Posts Tagged ‘Playing by Ear’

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Café Mouffe: Ces soirées là

Friday, August 21st, 2009

How many French pop singers named Yannick could there be. I came across Ces soirées là, his hit from 2000, and now I can’t get it out of my head. If you can’t stay in your seat for this one, we have a place for you in the Café Mouffe chorus line. When I went looking for more information, I found Yannick Noah, pop singer and pro tennis champ in a previous life. Here’s his official site. Maybe someone with better sight than me can tell me if they are one and the same. Wish I’d been on the street in Paris when the video for Vous was shot… I would have tried to dance and lip-sync, too.

Update 082209: Ms. Modigliani puzzled out my question about the singer: “Yannick Ngombo, not Yannick Noah, is the singer/rapper from Angola who sings Ces Soirees la. Tons of singers with name Yannick!”

Encore: I found my way to “Ces soirées là” after nourishing obscurity sent me a trackback. He linked to a photo montage of Charlotte Casiraghi that used the song as soundtrack. While searching for the original, I was totally charmed by a webcam vamp of it by two girls who are having too much fun. The post that started all this featured a concert clip of Willy DeVille’s Venus of Avenue D. Many thanks, nourishing obscurity!

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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Café Mouffe: Fare Thee Well, Mike Seeger

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Mike Seeger – singer, virtuoso instrumentalist, steward of American folk music traditions – died Friday night at 75. According to NPR, Seeger’s “love for traditional songs and tunes inspired many other musicians — including Bob Dylan .

Seeger was a highly respected performer and collector of traditional music and a major force in giving rural Southern musicians a wider audience. He became a spark plug for the revival of interest in American music traditions in the second half of the 20th century.

He was born into a prominent musical family. His half-brother Pete and sister Peggy are renowned musicians and social activists. His father, Charles, was a folklorist. His mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a music scholar, teacher and classical composer. Read more/listen now.

Mike Seeger tells how Elizabeth Cotton became part of that extraordinary family when he sings her classic song, Freight Train.

I have a memory of hearing Mike Seeger with Hazel and Alice in Yellow Springs sometime in the late 60s or early 70s. But it may be that I only heard a recording of a Kelly Hall concert on the radio, internalizing it deeply. Alice Gerard’s soft keening clarity on Quiero Decir Gracias echoes the springwater pouring out of the Blackhand sandstone below the ridgetop at my grandpa’s farm.

Encore:Listen to Seeger’s banjo on Bob Dylan’s The Ballad of Hollis Brown. The times were a-changin’ then. Find more Mike Seeger clips.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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Playing by Ear: John Cage & Marcel Duchamp

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

John Cage collaborated with Merce Cummingham, painter Robert Rauschenberg, and pianist David Tudor. He was influenced and inspired by the French artist Marcel Duchamp. [Photo by Erich Auerbach/Getty Images/NPR]
Composer John Cage.  [Photo by Erich Auerbach/Getty Images/NPR]

While I was working yesterday to repair a hacker attack on this site’s php code, NPR’s Fresh Air was on the radio somewhere in the background. Fresh Air was rebroadcasting interviews with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who died Monday at age 90.

John Cage has been a tutelary spirit throughout my creative life. At every other time in the past when I happened to hear him on the radio, everything else could wait while I gave the master my complete attention. I felt torn, as if I were betraying him, while I kept to the code.

Later, I couldn’t recall anything Cage said, but I could remember the tone of his voice. It was calm and soothing, playful and unassuming, suffused with curiosity and engagement.

After listening to the interview again, I was reminded how Cage was one of my earliest teachers in the practice I call playing by ear. I have much more to say about that, but for now here is a story Cage told about hanging out with Marcel Duchamp. It seems uncannily parallel to my experience of listening to Cage while working through the code. But it isn’t uncanny. It’s just the way things happen.

TERRY GROSS: I like to think of you and Marcel Duchamp playing chess together because here…

Mr. CAGE: Well we actually didn’t play much.

GROSS: You didn’t play?

Mr. CAGE: No. No.

GROSS: Oh. Oh.

Mr. CAGE: I played with Teeny Duchamp, his wife and he would criticize our game.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. CAGE: And he said to me once, he said, don’t you ever want to win?

