In thinking about the cookie store, thinking about the music has always been a high priority. We always wanted some lounge music, but refining what lounge music has been a trick. The first grouping of just a mere few 12 songs or so was so relaxing that it kept putting me to sleep. Not the kind of energy I was shooting for, but if anybody wants a night time mix, just let me know.

So this is a mix I'm pretty happy with as it has some energy, it has a nice mix of old and new but of the subtle flavors of which I like, and Artie likes.

Included in this lovely mix is some art work from the artist we are using to do our branding and stuff. I think it is awesome. More about him later.

We're the Rock of New Orleans

noreply@blogger.com (Conor) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:11:00 +0000

I was an avid shortwave radio listener when I was growing up. I'd strung up a wire encircling my room as an antenna, and for a while had a wire antenna set up outside, which I connected to my radio through a window when there was no threat of lightning.

Most of the stations were government run and operated. The Voice of America, Radio Prague, etc. Being able to hear them was more important than actually listening to their programs, although I did find it interesting to get another (usually commie) perspective on the news, and realized from a young age that our national news might not actually be totally objective (the horror). Turns out the rest of the world wasn't as in favor of our invasion of Panama as I would've imagined, for example. Didn't they know that Panamanian military strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega was a bad guy (tm)?

It was also quite a kick to hear the rapid transition on the various Eastern Bloc stations from moribund commie party line to what the hell is going on to young liberal takeover after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Other than the VOA, most of the small number of U.S. based shortwave stations that existed were religious broadcasters, whose programs were painful to listen to, and who would ask you if you had accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior if you bothered to send a QSL.

There was one exception, however. WRNO, New Orleans. Also a FM station, with motto "We're the Rock of New Orleans", WRNO Worldwide was their shortwave service. Why someone thought it would be profitable to broadcast 100,000 watts of hard rock and New Orleans Saints games to the world, I'm not sure, but I definitely appreciated its presence on the dial.

One day I tuned into WRNO and they were playing "Green Onions" by Booker T. & The M.G.'s, one of my favorite songs. Awesome. I continued listening, and what do you know, but they played it again! Then again. And again. And again and again and again, with no DJ interruption. I listened to "Green Onions" for at least an hour. Were they having technical issues? Did the DJ put it on repeat to go binge on beignets & sazerac? I never did find out what the deal was.

Sadly, according to the Wikipedia entry I just read, WRNO Worldwide's shortwave transmitter was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and its license sold to a religious broadcaster. As for the FM station, in 2008 it switched to a "Rush Radio" format (as in scum of the earth Rush Limbaugh). But whenever I think of WRNO, I'll always remember the good times:

Music to evacuate by

noreply@blogger.com (cherry blossom) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:46:00 +0000

In that sea of cars, trucks, busses, et cetera streaming from NOLA, is a 3-car mini-caravan containing six of my nuclear and extended family members and four birds. They left their homes on Saturday night and spent nearly 8 hours driving to Jackson. Seeing the news coverage of thousands of cars sitting on the freeways, I wished I could get some sort of audio snapshot of the scene. What were all those people listening to? It would be fun to see a histogram. I wonder in all the tens of thousands of man-hours people spent boarding up their homes and deciding what means most to them, what fraction of that time was spent making playlists for the drive. And what was on those playlists?

So I asked my family:

Car 1: My parents and my nephew - My nephew has hated music since he was old enough to say so (he's 17 now). [side note - I've never understood this - how does someone hate music from childhood? He would cover his ears and scream, no matter what the music. Is this a condition with a name?] They listened to WWL Radio.

Car 2: My sister and her other son (age 5) were driving my dad's car. For a while, they were also listening to the warnings and other "analysis" on WWL until Nikolai demanded something different. My sister had to make do with whatever was in my dad's cd player, which turned out to be Abbey Road. Apparently, Octopus's Garden is Nikolai's favorite.

Car 3: Matthew drove the third car and was the only person listening to music of his own choosing. But even he didn't prepare any special playlists. He said he just played mixes he'd made earlier and had in the car.

So there you go. I wonder if anyone had time to think about their music. Would I think about the music if I were about to lose my house? Probably not, I guess. Somehow that makes it even more interesting what was on those stereos.

They're in Memphis now. I'm watching tv on the internet as I type this, and a song just came on..."Who knows what tomorrow will bring...maybe sunshine and maybe rain..."

Definitely rain.

Addendum September 3, 2008
Half of the merry bunch made it back home to their respective homes tonight. Apparently it was a very smooth drive back into New Orleans from Memphis. I asked my sister again what she listened to on the way back. She said "i flipped radio stations, and wished sorely i'd brought my cds. :) listened to a bunch of stuff i have no idea what it is." I asked, "did you wish sorely enough to think next time to bring some CDs?" "No," she said, ":D - instead, i got exposure to more music. it worked out."

