The Festive Five (2012) - Christmas for Suckers

Please go here to find the following Christmas songs.

Deck Us All with Boston Charlie - Lambert, Hendricks & Ross

Grateful for Xmas - Hayes Carll

I Don’t Believe In Christmas - The Sonics

Jingle Bells - Leo Watson

Merry Xmas You Suckers - Paddy Roberts

This page is no longer updated. *Sniffs*

Evocations of the Dance IV: Crossovers: When Highbrow Went Lowbrow, When Lowbrow Went Highbrow (1)

http://www.jazzstudiesonline.org/files/Jazz%20as%20Decal.pdf

Fair warning: this is an exercise in false dichotomies – jazz and classical music in the twentieth century were often feeding off similar roots. But my key contention is that even now, long after Gunther Schuller’s ‘Third Stream’, the phenomenon that is the appeal of ‘World Music’, and the fusion of everything that isn’t bolted down (to mix a metaphor), we still have a sense of what is jazz and what is classical music.

It could be borrowings of melodic, harmonic or rhythmic qualities, or it could be the tendency of jazz musicians to favour more complex harmonies or to otherwise show their allegiance to the avant garde, which seems to me more of a highbrow borrowing from the classical music world than an indigenous jazz trait.

So, the following list of tracks represent a slightly selective history of the confluence of jazz tracks with classical elements and classical tracks with a jazz influence.

I want this list to be an organic thing. If you can suggest any tracks I’ve neglected, please leave a comment.

Late 19th & Early 20th Century

 

Year	The Jazz Side Of Things	The Classical Side Of Things
1869		Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor (Brahms, 1869) - Yehudi Menuhin, p. Adolph Baller - 1947
1902	On Emancipation Day (from In Dahomey, Will Marion Cook & Paul Lawrence Dunbar) - Len Spencer, banjo Vess L. Ossman - 1902
1903	I'm A Jonah Man (from In Dahomey, Will Marion Cook & Paul Lawrence Dunbar) - Arthur Collins - 1903
1904	Smoky Mokes (Cakewalk) - Peerless Orchestra - 1904	Allegro Marcato (Three Pieces) (Frank Bridge, 1904) - Phantasie Quartet - 1994
1905		Bethena (Concert Waltz) (Scott Joplin, 1905) - Joshua Rifkin - 1970
1906		Central Park in the Dark (Ives, 1906) - Vladimir Cherniavsky & the Polymusic Chamber Orchestra - 1951
1908		Golliwogg’s Cakewalk (Debussy, 1908) - Sergei Rachmaninov - 1921
1909		In Dahomey (Cakewalk Smasher) (Percy Grainger, 1909) - Marc-Andre Hamelin - 1996
1910	Dere was a man (from Treemonisha, Scott Joplin, 1910) - Gunther Schuller - 1976
1911		Polka de W.R. for piano in A flat major (Behr arr. Rachmaninov, 1911) - Sergei Rachmaninov - 1929
1914	Swing Along (Will Marion Cook) - The Afro-American Folk Singers - 1914
	Castle House Rag (James Reese Europe) - Europe’s Society Orchestra - 1914
1915		Chinese Blues (1915) - Sousa's Band - 1916
1916	That Funny Jas Band from Dixieland (Edison, first recording) - Collins and Harlan - 1916
1917	That Funny Jas Band from Dixieland (Victor, second recording) - Collins and Harlan - 1917	Rag-time du paquebot (edited) (from Parade, Erik Satie, 1917) - p. Georges Auric & Frances Poulenc - 1937
	Livery Stable Blues - The Original Dixieland Jass Band - 1917
1918		Rag-Time (Stravinsky, 1918) - Marcelle Meyer - 1925
1919	Rose Room - Art Hickman’s Orchestra - 1919	Piano Rag Music (Stravinsky, 1919) - Stravinsky - 1938

Download Part 1: 1800-1909 here.

Download Part 2: 1910-1919 here.

Danby and the Sparrows’ Nest – Historic Rotherhithe Organ – Nicholas Danby (1960-1970)

Two organ pieces by English composers of different eras. If you like the sound of an eighteenth-century English organ untainted by German influence, this will be your sort of thing.

Gramophone, again, is quite helpful here:

Noel Mander’s sympathetic restoration ten years ago in no way changed its tonal qualities, and it remains an instrument of great historic interest and beauty. The trumpet is quite as good as any continental reeds of the period, although completely English in treatment; the cremona has an authentic krummhorn flavour. The diapason chorus is wonderfully full, clear and ringing, and Cecil Clutton believes it to be one of the finest to be heard in London. The cornet is a splendid specimen: a five rank solo stop consisting of a stopped eight-foot rank, principal twelfth, fifteenth and seventeenth, with a compass from middle C upwards.

