No takers yet on the challenge to identify the picture below.
So let me request you to send in the name(s)-- and if possible--link(s), of your favorite, most outlandish example(s) of sublime, or not-so-sublime humor in music . . . .
I promise to share them, with your name listed if requested.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
CHALLENGE: The mystery diptych below
Let me reiterate my call for readers to identify the prominent musical figures so strangely yet beautifully fused together below.
Entries! Entries!!
The reward will be the sheer satisfaction of discovering this difficult and perhaps demented linkage, and I'll be more than happy to publish your name with a shower of accolades if you so wish.
Entries! Entries!!
The reward will be the sheer satisfaction of discovering this difficult and perhaps demented linkage, and I'll be more than happy to publish your name with a shower of accolades if you so wish.
Musical mischief and tomfoolery
In spite of today being April Fool's Day, I'm not feeling enough creativity to propagate my own hoax, but I am feeling mischievous enough to post the picture above. I'm wondering how many of my generation or older can identify the two very distinct musical personalities captured ingeniously in a pre-Photoshop photographic fusion. I've had the picture for at least thirty or forty years or more, taken from a source lost in the mists of memory, though judging from the size of the original, quite possibly from the pages of either of the now defunct large-format American family magazines, Life (d. 1971) or Look (d. 2000).
Beyond this, I am moved to share today a few of my favorite humorous songs that partake in the mischievousness and tomfoolery of a practical joke.
The first that comes to mind is the wonderful "But I Was Cool", by Oscar Brown, Jr. (1926-2005). While Brown's greatest musical contribution was unquestionably bringing a trenchantly realistic view of the African-American experience in the America of the 1950s and 1960s to song, he did depart from deep seriousness with this astonishingly manic performance on his first LP, "Sin and Soul", released on vinyl LP by Columbia in 1960, and now available on CD as "Sin and Soul . . . and then some", which includes material from Brown's subsequent LP, "Between Heaven and Hell".
(You can here a compelling, but slightly less impassioned version of this song by Blues master Albert Collins (1932-1993) here . . . . . . )
Another classic from an even earlier period of my life is "Wild Bill Hiccup", by the inimitable Spike Jones (1911-1965). One could devote a whole week of entries to Jones' musically witty and verbally incisive sendups of, and take-offs on, a wide range of genres; one of his best-known albums was "Spike Jones is Murdering the Classics", though his parodies covered many other styles as well. I hope to do a separate entry on Jones, as a kind of personal musical retrospective, but suffice it for now to say that when my maternal male cousins of a certain age and I get together, more than 60 years after the record's release, we can manage to keep the entire song going (more or less) in unison; I shudder to think what our mothers had to endure with the endless playing of that increasingly worn, progressively more scratchy 78 rpm record.
Then, from my college days, when I was much infatuated with things Indian, comes the 1959 version by Peter Sellers of Wouldn't It Be Loverly?", the classic song from the landmark musical My Fair Lady. There is not yet a YouTube version of this (quite probably through the diligence of Angel Records in monitoring online violations of copyright), but you can hear it here on Rhapsody, the Web-based music service that represents yet another of the digital musical resources that I noted in my opening entry of the year.
And finally, there is the quintessential distillation of every imaginable form of salesman's hype in 1976's "Step Right Up", by Tom Waits, a unique musical institution unto himself: "Step right up. . . . Step right up. . . . Everyone's a winner--Bargains Galore! . . . ." The Wikipedia article on Waits quotes the characterization of Waits' voice by critic Daniel Durchholz, as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car".
Continuing my preoccupation this year with the wonders of the digital era, I should point out that the lyrics to most popular songs (including some of those above) can be found on a whole host of Websites, which presumably post them without great concern for copyright restrictions. A simple Google search of "step right up lyrics tom waits" brings up some 56,300 hits, with the first presenting the full compendium of Waits' socio-verbal wizardry in all its glory.
