Sunday Random Ten


 


1. Orlando di Lasso: lagrime di san Pietro - Ma gli archi
2. Alice In Chains - Nutshell [MTV Unplugged]
3. Kol Simcha - Nigun
4. Music From The Gordian Knot Unty'd: II, Adagio [Henry Purcell]
5. Bill Evans - Isn't It Romantic
6. Dixit Dominus (1650) [Claudio Monteverdi]
7. Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Love And Only Love
8. Duane Andrews - Isaac's Blues
9. O nobilissima viriditas [Hildegard Von Bingen]
10. Fun Lovin' Criminals - Everything Under The Stars

And our Number 11 special added guest star bonus track: Ben E. King - Amor.

First off, let me say that I really like this new guy Duane Andrews. It's not everyone who can go toe-to-toe with Django Reinhardt on his own turf --le jazz hot--and come out honorable. The guitar is contemporary--well-miked acoustic, but playing against those splendid lost sounds--muted trumpet and clarinet.

I can understand finding one's favorite music by the words to a song, or the projected personality of the singer: indeed, I've got all sorts of stuff on the iPod that appeals to me on exactly that basis. (There's no other reason to listen to Kevin Coyne or Mojo Nixon , for example.) But the thing that goes right to my heart is that miraculous relationship between musician and instrument. And because I don't come from a classical upbringing, I particularly love that relationship where something is created on the fly.
There's something phenomenal in hearing a master classical musician shine through a composed piece--but I can't help it: I keep wondering hpw wonderful it would be if Horowitz would just take that Chopin and run with it.
Which is kind of what it's like listening to Bill Evans.
I play keyboards. And back when keyboards pretty much meant piano (all right, organ and accordion) the moment I heard Bill Evans, I knew that was what I wanted to play like. Not Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman; not Leon Russell or Dr. John; not even (as I grew in knowledge) Oscar Peterson or Art Tatum. My first exposure to Mr. Evans gives a clue why: it was his Conversations with Myself (1963), an experiment, or rather a meditation, in overdubbing. And although Bill was as fluid, fast and dazzling as anybody, the overarching adjective was thoughtful. And while Les Paul pretty much invented multitracking to make a band out of an individual (or a duo, including Mary Ford), Bill used it to make an ensemble that was an individual, having a mirror that (among those who know how to look) becomes a window.

And of course the strange and wonderful thing is that the conversation is in a language without referents: there are morphemes and phonemes, units of structure and organization, but no meaning in a linguistic form. In some ways pure structure, in some ways full of information, but with every piece of information a mystery.
(That's of course one of the wonderful absurdities of the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Music is a wonderful and inspired simile for alien communication--but at the end, when the big oil refinery and the pale guy at the Mighty Wurlitzer are riffing together, there's just no effing way they're building up a vocabulary. It's like the pale guy says, "What are we saying to each other?" It's an inspired piece of film, but there's no answer.)
No, for me, as wonderful as it is hearing Billie Holliday wring the history of an entire emotion out of a Tin Pan Alley song, it's still more wonderful to hear Bill Evans--or Django Reinhardt, or Chet Baker, or Jimi Hendrix--wring a conversation out of a structured song--because no one knows what those words are, or what the syntax is--and it is linked to mathematics on one side and the wolf's howl and the fall of rain on the other--a strange interface with the world outside (maybe above, maybe below) of reason and communication--and it's something that we do every day, something we're as comfortable with as we are with eating and drinking: Music.
The fact that Hildegarde of Bingen, Bill Evans, Duane Andrews, and Alice In Chains all go to that same place is, when you think about it, pretty astounding.
(There's a wicked humor puece by Peter Schickele , discoverer of P.D.Q. Bach: A Bach Portrait. As a send-up of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, Schickele quotes from J.S. Bach's writings--except that Bach's writings were all about money. Pretty good Copland-parody music, too--but at the end he does something both funny and telling. to paraphrase, Schickeleintones, "for, surrounded by enemies, and the cares of the world, Johann Sebastian Bach said--" and Schickele starts to sing ("dee dee dee dee dee dee") Bach's Air on a G-String. It's very cute, and there's also a world of meaning--or something like it--in it.)

Posted: Sunday - January 28, 2007 at 12:32 PM        

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