l'Histoire du soldat

The Soldier's Tale
Igor Stravinsky, 1918

This is one of my favorite Stravinsky works, probably the first piece of chamber music of his that I'd ever heard. I remember studying it as an undergrad and getting so caught up in its rhythmic world. It's a piece of music that combines several of my favorite things: a drama expressed in musical rhetoric, a non-standard instrumental ensemble, integration of the spoken word into music, meticulously crafted overlapping ostinati, interpretations of popular music styles, etc. There's the sense of a finely-wrought mathematical jigsaw puzzle, and simultaneously a very organic instinctual feeling for cadence and rhythm which is uniquely beautiful to me. Stravinsky's sense of pacing, both on the small scale and the large, are so precisely right that it makes my hair stand on end.

So there's a story (hence the word "Tale" in the title). It's a little parable about a soldier matching wits with the Devil. The three voices (the soldier, the devil, and a narrator) don't sing, but speak their words, sometimes in an exacting rhythm, and sometimes in ordinary speech, always over musical accompaniment. With good actors who also have a fairly sophisticated musical sense, it can be very compelling. There are long stretches of purely instrumental music as well, some of it angular and deliberate, some of it lush and fluid, all of it engaging. Stravinsky writes idiosyncratically for the instruments in the ensemble (2 brass instruments, 2 woodwinds, 2 strings, plus 1 percussionist = brilliant concept), teasing out combinations and sonorities that seem ludicrous in theory, yet are beautiful in actuality.

The recording that I enjoy is one that has big-name actors preforming the spoken roles: Ian McKellen as the narrator, Sting (yep, that one) as the soldier, and Vanessa Redgrave in a bit of excellent casting, as the devil. They all chew up the auditory scenery, overacting and emoting up a storm. Redgrave in particular seems to be having a ball. But this is a melodrama after all, and for me it's infectious - I have fun right along with them. But despite the star-power of the actors, to me the real gem is the conductor, Kent Nagano. He's one of my favorite conductors overall, and probably my all-time favorite conductor of Stravinsky's works. Not many can make the adjustments necessary to direct a smaller ensemble like this, but he is right there in it, making the music breathe and sparkle and meditate and gallop. It's quite an accomplishment in itself, and of course it helps that he's got some amazing instrumentalists too.

So this recording is a treat, and the piece of music an essential one. You really feel like you've been brought into a special universe of musical and dramatic relationships that can only exist in this defined space - perfect for what is after all an allegorical tale.

Sadly, itunes doesn't have this recording!
but here's a link to another that looks good:

Youssou N'Dour

The Lion
Youssou N'Dour, 1989

Ah the late-1980s. The "World Beat" trend had pretty much run its course, and it would be another half-decade or so before NPR began bestowing its Oprah-like blessings upon third-world flavor-of-the-month albums. This was the age of top-40 superstars exploring other musical cultures in order to grow as artists, man.

I'm being too sarcastic, because actually there was a lot of great music from that pocket of time, and because once you get past the colonial aspect of it all, really being exposed to music from around the world is a net positive for everyone listening. I wonder if Bush et al. would have a different understanding of America's place in world works if they'd been the right age to own, say, that one Ladysmith Black Mambazo album that was in every college dorm-room tape-deck right after Paul Simon's Graceland came out.

I'm also being too hard on myself, because like many others I got my introduction to the music of the great Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour from a Peter Gabriel album.

The Lion was the N'Dour album marketed to cash in on the duet "Shaking the Tree" which appeared on Gabriel's iconic So. And I bought it. And I liked it. And getting on 20 years later I still like it.

I'm no expert in the music called mbalax, but I do have a lot of appreciation for it. The music, whether in fast or slow tempo, has a percolating energy that derives from the overlapping polyrhythmic textures (the same kind of dynamic that you might find in Afrocuban musics or funk, for example, but of course with different kinds of rhythms). The instrumentation usually includes the kind of percussion I associate with Malian griot tradition, layered with a standard drum kit, and then the electric guitars, keyboards, and horn section one might find in afropop. The bass lines in particular are delightfully syncopated and keep the music pushing forward. N'Dour's voice often just sails above it all, winding and stretching and expanding. But just as often he dips down into a growl or a declamatory cadence.

I find that the transitions between these vocal "states" form some of the most compelling moments in the music. It's as if he's hinting at a path between the base guttural body and the soaring unlimited spirit. This is very dramatic in the title track, a rocking number that has one of those little pre-chorus "ramp up" sections that's so perfectly suited to its function it should be used as a model in songwriting classes. "Bamako" has a slithery chord progression over lots of talking drum - N'Dour sings on this one with a presence that's somehow bombastic and intimate at once (still trying to figure out how he manages that). I think my favorite of all the songs is "Bes," which is a beautiful minor-key 12/8 soundscape for a while. Then when the female back-up vocalists come in with their gently rising "oooh"s and the bass starts to pop a little, it transforms into something hauntingly gorgeous. There's even a real bridge section that keeps you on the edge of your seat waiting for the return of the chorus - but when we get there the backup vocalists launch into this little counterpoint on the words "don't forget me," which is somehow all the more intense for its control and reserve.

I'd be remiss not to mention lyrics here. N'Dour sings in Wolof (a Senegalese language), French, and English, often blending all three in a single song. Liner notes have translations of the lyrics into both English and French, and that's where I discovered that the song "My Daughter/Sama Doom" is basically a reworking of Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter," with a refrain that is achingly full of parental anxiety: "My daughter, do not follow your heart."

get it on itunes:

Miles Davis Tribute

Traveling Miles
Cassandra Wilson, 1999

So this is one of those albums that sort of creates a world unto itself. Something like how a good novel can pull you into its universe, a place that's textured and deep. Actually, maybe more like a collection of connected short stories by the same storyteller - Cassandra Wilson as Sheherazade, perhaps?

Not that these are narrative songs, really, but they all generally travel through emotional spaces over time. If you've heard Cassandra Wilson before, you know about her expressive smoky alto, her understated and studied interpretations of songs. The arrangements are stars right alongside her voice, and they are quite varied on this album, though all growing from a soil that I tend to think of as an "M-Base sound." Tempos are generally slow, as befits her voice.

The album is conceived as a tribute to Miles Davis, and I think it's far and away the best such tribute I've heard. It works well because she chooses songs that she likes from the Davis canon, without trying to be particularly comprehensive or trying to provide a profile of one of his stylistic periods. She freely adds her own lyrics to instrumental tunes; in fact, a number of the songs are her originals.

My favorite of the original songs is "Right Here, Right Now," which is expansive, meditative, and groovy all at once. "Run the Voodoo Down" is a great funk workout for the band (much shorter than Miles' original), anchored by Dave Holland's inhumanly in-the-pocket bass and her lyrics are a perfect homage to the spirit of the tune - there's even a second version of this song at the end of the album, with Anjelique Kidjo guesting. When the two singers hold those tight major seconds, letting them stretch out over the contrapuntal percolating rhythm section, it's one of the most intensely sexy things. Makes the corners of my eyes scrunch up.

"Seven Steps to Heaven" is just a bebop party, plain and simple. "Never Broken," her interpretation of "E.S.P.," retains that off-kilter unease of the original, in a very different context, which is an amazing achievement in itself.

"Time After Time" is in many ways my favorite on the album. Yep, it's that Cyndi Lauper song, covered by lots of people in the last 20 years (including Miles Davis, which is why it's here). This is the best one, hands down. I rarely essentialize, but there ya go - the best. Heartbreaking. Adding about 60 layers of meaning that you didn't think the song could possibly carry. I caught Cassandra Wilson on tour in NY once and she brought Ms. Lauper out to sing it as a duet with her- it's one of my top concert memories. Wish the song could have been twice as long, if not three times.

One of the gems in my vocal jazz collection, for sure.

itunes link:

Spillane

Spillane
John Zorn, 1986

Well this was the first John Zorn music I ever heard - think I bought the album my first year in college. Definitely a great one for me to start with, I have to say, for lots of reasons. The album has three pieces of music on it, but I'm just going to talk about the title track.

First and foremost, Spillane is a musical exploration of the milieu, dynamics, and themes of Mickey Spillane's hardboiled detective stories. I have to say that I've never been a big fan of Spillane's writing, but obviously Zorn is. He takes what's basically tawdry derivative prose and uses it as a jumping off point for his prodigious sonic imagination.

