Feb 27 2009
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.
Feb 27 2009
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:
Feb 24 2009
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.
Feb 23 2009
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.
Feb 07 2009
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.
Feb 07 2009
Also, an insightful and entertaining review of Toward 2012 from the New York Times. Many of the essays are available at Reality Sandwich.
Feb 04 2009
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).
Feb 04 2009
When you don’t feel like assembling a whole lasagna, or change your mind at the last minute – this is a very tasty and healthy vegetarian pasta bake. For us, it feels a bit ‘festive’ each time we make it; as if we’re treating ourselves.
1.5 bags brown rice pasta (spirals or penne; Tinkyada is a good brand)
1 small onion, cubed
2 red peppers, chopped
3 stalks celery, sliced into small pieces
1 zuchini, diced
1 carrot, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 bunch spinach, washed and chopped into 1″ pieces
2+ cups vegetarian stock
Oregano, salt, pepper to taste
3-4 tbsp olive oil
2 cups of grated aged white cheddar
Quarter cup of grated parmesan
Pour olive oil into a large lidded frying pan, add all the vegetables (excepting spinach), and sauté until they begin to soften. Add the stock, oregano and salt and pepper to taste. Cover, and cook, stirring occasionally, on medium heat, about 10 minutes. Add spinach to wilt, stirring occasionally. Recover, and cook another 2-5 minutes. Remove from heat.
Prepare the rice pasta as per the manufacturer’s description. (It makes sense to try one occasionally while it’s cooking – rice pasta should be ‘al dente’ and not too soft, and it turns too soft very quickly). When it’s cooked, drain and rinse well using hot tap water. Once the excess water has dripped off, add the pasta to the vegetables, and fold together so that the veggies are evenly distributed and the pasta is fully coated by the sauce. The key to this recipe is that the veggies aren’t dry; they need quite a lot of sauce. So if you’re thinking your veggie mix is too wet – it’s actually just right.
Rub or spray a very light coat of olive oil onto the inner surface of a large lasagna baking pan. Pour pasta & veggie mixture into it. Distribute cheddar evenly on top and then sprinkle with parmesan. Add salt and pepper if desired.
Briefly bake at 350°F (5 minutes at the most) until the cheese starts to melt. Then, briefly broil it (2-3 minutes) on high to brown the cheese slightly. Remove from oven and let cool down slightly before serving. Serves 4 very hungry people or 6 if you’re also serving a salad and dessert.
Feb 02 2009
A review of Susheela Raman’s 33 1/3
There’s nothing Susheela Raman can’t sing. I remember thinking this the first time I heard her first record, Salt Rain, in 2001. Raman is a British singer of Indian origin (who grew up in Australia), and 33 1/3 is her fourth album, an homage to other people’s songs, particularly album tracks from beloved vinyl records (hence the title). On her website, she describes 33 1/3 as “a kind of homage to the well-attested pleasures of the ‘long player,’ of owning some tangible artefact of music’s immaterial magic.”
Her song choices are wonderfully, almost absurdly pluralist and wide-ranging:
I’m Set Free – Velvet Underground/Lou Reed
Yoo Do Right – Can
Where Did You Sleep Last Night – Traditional (I’m wondering if it’s a Nirvana reference?)
Like a Rolling Stone – Bob Dylan
Love Lies – Captain Beefheart
Oh My Love – John Lennon
Voodoo Chile – Jimi Hendrix
Heart and Soul – Joy Division
Persuasion – Throbbing Gristle
Ruler of My Heart – Linda Ronstadt (Norah Jones?)
Holidays in France – Michel Polnareff
What unites this material is the tasteful treatment is gets. There is reverence in these cover versions, yet – in the best ‘jazz’ tradition – they are often barely recognizable, having been re-fashioned into entirely new music. Raman’s band, led by guitar player/producer/arranger Sam Mills, is a world music powerhouse – everything pulses with a lucid life force, a deep-seated rhythm that makes even the slower numbers swing. You never lose interest: in her renditions, these songs become new again, validated by being re-imagined and entered into Raman’s repertoire, all of which sounds like a ritual, an incantation, an exploration of identity and of how music unites us easily and naturally.
As world music seems to have fallen permanently out of favour in the English-speaking world, Raman appears to tour mostly in France (the last bastion, apparently; the French appear uninterested in restricting their music consumption to white men with no rhythm). This is a shame, because I’d like to see her live and because I think her music most strongly relates to what we think of as vocal jazz – her closest musical ‘relative’ might be someone like Cassandra Wilson, who is also known for her tasty and virtually unrecognizable but beautiful cover versions.
33 1/3 is an independent release. It appears to be somewhat available on Amazon, but you can also order it from Raman’s web store. Her other three records – Salt Rain, Love Trap and Music for Crocodiles are widely available and highly recommended. They all contain some of the best singing, and downright the best and most organic sounding acoustic/world band you’ll ever hear.
Afterthought: Can’t have a review of 33 1/3 without at least mentioning the superb weirdness that is Susheela Raman’s cover of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Persuasion.’ Wow. What a strange piece of music!
