Issue 46:
Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By
Medulla Vesuvius
Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece by Ashley Kahn, 2000 Da Capo Press, 218 pgs
A mere handful of seconds ago I got done reading Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece by Ashley Kahn. This book is a loving tribute that tells the story of what has proven to be one of the most popular jazz albums of all time. Kahn does a really good job of setting the scene in the studio but that’s quite literally not the whole story. He also gives some of Miles’s history as a musician and bandleader, from wet-behind-the-ears bebop sideman fresh off the bus to New York to his seemingly inevitable years as lost heroin devotee to his ascent to unlikely pop culture icon before discussing the album’s impact and legacy.
What I found most interesting is how well Kahn talks about matters of musical aesthetics for non-specialists. I’ve always been a little unclear about what exactly jazz musicians are doing when they play. But after reading this I feel slightly more enlightened. Kahn laid down the basics of jazz tradition so as to show what exactly Davis and his bandmates were shrugging off, (the convention of lining up improvisation with regimented, repeating chord progressions) when they went off in this “modal jazz” direction. Maybe unintentional is Kahn’s assertion of piano player Bill Evans’ often underappreciated conceptual contributions to this landmark work. It is easy to come away from this book thinking that Bill Evans, with his unflashy minimal style, is the guy who convinced Miles to slow down…
Also interesting was how enigmatic Miles became immediately after this album, very quickly choosing to speed up tempos when presenting this music live. Maybe he got bored. In the wake of even more free music by his former bandmate John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, what was “revolutionary” about modal jazz quickly seemed merely “evolutionary.” Here’s a great quote:
After the wild ride Bird and Diz [Charlie "Bird" Parker and Dizzy Gillespie] had taken jazz on in the mid-forties, pushing the envelope of harmonic and rhythmic invention as far as it would go at that point, Miles and other cohorts had pulled jazz back to a cooler, blues-spirited extreme. That pendulum swing, from the apogee of bebop to the high-water mark of modal jazz, constitutes a period of unparalleled creativity in jazz. From that perspective, many see Kind of Blue as more of a goodbye to an age that has passed than a vision of the future.
“That album was really the end of the bebop era, you know?” remarks Quincy Jones. “Kind of Blue was the voice of that era-from ‘48 to ‘59- it was the highest culmination of the standards of the time.” Amram adds: “I’ve always felt that Kind of Blue was Miles’s valentine to Charlie Parker…a farewell, a moving on from that whole experience.”
Two recommendations:
1) Go out and buy a copy of this album. Live with it for a couple months. Alternately listen to it closely and then not listen to it as background music.
2) Read this book and witness a writer coming this close to defining the indefinable “magic” contained in the sounds.
Issue 45:
Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By
Medulla Vesuvius
Few musical artists are as universally revered for their songwriting craft than Elvis Costello. He looks down on mere mortals from the pantheon of wordsmiths like Bob Dylan, Lennon/McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen. In addition to his distinctive, dramatic singing voice he is known for a biting literary wit. The latter never hit home for me until I started perusing his lyrics in research for this article. I discovered song after song after song about bad relationships, love lost, love gained tenuously, cheating, wondering about lost lovers’ new romances, awkward sex and self-loathing. I had no idea that I had been listening to such a vast wasteland of morose musings, for oftentimes these thoughts and themes are delivered with such an accessibly catchy mechanism.
But today I want to focus on a microscopic element of the bespectacled one’s songwriting- namely, the handful of times he has employed a “well-turned phrase”- an idea we musical types don’t discuss very often. Namely, I’m talking about taking a well-known utterance or cliché and flipping it around, tinkering with it, putting it in a new context or otherwise futzing with it to say something new. A couple of examples: the first time someone said “up at the buttcrack of dawn,” or the many times my dad said “No good deed goes unpunished.” A couple musical examples of this would be when the Monty Python guys sang “Always look on the bright side of death,” or when Rush earnestly says “An ounce of prevention, a pound of obscure.”
It’s my opinion that we have with this one literary technique the soul of a modern songwriter’s job. In a world where there’s “nothing new under the sun” a songwriter can only be expected to listen, observe and absorb the world around them and then process the data and synthesize it to make something new. This is a new textbook definition of the creative act, (creatio ex materia.) So, I thought I would discuss the more striking examples of this technique as discovered in Costello’s catalog.
The original example that started this area of thought for me is in the song “20% Amnesia” off the album Brutal Youth. I’ll be honest. I’m not really even sure what this song is about. It’s most likely a commentary on some mid-90s British political nastiness, but it includes a killer line sung by Costello at the top of his range: “Life intimidates art,” of course a play on the self-recursive thought that “art imitates life,” and “life imitates art.” I’m starting to realize the truth of this line, that “normal” life-consumerist, rational, mundane- makes strange bedfellows with the creative impulse. I’m speaking largely of time here. Regular folks are just too busy making money and buying things to spend time creating things of questionable value to the majority of society.
