Not much to say about this one: composed by Moore, performed by NYCs finest, The Bang on a Can All-Stars. If a little repetition annoys you, this is going to royally piss you off. A little repetition annoys me too, but a lot of it takes me somewhere interesting.
Matthew Guerrieri (aka Soho the Dog) has a new installation of his ongoing series Strauss and Mahler Re-Enact Your Favorite Movie Moments. Today's episode is The Ten Commandments. Read 'em all—they're hilarious.
Visitors to the 2008 International Auto Show, currently taking place at NYC's Jacob Javits Convention Center, might discover something different at the Bentley display: a high-end audio listening room. Bentley Motors and Naim have teamed up for the "Naim For Bentley" program, which will be offered as a sound package upgrade for all Bentley models by year's end.
"Bentley wanted to demonstrate the value of a real audio system to its customers," Naim's managing director Paul Stephenson told me. "So we suggested that we set up a real Naim system and allow people to hear what it is we do. At first, they said No, you can't do that in a car show, but then they became wildly enthusiastic about it. They built two dedicated rooms, which will make the rounds of the international car shows."
Stephenson led me into the largish room—it seemed about 12' by 25'—and closed the door. The off-white walls, the indirect lighting, salmon-colored carpet, and leather Barcelona chairs exuded an understated elegance. Along the long wall, a complete Naim system was on display (CD555, NAC552, and NAP500—each with its matching power supply). Nestled against the short wall was a pair of Naim SL2s.
I sunk into a Barcelona chair and let Stephenson do a quick demo. There was detail, loads of timbre, and an effortless sense of power. And that was on a recording of voice and piano! "We audiophiles are used to sound like this," Stephenson noted, "but a lot of people aren't. Time after time, we get the reaction I didn't know my CDs could sound like this!"
It's true. I saw it myself. Two Bentley salesmen came in on Press day and asked if they could listen. I gave up the sweet spot and Stephenson cued a disc. The salesmen fell quiet. They listened intently and finally examined the electronics. When the song ended, one pointed at a Supercap power supply. "Are all those amplifiers?"
"No Stephenson said. "We're listening to two-channel stereo. Those are power supplies. You'd be amazed at how much difference a well-regulated, quiet power supply can make."
"Power is adequate," deadpanned the salesman, quoting an old Rolls-Royce tagline.
Perhaps high-end audio and luxury motoring aren't worlds apart after all.
Blender has just posted its nominations for greatest record industry screw-ups. I have a few quibbles, but as a whole, Blender tells a tale of monumental stupidity,from Decca passing on the Beatles because Dick Rowe was irritated that too many frantic teens were attempting to get into the Cavern Club to shutting down Napster without having a legitimate channel to replace it.
Here's an interesting article about Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, who has string theory mathematics to represent the relationship of musical chords to one another in a graphic form.
His paper has been published in Science, the first music theory article ever published in that journal. We've known about the close relationship of music to math for centuries, what makes Tymoczko's theory significant?
"Composers have been exploring the geometrical structure of these maps since the beginning of Western music without really knowing what they were doing," Said Tymoczko. "If someone you a map, you might say, 'Wow, I didn't realize the Safeway was close to the disco.' We can now go back and look at hundreds of years of this intuitive musical pathmaking and realize that there are some very simple principles that describe the process."
One thing I find fascinating about Tymoczko's work is that it is less interested in "explaining" music than it is in mapping how music in various styles moves through his "orbifold space." Any definition of music thattreats it as a steady state phenomenon is doomed to incompleteness.
Of course, the minute I posted the Tom Russell song, that little voice in the back of my head, said What about "We Can't Make It Here Anymore?" Well, I'm glad I asked me that. A little Google magic and I found the performance above. Is there a cooler radio station in the world than KFOG?
If there is, somebody please tell me about it. Otherwise, pick up a couple of KFOG's Live From the Archive compilations. They're fabtastic.
I happen to think Tom Russell ranks among the greatest living American songwriters. Don't know him? You probably do, but know performances of songs by other people—typically his co-songwriters.
So why do I cite Russell and not Dave Alvin, Ian Tyson, or any of his other collaborators? Because Russell is the only thing all of those songs have in common, other than an inordianately high level of craft.