On the other hand, in an attempt to find the source of the picture above (I would love to credit the creativity of the perpetrator of this wonderfully bizarre facial juxtaposition), I initiated a Google image search, using the first and last names (each pair linked by quotation marks) of both of the two hugely dissimilar musical giants. Alas, I found nothing in the 551 results there. But my challenge of identification stands: who are they?
Friday, March 25, 2011
Azerbaijan's incomparable and unique Natig Rhythm Group
Last night, Washington's refurbished (with historical correctness made possible and inspired by the cultural re-invention of the nation's capital beginning in the 1980s) Lincoln Theatre, was the venue for an extraordinary double-barreled concert of Azerbaijani music. The theatre, opened first in 1922, and thereafter Washington's equivalent of New York's iconic Apollo Theater as the premier public home for the city's African-American cultural events during the following decades of American racial segregation, was closed in 1968 following the devastating riots which followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Lincoln Theatre was reopened, fully restored, in 1994, and I find it quite moving that the multi-culturalization of Washington made the theatre a worthy venue for a major concert of the contemporary music of Azerbaijan--one of the many newly independent nations to emerge after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I also find it wonderfully exciting that the first half (more on the second part of the evening to come in a later post) of last night's performance by the astonishing "Rhythm Group" of Natig Shirinov (see picture above by Zanyasan Tanantpapat, used with permission, courtesy of the Karabakh Foundation)--which stunned me with its bone-shaking energy and brain-teasing precision--was available (potentially) in video and sound to the entire world only six hours later on YouTube (see my initial posting this year on the wonders of the Internet. . . .) There were several fixed video cameras in the auditorium last night, as well as a single balletic videographer (doing a pas-de-deux with the stubbornly independent SteadiCam as a mechanical dance partner, the two weaving among the performers on stage with feline grace) felt a special frisson this morning when, on a hunch, I began a search on YouTube for some trace of last night's musical miracle, and found that I was able to be the first to view, not one, but two video clips (see them here, and, yet again, here) put up by a YouTube entity known as "Ambrosian Beads" (more to come of my related identity search later).
If you see the video clips, you'll be able to capture some of the galvanizing effect of Shirinov and his troupe of amazing drummer/musicians. And speaking of the wonders of the digital age, you can see them not only in a 480p setting, but in an even higher resolution setting on DivX HiQ.
Shirinov's primary instrument, the nagara, is said to be the national drum of Azerbaijan. (I had previously encountered a cognate Indian drum, the naqqara, and discover that the instrument occurs widely in the Middle East and Central Asia as well. ) As you can see in the videos, it is a percussion instrument of rather simple cylindrical structure. The first notes played by Shirinov, after the house lights had dimmed, were highlighted (literally) by a bright electrical bulb inside the drum, whose heat is used in many Middle Eastern drums to maintain the tension--and hence the pitch--of the instrument's animal-skin head, and whose brilliance in this case inaugurated with a magical luminosity the ensemble's subsequent performance. As for the technical brilliance, the virtuosity of Shirinov and his colleagues, I can only continue the metaphor by saying that it was nothing short of electrifying.
I have heard many (and have had the good fortune to perform with a few) of the best Indian and Pakistani masters of the tabla and pakhawaj--the two drums used in classical Hindustani (northern South Asian) music, and have not often enough listened to masters of the mrdangam--an essential part of any Carnatic (south Indian) classical ensemble--and have no doubt that they may be counted among the world's best percussion artists. And I've savored (and experienced as a player) the mystical ambiance created by the Persian daff (large frame drum, often with a haunting chorus of metallic jingles), the subtle cross-rhythms of the Persian tonbak (hourglass drum), and the electrifying crispness of the Egyptian riqq (tambourine with tiny brass cymblets). But I must say that hearing Shirinov and his colleagues last night blessed me with experiencing one of those nights of musical epiphany that stay forever in the memory.
