Category: Music

YouTube Jukebox: Miriam Makeba

By David Ross. My daughter and I heard the Tokens’ “Wimoweh” somewhere or other; this led to Ladysmith Black Mambazo; this in turn led to Miriam Makeba, and ever since we’ve been listening to Makeba day in and out, with no weariness – indeed with ever deepening respect – on the adult side. My daughter wanted to be an ‘African singer’ last Halloween, but we talked her down from this ledge of potential racist scandal, and she wound up going as a ‘Chinese princess.’

Let me offer a simple conviction: during the 1960s Miriam Makeba was one of the very greatest vernacular artists in the world, in a category with the likes of James Brown, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Mingus, and Thelonius Monk. She might be reasonably compared to Aretha Franklin or Sarah Vaughan, but on the whole she was their superior, combining the former’s soaring voice with the latter’s genius for phrasing, and endowing everything she did with a palpable personal charm. As a politically resonant Third World artist combining native and American idioms, the obvious – and fair – comparison is to Bob Marley.

Here (see above) is a tremendous clip associated with Makeba’s appearance in Stockholm in 1966. The concert is available as a DVD import titled Miriam Makeba Live at Bern’s Salonger (I purchased mine from Amazon.co.uk), but the film does not include this sequence. I gather that Makeba appeared on TV in support of the concert proper. The clip features two tremendous songs and some comments on the arch-nastiness of the racial politics of South Africa, with Makeba herself utterly fetching in her duality of girlishness and loftiness. This second clip, a bossa nova delight from the live appearance at Bern’s Salonger, highlights Makeba’s remarkable versatility. This third clip drives home her capacity for massive, earth-shaking grooves.

Enjoy this material while you can. YouTube has lately been stripped of Makeba material.

The core of Makeba’s sixties output is available on three CD sets that repackage seven of her albums. These sets are a must for anyone with a serious interest in twentieth-century music, as indispensible as Live at the Apollo and Kind of Blue.

Posted on June 11th, 2011 at 9:23am.

LFM Presents YouTube Jukebox: Eva Cassidy

By David Ross. In a new feature, Libertas will excavate the YouTube cave of treasures, drawing attention to certain heroes of film, music, art, and literature – and preferring as always the vintage, the homemade, and the un-co-opted. YouTube Jukebox will be an ongoing demonstration of genuine creativity – a recurrent potshot, if you will, aimed at the ventilation shaft of the Hollywood Death Star.

The D.C.-area chanteuse Eva Cassidy (1963-1996) died young of cancer, so we can enjoy her work only elegiacally and with the kind of autumnal wistfulness with which we listen to Sandy Denny (see here), a similar and even greater singer-songwriter who departed all too soon. I stumbled upon Cassidy’s epochal version of “Autumn Leaves” only because my daughter happened to be learning the song on the piano. I was stunned. Nearly seventy years after the song was written, Cassidy reinvents it and claims it utterly, much as Coltrane claims “My Favorite Things” and Hendrix claims Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” Her talent is not remotely theirs, but her desire to speak through the song is enormous and urgent. She recorded the song at Blues Alley in Washington on Jan. 2, 1996. Did she know she was dying? Perhaps she did, in which case the image of ‘autumn leaves’ is pregnant indeed.

Yves Montand debuted “Autumn Leaves” – originally called “Les Feuilles Mortes” (“The Dead Leaves”) – in Marcel Carne’s 1946 film Les Portes de La Nuit. Here Montand reprises his signature tune in the 1951 film Paris Is Always Paris. In 1947, Johnny Mercer rewrote the song in English and it has been a jazz standard ever since.

I hazard to say that nobody has ever taken the song as seriously as Eva or so fully grasped its expressive possibilities. “Autumn Leaves” was supposed to be a smoke-ring of 40s-era café sentimentality; it was never meant to have the emotional weight she gives it. Compare Eva’s life-and-death version to Montand’s unctuous crooning or to Stanley Jordan’s gymnastics on two guitars. She sings closed-eyed with the effort of permanent statement.

Thankfully, the Blues Alley concert is available on CD, though the album does not include, perhaps for copyright reasons, Eva’s fine version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” a gorgeous melody that Eva rescues from its original synth-heavy context.

Posted on June 6th, 2011 at 2:33pm.

Say Amen! LFM Reviews Rejoice and Shout

By Joe Bendel. How hip a blues guitarist was Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Well, she was one of the primary influences on a kid from Tupelo, Mississippi named Elvis. Yet she was not really a blues or R&B artist, but a Gospel singer. By profiling trailblazers like Tharpe, director Don McGlynn and producer Joe Lauro celebrate the rich legacy and diversity of American Gospel music in Rejoice and Shout, which opens this Friday in New York at Film Forum.

Rejoice opens on a true high note, as a young member of the Selvy Family of Gospel singers belts out a powerful old-time religion rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The film then proceeds to backpedal, explaining where the music came from. Yes, it is rooted in the plantation experience of African Americans, but the story of Gospel’s development is more complicated, involving entrepreneurial figures like Thomas A. Dorsey. A reformed bluesman, Dorsey penned and promoted scores of Gospel standards, often popularized through performances by the great Mahalia Jackson.

Frankly, it is pleasantly surprising how intelligently Rejoice addresses the actual music. The film is particularly effective illustrating the complexity of the arrangements and the syncopated jazz influences of the vocal ensembles like the Golden Gate Quartet. More to the point, many people will probably be surprised how much fun this legitimately sacred music truly is.

Of course, the music is the thing in Rejoice. To their credit, McGlynn and Lauro unearthed some remarkable rare footage, ranging from sound film that predates Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer to some totally cool video of the Edwin Hawkins Singers performing “Oh Happy Day” during a stadium concert. Still, Rejoice never forgets the music’s raison d’être, allowing former 1970’s Gospel superstar turned everyday preacher Andraé Crouch the time and space to speak eloquently of the glory and power of God. Continue reading Say Amen! LFM Reviews Rejoice and Shout

Tarkovsky, Bach, and God

By David Ross. I first heard Bach’s choral prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (“I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ”) in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). It seems to me one of the world’s most beautiful compositions, and Tarkovsky’s scene, in which the piece harmonizes with the camera as it plays over Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), seems to me one of the most solemnly lovely scenes in cinema. The camera scrutinizes the details of Brueghel’s painting, at first coldly (as Kris must see it), but then with a certain wistful sorrow, as if in recognition of our hopeless estrangement from the natural life of the old village. The mournful precision of the piece by Bach (see here for Vladimir Horowitz’ transcendently lovely interpretation) underscores that there is only the beautiful sadness of our estrangement and longing. Kris stirs with new humility and humanity, and he and Hari begin to float, ostensibly in a state of zero gravitation, but actually in a state of grace.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Hunters in the Snow" (1565).

People often speak of Falconetti’s ecstatic expression in Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) as film’s most inspired synecdoche of the religious experience, but Tarkovsky, in my opinion, exceeds Dreyer artistically and spiritually. Tarkovsky seems engaged not in a pastiche of an archaic faith, but in the genuine struggle of modern faith, and his dense, intricately coded scene seems to compress everything integral to Western culture in its modern self-bewilderment and tentative hope.

In a 1986 interview, Laurence Cossé asked Tarkovsky whether he considered his films “acts of love towards the Creator.” Tarkovsky responded “I would like to think so. I’m working in it, in any case. The ideal for would be to make this constant gift, this gift that Bach alone, truly, was able to offer God.”

Posted on June 2nd, 2011 at 2:42pm.


The Lost World of the Indie Record, Book & Video Store

By David Ross. Brendan Toller’s documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store (2010) brings a good deal of personality and attitude (in the best sense) to the story of the demise of the independent record store, though it might just as well tell the story of the demise of the independent video or book store, all of which are victims of the same forces: box store encroachment followed by on-line revolution, all feeding the bottom lines of large corporations that don’t particularly give a damn about records, or movies, or books. The restaurant business has been similarly decimated. Applebee’s anyone?

"I Need That Record!" on DVD.

I am a fierce advocate of free-market capitalism, and yet I have to agree with Toller that something has gone wrong when Wal-Mart sells 20% of all albums and those albums are largely the work of corporate mannequins like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. My mid-sized Southern college town has one remaining used record store and one remaining used book store. Our last independent video store closed in December, and our Borders – which drove out our independent book and record stores – recently got a dose of its own medicine and closed amid a blaze of luridly florescent signage of the kind you associate with particularly tacky used car lots.

I’ll have to explain to my young daughter how likeminded people used to gather – in the flesh – to mingle, swap notions and preferences, and listen to whatever was on the turntable. I will have to recreate the lost world of my youth, and tell how I roamed the second-hand record stores of Boston and Cambridge, spending hours in grungy mouse-holes like Mystery Train (named in honor of the Elvis tune), and how I timidly put my fourteen-year-old inquiries to the superior wisdom of pierced twenty-four-year-olds, who had, in fact, heard everything and evolved a real critical acumen. Between 1988 and 1992, I spent many procrastinative late afternoons at Cutler’s in New Haven (still there!). I once asked the sagacious manager about Moby Grape’s first album, about which I’d read in The Rolling Stone Record Guide (before it annoyingly became the “album guide”). He said that the record was out of print but that he had a copy (of course) and that he’d make me a tape. My tape was waiting for me the next day, as promised. You don’t get that kind of service – that degree or any degree of giving a damn – at Wal-Mart. Continue reading The Lost World of the Indie Record, Book & Video Store

On Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday

By David Ross. Rolling Stone has celebrated Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday with a lavish spread featuring a list of his seventy best songs and a smaller list of the best Dylan covers (see here). There’s no doubt that Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” is the supreme Dylan cover, turning a gnomic ditty into a sweepingly prophetic desert-vision with the tone quality of an LSD-fueled aurora borealis, but otherwise the list has little – in fact almost nothing – to recommend it.

Let me offer a sounder guide to the greatest Dylan covers:

  • Fairport Convention (Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, et al.) were consistently masterful Dylan interpreters. Here they magnificently elevate two minor chestnuts: “I’ll Keep it With Mine” (from their 1969 album What We Did on Our Holidays) and “Percy’s Song” (from Unhalfbricking, also 1969 – they had a very good year). Dylan wrote and recorded the songs in the early sixties, but they saw the light of day only with the 1985 release of the compilation Biograph. Over and over again, Fairport fulfilled the highest function of the Dylan cover: drawing attention to the obscure wonders of the oeuvre.
  • Hendrix not only swallowed whole and fully metabolized “All Along the Watchtower,” but nearly gave the same treatment to a far bigger fish, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which he ripped through at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and, as far as I know, never played again.
  • Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishman, a gypsy caravan of top-flight session musicians, lends a soulful huskiness to “Girl from the North Country” (from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), while Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash capture the song’s tender and crystalline essence on the Johnny Cash Show. The Cash-Mitchell duet appears on the surprisingly nugget-filled album The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-1971 (2008).
  • The Band were not merely Dylan idolaters but Dylan collaborators and bandmates, protégés in the fullest sense. Their version of “This Wheel’s on Fire” – which Dylan co-wrote with Band member Rick Danko – appears on their 1968 masterpiece Music from Big Pink and distills the yodeling, yowling, jingle-jangle dustbowl America that Dylan somehow tapped into. Dylan’s own version of the song appears on The Basement Tapes (1975).
  • Gram Parsons of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers – and brief solo glory before sister morphine escorted him to the next world – brings his particular wistful yearning to the Burrito’s fragmentary version of “I Shall Be Released,” an anthemic concert-closer of a tune that the Band had debuted on Music from Big Pink.
  • The Byrds were the greatest and most prolific Dylan interpreters and never more so than on their 1968 country-rock classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which features two standout, fully countrified Dylan covers: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Nothing was Delivered.” Dylan himself released versions of the songs on The Basement Tapes.

Posted on May 16th, 2011 at 8:49am.