This is a pretty good protest song until the last two verses, which kick it up a notch:
We've got fundamentalist Muslims,
We've got fundamentalist Jews,
We've got fundamentalist Christians
They'll blow the whole thing up for you.
But as I travel around this big old world
there's one thing I most fear
and that's a white man in a golf shirt
with a cell phone in his ear.
A study published in the open source science journal PLoS One investigates the neural processes of jazz improvisation. Johns Hopkins neuroscientists put piano players in a fMRI scanner with a special keyboard and asked them to perform different five-finger exercises: play a scale, play a melody, and improvise on either the scale or the melody.
(The study used a very simple definition of improvisation: "Subjects improvised in quarter notes only, selecting all notes from within one octave and from the C major scale notes alone . . . . For jazz's improvisation condition, subjects improvised using the composition's underlying chord structure as the basis for spontaneous creative output."
What did they discover? The paper's summary says: "The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests
As I was scrolling through the offerings at TDF a few weeks ago, I spotted a performance by the McCollough Sons of Thunder Brass Band. Hmmm, I thought I remembered my old friend Michael Cogswell mentioning to me that I ought to check them out. Actually, what he told me was that if I was ever able to hear them, I should cancel everything I could be doing and hie myself hence at oncely.
The MSOT are a "shout" band, performing a form of ecstatic sacred music at the United House of Prayer for all People on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 125th St. Founded in 1919 by Bishop "Sweet Daddy" Grace, there are now 134 branches of the United House of Prayer around the country, but the mother church is the one on FDB and 125th—and it’s the one with the McCollough Sons of Thunder, who perform during services on Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings. Somehow, I had never quite made the pilgrimage to the mother church, but a chance to see them at Baruch College? That I could manage.
May Pang spills the beans about her relationship with John Lennon.
And, just in case you missed it, here's a lovely assessment of what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi actually did for the Beatles, especially Lennon. Having never met Lennon, it's fatuous for me to say that some of Michael Gerber's insights ring true, but this line seems like it must be: "John Lennon always needed two things: something to do, and something to fight."
In my first job in New York, my boss walked into my office one morning with a folded sheet of paper and a pained expression on his face. I asked him, "What's that?"
"My Grammy ballot. I don't even know who most of these punks are," he said.
"Like who?"
"Any of them, other than the classical section. I guess Bob [Ludwig] and Greg [Calbi] know who these people are, since they mastered most of them, but I have no clue about any of the popular stuff."
"I've always suspected that's why the Grammies seem so removed from reality," I said. "I reckon half the people in NARAS don't actually listen to music, they just vote for people whose names they've heard."
"You want to vote, go ahead. The only person I feel passionate about is Jack [Pfeiffer]. The other categories, knock yourself out."
So, after years of working in record stores and marveling about how wrong the Academy always got it on Grammy night, I finally got to vote—albeit not legally. I was immediately disappointed to discover that one reason the awards seemed so unimaginative was that the nominations were unimaginative. Despite my enthusiasm, King Crimson's Discipline didn't sweep the awards that year.
Saturday night, Jeff Wong, my wife, and I went to see the Holmes Brothers at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater. Wowsers! State of Grace has been one of the most-played discs I bought in 2007, so we expected to be entertained.
We were completely knocked out. The Holmes Brothers came to play and within minutes of hitting the stage, Wendell Holmes, Sherman Holmes, and Popsy Dixon turned a bar full of jaded New Yorkers into a down-home tent meeting. They ended the set with a medley of "Amazing Grace," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," and "Jesus on the Mainline" that had people speaking in tongues and testifying at the top of their lungs.
A true power trio, the HB's simply tore the place up. As they were wrapping up "Mainline," Wendell looked out at the audience and said, "Not too bad for old people, hey?"
No Wendell, not bad at all. After the show, one fan was raving about how Wendell had gotten wah-wah and peddle volume effects without using any pedals. "We old people don't get along with no pedals," Wendell deadpanned. Right.
If the Holmes Brothers play your town, you owe it to yourself to go see them. You will get on down that night.
Steve Martin has just published an autobiography, Born Standing Up, in which he describes how he created his comedic persona by using logic. That was the easy part, next he had to figure out how to sell it to the audience.
As with everything in comedy, it's all in the timing.
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