GROSS: Did you play to win when you played chess?

Mr. CAGE: I didn’t then. I played chess in order to be with him. I wanted to be with him as much as possible. Now that he’s dead, my game has improved.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Did you talk much during those chess games with Teeny, talk with Duchamp?

Mr. CAGE: No, I had a kind of confidence that if I was just near Duchamp that that would be enough, that I didn’t have to ask him questions or converse. Once I remember he said let’s sit down and have a conversation. We sat down. I don’t remember what we talked.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Was that…

Mr. CAGE: I just liked being with him.

GROSS: Was that so, that being with him and not talking got for you some of what you wanted to be around him for?

Mr. CAGE: Yes, I think his presence, his being, was both question and answer, hmm?

Creative Coincidences: Cage On Cunningham Fresh Air 073109 | Listen to Interview | Read Full Transcript

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Café Mouffe: An Antidote to John Philip Sousa

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

If you’ve had enough already of The Stars and Stripes Forever, try a little Todd Snider as he commemorates the day Pittsburgh Pirates hurler Doc Ellis pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD. Snider explains his inspiration on NPR Music:

“I felt connected to that, because many times I have come to work unprepared and still done OK,” Snider says. “I think Doc Ellis gives unprepared people everywhere someone to look up to. He didn’t do it on purpose — he thought he was pitching the next day.”

There’s no moral to this story except not to judge a book by its cover.

“You don’t always know who’s going to be able to deliver or have the solution. You can’t rule somebody out just because of what you know about them,” Snider says. “You can’t judge a book, and not even if you’d read it.”

Doc Ellis tells the LSD no-hitterstory:

Encore: If you need more patriotic fervor, you can’t go wrong with Leonard Cohen’s Democracy Is Coming to the USA. (Read the lyrics.) Happy Independence Day!

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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A Vulture-Bone Flute For Primordial Music

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, showed a thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago. [Photo by Daniel Maurer/AP/NYT]
Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, showed a thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago. [Photo by Daniel Maurer/AP/NYT]

John Wilford Noble writes in NYT:

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.

Archaeologists reported Wednesday the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represent the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.

But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of music instruments had previously come from France and Austria, but dated well after 30,000 years ago.

In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”
Read more and listen to a replica of the bone flute

Abstract from Nature:

Considerable debate surrounds claims for early evidence of music in the archaeological record1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Researchers universally accept the existence of complex musical instruments as an indication of fully modern behaviour and advanced symbolic communication1 but, owing to the scarcity of finds, the archaeological record of the evolution and spread of music remains incomplete. Although arguments have been made for Neanderthal musical traditions and the presence of musical instruments in Middle Palaeolithic assemblages, concrete evidence to support these claims is lacking1, 2, 3, 4. Here we report the discovery of bone and ivory flutes from the early Aurignacian period of southwestern Germany. These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe, more than 35,000 calendar years ago. Other than the caves of the Swabian Jura, the earliest secure archaeological evidence for music comes from sites in France and Austria and post-date 30,000 years ago.

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‘Perfecting Sound Forever’: From the Big Bang to Led Zeppelin

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Book cover of 'Perfecting Sound Forever' by Greg Milner NPR Music: “In his book, Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner explores the evolution of sound. His history covers the analog days of Thomas Edison through the present day of digital recordings, and the quest for sonic perfection.

“Technological advances have complicated the debate about the value of the most accurate reproduction of a sound, versus the most enhanced. Whereas Edison set out to perfectly capture a live performance, today’s sound engineers have the ability to create recordings from musicians who aren’t in the same room — or aren’t even alive at the same time.

“Milner takes the reader through major breakthroughs and massive failures in recording history. He also digs into specific recordings from Lead Belly, the Beatles, Mission of Burma, Steve Albini and Massive Attack.”

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Café Mouffe: Tarace Boulba

Friday, June 5th, 2009

No, this isn’t the Rebirth Brass Band. It isn’t New Orleans, either, , but it could be. You can go ahead and second-line. Don’t sit down.