She’s The One

noreply@blogger.com (mrshl) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:21:00 +0000

Tom Petty’s in town this weekend and I think it’s a good time to remember one of his most underrated records: his soundtrack for Ed Burns’s otherwise forgettable She’s the One.

I bought the soundtrack because I loved its signature song, “Walls,” which appears on the soundtrack twice. “Walls (Circus)” includes damn near eleventy people singing on it and probably thirty billion guitar and keyboard tracks. But no matter how much Rick Rubin tries to drown it in production, the song refuses to let its simple hook succumb.

I’m not sure why the song so affects me. Petty’s lyric, “You’ve got a heart so big, it could crush this town” might be the key. That little hook takes me in a bunch of different directions. I’ve included it on more than one mix tape for more than one girl, and it’s never meant quite the same thing. But maybe it is the production that lends it such immediacy. The second version, “Walls (No. 3),” is stripped down and features a more relaxed vocal from Petty. It’s terrible. It sounds like a rough mix that never got mastered, and it’s marred by a ridiculous harmonica solo.

That’s not to say the song can’t be treated sparely. Josh Ritter’s acoustic version captures its middling pleasures pretty well:

Much as I love “Walls,” the rest of the record is where She’s the One draws its staying power. Petty’s albums have always been half-filler, half-killer. Since filler is sort of the nature of the soundtrack beast, She’s the One is stronger than it should be, despite the instrumentals and two versions each of the record’s strongest songs, “Walls” and “Angel Dream.”

“Angel Dream” is probably the most direct love song Petty’s ever done, on a record that’s uncharacteristically personal and confessional. It’s impossible to say whether Petty was just trying to channel the movie or whether he used the soundtrack as a bucket for songs that didn’t appropriately maintain his usual distance.

It’s the covers that best capture the hurt and recrimination that seem to color the whole record. Lucinda Williams’s awesome “I Changed the Locks” is the most convincing rocker on the record, although Petty’s vocal doesn’t do much to communicate the vulnerability and bitterness of the original. Here’s Williams and Elvis Costello doing the song together. How’s that for vulnerable and bitter?

Petty fares better with an unexpected cover of “Asshole”, a song from Beck’s now classic One Foot in the Grave (easily my favorite Beck record that isn’t Midnite Vultures). My favorite thing about Petty’s version is the fact that freaking Lindsey Buckingham is singing backup. If I’m Beck circa 1996 and only famous for three years, this blows my Southern California mind.

She’s the One was kind of a return to form for the Heartbreakers. Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers were both great solo records. But sandwiched between them was the Jeff Lynne-produced Into the Great Wide Open. Except for “Learning to Fly,” I hated that record. Although the Heartbreakers were credited, it sounded like Full Moon Fever-lite, and the songwriting was dull, dull, dull.

On my favorite She’s the One songs, “Grew up Fast” and (especially) “Hope You Never” the Heartbreakers sound like they got their balls back. And the lyrics are mean enough for an entirely different mix tape.

I hope you never fall in love
Hope you never get your heart broken
I hope you never fall in love
With somebody like you

I hope you never give a damn
Hope you never lose your perspective
I hope you never fall in love
With somebody like you

I wish you well
I wish you everything and more
Forgive my ignorance
I was starting to ramble on and

I don’t know what Petty was thinking. Wasting all these songs on a soundtrack for some bland filmmaker’s second movie. But She’s the One isn’t a throw-away. It’s got some of my favorite Tom Petty songs ever. Maybe he thought he’d have plenty more classic tunes with which to stock his future records. He didn’t. She’s the One is the last good record he ever made. It’s also one of his most consistent. I can’t think of a single song he’s written since that sounds as good as the worst thing here.

But he crapped out hit singles for 20 years, and that’s a pretty good run. Now I just wish I could find the CD to go with my She’s the One jewel box. I had to download these songs from Amazon just to write this post. Some records, though, I don’t mind buying twice.

Steers and Stripes

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 03:59:00 +0000

I have to wonder why, after a long campaign with rallies which had some good music--or at least had Tom Petty, Obama picked a Brooks & Dunn song to be the punch line for his biggest speech. Sure, I know the lyrics for "Only in America" fit Obama's "living the American dream" theme, but so do lots of songs that don't have a steel guitar*. It's a fair assumtion that this song is not really Obama's type of music. His music leans more toward the Stevie Wonder end of the pop spectrum. Maybe it would have seemed like too much Stevie Wonder to play "Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)" like he has at many other rallies. He could have picked the will.i.am Obama song. Or he could have picked the even more horrible Dave Stewart Obama song, whose release seems to have been timed for it to be used for this very purpose. Nope, Obama picked a song that Bush used at the Republican Convention. And not only did Bush use the Brooks & Dunn song, he actually campaigned with them, so they are clearly Republican supporters**. I guess Obama should be glad they didn't sue him.