I'll await access to some video clips to hold forth in greater detail on the beauties of the group's performance. Suffice it to say for the moment that the rich rhythmic textures of the music were embroidered with additional melodic dimensions by the oboe-like zurna (which along with its Armenian cousin, the duduk, has been increasingly used of late to capture a haunting and uniquely Middle-Eastern ambiance in film and television soundtracks), and what I gather to be the Azerbaijani "accordion"--but so much more than the conventional "Lady of Spain" accordion, with a razor-sharp tone, and a breathing, primal sensuous resonance similar to that of the Argentinian bandoneón),
The evening's primary sponsors--the Washington-based Karabakh Foundation, and Azercell Telecom (see also here), the leading cellphone company in Azerbaijan, and the second largest taxpayer outside the country's oil industry--are to be congratulated for making available to all interested listeners free access (with no ticket cost) to this extraordinary, luminous music, whose magic in the darkened auditorium was further enhanced by a subtle but gradual change of rich color washes in the lighting on the wall behind the stage--something we had last seen in the illumination of the organ pipes during the National Symphony Orchestra's performance of Oliver Messiaen's epic Turangalîla Symphonie exactly two weeks ago as part of the maximum INDIA celebrations (see my posting on the inaugural concert)--but which here functioned as a more integral and captivating enhancement of the tapestries of rhythmic and melodic colors we all shared from the extraordinary performance of the Nadig Shirinav Rhythmic Group.
The Lincoln Theatre was reopened, fully restored, in 1994, and I find it quite moving that the multi-culturalization of Washington made the theatre a worthy venue for a major concert of the contemporary music of Azerbaijan--one of the many newly independent nations to emerge after the fall of the Soviet Union.
I also find it wonderfully exciting that the first half (more on the second part of the evening to come in a later post) of last night's performance by the astonishing "Rhythm Group" of Natig Shirinov (see picture above by Zanyasan Tanantpapat, used with permission, courtesy of the Karabakh Foundation)--which stunned me with its bone-shaking energy and brain-teasing precision--was available (potentially) in video and sound to the entire world only six hours later on YouTube (see my initial posting this year on the wonders of the Internet. . . .) There were several fixed video cameras in the auditorium last night, as well as a single balletic videographer (doing a pas-de-deux with the stubbornly independent SteadiCam as a mechanical dance partner, the two weaving among the performers on stage with feline grace) felt a special frisson this morning when, on a hunch, I began a search on YouTube for some trace of last night's musical miracle, and found that I was able to be the first to view, not one, but two video clips (see them here, and, yet again, here) put up by a YouTube entity known as "Ambrosian Beads" (more to come of my related identity search later).
If you see the video clips, you'll be able to capture some of the galvanizing effect of Shirinov and his troupe of amazing drummer/musicians. And speaking of the wonders of the digital age, you can see them not only in a 480p setting, but in an even higher resolution setting on DivX HiQ.
Shirinov's primary instrument, the nagara, is said to be the national drum of Azerbaijan. (I had previously encountered a cognate Indian drum, the naqqara, and discover that the instrument occurs widely in the Middle East and Central Asia as well. ) As you can see in the videos, it is a percussion instrument of rather simple cylindrical structure. The first notes played by Shirinov, after the house lights had dimmed, were highlighted (literally) by a bright electrical bulb inside the drum, whose heat is used in many Middle Eastern drums to maintain the tension--and hence the pitch--of the instrument's animal-skin head, and whose brilliance in this case inaugurated with a magical luminosity the ensemble's subsequent performance. As for the technical brilliance, the virtuosity of Shirinov and his colleagues, I can only continue the metaphor by saying that it was nothing short of electrifying.
