Category Archives: musics

Today’s musical excesses

I’ve been rolling like a spaniel in dead fish in PLAYLISTS and REAL AUDIO ARCHIVES from WFMU’s Transpacific Sound Paradise: Popular and unpopular music from around the world with Rob Weisburg

…and I hardly know where to begin with YouTube stuff I’ve run into in the last day, but try these:

Annabouboula on Night Music (and catch the instrument at 2:05)

early 60s -late 50s Greek nightclub: Xiotis bouzouki performance

…and for extremes of kitsch, consider Alexandriani Felaha, with Audience Participation (the Levis company has a lot to answer for…)

Today’s musical overload

If I wish I had somebody’s Powers, it’s Ross Daly’s. Plenty more via the ‘Related’, and he has quite a few CDs out there, though they’re not easily found.

Pervane (“an Irish tune”, though it doesn’t become recognizable until 4:10 or so –usually known as “The Butterfly”)

Iocasti’s dream (Ross plays laouto here)

continued

Musical adventuring

Musical projects have dined on my time for the last couple of months, mostly in forms that aren’t Web-distributable (for reasons of copyright, not to mention server space). Along the way I’ve been working with literal mountains of vinyl, tape, mp3s, CDs collected over the years, and YouTube has raised its little head repeatedly. Dunno just why I haven’t thought to make more use of blogspace to track what I’ve been finding, so maybe I’ll try that for a bit. I note that the leaps from one genre to another are sometimes pretty canyonical: what, after all, unites Old Timey American with off-the-wall Klezmer? Tubist Mark Rubin for one. Here he underpins Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars, plus semi-invited guests:

Any YouTube video is likely to provoke one into watching more of the “related” offerings, and probably a couple of steps down that path will take the wanderer into even hairier territory. Consider Vassilis Saleas vs. Ferus Mustafov:

and a couple of steps further south takes us to the Turkish band Laço Tayfa, with clarinetist Hüsnü Senlendirici:

Incorrectitude

Good Old Serendipity (in the form of the 11 Sept 2007 iteration of WFMU’s Antique Phonograph program) brought me to Rosetta and Vivian Duncan, and some googlement ensued:

Wikipedia article
from vaudeville.org
Midnight Place article
I’m Sailing On a Sunbeam (1929, via YouTube)
…and Mean Cicero Blues from Jeff Cohen’s delirious Vitaphone Varieties blog

What caught the Old Ear was this preposterous song:

The Argentines, the Portuguese, and the Greeks (1923 –there’s a slightly different version linked via Jeff Cohen). My not-quite-complete transcription:

Columbus discovered America in 1492
Then came the English, and the French, the Scotchman, and the Jew
Then came the Dutch and the Irishman to help the country grow
And still they keep on coming, and now everywhere you go
There’s the Argentines, and the Portuguese, the Armenians, and the Greeks
One sells you papers, the other shines the shoes
The other takes the whiskers off your cheeks
And when you ride again on a subway train
Notice who has all the seats
Ah!
They’re all held by the Argentines, and the Portuguese, and the Greeks

Now there’s a little flat where you lay your hat
Has a history I’ll explain
The ….. is a …., the hobo is a Coon, the elevator fellow is a Dane
But who is the gent that collects the rent at the end of these four weeks?
Ah!
That is all done by the Argentines, and the Portuguese, and the Greeks

There’s the Oldsmobile, and the Hupmobile, and the Cadillac and the Ford
Now these are the motors that you and I can own, the kind most anybody can afford
But the Cunninghams and the Mercurys and the Rolls Royce racing …
Ah!
They’re all owned by the Argentines, and the Portuguese, and the Greeks

Now there’s the Argentines, and the Portuguese, the Armenians, and the Greeks
They don’t know the language, they don’t know the laws
Yet they vote in the country of the free
And the funny thing when we start to sing “My country ’tis of thee”
None of us know the words but the Argentines, and the Portuguese, and the Greeks

There’s the Argentines, and the Portuguese, the Armenians, and the Greeks
When we’re departed, our souls will soar up in the heavenly seats
At the Golden Gates, where the angels wait, we’ll be asking there for seats
And they’ll all be reserved by the Argentines, and the Portuguese, and the Greeks

Make of it what you will…

Beyond the Pale

My attention has been pretty single-mindedly on ‘traditional’ music for the last little while, but our friends at WFMU never let anybody sit still or get too comfy for long. A recent blog posting on Diamanda Galas led me into a half-hour detour on the farther edges… There’s so much astounding clear-the-room music out there, available via archived radio shows (like those at WFMU such as Strength through Failure with Fabio) in RealAudio, and via YouTube (e.g., Maja Ratkje) and in mp3 via archives like UbuWeb (e.g., Jaap Blonk –see also his Web site). Take a walk on the wild side, but keep dropping that trail of crumbs…