It's one of Zorn's pastiche-style pieces, made up of a few dozen small vignettes, stitched together. Some bits are purely atmospheric soundscapes, setting a scene (rain and windshield wipers, footsteps echoing in an alley). Some are genre music of one kind or another (roadhouse blues, 50s West Coast jazz). Some are soundtrack cues in the 70s-80s Hollywood style (think synthesizer arpeggios). There are also a handful of recitations of lines from Spillane novels. More often than not, several of these things are happening simultaneously.

There seems to be an overall direction to the piece that I can only describe as dramatic. Trying to find a plot in it doesn't seem fruitful, but as a representation of fluid emotional states, or perhaps memories of emotional states, it really works for me. There are a number of musical elements that help it hang together as a whole as well, which is one reason that I think it's more successful (for me) than alot of Zorn's other work in this vein.

Really fun and beautiful piece of work, with top-notch downtown NY players, I might add. It's something to listen to with no other distractions, to let it pull you into its world for a little while. Like film that way.

itunes link:

Pithecanthropus Erectus

Pithecanthropus Erectus
Charles Mingus, 1956

I've been a Mingus fan since I was a teenager. Partly it's because I'm a bassist and composer, so really your choices are Mingus or Bottesini if you want to idolize someone. But beyond that, Mingus is a looming inescapable figure because he travelled his own path (to put it mildly) in his life and in his art. I won't get into biographical details here - got to save something for when I write about the other records I own, right? - but suffice it to say that he was known for being a difficult personality, and he had his own set of musical priorities that didn't always coincide with the "mainstream" of the jazz world.

Mingus wrote and played music that spoke quite directly about how he lived in the world, and that is a pretty extraordinary thing. He found innovative and startling ways to express ideas/themes from sociology, politics, and psychology through music. Not to say that there's a secret hidden message in everything, but he was someone who wasn't afraid to imbue extramusical meaning in his work, overtly or covertly. I really dig that.

And really there's no better example than the title track of this album. "Pithecanthropus Erectus" is about the evolution and the self-destruction of our species, according to Mingus' own liner notes, but it's so much more than that too - a musical essay on race, on hubris, on xenophobia. I know it sounds ridiculous to assign that much connotation to 10 minutes of music played by a jazz quintet, but I swear to you it's all in there. The opening of the piece has sudden changes of dynamics from soft to loud and back again, and these relentless repeated tones in the bass. Always makes me feel like Mingus is trying to foment revolution (or at least thumb his nose at the establishment) in those repeated notes: "Oh, did you want me to play a slick, polished walking bass line for you? Well fuck you, I'm sitting here pounding away on this one pitch till I'm good and ready to switch to the next one!" The musical ideas get opened up and turned inside out by the players. The pianist Mal Waldron, a brilliant player, is in fine form on this tune, in no small way responsible for the overall tone of the piece.

The version of "A Foggy Day" is lovely, emerging out of "street noise" re-created by the players, and subsumed by the sounds again at the end. Really nicely done, especially when you hear the main melody of the tune and bits and pieces will remind you of the foghorns, sirens, and car horns that opened the track.

And I want to talk about "Love Chant" just a little, though maybe I should put this into another separate post. This piece has always been mysterious to me. It's big and sprawling, covering a lot of ideas, and in many ways it seems the most loosely constructed of the pieces on the record. I can't say that I have a real handle on what it's up to, but one thing that comes across pretty strongly is that it really is about love. In particular, the two saxophonists (Jackie McLean on alto and J.R. Monterose on tenor) play lines that slither and slide around each other quite frequently. The mood changes on a dime, the harmony becoming very diffuse for long stretches, then starting to coalesce for a while, then dispersing again. It's really amazing stuff, sometimes keeping me on the edge of my seat with tension and anticipation, and sometimes beguiling me with pure beauty (beauty of the groove or of the moment). There is some really incredible playing on this tune, and even if I don't always know quite what they're up to, the sense that the players are all in the same headspace, working together to communicate some concept or dynamic through shared improvisation, is evident in every note. Even when only one instrument is playing for a while, I feel like the whole ensemble is part of what's happening.

There is wisdom and grace and humor and pain here. Music to listen to deeply, to enjoy on its surface, and to reflect upon in quiet moments afterward.

itunes link:

Ten Song Demo

Ten Song Demo
Rosanne Cash, 1996

So this is just a real nice album, full of well-crafted tunes in the Nashville songwriting tradition, but in sparse stripped-down arrangements, mostly very downtempo. The lyrics are personal, emotional, often political, and unabashedly, beautifully feminist throughout.