I have heard many (and have had the good fortune to perform with a few) of the best Indian and Pakistani masters of the tabla and pakhawaj--the two drums used in classical Hindustani (northern South Asian) music, and have not often enough listened to masters of the mrdangam--an essential part of any Carnatic (south Indian) classical ensemble--and have no doubt that they may be counted among the world's best percussion artists. And I've savored (and experienced as a player) the mystical ambiance created by the Persian daff (large frame drum, often with a haunting chorus of metallic jingles), the subtle cross-rhythms of the Persian tonbak (hourglass drum), and the electrifying crispness of the Egyptian riqq (tambourine with tiny brass cymblets). But I must say that hearing Shirinov and his colleagues last night blessed me with experiencing one of those nights of musical epiphany that stay forever in the memory.
I'll await access to some video clips to hold forth in greater detail on the beauties of the group's performance. Suffice it to say for the moment that the rich rhythmic textures of the music were embroidered with additional melodic dimensions by the oboe-like zurna (which along with its Armenian cousin, the duduk, has been increasingly used of late to capture a haunting and uniquely Middle-Eastern ambiance in film and television soundtracks), and what I gather to be the Azerbaijani "accordion"--but so much more than the conventional "Lady of Spain" accordion, with a razor-sharp tone, and a breathing, primal sensuous resonance similar to that of the Argentinian bandoneón),
The evening's primary sponsors--the Washington-based Karabakh Foundation, and Azercell Telecom (see also here), the leading cellphone company in Azerbaijan, and the second largest taxpayer outside the country's oil industry--are to be congratulated for making available to all interested listeners free access (with no ticket cost) to this extraordinary, luminous music, whose magic in the darkened auditorium was further enhanced by a subtle but gradual change of rich color washes in the lighting on the wall behind the stage--something we had last seen in the illumination of the organ pipes during the National Symphony Orchestra's performance of Oliver Messiaen's epic Turangalîla Symphonie exactly two weeks ago as part of the maximum INDIA celebrations (see my posting on the inaugural concert)--but which here functioned as a more integral and captivating enhancement of the tapestries of rhythmic and melodic colors we all shared from the extraordinary performance of the Nadig Shirinav Rhythmic Group.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
St. Patrick's Day grand music rollout!
In appreciation of the musical aspects of this melodious Irish holiday, I'd again like to introduce a few of the prominent Irish performing groups, with the approximate date of their founding, links to their Wikipedia entries, and to albums (with--in most cases--links to brief musical samples to provide a sense of the group's "sound" and musical approach; and of course, with further opportunities available on YouTube not only to hear but to see these groups). When available, a link to the groups' Website is also provided.
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. (1950s) As noted in Gary Thomas' observations below, these artists were the first to establish themselves as Irish performers in the American folk music scene presenting vocals with guitar and five-string banjo accompaniment--the emphasis being on the heartiness of their singing.
*****Album: The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem In Person at Carnegie Hall - The Complete 1963 Concert [LIVE]. At the bottom of the link, under the rubric "Customers who bought this album also bought" are links to several other of their albums.
The Clancy Brothers' MySpace page
The Chieftains. (1962) Initially a four-man instrumental group, with Uilleann pipes, tin whistle, button accordion, bodhrán (frame drum), and fiddle. As noted in my review two years ago of their Washington concert., the group has collaborated for decades with a wide range of musicians, including in the reviewed performance a vocalist/drummer.
*****Album: The Best of the Chieftains. Click on "Track Listing"to listen.
The Dubliners. (1962) Again, basically a hearty-singing vocal group with a range of instrumental accompaniment and solos.
*****Album: Best of the Dubliners. Click on "Track Listing"to listen.
The Dubliners' Web page and Patsy Watchorn's Web page
Planxty. (1970s) Also mentioned in Gary Thomas' notes, this "supergroup" included, along with its vocals, guitar, bodhrán, bouzouki, mandolin, mandola, hurdy-gurdy, harmonica, Uilleann pies, tin whistle, and flute.
*****Album: The Planxty Collection.
The Bothy Band. (1974) With the addition of a female vocalist, similar to Planxty in approach and instrumentation (and adding harpsichord and clavinet), and also short-lived.