Dept of Co-Incidence

For the last 10 days or so I’ve been deeply immersed in a project that’s excavating and organizing stuff from my [enormous] collection of “British Isles music” (mostly in and around the so-called ‘revival’ of the 60s and 70s). I’ve been listening to old records, reading books, hunting up lyrics and tablature of tunes, and generally rolling in it like a **spaniel in dead fish** to coin a trope. This process brought me to Anne Briggs, a truly singular singer who ignited a good bit of the tinder that was lying around in the early 1960s. I’ve been reading Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, and today I find, three Google pages deep in a search, Gone but not forgotten (“In a rare interview, Anne Briggs talks to Alexis Petridis about her ‘lost classic’ folk album – and why she has hardly sung a note for 34 years”), published

(wait for it… wait for it)

Friday August 3, 2007 in the Guardian

I am, as they say, gobsmacked.

Uilleann example

An update on musical Leviathan progress, mostly for my own interest and later retrieval, but with not a little bearing upon the social nature of the enterprise. The project is sort of background activity, something I think about amongst other interests and activities like fence-building and being Designated Shopper for my sister’s household, so progress consists of little steps and not great strides.

I started looking again at MusicBrainz and (instead of reading the documentation) fell immediately into messing about with making an entry for a record in my collection that seemed to be missing from the database: Paddy Keenan’s 1975 Gael-Linn release. No big deal, but one has to experiment with things to gauge what their importance might be. This morning, just 12 hours or so later, I had email indicating that somebody had found my addition and edited it to link to the original liner notes (by Seamus Ennis) on Paddy Keenan’s site, which include mp3s for a couple of the tunes. There’s also a new link to the Wikipedia page on Paddy Keenan. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find that I’ve wandered into an active community, though blundered is more the style of thing.

Of hoards, troves and legacies

One of the nicest things about being Retired is the greatly increased latitude to choose amongst the things one might do, but there are still nagging reminders of things one has been meaning to get to Real Soon Now. In the last couple of years I’ve been pawing at various collections [Nova Scotia Faces, my various Webstuffs, a friend’s grandfather’s jazz 78s (digitized and databased on a DVD), my own photographs from various eras, a whole lot of file drawers of remnants from my several academic careers, etc.], imagining glorious ways to organize their contents and transform them into distributable resources, and experimenting with assorted media and technologies that might help me realize my heart’s desires. Those desires seem to come down to telling the stories contained in the collections, for whatever audiences might find them interesting.

The Elephant in the Room is my vast musical holdings, the vinyl and CDs and tapes that I’ve been working with and augmenting for most of my life. How can I make Sense out of that, and how can I make its wonders into a distributable resource? Or even a resource more accessible for my own use? The obvious impediments are (a) sheer size of the task and (b) copyright restrictions, and there are daunting questions of format (mp3? audiophiles may sneer) and approach (review Nick Hornby on the subject).

Case in point: I think I can reconstruct the sequence of my fascinations with several European folk music streams (Celtic, Scandinavian, Hungarian, Greek, Klezmer…) through about 30 years of collection, right down to the order of acquisition of records/CDs and the uses I made of their contents. And likewise with American guitar and mandolin, and with blues. And similarly with the various World Musics that fed into courses I taught. Most of those recordings have liner notes, reading of which was essential to my musical education. Wouldn’t it be nice to make all of that accessible, ideally on the Web but perhaps more realistically as private-distribution DVDs with html interface… surely a MegaProject.

It seems pretty obvious that a landscape of hyperlinks would grow pretty quickly once construction was begun, and that it would be wise to think carefully before plunging in, in order to minimize the amount of hand-coding and repetition. I probably need to develop some database and CSS skills that I dimly grasp. I certainly don’t envision digitizing all the vinyl and tape –just the truly significant bits, those that help to tell the story and/or epitomise something. It would be desirable to implant lots of metadata into the headers of those mp3 files, and to ensure that items can be tagged as seems most useful, and that tags can be displayed and searched, and augmented too. It would be convenient to find models to build upon… but I don’t know of any.

What else should I be thinking about as I design this Leviathan?

Higher fi

I’ve just connected my laptop into the sound system (via an Indigo Echo unit that I bought a while ago), and I’m enjoying mp3s and YouTube stuff through the Earthworks speakers. Can’t think why I didn’t do this long ago. Stuff like this from Nederlands Blazers Ensemble comes through amazingly, and renews one’s faith in humanity: