Archive for February, 2009
E.S.T. – Tuesday Wonderland
Posted on | February 27, 2009 | No Comments
The Esbjörn Svensson Trio sounds like the most balanced and smartest modern ‘jazz’ piano trio of the ones I’ve heard. It’s post-everything: it’s not ironic, not ‘fusion’ in any way – it feels like a logical growth path for jazz. It’s sad that Svensson died in a scuba diving accident last year. This tune sounds more like Kruder & Dorfmeister than Bill Evans.
Thelonious Monk’s two words
Posted on | February 27, 2009 | No Comments
Thelonious Monk, from Library and Archives Canada via Wikimedia Commons
Seen today on Wikipedia:
Bassist Al McKibbon, who had known Monk for over twenty years and played on his final tour in 1971, later said: “On that tour Monk said about two words. I mean literally maybe two words. He didn’t say ‘Good morning’, ‘Goodnight’, ‘What time?’ Nothing. Why, I don’t know. He sent word back after the tour was over that the reason he couldn’t communicate or play was that Art Blakey and I were so ugly.”
I find myself wondering what the two words were that he did say. Maybe I have too much time on my hands.
This is a truly great Thelonious Monk record to hear if you have the chance:
Listening to: Chick Corea & Hiromi Uehara, Duet
Posted on | February 24, 2009 | No Comments
Cascading, skittering, effervescent, energetic, virtuoso, surprising, accomplished. You’d need a stream of adjectives to describe how these two play together. An easier way to say it might be to think of four hands attached, somehow, to the same brain. An orchestra of pianos, perfectly conducted by a single musical mind. This record is the result of
1 night, 2 pianos, 2 sets, 4 hands, 12 songs, 20 fingers, 176 keys, about 600 people in the audience and thousands of ideas exchanging between the two pianists and the audience,
…as Chick Corea says in his liner notes. It’s certainly showy – these are two seasoned jazz pianists, and their technical skills are impeccable. Chick Corea needs no introduction (Miles Davis, Return to Forever). Hiromi Uehara, a month away from being 30 years old, is a Japanese piano Wunderkind – trained at Berklee College of Music and known for her energetic live performances with the Hiromi Uehara Trio. Corea says he found her playing inspirational and suggested they record a set of duets together.
If you spend any amount of time listening to this, though, the showiness becomes less important, and the music speaks clearly. Full of delightful subtleties, surprises and curve balls, Corea and Uehara both hold each performance down tightly while challenging each other in a what-else-can-you-do-with-that kind of way. The program is mostly jazz and pop standards, well known material, but, as with any jazz improvisation, the pleasure is in the moment of surprise, and in how the moments, together, form a lasting musical whole. Each tune’s lines are beautifully concluded, and nothing is allowed to ‘fizz out’ in the din of improvisation.
Instead of discussing it more, here are two Youtube clips of Hiromi and Chick playing:
If you have a chance to hear the CD, you should.
What I can’t quite figure out is whether they practiced before performing, and how much. With this level of musicianship, it’s entirely possible that very little was rehearsed and agreed beforehand. One guesses that they shared creating the setlist at least (hard to imagine that one would kick off a tune and have the other guess what it is). Either way, once you’ve absorbed the pyrotechnics a bit, this is quite a transcendent musical treat.
Combatting winter neglect
Posted on | February 23, 2009 | No Comments
When it’s winter, I find I let things slide. Or maybe they slide all by themselves, and I just don’t do anything about them. That’s often because I find I’m quite unaware that something needs doing. Take, for instance, some inflation issues I encountered recently (no, not of the economic kind…).
This is the first year I am parking outside overnight. Previously, I had been in nice, hermetically sealed shoebox-like condos with underground parking. There, my car didn’t really encounter winter until I drove it outside. It got a little crusty as I drove it from parking garage to parking garage, but really, winter was something we both ventured into only for brief periods of time. So tire inflation issues weren’t really something I was particularly familiar with. Imagine my surprise when I realized just how much tire pressure (10% or more) my brand new tires lost over the course of a couple of weeks at -20°C! I found myself wondering why my Subaru’s steering was off and things were feeling a little, well, sloshier than even the sloshiest of Toronto’s icy streets should. I was also mystified about why my fuel consumption seemed way up… I thought, “Okay, a cold engine might use more fuel, but…”
So I stopped by my friendly neighbourhood gas station (okay, it’s actually a completely impersonal chain gas station that gives you ‘points’ every time you fill up; I just like saying ‘friendly’ and ‘neighborhood’) and properly inflated my tires. What a difference!
Another thing I realized a month or so ago was just how bad my mattress had become. When bought, a number of years ago, it seemed like a good one – expensive and properly supportive. Maybe a little too fluffy in that 18″ pillow top kind of way. But okay. What the pillow top masked, for me at least, was how unsupportive the underlying structure had become. It was sagging in the middle, and its occupants would sort of roll into the centre. When this was pointed out to me recently, I bit the bullet and went to my friendly neighbourhood mattress store (there is actually one in the neighbourhood but it, too, is a bit soulless, filled with salespeople pretending to be sleep consultants). $700 later and I’m now the proud owner of a brand-spanking-new mattress. My back thanked me immediately and continues to thank me every day.
Clearly, winter is a season that requires me to be more structured and organized than I normally need to be. Nothing feels naturally as if it needs doing; my caveman instincts tell me it’s time to bury myself in my home, stay inside, consume the food I have stored in my cupboards and hibernate. From now on, I think winter will require me to make lists and check items off as I go. The relief of addressing these two things was immediately tangible, so I think I’ll continue to go through my list of things I don’t want to know about (or do) as winter turns into spring.
Listening to: UB40, Twentyfourseven
Posted on | February 7, 2009 | No Comments
A review of UB40′s Twentyfourseven (2008)
An elegant, slightly dark and dubby swansong, Twentyfourseven affirms for the last time what a strong and intelligent reggae band UB40 was. Forging its own path on the periphery of reggae, and – at the same time – somehow propelling the genre into the future by keeping it anchored in one-drop while dancehall and hip hop threatened to transform it into another ‘lost’ music, the brothers Campbell and their bandmates always had a lyrical and sweet sound. Their evident love of classic ska and reggae singles from the 60s and 70s resulted in a seemingly neverending string of radio hits in the 80s and 90s. Cynics might say that they just found new ways of selling the same old music to white people again; but, as their best-known album titles affirmed, their cover versions were really labours of love.
Twentyfourseven is less upbeat than many of the other recent UB40 efforts. It’s also more coherent and demonstrates (too little, too late, perhaps) how and where reggae and hip hop connect in the UK. Much of it sounds surprisingly like those delicious reggae tracks on Massive Attack’s first two albums. There’s a dubby flavour to Twentyfourseven that sometimes puts Ali’s vocals a little further down the sound stage and surrounds them with almost King Tubby like reverb (a counter-intuitive move, of course, for reggae traditionalists who would expect the dub plates to come after the album tracks). On ‘Lost and Found,’ he sings,
Anybody could be me | You could be standing here | It’s so very easy | For me to disappear | No-one seems to see me | It’s as if I don’t exist | I’m going nowhere | And I know I won’t be missed (from “Lost and Found”)
I think that the autumnal keyboard pads and other melancholy sounds are, in a manner of speaking, a reflection of what happened to UB40 in the late 90s and 2000s to date. Largely forgotten by the record-buying public, filed under “Easy Listening” in record stores, doing the de-facto nostalgia circuit and adrift in terms of label distribution (Twentyfourseven did not see a North American release), the last 10 years can’t have been an easy journey.
More than listenable, Twentyfourseven is reggae that embodies, in a way, a fresh take of my generation’s first grasp of this music: too young to have been attuned to Marley, Tosh, Culture and Jimmy Cliff in the 70s, I think I may have heard UB40′s first Labour of Love around the same time I first heard Marley. To be sure, Twentyfourseven is also very modern and has an up-to-date sound, somewhere between Jamaica’s own one-drop revival of the last few years and the aforementioned UK trip hop. And Ali Campbell’s voice is still interesting and unique – instantly recognizable, it lends a lyricism and romance to UB40′s music that many other reggae acts simply don’t have.
Campbell has now left the band to pursue a solo career. His departure was poorly handled, as the press releases on the band’s website amply illustrate. Not cool, not classy, and maybe a little too 80s.
His initial solo product is not that encouraging: the production is too high-pitched and tinny, and – despite some interesting collaborators – the whole thing falls rather flat as a record. But, like Queen or INXS, UB40 is ultimately as defined by its lead singer’s voice as it is by its material. It stands to reason that if Campbell finds his solo feet, his music will sound just like UB40′s. UB40, though, without him, will not. To keep the cash cow going as long as possible, the anthologizing has already started: this year’s Love Songs begins the journey of preserving UB40, with Ali Campbell as lead singer, for generations to come. Whether the rest of the band continues to record and perform as UB40 is quite irrelevant.
Currently reading
Posted on | February 7, 2009 | No Comments
Also, an insightful and entertaining review of Toward 2012 from the New York Times. Many of the essays are available at Reality Sandwich.
A font in your own handwriting
Posted on | February 4, 2009 | No Comments
YourFonts offers a free online utility to create a TrueType font based on your handwriting. Basically, you download a 2-page PDF form that you print out and fill in, in your handwriting. Then you scan the two pages and upload them to YourFonts. There, they are processed into a TrueType font that you can download and install. Instructions are pretty clear throughout. The site seems to be a bit shaky at times… I think it’s related to volume and time of day. Also, there’s a field for “signature” on the first page of the form template that I chose not to fill in. I assume the idea is that you’d get your signature as part of your font but I’m not too comfortable with uploading my signature anywhere (it works fine without the signature).
keep looking »
Recent Posts on Changebowl, Carsten’s other blog- Playing around with Ontario electoral geography August 11, 2010
- HelTweetica for iPad July 20, 2010
- Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY July 19, 2010
- What we can learn from gear porn May 31, 2010
- Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional? May 27, 2010
- Comparing the tech giants May 2, 2010
- Corporate applications and content on smartphones March 21, 2010
About
Carsten Knoch
Attentive music listener, reader, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, software and services professional, vision enabler, instigator, product manager, marketer, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992
Teabowl is my blog about music, vegetarian food, books, art and life.
Teabowl's sister blog Changebowl discusses technology, community, design and business.