The story of the album (though who knows if it's made up or true, or some combination?) is that Cash wrote a set of songs for her next album, and did the usual next step of recording a "demo" version of the songs with just the bare-bones instrumentation. And the A&R person at the record company, either moved by the artistry or moved by the bottom line, decided to release a cleaned-up version of the demos, rather than bring in a full band and big-name engineers to record a mainstream album. So what you get is Cash's expressive voice, accompanied most of the time by just acoustic guitar or piano (on a couple tracks another instrument is added, or maybe a contrapuntal guitar line overdubbed or something).

However it came about, thank goodness. The songs stand on their own, clean, bright, raw, vulnerable, and quirky - with no string sections or studio wizardry to get between singer and listener. Personally, I can't imagine enjoying an overproduced studio album half as much as I enjoy this.

The highlight for me is a song called "Child of Steel," which is one of those "advice for children" songs, but decidedly unsaccharine, outlining the relationship between parent and child by means of the shifting melodic profile as much as by the lyrics themselves. "If I Were a Man" is a breezy country-shuffling waltz that pokes fun at the absurdity of power relationships. Odd how the lyrics here remind me much more of a band like R.E.M. than any contemporary country act.

She fumbles on a couple songs: "Bells and Roses" sounds forced to me, like the words were calling for a different melody. And oops, the message in "The Summer I Read Colette" is excellently wrought, but I guess nobody recognized that the melody was (accidentally I'm sure) lifted from a song that couldn't be more inappropriate: Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf."

There are some other really nice songs, including "Western Wall," which is obviously a favorite of hers, as she's recorded it on at least two other albums that I know of. "List of Burdens" would have been the rocking radio-friendly lead single in the alternate universe of a major studio album, and "Take My Body" is such a heartbreaking performance as to be almost unlistenable (I often wonder what a Mary J. Blige cover of that song might sound like, though).

It's surely a melancholy album, but I find that it fits more of my moods than just that. It's a set of songs which remind me that one pop-music ideal hasn't died: that of the singer-songwriter who can make the personal universal and vice-versa.

itunes link:

Ravel Quartet

String Quartet in F
Maurice Ravel, 1904
peformed by the Daedalus String Quartet on "Sibelius, Stravinsky, Ravel"

So this is the first time I've reviewed something on this blog that's been released very recently, but I had to make an exception for this marvellous disc. The Daedalus String Quartet are just phenomenal - I've heard them in concert several times, and often wondered how their energetic, deeply studied, passionate, dramatic playing would come across on disc. Well now I know - and it's a wonderful transition for them into the world of recordings.

I've said here before that I prefer live performances to recordings for a thousand reasons, but it's great to hear a disc like this one, in which (1) the personality of the group really comes out, (2) the pieces of music are represented with scintillating performances that you want to listen to over and over, and (3) the recording serves as a "calling card" to get you out to the next live show. I don't think there are many chamber groups that can rival this one, and that's not praise I dish out lightly. So while listening to this CD doesn't bring me to the verge of tears (I'm not ashamed to admit more than one concert of theirs has done just that), there's no doubt that this is playing at the highest level, interpreting some great music.

I hadn't heard the Sibelius quartet before this, and it's a beautiful piece that I want to hear more of. The Stravinsky "Three Pieces" is a classic, and is stunningly played. But I really want to talk about the Ravel quartet here.

Quite simply, this is one of my favorite string quartets ever. I dream of writing music like this. Deep, gorgeous, playful, balancing the raw and the calculated. This is music that sweeps you along, and pauses to reflect at just the right moments, music that has a humanity that is so personal as to be near-harrowing, and a rhetorical brilliance that serves to show it off.

And this performance. Well I don't even know how if I can find words, when it comes down to it (it's like dancing about architecture, after all). Listening to this recording showed me things about the music that I never knew were there. And not just little things, but tremendous things that make the whole quartet mean something different to me than it ever did. They play with a propulsion and grace that floors me, and the fluid, ever-shifting relationships among the players is part of what's genius here. There are these big overarching connections among the movements that come across so clearly (yet not emphasized in an "obvious" way). I think that this piece is a perfect match for the ensemble, frankly. I can't think of it being done better.

Yes I am waxing rhapsodic, but this deserves it. Give a listen.

itunes link