*****Album: The Best of the Bothy Band.
Clannad. (1970s) Radically different from the previous groups, Clannad, also with a female vocalist, won a Grammy in 1998 for The Best New Age Album.
*****Album: The Best of Clannad: In a Lifetime.
The Clannad Website and News Blog
The Pogues. (1982) Also departing somewhat from tradition, though in a very different direction from that of Clannad, this group incorporated elements of rock and punk.
*****Album: The Very Best of the Pogues.
The Pogues' Website and Shane McGowan's Website
The above is of course just a sampling from among hundreds of groups, and thousands of recordings. For those wanting to pursue their listening further, below are two Websites that specialize in Celtic music, some of which may include musical samples as above:
www.celticmusic.org A self-described "Mom and Pop store" which specialized exclusively in Celtic Music CDs.
www.cduniverse.com A large on-line CD company with a separate section for Celtic music containing more than 1,000 pages (!)(!) of recordings, almost all with samples of each track.
There are also on-line radio streams dedicated to Celtic music: A Google Search specifying "Celtic Music online radio" brings up 143,000 hits (up from 23,500 hits a year ago, and from 13,700 hits two years ago!)
Good listening, and again, Happy St. Paddy's Day!
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. (1950s) As noted in Gary Thomas' observations below, these artists were the first to establish themselves as Irish performers in the American folk music scene presenting vocals with guitar and five-string banjo accompaniment--the emphasis being on the heartiness of their singing.
*****Album: The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem In Person at Carnegie Hall - The Complete 1963 Concert [LIVE]. At the bottom of the link, under the rubric "Customers who bought this album also bought" are links to several other of their albums.
The Clancy Brothers' MySpace page
The Chieftains. (1962) Initially a four-man instrumental group, with Uilleann pipes, tin whistle, button accordion, bodhrán (frame drum), and fiddle. As noted in my review two years ago of their Washington concert., the group has collaborated for decades with a wide range of musicians, including in the reviewed performance a vocalist/drummer.
*****Album: The Best of the Chieftains. Click on "Track Listing"to listen.
The Dubliners. (1962) Again, basically a hearty-singing vocal group with a range of instrumental accompaniment and solos.
*****Album: Best of the Dubliners. Click on "Track Listing"to listen.
The Dubliners' Web page and Patsy Watchorn's Web page
Planxty. (1970s) Also mentioned in Gary Thomas' notes, this "supergroup" included, along with its vocals, guitar, bodhrán, bouzouki, mandolin, mandola, hurdy-gurdy, harmonica, Uilleann pies, tin whistle, and flute.
*****Album: The Planxty Collection.
The Bothy Band. (1974) With the addition of a female vocalist, similar to Planxty in approach and instrumentation (and adding harpsichord and clavinet), and also short-lived.
*****Album: The Best of the Bothy Band.
Clannad. (1970s) Radically different from the previous groups, Clannad, also with a female vocalist, won a Grammy in 1998 for The Best New Age Album.
*****Album: The Best of Clannad: In a Lifetime.
The Clannad Website and News Blog
The Pogues. (1982) Also departing somewhat from tradition, though in a very different direction from that of Clannad, this group incorporated elements of rock and punk.
*****Album: The Very Best of the Pogues.
The Pogues' Website and Shane McGowan's Website
The above is of course just a sampling from among hundreds of groups, and thousands of recordings. For those wanting to pursue their listening further, below are two Websites that specialize in Celtic music, some of which may include musical samples as above:
www.celticmusic.org A self-described "Mom and Pop store" which specialized exclusively in Celtic Music CDs.
www.cduniverse.com A large on-line CD company with a separate section for Celtic music containing more than 1,000 pages (!)(!) of recordings, almost all with samples of each track.
There are also on-line radio streams dedicated to Celtic music: A Google Search specifying "Celtic Music online radio" brings up 143,000 hits (up from 23,500 hits a year ago, and from 13,700 hits two years ago!)
Good listening, and again, Happy St. Paddy's Day!
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