Here’s another succinct example from the song “Senior Service” off the album Armed Forces: “It’s a death that’s worse than fate.” Here Costello merely switches the order of the nouns in a cliché to deliver a pretty clear vision of how he views the prospect of joining the British Royal Navy. Also on the same album is the song “Accidents Will Happen” in which he turns a typically positive, encouraging comment into one of hopelessness: “There’s so many fish in the sea/ That only rise up in the sweat and smoke like mercury,” a very powerful image.
The R&B-influenced album Get Happy!! contains a great love-gone-wrong song called “Riot Act” that includes this clever pairing: “Don’t put your heart out on your sleeve when your remarks are off the cuff.” The album also contains the song “Love for Tender” with the line: “The wages of sin is an expensive infection.” I’ll let you decide what he’s talking about there.
Consider these last few stray examples:
The song “Human Hands” off the album Imperial Bedroom contains “I’m just the mere shadow of my former selfishness.”
“There’s no such thing as an original sin,” from the song “I’m Not Angry” off My Aim is True.
The song “Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head” from Blood and Chocolate.
“One day my Prince of Peace will come” from the beautiful song that Costello calls an “agnostic’s prayer” called “Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4″ off the album Mighty Like a Rose.
So, there’s a sampling of Elvis Costello’s use of the well-turned phrase. Of course, how the act of flipping and amending these well-trodden sayings actually impacts a song is fodder for another discussion. In the meantime- anybody else out there have any other examples of songwriters employing this device?
Issue 44:
Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By
Clancy Lass
It had not been a Merry Christmas to that point…
My newlywed and I were having a very difficult time finishing up the debris from our wedding. Our home was a disaster area, we were still writing thank you notes squeezing in Christmas shopping at the sacrifice of everything else.
I hadn’t been looking forward to Christmas because too much in my life had just changed. My name wasn’t even the same. Between work and the holidays, there wasn’t time to just relax and enjoy being married. The joy had even been taken out of receiving gifts because of the wedding. We received so many, I just honestly didn’t want any more. Though believe me, the sentiment was greatly appreciated.
So the “anticipation of Christmas?” Just not there. Church had also not been the comfort it usually is. That reason I cannot answer. I just seemed to have lost the meaning in between fighting people for the last toy of its kind and wrapping paper that I knew people would tear up and throw away in a matter of seconds.
Sending a few measly Christmas cards felt like a punishment. They were all just courtesy cards to those who had sent cards to me. Baking the sweets for the family used to be something I looked forward to all year round, and hoped a bulk of the duties would someday be mine. Be careful what you wish for. They are now almost ALL mine. And the fun has begun to sink out of this tradition as well, with no one is there to help sift the flour or melt the butter. They all have children and other lives.
We were also on the crucial second year of family division for the holidays. However you choose to divide in the beginning may decide the next several years, as it will then be seen as a tradition. Thus began our fight and my bad mood on this momentous afternoon…
“A Christmas Carol” is generally a story I ignore. The idea that someone is mean all the time and doesn’t like Christmas is just too far-fetched. But in one instance that night, I realized I am Ebenezer. I refuse to say Scrooge, as I have at least seen the error of my ways and hope to make some sort of amends for my transgressions. And all I had to do was get on an escalator.
My husband and I had been bickering for several hours, (bad habit, but we get over it.) Anyway, we climbed aboard an escalator to zoom past Gymboree and the Gap and get to El Chico for dinner in between shopping and a trip to the mall cinema.
As we rode, a man several people behind us began yelling at the woman in front of us. It was his wife and he was puzzled as to where she and her two girls were going. Admittedly, I was annoyed. I didn’t give a crap where they were going and get easily irritated at people yelling a conversation around me. The mother and the girls reached the landing, got off the escalator and just stopped. I assumed they were waiting for their loud-mouth dad. And in a voice I considered under my breath or just to my husband, I sarcastically said, “Why don’t we all just stop.” The mother must have been as eves-droppy as I. She heard me and replied…are you ready for this? She replied…
“She’s blind. That is why we had to stop.”
I didn’t say another word to her. For the first time in years I was speechless. But my defiance and pride stopped me from even looking at the mother or the girl, or making an apology. I just kept walking. I even tried to justify my rude behavior by saying loudly a moment later, “She’s not going to make me feel bad. They could have stepped over to the side.”
We arrived at El Chico and I noticed how silent my husband had become. After some chips were delivered to our table, he said, “Are you just really wound up tonight?” I snapped, “Why? The waitress forgot the lime for your beer, so I asked her to bring some. I wasn’t rude.” He said, “I know. I’m not talking about that.” I said, “I already feel bad enough having tried to shove a blind girl out of the way.” And then I just started crying. He said, “I knew you already felt bad enough. You just seem really worked up.”
We walked down to the movies after dinner to see “Spanglish.” You go into movies thinking you will identify with the main character, who is usually the good person, the one who does the right thing and can’t get a break. …But another slap in the face made me realize I was just like the over-controlling, ever-correcting selfish mother played by Tea’ Leoni. It was hard to enjoy the movie after that, though I did.
For Christmas that year, I received a wake-up call.
Maybe we all have a Charlie Brown and Linus moment of clarity around the holidays. We are all lost, trying to find the spirit of Christmas and brotherly love, and from out of nowhere comes one small thing said by the least expected person/character that changes your entire perspective- humbles you, and makes you thankful all at once. And the fact that I got it and it moved me…Maybe I’m not so bad after all.
But even more unexpected is that I feel like the scrawny Christmas tree more than I do Charlie Brown. I am not attractive. I have nothing to prove and I’m just a sharp small tree that loses her needles around people. But a mother was willing to show me patience because she knew I had no idea of her daughter’s blindness. And my husband continues to love me so much that sometimes, something like a light or a Christmas ornament will show in my smile.
We can’t all be evergreens. We can’t all be good, compassionate people all the time, and Lord knows I’ve never claimed to be. But maybe somewhere in there I can figure out how to be as strong as I am stubborn and change myself…realize I’m the one that’s really blind.
…Or at least buy some duct tape and close off my mouth.
Issue 43:
Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By
Medulla Vesuvius
Just last week the National Geographic Society unveiled the discovery of a new dinosaur. (Well, it’s new in that it’s the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur 110 million years old.) Discovered by Paul Sereno, it’s called Nigersaurus taqueti, after the country of Nigeria, where it was hiding out and paleontologist Phillippe Taquet. The thirty foot long skeleton is interesting in that it suggests the herbivorous animal sucked up its food like a vacuum cleaner, kind of like a cross between a large-mouth bass and an anteater, (the latter being my personal favorite of the animals at the zoo, by the way.) What fabulously efficient construction! I wonder why every dinosaur didn’t work this way!
Two things struck me about this story. One- sometimes we forget that we live in an age of scientific discovery. The domesticated nature of research- controlled, orderly laboratory conditions, the implementation and manipulation of all kinds of super-specialized “knowns” like the tiniest amounts of hormones that trigger certain small behaviors in mice, that only highly-skilled and trained scientists can even discuss- can lead us into a false sense that we already know pretty much all that’s knowable. The rest is just nitpicky details.
But then this oafish beast Nigersaurus enters our scientific house like a plodding, clumsy uninvited dinner guest, unintentionally smashing all of our good crystal and china. The nigersaurus didn’t require an electron microscope to be found. Some adventurous African kid could have tripped over his bones at some point.
And that kind of serendipity and “good fortune” make life much more interesting, reminding us of potential wonders all around us, and not just those at the microscopic level for guys in lab coats. But this is not to say that there was no science behind this discovery. I’m sure that lots of highly-skilled intelligent people pieced together this skeleton and its former way of life. But what a discovery on a “macro” scale!
Two- what exactly is it about dinosaurs that is so intriguing to youngsters? Doesn’t every kid go through a dinosaur phase? I know I did. (If you want to know just how deeply entrenched the nerdiness is in my life: when I was about ten years old I took a week-long summer class about dinosaurs as well as a class about space, the highlight of which was watching the movie Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend.) Does it have to do with the mythos surrounding them? Are dinosaurs as real to us as fantasy? You kind of have to use your imagination to complete the story and reality of dinosaurs. Maybe kids like using their imagination. Whatever the reason, kids just have a dinosaur-shaped hole in their hearts. Why else would a goofy purple tyrannosaurus rex serve as babysitter and pacifier?
Issue 42:
Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By
Medulla Vesuvius
Dear Readers, do you ever take the time to stop and think about the possibility that the universe and the people and events contained therein are converging in a suspiciously meaningful way in your own tiny life?
I don’t.
But I do find it amusing that within the last couple of months I have found myself engaged in conversation with someone about the harpsichord. And in both cases, the other person has deferred to me as if I was some kind of expert. I don’t know where they got that idea. I’ve never even played one before. But I do know a little about it. The one common question people have is- “what’s the difference between the harpsichord and the piano?”