This brass band is  Tarace Boulba from Paris. Their 2006 and 2008 concert clips prove that neither side of the pond has a monopoly when it comes to funk. According to Global Hit’s Marco Werman:

Tarace Boulba. Sounds like a sweet Turkish dessert. It’s actually one funky brass band from France. Technically, they consider themselves a “fanfare,” spelled like fanfare, but in French it means a brass ensemble. Tarace Boulba sounds like Balkan wedding music…if it were played by African and African-American funk musicians. The group was founded in the outskirts of Paris in 1993. It has 800 members, most of them non-professional, all of them very committed. So committed, they’re unpaid. They actually pay…a membership fee of 15 euros (or 20 bucks), and they’re in the band, for life.

Encore: Some members of the Tarace Boulba collective compled their first North American tour last week, tracing the roots of funk from New Orleans to Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York. They closed at Rubulad in Brooklyn on May 30.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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The King of Swing at 100

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

Benny Goodman was born 100 years ago today. If my father were here to celebrate Benny’s centennial, he’d surely turn to this music from the legendary 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, the first jazz concert performed in that august space. NPR Music had a fine Benny Goodman tribute this morning.

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Café Mouffe: Theresa Andersson

Friday, May 29th, 2009

The last time I heard Theresa Andersson in New Orleans, she was singing for 10,000 people in Wollenberg Park. She rocked and the echoes rolled all the way to Algiers and back again while tankers and tugs plied the muddy Mississippi. The noonday sun was blistering, and Theresa wore a Day-Glo pink bikini with matching sunglasses. I know that much because Ms. Modigliani described the scene for me shortly before we succumbed to the heat.

That scene stands in vivid contrast to these home videos, but not the singer’s animation. Theresa is a one-woman band here, working with samples, live loops, and a room full of instruments. Maybe Ms. M will undertake an audio description for me so I can follow the dance that unfolds in Birds Fly Away and Na Na Na, two cuts from Theresa’s latest recording, Hummingbird Go!.

Theresa described a bit of her process in a Global Hit interview with Marco Werman:

I sampled a New Orleans drummer called Smokey Johnson. And it’s a piece of vinyl that I found, cause they’ve got some awesome vinyl shops in New Orleans, and you can dig around and find all sorts of cool stuff. And it’s from a song called “I Can’t Help It.” So I called him up, and like hey, can I use this. And then I built the whole song around it.

The bounce and the groove are so great to sing over. Like that’s how the whole melody came about. Just bouncing off of those drums.

Encore: You could say Theresa Andersson is Sweden’s gift to New Orleans, but the reciprocity rolls the other way, too. Listen to her noodling around backstage at Jazz Fest in 2008. Then take in the spectacle at Melodifestivalen 2008, the Swedish competition for the Eurovision song contest. Therese Andersson is the same singer, right? Someone tell me if I’m wrong.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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“L, I think you are swell!”

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I heard a snippet of this Sesame Street alphabet lesson on the radio this morning. Now I can’t get it out of my head. Nothing else I’ve heard today has been as dramatic, as funny, or as profound. Guess I work in the cube farm equivalent of the FAA’s sterile cockpit. Maybe I should get a cape.

Listen to an interview with bass Samuel Ramey on NPR Music.

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Happy 90th Birthday, Pete Seeger!

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen lead the crowd in This Land is Your Land at the inaugural concert held at the Lincoln Memorial pm January 18, 2009..

Listen to Folk Alley’s 5-hour side stream of memorable Seeger classics covered by artists like Tom Paxton, Bruce Cockburn, Janis Ian, Natalie Merchant, Greg Brown, and, of course, the iconic troubadour himself. According to NPR Music:

Pete Seeger turns 90 today — and he’s still performing. In fact he’s playing and singing tonight at a birthday bash in Madison Square Garden, alongside Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Emmylou Harris and many others.

Proceeds from the show will go to Clearwater, an organization — and a boat — launched by Seeger 40 years ago to raise awareness about pollution in the Hudson River.

Pete Seeger firmly believes that song can bring us together and make our lives better. He sang for and with workers in the 1940s. His beliefs in their rights — and his refusal to testify about those beliefs before Congress — got him blacklisted.

But Seeger kept singing. He sang for civil rights in the ’50s and ’60s. He sang out against the Vietnam War — and all of the others since. He continues to encourage all of us to sing: You can’t leave one of his concerts without singing along.

But as we celebrate his 90th birthday, we shouldn’t forget that Pete Seeger is also one hell of a banjo player.

