Tea for Two

A little preamble: Vocalist Kiki Ebsen recently released an album "The Scarecrow Sessions", funded by a Kickstarter project. There's a lot of interesting stuff around that: you can find all the details here.  I'll just say that it's an album of songs for her father, Buddy Ebsen, who was an actor and song-and-dance man.  His story too is a very interesting one (he would have been the Tin Man in the movie of the Wizard of Oz, but for an allergic reaction to the makeup.  Nonetheless his voice appears in some songs).

Here's Buddy Ebsen with Shirley Temple.  All eyes are on the tiny Miss Temple, of course, but look at the how the lanky Buddy partners her with wit and grace, and (it seems to me), great kindness. You can't but like him:

So Buddy's daughter, Kiki, 10 years after her dad's death, records an album of deliciously jazzy tunes for him (including Codfish Ball of course).  Park that thought, click on that link and have a listen while I take you in a different direction.

It's fascinating to me how tunes can be malleable in the hands of different performers, and before the age of singer-songwriters, this was the norm:  that the songwriting was one thing, the performance another.  Since the 1960's we strongly identify tunes with the original performers.  We talk of originals and cover versions. Go back a bit though and it wasn't like that.

Take the tune Tea for Two.  I was a very small boy when I first came across it.  This version: a track on an album of my big sister's: Cliff Richard ("Britain's answer to Elvis") - "21 Today" (1961). How odd  it seems to me now, that a pop album like that would include songs written, well almost 4 decades earlier.  Because by that time, Tea for Two already had lived many lives.

Written in 1924 for the musical No No Nanette this is an early recording: pleasant enough, but really I won't blame you for not listening all the way through.  Who would have thought it promising material?

But then this tune started getting a life of its own.  From Wikipedia "In October 1927, the conductor Nikolai Malko challenged Dmitri Shostakovich to do an arrangement of a piece in 45 minutes. His "Tea for Two" arrangement, Opus 16, was first performed on 25 November 1928". Here's what he came up with: Shostakovich version.

Then the jazz crowd got hold of it, most famously Art Tatum, in this performance.  And he wasn't the only one.  Here is bopper Thelonious Monk's version.  And Tommy Dorsey's somewhat heavy handed cha cha cha ...  Smoothly from Lester Young (Nat King Cole on piano).  And swingingly from Mr Thomas "Fats" Waller.  And for fans of Gypsy Jazz, the incomparable Django Reinhardt had his go at it too.  It almost feels that you could structure a history of jazz around just this tune.

And ... It was a hit for Doris Day ... And if the obsession takes you (and it took me), you can even find a recording by Harpo Marx!.

I suppose what strikes me most is that none of these is a pastiche or a perversion of some perfect "original" performance - indeed the original seems almost the weakest.  And no one would say that the tune itself is any sort of masterpiece.  But artist after artist has chosen it as a theme, an inspiration. And each of these versions seems to me equally valid, and in each performance the tune is both entirely and recognisably itself, and still, entirely and recognisably the artist's.  I find this a wonderful thing.

But if you click on just one link here, choose this one.  A more recent recording, which I find utterly charming: Cuban father and son, Bebo and Chucho Valdes, a piano duet.

And what about father and daughter, Buddy and Kiki Ebsen?

Well of course on her album, Scarecrow Sessions, she includes this song.  Here is a link.

And why would she choose this tune to be on an album dedicated to her father?  Well here is Buddy in later years, but still just as light on his feet:

Made me smile ....

The Great Intoxication

Picture the scene:

2001, me aged 43, doing the washing up, new David Byrne CD, paying a little more attention than usual to the lyrics ....

He sings: "Who Disco? / Who Techno? / Who Hip-Hop? / Who Be Bop? / Who's been playing records in his bedroom?"

Those words suddenly draw a visceral reaction: "who's been playing records in his bedroom?" and I sharply remember the intensity of my younger self, the way I would listen to records, obsessively poring over album artwork and lyric sheets, absorbing, responding, trying to make sense of it all, and all the while the music is shaping me.

CUT

1996, age 38, driving a 2-hour commute, revisiting old C90 cassettes, among them King Crimson's "Larks Tongues in Aspic". Listening with profound attention, the sheer power of the music coupled to an equally powerful wave of memory. Understanding for the first time how this one, almost forgotten piece has all unknowingly shaped my musical tastes: the rawness, the invention, the minimalism, the discordance, the slow build - this album left those doors wide open.