“Why, it’s the method of tone production of course, you nit,” I say in my best academic voice. You see, both instruments have long strings stretched over a resonating sounding board, but they are very different in how they get those strings to start vibrating. Essentially, pianos have a complicated mechanism for hammering the strings, whereas the harpsichord plucks the strings, kind of like having a few dozen guitar players, picks in hand, scrunched-up in a wooden box.
The differences in sound are quite pronounced. Compared to the piano, notes on the harpsichord are quieter and have very little sustain. The “attack” of the sound is the thing with the harpsichord, whereas the piano is able to play all kinds of different volumes and lengths of notes. But philosophically, it’s really the difference between clinical properness and wild-man Romanticism, which is appropriate, since the musics employing these instruments developed more wildness and “emotionalism” as the development of the piano followed that of the harpsichord. Just as the early Baroque and early Classical individual was dissuaded from expressing the unspeakable visions and longings of the heart in favor of rational control of the body and mind, the Romanticist felt a newfound freedom to discuss the full spectrum of being human from quiet reverence to “Song of Myself” Whitman-esque self expression, so the embrace of dynamism.
But this article isn’t about the harpsichord comparative philosophy. Rather, it’s about the word “harp.” I don’t know if the harpsichord was named from the plucking motion used to make noise with it. If so, it could just as easily have been called the guitarichord. But I do know this: there are all kinds of instruments referred to as a “harp.”
First of all, there is the harp harp. In my opinion it’s one of the sexiest of all orchestral instruments, (besides maybe the cello. Think about the posture one assumes while playing that instrument.) The harp is a beautiful looking instrument-curvaceous, the strings gradually making their way from tiny and high-pitched to long and booming. There is an elegant “rightness” to its conception. (A rightness that costs you quite a bit of money, I might add. I recently met a guy whose wife plays the harp for our local orchestra and her instrument cost more than the car they transport it around in.) Not to mention the sound. I maintain that if I were to ever become an eccentric billionaire I would hire a harpist to gently wake me up in the mornings with a tranquil pastorale.
But there are other “harps” out there. Autoharp, anyone? (Think Mickey in A Mighty Wind. Or my second grade music teacher.) This is a rather simple instrument to play, as all of the buttons are labeled with the chord that they form. For all you rock band readers, I implore you to please find a way to incorporate this instrument in your music. I suspect Andrew Bird is already working on it…
In my research for this article I also discovered the existence of an instrument called the Aeolian harp, (also known as the “wind harp.”) This, my friends, is a fabulous idea! Basically, it’s a group of strings that play random harmonics whenever the wind blows, kind of like wind chimes. They’ve been around for hundreds of years, yet the idea of randomness and drones in music is still very avant-garde. (Continuing on in my make-believe scenario of myself as eccentric billionaire, I would also own a cottage in the fields of Scotland with nary a neighbor for miles around and I would have a giant wind harp right smack dab in the middle of my property, randomly espousing beautiful music from the breeze.)
But if nature is the performer, is the result really random? While that question blows your mind, read what Samuel Coleridge had to say in 1795 in his poem The Aeolian Harp:
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic Harps diversly fram’d.
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
On the opposite end from the pastoral sounds of the Aeolian Harp, I remember the sound of the Jew’s harp, also known as the “Mouth harp,” or “Jaw harp.” It’s another simple idea, you strike a piece of metal and your mouth serves as a resonating chamber. (Think: a group of nabobs on the front porch playing jug band music. This is the instrument that sounds like a rubber band.) I learned how to play this instrument in about fifteen minutes and have found it completely useless in wooing the ladies. Yet, there is a certain rusticness to the sound. The charming sound of simple fun. Or I could be full of crap.
Now is the point in this essay where things get confusing. Up until now, all of the “harps” have involved strings vibrating, (or at least a thin, metal strip.) For some reason there is also the tradition of calling the harmonica a “harp,” as in “Boy, Dan Akroyd sure plays a mean blues harp.” What the connection is I don’t know. If anyone out there can enlighten me, please do.
There is also the Greek mythological creature that is half woman, half bird—known as the “harpy.”
And finally I come to the ARP synthesizer, which has nothing to do with harps, really, except for three common letters. The company’s name is merely the initials of its inventor Alan Robert Pearlman. Yet the history of music would be drastically different had the ARP Odyssey and 2600 never come along. Contemporary with the development of the Moog synths, these can be famously heard on The Who’s album Who’s Next and Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein”, as well as on songs by Genesis, Pink Floyd and Stevie Wonder. Even more famously, an ARP serves as the method by which earthlings first communicate with extraterrestrials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Therefore, such an awesome instrument demands inclusion with a list of instruments as affecting and beautiful as the “mouth harp,” no?
That sums up what I’ve been thinking about today. Stay classy, Nerd City and thanks for stopping by.
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