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Café Mouffe: Mary Mary & Stevie Wonder

Friday, April 10th, 2009

An NPR Music profile of the gospel sister act known as Mary Mary sent me searching for an opportunity to bring them to Café Mouffe. Along the way I found their performance of Higher Ground honoring Stevie Wonder at the White House last February. I couldn’t find clips then, but they’re out there in the universe now, and I can’t pass them up. The President’s testimonial to Stevie, and his acceptance of the Gershwin Award, are moving expressions of the best in American culture.

And who knew so many White House politicos could get down like that on Superstitious? I think some of them were passing a joint. Everybody scream!

Encore: Mary Mary deserve a Mouffe of their own. Check out their NPR Music profile. It isn’t my grandma’s gospel music, but I’d like to believe that she would believe the witness given in I Worship You.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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Café Mouffe: Fol Chen

Friday, March 27th, 2009

I was drawn to Ful Chen after hearing a Fresh Air review by rock critic Ken Tucker. It wasn’t the snippets of the songs that did it, but Tucker’s writing about the music:

Fol Chen opens its debut album Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made with the song The Believers, advising us in the chorus, “Don’t follow me.” To which I respond: Don’t worry, Fol Chen. Who’s going to try and attempt your instantly-unique blend of dread and whimsy, your quietly-stated intensity? The band tries to hide its faces in photographs and videos, and issues information about itself that are less press releases than gnomic prose poems, yet the group isn’t nearly as arch or pretentious as what I just said would seem to imply.

In the song No Wedding Cake, you can hear what I mean. How can you not develop an immediate fondness for an art-rock experiment that delivers sentiments like, “I could never break your heart,” and simply beseeches us to just “listen to this song”? With its perky keyboard riffs and chicken-scratch guitar, “No Wedding Cake” is a charmer. Indeed, charm and a knack for memorable melodies is what lends Fol Chen an energy too many self-consciously hip bands lack.

Over synthesized beats, organ-like sounds (could that be an actual organ?) and fluting vocals, the lines in “The Idiot” sink in with quivering resonance: “Everybody here thinks I’m an idiot/How can that be true/If I’m in love with you?” It’s a sweet, winning question, its tenderness bolstered by the firm, springy rhythms. Fol Chen’s best vocals are provided by Melissa Thorne, who’s already helped turn the song “Cable TV,” into an internet-download hit.

Cable TV is a simple song about an assignation at a cheap motel with cable TV. That composition is filled with nice little details, such as a line about “getting dizzy from the spritzers and the desert heat.” It’s sung by Thorne in the kind of barely-inflected murmur that comes off, in music like this, as both brainy and sexy. And what of that unwieldy album title, Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made? Well, members of Fol Chen have made vague remarks that John Shade represents evil, which would seem confirmed by the song called “Please John, You’re Killing Me.”

But it occurred to me that John Shade is also the name of the poet in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire. I can easily imagine the members of Fol Chen, so fond of obscuring their own identities and motives, being taken with Nabokov’s tale of a poet whose work is obsessively annotated by others. Kinda like what happens when music critics try and take apart Fol Chen’s music to see what makes it tick. No matter — as Nabokov proved, analyzing admirable but elusive, allusive work only adds another layer of pleasure.

Encore: Check out a snatch of  Fol Chen’s third-ever show at Radio Free Silverlake’s Let’s Independent! at Boardner’s.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays at 3:00 p.m. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the set notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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Café Mouffe: Lula Pena & Marta Topferova

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Often when I wake up during the night I flip on the clock radio to listen to the BBC World Service. It puts me right back to sleep unless breaking news gets my attention. Sometimes I listen subconsciously while I sleep and have the strangest dreams. That happened this week when I heard haunting, alluring songs on Charlie Gillett’s World of Music. I tracked down the playlist later to figure out what I had heard. I can’t begin to recover what I dreamed with Lula Pena (Fria Claridade) and  Marta Topferova (Semana Azul).. Listen and dream it for yourself.

Encore: Another surreal sound from this dream state was an arrangement for tenor saxophone of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 (Prelude). The musician was Yasuaki Shimizu. I couldn’t find a clip of his solo performance, but an ensemble version will give you a sense of it.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays at 3:00 p.m. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the set notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.

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