*And if you listen, the steel guitar, along with banjo, sound as if they were added as an afterthought to remind you that you're listening to "country" music.

**Or they just know their audience is likely to be Republican, à la Toby Keith.

Week 96: A Secret

noreply@blogger.com (Carlos Anaconda) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:09:00 +0000

This is a secret post. On the surface it looks like it is saying one thing, but really it is saying something else completely. You will read this and think you know what it says, because when we understand the words, we think we understand the meaning, either that or the words make no sense. But these words make sense in that they are put together in a way that is grammatically correct and designed to convey a meaning. But that is not their true meaning, their true meaning is secret, because it is written in a secret language, a secret language that not only can't be written, but can’t even be spoken. Because the consequences would be truly terrible. That’s why it’s a secret.

So I can’t tell you what this post says, but what I can do is point you towards the code. Because like every secret language, this one also has a code. And if you want to know what is being said here, you will need the code.

I will tell you how to find the code, not because I want you to go find it or because I think that you will. I will tell you just so you know that there is indeed a code, and so that maybe one day, maybe years from now, maybe you will find yourself at the right time, and the right place, and then maybe you’ll be able to know what this post is about. Unless you already do.

So here’s where the code is: The code is under the sand in front of Foxy’s Tamarind Bar on Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Isles.

On New Year’s Day, on Great Harbour Bay, Foxy himself sits in front of his bar and plays a few songs on his Spanish guitar. Foxy plays most days, around sunset. Barefoot, because I don’t think he has ever worn shoes, he sits facing the sun as it sets over the far end of the bay, and plays for his friends and the few visitors who have made the trip to this distant Caribbean outpost.

However, on New Year’s Eve, known as Old Year's Night in the islands, hundreds of sailboats from around the world gather on Great Harbour Bay. They come for one of the greatest Old Year's Night parties on the globe. The bay fills with boats until you can almost cross the bay from one end to the other just by stepping from deck to deck. And the people sing and dance into the night until they pass out on the sands.

Later the next day, New Year’s Day, after most of the sailboats have left, Foxy once again sits on his chair to play, like he does most sunsets. But on New Year’s Day, instead of facing the sunset, he moves his chair to a different spot right on the shore, and plays his guitar facing the open waters of his lady in the blue dress, as he affectionately calls the sea beyond the bay.

Right next to where Foxy sets his chair, there is a palm tree. It is a very old palm tree. The fishermen at the bay, who know the story of each palm tree like they know the story of the beach, might be able to help you find this palm tree, but fishermen don’t easily share their secrets. I will tell you though that during the terrible hurricane of 1916, this palm tree bent until its crown touched the sand, but it didn’t break, and now still graces the shore of Great Harbour Bay.

When you find the palm tree, sit at its foot with your back against the trunk and, along with Foxy, face the open sea. If the tide is high the water should be licking right at your feet. I sat on this same spot at the end of one summer, and waited for the night to fall, and waited for the storm to reach the shore. And right as I thought the storm would blow me away, I jumped into the bay and let the water carry me away. And I lost consciousness. I woke up on the sand, at the other end of the bay, and covered in seaweed, I walked back to Foxy’s in the dark.

So sit at the foot of this palm tree, and look out at Great Harbour Bay, and listen to Foxy play his guitar, and look beyond the bay at that lady in her blue dress. Then, with your left hand, dig a little under the sand until you find the root base of the palm, and feel with your fingers among the mass of tangled roots, and there you will find the secret code of this secret post.

I can’t tell you anymore than this, but I do hope that one day you’ll get to sit, at the foot of that palm tree with your hand in the sand, looking over the ocean and listening to Foxy play guitar, at the edge of Great Harbour Bay in Jost Van Dyke on the British Virgin Isles.

First day of Kindergarten

noreply@blogger.com (stacey) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:40:00 +0000

(No music)
Yesterday was my oldest boy's first day of Kindergarten.

We woke up on time though the alarm didn't go off so I'm not sure how that happened.

Then we found out my youngest son has a high fever and will not be going to school, which means I am not going to work. And for that I am thankful as I need a break.

In trying to take his temperature, I dropped and broke the mercury thermometer. So I spent half the morning trying to clean up the glass and little balls of
mercury.

Abe, on the other hand, woke up at once, which is very rare. He started to get his clothes on immediately and the first thing he said was that his 'nervous left him over night'.

He ate his cereal and then got his shoes and socks on. He described his outfit as 'super hero.' This was important for him.

He talked a mile a minute all the way there. We parked a couple of blocks away and walked in, dragging all of the school supplies. Then he got in line with his class. We saw our neighbor friend who got in trouble for coming over, and he mentioned that.

Then the Assistant Principal got on the stage and welcomed everybody and had them all wave bye bye to the parents.

I definitely teared up at that moment.

Then we walked back to the van and went back home.

That whole, they grow up in a minute thing, is starting to come true for me, so, thankfully I had the rest of the day with my little one before he grows up too and starts a band and lives by himself.

The Quarterback

noreply@blogger.com (Wednesday) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:46:00 +0000

As part of the Chicago Jazz Fest, both Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman are playing this week for the cost of a couple of CTA train rides.

Sonny Rollins is the deepest tenor saxophonist to come out from under Thelonius Monk's broad wings. And from what I hear, the 78 year old blower still has the wind. If you're not familiar but want to be, I suggest you pick up Next Album which was a come back record for him in 1972 after an apparently self-imposed six year exile from the music business.

Ornette Coleman is, of course, a founder of the Free Jazz movement. His career spans decades but if you're not familiar with Coleman, I suggest you look back no further than his 2007 Pulitzer winning live album Sound Grammar.

I got my free Free Jazz kick started early Monday night - went to see Mike Reed's People Places & Things down at Millennium Park. They had with them some players from back in the day including a member of Sun Ra's Arkestra from their early ground breaking days in Chicago.

And this is where I stop writing and ask you to read this article about Mike Reed, a great musician and a huge contributor to the over all good of the Chicago music scene (this jazz drummer is oddly enough the man behind the Pitchfork Music Festival).

The Monster Mash

noreply@blogger.com (Conor) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:33:00 +0000

Not being a teenage girl, I wasn't expecting to get into Tegan & Sara, but after finding an in-store copy of their CD So Jealous for $1 at a CD store closing sale, I decided to give them a shot. Turns out I already had the album as a CD-R, which I'm sure I had probably never listened to. At first listen, the music seemed simplistic and the singing stilted, but soon I recognized the singing as charming and the simplicity as a sort of positive quality in itself, much like with punk rock or certain Pixies tunes. I especially liked the first four or so songs and often, after becoming annoyed with later tunes (some of which are quite annoying), would start the CD over from the beginning.

One day I was driving in my car, as I am wont to do when I can afford a bit of refined Texas tea, and heard an entrancing dance song on the radio. My gosh, was that Tegan & Sara? The song was something else, incredibly catchy and fun. I noted the lyrics, "I was walking with a ghost", and proceeded to my domicile. I looked on my CD and there it was, a song entitled "Walking With a Ghost". But when I put the CD on, the song wasn't the same at all; though good it was rather more staid, seemed slower and was missing certain things.

Hmm, perhaps it was a remix? I looked through their discography for remixes, but didn't find anything that sounded the same. The song did seem to be popular, though. The White Stripes even covered it. Finally, I came across the source. Turns out it was a mash-up by a San Francisco DJ named Party Ben. Apparently, he's most famous for a mash-up of Green Day, Oasis, Travis and Eminem called "Boulevard of Broken Songs".

In 2005 he made a mash-up of the Tegan & Sara track in question with a track by Mylo (who according to Wikipedia is a Scottish electronic musician) called "Paris Four Hundred". And so I give you the result of my quest, "Walking with a Ghost in Paris". (Confusingly, he also did a different version in 2007, but I don't like it as much.)

BTW, Party Ben's website is well worth checking out. Even if you're some kind of sicko who doesn't like mash-ups, you can't help but be amused by some of the covers he came up with, e.g.:

your brain

noreply@blogger.com (cherry blossom) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:30:00 +0000

Picking up a little bit on Justin's post from Friday, I'm reading a book right now called This is Your Brain on Music - The science of a human obsession by Daniel J. Levitin. Levitin is a former successful music producer and engineer who got so fascinated with how people perceive music that he went back to school and got a Ph.D. in neuroscience. If I were a real blogger with a real blogger's conscience, I'd write a proper review of this book because it's awesome and deserves a more thorough discussion. I'm less than halfway through it, though, so a review would be premature at this point. I just want to talk about a few points he raises in the book.

The first 80 pages or so are spent defining the basic elements of music for the non-musician. One of the obvious upshots of this whole first section is that everyone is a music machine, whether they consider themselves to be or not, and that we acquire a sort of musical language and culture in ways that are poorly understood but seem similar to language. He says in the first pages that musicians might want to skip this introductory discussion of the elements of music, but I wouldn't recommend skipping anything here. I have been studying, performing, and producing music pretty intensely my whole life, and I learned things from this section of the book about pitch, timbre, melody, rhythm, etc. that I hadn't ever considered.

For example, the discussion of pitch gives just enough detail to convey the complexity of the issue without being completely overwhelming to the newcomer. I had always thought of pitch in a fairly simplistic way, roughly equivalent to the fundamental frequency of a tone, but apparently this is not the case. Pitch is, according to Levitin, a purely psychological phenomenon, not a physical one. He says sounds have no pitch until our brains get involved. In fact, if I'm reading him correctly, he says there is no sound until our brains get involved - until then, there are only vibrating molecules of air. This is a pretty interesting concept for me and it gets even more interesting when he starts talking about how our brains learn how to group sounds together to form coherent gestalts. Before he gets to that point in the discussion, though, he talks about the special relationships our brains have to pitch. Here's what he says about this:

"After sounds enter the ear, they pass by the basilar membrane, where certain hair cells fire, depending on the frequency of the sounds. The membrane acts like a motion-dector lamp you might have in your garden; activity in a certain part of the membrane causes it to send an electrical signal on up to the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex also has a tonotopic map, with low to high tones stretched out across the cortical surface. In this sense, the brain also contains a "map" of different pitches, and different ares of the brain respond to different pitches. Pitch is so important that the brain represents it directly; unlike almost any other musical attribute, we could place the elctrodes in the brain and be able to determine what pitches were being played to a person just by looking at the brain acitivty. And although music is based on pitch relations rather than absolute pitch values, it is, paradoxically, these absolute pitch values that the brain is paying attention to throughout its different statges of processing.

This direct mapping of pitch is so important, it bears repeating. If i put electrodes in your visual cortex (the part of the brain at the back of the head, concerned with seeing), and I then showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons that will cause my electrodes to turn red. But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precisely that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz - for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain!"

He then gets into an even more mindblowing discussion of timbre, wherein he talks about the phenomenon of the restoration of the missing fundamental. I couldn't believe I'd never heard about this, and now I can't stop thinking about it. Apparently if you hear a tone composed of a normal set of physically realistic overtones and you strip out the fundamental frequency (or the note's pitch), your brain will calculate from the overtones the fundamental frequency that should have been there and will restore it into your mental perception of the note. You can even deviate somewhat from the frequencies in the harmonic series and your brain will sort of interpolate to find the fundamental frequency that best fits the series. He then tells of a graduate student, Petr Janata, who tested this phenomenon by putting electrodes in an owl's brain. He played for the owl a version of Strauss's "The Blue Danube Waltz" that had the fundamental frequencies missing from the notes.

"Petr hypothesized that if the missing fundamental is restored at early levels of auditory processing, neurons in the owl's inferior colliculus should fire at the rate of the missing fundamental. This was exactly what he found. And because the electrodes put out a small electrical signal with each firing - and because the firing rate is the same as a frequency of firing (as we saw above) -- Petr sent the output of these electrodes to a small amplifier, and played back the sound of the owl's neurons through a loudspeaker. What he heard was astonishing: the melody of "the Blue Danube Waltz" sang clearly from the loudspeakers: ba da da da da, deet deet, deet deet. we were hearing the firing rates of the neurons and they were identical to the frequency of the missing fundamental."

Whoa. This might be old news, but it was new to me. I can imagine all sorts of interesting things you could do by putting electrodes in people's brains, putting headphones on them, and then hooking their brains up to loudspeakers and listening to their brains. I wonder what the output would sound like if you did this with 10 people simultaneously processing the same input. If this were legal, it could be all sorts of fun.

I can totally see why this guy left the world of music to study this stuff.

The other thing that struck me was the story of his interactions with the famous engineer, John R. Pierce, of Bell Labs and an early faculty member at Stanford's computer music center, CCRMA. Pierce is one of those people who is such a badass that you can't figure out which major accomplishment to list first when trying to briefly characterize him. He supervised the team of engineers who built and patented the transistor, and he apparently named it. He is also credited with inventing the traveling wave vacuum tube, and he launched the first telecommunications satellite, Telestar. He co-invented a tuning called the Bohlen-Pierce scale. He was a true innovator. Here's Levitin's Pierce story:

"I first met Pierce in 1990 when he was already eighty and was giving lectures on psychoacoustics at CCRMA. Several years later, after I had earned my Ph.D. and moved back to Stanford, we became friends and would go out to dinner every Wednesday night and discuss research. He once asked me to explain rock and roll music to him, something he had never paid any attention to and didn't understand. He knew about my previous career in the music business, and he asked if I could come over for dinner one night and play six songs that captured all that was important to know about rock and roll. Six songs to capture all of rock and roll? I wasn't sure I could come up with six songs to capture the Beatles, let alone all of rock and roll. The night before he called to tell me that he had heard Elvis Presley, so I didn't need to cover that.

Here's what I brought to dinner:

1) "Long Tall Sally," Little Richard
2) "Roll Over Beethoven," the Beatles
3) "All Along the Watchtower," Jimi Hendrix
4) "Wonderful Tonight," Eric Clapton
5) "Little Red Corvette," Prince
6) "Anarchy in the U.K.," the Sex Pistols

...Pierce listened and kept asking who these people were, what instruments he was hearing, and how they came to sound the way they did. Mostly, he said that he liked the timbres of the music."

I don't know why this story amuses me so much, but it's hilarious to me. Just the thought of having to introduce all of rock music in 6 songs to a genius whose primary experience with music is through physics and perhaps classical music...I don't know. It cracks me up. Maybe because I've worked with old guys like this who are so out of touch with popular culture that I can imagine how this scenario would play out.

It also made me think about which six songs I would come up with (minus Elvis) to "capture all of rock music." I doubt I would think of any of these. What songs would you choose?

My version of Tattoo You

noreply@blogger.com (stacey) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:42:00 +0000

Not that I don't like the songs I left off, but I just need a longer break before I can listen to them again. And then, the main reason I like the rest of the songs is the relaxed feeling I get, like I'm going down a country road in a truck with the windows down.
(might take a moment before the player updates)

Eight miles in the snow. Both ways.

noreply@blogger.com (mrshl) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 21:08:00 +0000

I remember combing the racks at the old Sound Ex on Westheimer or Vinal Edge to see if Palace had a new record out.

I used to sit down in front of the wall of magazines at the Alabama Bookstop and read the reviews in Alternative Press.

Josh and I went to Cactus at midnight to buy Brighten the Corners. It totally sucked, and it felt like a kick in the belly, but we felt it at the same time.

I can’t count the number of times I stood tethered to a listening station trying to hear a new CD with of one good speaker.

I don’t do any of this stuff anymore, and I miss having that kind of time to kill. But despite the nostalgia I have for those college days in the Montrose, I think finding and listening to new music is a lot easier now. Certainly, I encounter a lot more of it. The reason, of course, is the Internet.

I don’t want to belabor the point, because I think everyone around my age experienced the same shift at around the same time. The advent of the Web and the post-Napster era of broadband means that we can subscribe to feeds instead of magazines. We can download craploads of music for orders of magnitude less than we used to pay—if we pay at all.

So yeah, you know all that.

I just wanted to take a few moments to share my personal music discovery workflow. This is how I get sounds:

eMusic.com

Yeah, I’m a huge fan of paying less than 40 cents per download, but part of eMusic’s massive value is their commitment to top-notch editorial content. Their editors of the eMusic magazine review a ton of releases and supplement their reviews with features and interviews. They also have an employee blog that highlights new releases and hidden gems. But my favorite regular feature is the eMusic dozen, which collects 12 signature releases in a given category. For example, there are dozens devoted to labels (e.g., Southern Lord, Sun Records) and genres (More Essential Alt-Country, Scandinavian Jazz). Artists like Brit Daniel, Isaac Hayes, and Chuck D have also contributed their own compilations. Because eMusic is a subscription service and you lose the monthly downloads you don’t use, I’m constantly looking for new stuff. Fortunately, eMusic’s editors do a great job helping me discover new music and classic records I’d overlooked.

Last.fm

Last.fm is best known for its Scrobbler, a software program that keeps track of what you play on your computer and shares it with your friends. You can see my most recently played artists and songs below.

But I think their Web radio service is underrated. Like Pandora, if you visit the Last.fm Web site and enter the name of a song or an artist, Last.fm will play similar tracks for you. You can also listen to a style or “tag,” such as light jazz or black metal, or to the personalized station for any user (e.g., mrshl, or willadams). Most often, I listen to the “My Recommendations” station, which selects tracks based on all the songs I’ve submitted to My Library via the scrobbler. As different songs play, Last.fm will show you crap loads of information about whatever’s playing, including artist bio and similar artists.

Unlike Pandora, last.fm doesn’t force you to visit their Web page and view their ads. You can access the site through their scrobbling software, which is available on Mac, Windows, Linux and iPhone.

Recently, though, I’ve started listening to Last.fm via the Fire.fm firefox add on, which remembers your past radio stations and lets you access them in the address bar. It’s perfect for work, where it lets me listen to millions of songs without having to plug in a hard drive.

Other sites and tools I use

Metacritic
Reviews of new releases collected from a wide swath of music sites, magazines, and papers.

Jango.com
Another Pandora-like site that I actually like better than Pandora. A lot more control over what you hear, plus a larger library of songs. It’s not pretty, though. Looks like MySpace.

HypeMachine
This site aggregates tracks and links from the most popular MP3 blogs around the Web. It’s got integrated Web radio, and it can sync with Twitter and Last.fm.

Pitchfork.tv
The dominant Web zine everyone loves to hate is still awfully useful, especially if you want to see high-quality videos, films, documentaries, and interviews. This spin-off site proves that the much-dissed site is putting their massive cache of ad dollars to good use.

Allmusic.com Blog
As if Allmusic weren’t already ridiculously useful, this year they started a blog, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite reads on the Web. They cover a lot of ground, and the lack of focus on a single genre or era of music makes it a particularly useful discovery tool.

Amazon MP3
I can’t stand iTunes, so Amazon was a welcome competitor. Lots and lots of high-bit rate, DRM-free music, and most of it is cheaper than iTunes. The lightweight downloading software will automatically add your music to iTunes or Windows Media Player.

MediaMonkey
Not a music discovery tool per se, but this is what I use on my PC instead of Winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media player. How good is it? I paid $34.95 for a lifetime license. It’s got features no other player has, and it can handle huge libraries of songs without freezing. Sadly, it’s Windows only.

8tracks
Recently, Muxtape (a site I wrote about here) was shut down by the RIAA. That sucks, but the newish 8tracks (review here) is a better alternative. Unlike Muxtape, 8tracks lets you create more than one mix. It also imports album art, and it allows you to add tracks from other users without having to upload them first. Recommended. Here’s my profile.

___________________

From this list, you can probably tell that I’m not scouring the Web for the most obscure shit I can find. The sites and tools I mention above are wide nets that allow me to cover an awful lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time. That’s the point of this post, I guess.

When it comes to finding new music, I don’t work as hard as I used to. But I buy more music now. And I listen to more music. I’m not sure the music is as great as what I loved in 1995. I’m pretty sure it’s not. But I haven’t given up trying to find it.

Specious Connections

noreply@blogger.com (Justin) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:34:00 +0000

I would just like to point out a couple things.

First there's this study which says that listening to music can make you more musical.

Then there's this other thing:

I'm guessing she doesn't listen to much music.

Week 95: The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 11

noreply@blogger.com (New Town Drunks) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:13:00 +0000

We are approaching the end of this project. It’s been almost two years since we started putting the songs together for this. And soon we will be doing final mixes, mastering, and artwork, and then finally manufacturing the thing. But there is still a little bit of recording to be done.

Recently Nathan Golub came in and put down pedal steel and cuatro parts on some of the tracks. Nathan is one of those string wizards one sometimes has the luck to meet; give him anything with strings and he’ll make it sound good. He can probably make music out of shoe strings. He played my old beat up cuatro and fell in love with it so he asked if I knew how to get one. A quick call to my mom in Puerto Rico and she was off to see her cuatro maker friend who quickly set Nathan up with a nice new cuatro.

Nathan recorded cuatro parts on three songs, but the bulk of the work he did was on pedal steel. For the pedal steel, we set up a Peavy Nashville 112 amplifier in a sound room, and Nathan sat in the control room, running through the amp and also direct. The session was, like Koko Goldstein might say, smooth. Nathan had already played the songs with us live, so it was just a matter of streamlining the material for the record. And Nathan is not only an attentive player, but also very easy to work with.

The coolest part of the whole session, though, might have been recording with the plate reverb. On the record, there is a crazy transition between Itch and Feet Beat Faster. Neither song has a pedal steel part, but we thought that the transition between them could use some. Well, to tell the truth, at this point we’re throwing everything we got into this transition. Later we’ll have to spend some time editing and mixing it. So when we were about to record the pedal steel part for the transition, Jesse Olley (engineer/co-producer extraordinaire) suggested we use the reverb plate. Reverb plate, said I? What reverb plate? And Jesse said I probably hadn’t noticed it, but it was right against the wall in the room with all the guitars. I had been in that room many times, so I went back and looked again. The reason I hadn’t noticed it is because it looks just like a super long, super tall and super narrow box, almost the size of the wall. I thought it was the wall.

I sent Jesse and email to get some details about the plate. Here’s what he wrote: “It’s an Echoplate II with modifications designed and sold by the guy who originally built it in Chicago in 1983, the last year of production. It's a suspended sheet of stainless steel with a speaker driver and two transducer pickups mounted on the plate. The one control is labeled reverb time scale. It goes from from 1 to 8. It came from the late Wavecastle Studio in Hillsboro where (among others) Zen Frisbee and The Family Dollar Pharaohs recorded their albums.”

Jesse continues, “Here’s a picture of the reverb plate with the side of it removed so you can see the plate.

Note the one cable in, two cables out on top and the lever, top left. The speaker magnet is in the center. The original pickups are the small black things stuck on the plate, the new (modified) ones are the brass disks lower on the plate.”

So we hooked up the pedal steel to the reverb plate, and cranked it up to 7. It was like swimming in an ocean of melted steel. I only wish we could take that monster to a solo pedal steel performance, on top of a mountain, with giant amplifiers pushing the waves of steel down the mountain like musical lava.

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Nathan’s session.

First, the last two minutes of Walk, featuring a steel solo.

Walk excerpt

And then some of the craziness going on in the transition between Itch and Feet Beat Faster.

Itch to Feet Beat Faster transition excerpt

Bonus links:

A Little Reverb History

How to build your own plate reverb

You people in New York should go see this show tonight.

noreply@blogger.com (Wednesday) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:47:00 +0000

Sunday night the 29 year old experimental Dutch band the Ex played in collaboration with 73 year old Ethiopian saxophonist, Getatchew Mekuria, at Chicago's Logan Square Auditorium while this 39 year old Mr. Mom slept.

Luckily for Mr. Mom (and a certain 7 month old girl), the Ex and Mr. Mekuria also played a noon show at Millennium Park on Monday. Lucky indeed since this the best show I've seen yet at the Pritzker Pavilion.

This line up is doing one more show in the States tonight at 6PM at the Damrosch Park Bandshell in New York City and I highly recommend that any Nappers in the area make their way over there at pretty much any cost.

That is if jangly scratchy electric guitars backed by one of the most trance-inducing drummers known to punk (who also happens to have a lovely singing voice) joined by a line-up of well rehearsed and tasteful horn/reed players all right in tune with one of the most clever and wise saxophonists on the planet is your cup of tea.

You can take or leave the socialist message - I don't think it takes a like mind to enjoy this - but don't miss the "special guest" who I can best describe as the Michael Jackson of Ethiopia if all Michael Jackson could do is dance.

For the rest of you, there is the collaborative album which also comes recommended by Mr. Mom (as does practically everything in the Ex discography). If you like the Evens, the Mekons, the Fall or just Dutch people in general you will not be disappointed.

Why not start with the generous free offerings from the Ex's Official Website? Mr. Mom would start with Town of Stone and It's a Sin.

Update: I forgot to mention for those in Chicagoland this week - come out to the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport Saturday night for an all Bridgeport lineup of artists, with my band churchbus (and others) providing the background noise.

Oldies

noreply@blogger.com (stacey) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:36:00 +0000

Just reading yet another story yesterday about how we can get the older generations to buy more music, which of course made me nervous because it touched on that thinking that older people only like their music from their childhood or high school days and can't really expand their minds to like anything else.

And maybe that's true. I don't know why I really care, exactly. Maybe I just don't want to get old? Who cares what kind of music you listen to anyway, at any age? It's all so subjective.

Then my thoughts were carried to a different topic as a friend told me that her husband is having some severe health difficulties and has been in the hospital for a week. His heart is really weak and so he has trouble just getting to the bathroom. With only one nurse per floor, she had to hire someone to come help her so she could get some sleep herself so she could go to her job so she could pay for this person to help. This is after the granddaughter helped for quite awhile already.

I told her a story to help her feel better about yet another friend I have whose husband is having similar problems, though he's younger, at 75, while the aforementioned husband is 85, but who had a terrible accident while trying to go to the bathroom. Terrible in that it just was not something you want people to be a witness to, not that it was truly terrible.

Dignity is not around while in the hospital, in many cases, especially if you're old, which of course means you're in the hospital more often than not, or at least have some assistance in daily living, which amounts to a similar experience.

All of that to say, wouldn't it be great if there were some really punky songs that sang about this and made it a joke and we could all laugh about it together? It would be preferable if the band members themselves were at least 60 as to be authentic, but I think this would be a big hit and really helpful.

Maybe all we have to do is wait until the Boomer generation gets to that age as many of them were punk or rocked out. Let's see... that's about now for the first wave of them as they were born from 1945 to 1964. Metal heads came later, so metal aged songs won't happen until about 20 years from now.

Ok, 5 - 10 years from now, I say songs about being old and feeble will be prevalent. That is my prediction - my analysis of an about-to-be trend.

In other news, I'm super busy lately and for the next month as the store gets going, so I'm having a hard time keeping up with the reading of your posts and comments, but intend to and like to.