CUT

2013, again driving to a work meeting, again revisiting 70's prog rock.  This time Golden Earring - Eight Miles High.  Again that tug, the music that drags you back to who you once were, back to boarding school with a clapped out old woofer speaker that we attached a 15 foot length of string to and saw how the bass notes made standing waves in the string.

CUT

Walking through London, my Android phone playing Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" in my ears, and, fully forty years after first hearing I still marvel at the tightness and polish of the performance, and even though I know the lyrics are a pretentious spoof of an epic poem by a fictional pretentious eight-year-old, still I am moved by them.

"In the clear white circles of morning wonder / I take my place with the lord of the hills /

And the blue-eyed soldiers stand slightly discoloured / (in neat little rows) sporting canvas frills."

Listen here:

Spoof it may be, but with Ian Anderson you are never sure - he has a way of finding the profound in the banal, and then slyly teasing himself for his pretension, and you for buying into it.  Just look at the way in which he sets up this mythic feel in the first two lines, and then punctures that with the gently mocking second two lines.  I take delight from every time I hear this, and I want to point it out to someone, to share it.  I don't expect you to get it - I know it's just me, but still I want to share it.

CUT

As a father to two young boys, wanting to share with them something of my childhood, finally finding this Burl Ives tune, and hearing it, becoming a very small boy again.

"In San Francisco town there lived a whale / She ate porkchops by the pail / By the pillbox, by the suitcase / By the bathtub, by the schooner.

Her name was Sarah and she's a peach / But you can't leave food within her reach / Nor nursemaids, nor airedales / Nor chocolate ice-cream sodas

She eats a lot, but when she smiles / You can see her teeth for miles and miles / And her adenoids, and her spareribs / And things too fierce to mention.

So what can you do in a case like that? / What can you do but sit on your hat / Or your toothbrush, or your grandmother / Or anything else that's helpless?"

OK

What's going on here?  These are none of them peerless masterpieces, but every one of these pieces feels somehow integral to my being.  I don't think I could fully explain to any one person exactly why each of these pieces of music (or any of a hundred others I could have chosen) key into some deep part of me, and bring out such strong feelings. But they do: somehow this is important.

I know that this reaction to music like this is intensely personal.  I have a deep desire to explain to someone what is so insanely great about each one, but actually I know they will never get it, not the way I get it.  Because I know that what makes these special is that the original experiences of listening over and over to these actually changed me, and in some small or not so small way, made me who I am.

And now ...

My musical tastes have grown and matured, and new pieces and new discoveries come along and in their own way, they continue to influence and shape me, but perhaps not quite so much.  And I still want to share with others these discoveries, and what makes them seem special to me.  And I want to understand why music can do that ...

Indeed, a Great Intoxication.

David Byrne continues:

"The great intoxication / Mental generation / Sound effects & laughter / Stupid ever after
Hopin' it was cranked up loud enough for you to hear"

Spot on ... I am still that teenager (stupid ever after), and I am still hoping this is cranked up loud enough for you to hear.

Gimme a Muskrat!

For a bunch of boarding school boys in South Africa in the early '70's, the showing of the movie "Woodstock" in the school hall was unmissable.  The projectionist was also a hi-fi nut, so we had great (and loud) sound.  And of course one of the most memorable performances (well maybe second to Joe Cocker's With a Little Help From My Friends) in that movie was Country Joe McDonald singing the "Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Blues". He introduced the tune by inciting the crowd to "Gimme an F, Gimme a U, Gimme a ..." well, you get the message.  How deliciously wicked that seemed!

Well, many years later in 2003 Country Joe was taken to court for copyright infringement by Babbette Ory, daughter of Kid Ory, who claimed it owed an awful lot to her father's tune "Muskrat Ramble".  In fairness, she had a point: the first strain is pretty similar, the second is unmistakeable.  Here is the original recording, Kid Ory playing in Louis' Hot Five.

Sadly for her, she lost the case: the court ruled that she had waited over 30 years to sue, and that was too long.

But who'd'a thunk it? Woodstock, the musical event that defined a generation, included a 54-year old tune!  You really can't keep a good tune down, and it pops up in so many different styles and manifestations.  Here are a few:

• The incomparable Sidney Bechet
• Classic Louis and Bing
• Vocal harmonies from the McGuire Sisters
• Guitar duet from Chet Atkins & Merle Travis
• Shuffling Rock 'n' Roll from Freddie Cannon
• and even ... Cha Cha from the Flippers
• and probably my favourite of these variants, a Joplinesque version by Harry Connick Jr

and for sheer joy:

Whoever wrote it, that's a song with some staying power. And in the end who did write it? Looking deeper we learn that Louis claimed "I wrote Muskrat Ramble. Ory named it. He gets the royalties. I don't talk about it.".  Who knows? There are even suggestions that it's based anyway on a Buddy Bolden tune called "The Old Cow Died and the Old Man Cried".   So maybe justice would not have been served by Babbette Ory winning her case after all.

P.S.

It seems the original "Gimme an F" chant was a little more innocuous: take a peek here.

Songs From Liquid Days

Everything connects.

There are some record albums that stand out as landmarks, and often these great albums involve inspired collaborations.  Notwithstanding the controversy around it, one such album is Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland.  Paul Simon's smart, sharp songwriting was imbued with the sounds of Africa, to make a set of songs that has stood and will continue to stand the test of time.  One of the contributors to that sound was the great guitarist, Ray Phiri, as heard on this live performance of Call Me Al.  Three years later in 1989 Ray also appeared on another landmark album, Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels: listen for that characteristic African guitar on The Monkey's Paw.

I delight in discovering these little connections, I smile that Ray Phiri worked with these two artists so strongly associated with New York.  And we can start playing a kind of "Six Degrees of Separation" game, chaining from one artist to another.   So let's see where this leads us, and pick out some favourite pieces of music along the way.

So ... Laurie Anderson is married to Lou Reed (and they worked together from time to time e.g. on this), Apart from Lou Reed's solo masterpieces (I can't omit this astonishing track from Magic and Loss), he connects us to the Velvet Underground (Sweet Jane could lead us to Cowboy Junkies if we wanted to go that route), and connects to Andy Warhol ... but we can't follow all the leads.

Right: so Laurie Anderson worked with Brian Eno on the album Bright Red: listen to her lyricism matched to Eno's precision in Poison.  And Eno? well Eno seems to have worked with everyone.  From Roxy Music to U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Robert Fripp of King Crimson, and including, by the by, an album with John Cale, ex-Velvet Underground.

Taking just a couple of these threads, Eno's collaboration with Talking Heads frontman David  Byrne gave us the astonishing and influential album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, while his work with David Bowie on the album Low was picked up by Philip Glass and turned into the Low Symphony.  Philip Glass wrote a soundtrack to the silent movie Dracula, which was recorded by the Kronos Quartet, who have also done an Africa-inspired album, Pieces of Africa.  (The Kronos Quartet would be another very fruitful branching point for launching new explorations.)

Now let's pick up one thread again from our starting point: one of the vocalists on Graceland was Linda Ronstadt, in Under African Skies.

We have the pieces in place ... and now, like a magician, I reveal from under my cloak, the one that ties all together:  Songs from Liquid Days, an album with Philip Glass's name on the sleeve, but ...

• Paul Simon wrote the lyrics for Changing Opinion, 
• David Byrne for Open the Kingdom, 
• Laurie Anderson for the sublime Forgetting, 
• which was sung by Linda Ronstadt, 
• and performed by the Kronos Quartet.
• ... oh and Suzanne Vega is in there too. She did lyrics for Freezing...  

A landmark album indeed.

Everything connects.  I love it.

I Hear My Train A-Coming

Nothing deeply profound here, no big questions, just one small one: why are there so many great songs about trains?

Take Jimi Hendrix waiting acoustically on the platform here, determined to make it big.  And he's not alone in singing on the station platform.  Jimi's leaving home, but when Paul Simon wrote his tune he was Homeward Bound, and these folk from Belgrade are making a return visit back home on a Sentimental Journey (stick with it, some lovely performances there).

Perhaps that's part of the answer: the emotional journey.  For the songwriter scratching for a theme, the train is a natural choice: a big journey that marks a transition in life, an emotional peg on which the song can be hung. In fact as Paul Simon explains in Train in the Distance, it's all about the hope that comes with a journey, real or imagined: "The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains". (Aside - there is no-one quite like Paul Simon for writing literate lyrics that look like prose but still work as song).

Then, for some train songs it's all about the rhythm: Choo choo ch'boogie - "I love to hear the rhythm of the clicketty clack". How about Chattanooga Choo choo, not to mention the shuffling madness of Locomotive Breath, or the skiffling Rock Island Line?

Hmm, did I hear a train whistle in that?  It's not the only song to want to emulate that evocative sound.  I'd include in my count, Night Train, Take the A Train, and many more. 

But of all these train songs, for my money, there is none more moving or expressive than Hugh Masekela's Stimela.  It has it all: the emotional journey, the rhythm, and a very fine train whistle.  

Nina Simone: Little Girl Blue

No other place to start but here: My Baby Just Cares For Me.  Hearing this for the first time was my introduction to the work of Nina Simone.   Go on, watch it through to the end.  And then once more if you like, I can wait.  Seeing this perfectly crafted little movie I too wanted to watch it over and over again.   Knowing a little more about music now, I can feel/hear the structure of it, how the solo matches the tune in length, tempo, and chord progression.  Knowing more, helps me understand more.

I can also marvel at how Nina crafts her solo: how she builds up from very, very simple phrases, increasing in complexity with complete precision and assurance until it feels like she is about to run out of road, but in in the nick of time she pulls up and returns to the simplicity.  Not once, but twice in that very short solo.  A trivial song? - yes, maybe - but done with poise and panache: beautifully sung and craftily performed.


Now look at/listen to this one: Love Me or Leave Me.  Such intensity - such a look!.  She plays with great precision, and I just love how that solo very soon morphs into something with very clear baroque influences, almost Bach-like.  


Here's a contrast: Summertime.  I am in awe of her jazz musical sensibilities here.  This is just so delicately judged, dark, almost hypnotic.  Some people see "Summertime" as an optimistic piece: I don't - I see it as ironic, the reassuring lyrics undermined by the melancholy melody.  As Nina Simone plays it, her piano work allows me to feel the atmospheric heaviness of the building up of a summer storm: even summertime has its dangers.


And perhaps this is the key to why I find her music so fascinating.  There is a sense of depth there, of complexity - even in the simple tune we started with, the frivolity of the tune is tackled with complete professionalism.  In other tunes there is a sense of the strength born of survival, the joy that comes from pain endured:

Try this: Feeling Good.  "It's a new dawn / it's a new day / it's a new life for me ... and I'm feeling good".  Of course these are optimistic words, but her voice doesn't quite tell the same story - it's a voice that has just been through a trial:  it's a new life because the old one has had to be left behind ...

This blog is about the music, but of course Nina Simone was also very involved in the civil rights movement: how could she not have been, being Young, Gifted and Black at that time and place?


What engages me especially in her music is that throughout all these tunes, whatever the style, there is evidence of an intensity, an intelligence, a willingness to tackle everything, even playfulness, with complete seriousness of intent: Like these: Ain't Got No ...,  How it Feels to be Free and of course Little Girl Blue

Inspiring stuff: may it never be forgotten.

PS. And then I found this and this: "it's meant for a queen, and I am a queen."  Yes indeed.

Music for Helicopter Pilots

This is about a change in perspective: a shift in how I see the world. Maybe it's just about getting older, but actually this shift was triggered by my reawakened interest in music. Some of these ideas are still slippery in my mind but I'll see if I can catch one or two and lay them before you. Tell you what, here is something to listen to while you read: Nothing Really Blue. Take the tempo down a little.

A couple of years ago I did a lot of reading around the history of jazz (this recommended). What really struck me was how quickly things were moving at the start of the 20th century. The first few decades of jazz saw the music develop hugely.  And that early jazz period which had seemed so far away, so sepia-tinted, suddenly seemed accessible to me, available for me to explore. I was starting to play some of these tunes: no longer were they museum pieces, but living things.  And with services like youtube and spotify, that music had become so easy to find and hear.

Sometimes we categorise ourselves too easily: things are "before my time", or "not my style". Musically,I had by and large stayed locked in what I learned to like in childhood and young adulthood. Now I was discovering music from before my time, and finding it to be fresh and inspirational. My horizons were broadening: as if I were going up in a helicopter, able to see how my familiar territory fitted within a larger landscape.

Our Love is Here to Stay suggests: "The radio and the telephone / And the movies that we know / May just be passing fancies / And in time may go". Well even if those then-newfangled gadgets have transformed out of all recognition, the ideas of them have certainly stuck around. Some things are passing fancies, but some things endure.  I love my Android smartphone that gives me all the backing tracks I could want,: but my sax of bronze and leather and cane is far more satisfying as an object, and will endure far longer. And increasingly the things that will endure should be where my attention is focused.

I know that these are ideas I will keep returning to.

For me, the music of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra has this quality of wide horizons. Their music is unmistakably their own, but it has echoes of many cultures, and many times.  It feels somehow universal, timeless, as in Perpetuum Mobile, Air a Danser and Music for a Found Harmonium. Now the PCO has been reborn as plain "Penguin Cafe": note the comment someone made on That, Not That: "I suppose the Penguin Cafe is a music that can last for ever." I suppose it can.


And the title of this blog entry? Enjoy Music for Helicopter Pilots.