Oh, OK, that meant almost nothing to me, but here is one detail that does: if you listen carefully, in the quieter passages of the Fantasia you can hear the tweeting of nesting sparrows. These sparrows were immune to the efforts of the recording engineers, and so remain a part of this recording, as they should.

Fantasia for Double Organ (Orlando Gibbons) (1583-1625)

Air & Gavotte (Samuel Wesley) (1766-1873)

The Voice of the Iron Lady

After watching The Iron Lady, about which I suppose my feelings are about as mixed as they are about Thatcher herself, I was almost entirely consumed by one conviction: that hers is the most recognisable voice ever in British politics (no doubt partly because she is still probably the most discussed – and most polarising – woman in the Western world).

During the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, Wendy Richard
was a frequent and conspicuous supporter of Thatcher's policies and accomplishments.

So it’s no surprise that the scene that most intrigued me is a relatively minor one where she undergoes vocal training to ‘feminise’ her voice. Now, I’ve read that a recording of one such session used to be in circulation among journos, but I’ve never heard it. Here’s an illustration of the difference. According to Max Atkinson (in Our Masters’ Voices)

She achieved a reduction in pitch of 46 Hz, a figure which is almost half the average difference in pitch between male and female voices.

One record that made excellent use of Thatcher’s distinctive voice was this Pete Harman-produced tune from 1991, which apparently reached No. 10 in the 12” charts (sounds apocryphal to me, but I’m sure I could find out if I could be bothered).

Maggie’s Last Party – V.I.M.

I had a go at doing a mix using an interview with her myself. It’s a dystopian tale that also features little Prince and the theme from Are You Being Served? You can listen to it here.

An Interview with June Honri about ‘Working the Halls’

(This post complements my post on Peter Honri’s book Working the Halls.

You might want to read that first!)

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You may remember my post in October about Peter Honri’s book Working the Halls. I was so impressed by the book and the accompanying flexidisc that I felt that rare desire Holden Caulfield talks about in Catcher in the Rye to call up the author. To that end I contacted the Honris and managed to speak to June Honri, Peter’s wife, later that month to ask her about the circumstances under which the book was written.

At first when I realised it was Peter’s wife I was to speak to, I must admit I feared the worst, but June soon explained that she was speaking on Peter’s behalf because he sadly now has Alzheimer’s disease. However, I found June to be quite the raconteur, with a disarmingly youthful voice – indeed, very soon into our conversation she explained that people who assumed she is younger than she is were sometimes a bit ‘offhand’ with her!

MUSIC MAKES ME: Hello June! I really wanted to ask about Working the Halls. The book is unusual in coming with a ‘gift record’ – I think they call them flexidiscs. [You can listen to it here.]

JUNE: Oh, you’re lucky. You’ve got the original one. It was just done for the book. You’re very lucky to get one with the record intact. Where did you get it?

MMM: I think in a second-hand bookshop in Whitby.

J: In Whitby! Oh, well done!

MMM: I don’t think I realised it had the record in it until I’d finished reading it! And it seems to me an invaluable part of the book. Was it always a part of the book?

J: Yes. It was done through a Dutch publisher. Peter had ended up writing a show for Farnham Castle Theatre Music Hall. The next day after the opening night the phone rang about five o’clock in the evening – when you’ve got three children and you’re doing tea, not a very convenient time – and a Dutch voice, which I just about managed to understand, asked me could Peter write a book about music hall? So I said ‘Yes,’ straight away. And then he said, ‘Could he do it in eight weeks?’ and I said ‘Yes.’ So that book was written in eight weeks. It took over the entire house.

MMM: Really? Eight weeks?

J: He’d already done a lot of research in piecing it together, you see.

MMM: Yes. I can see that. To me, it’s like a brilliant scrapbook. Now, I have to confess I haven’t read any of Peter’s other books.

J: You’d like Music Hall Warriors [The full title is Music Hall Warriors: A History of the Variety Artistes Federation 1906-1967].

MMM: Thanks for the recommendation! Now, there is a passage later in the book where Peter speculates about the Arts Council officially recognising music hall as a part of the living arts. Did anything ever come of that?

J: I couldn’t tell you about that, but if you read Music Hall Warriors you’ll find the Variety Artistes Federation could be very awkward fellows! And Wilton’s Music Hall – which is a fictitious diary of its owner John Wilton. [Oddly enough, Wilton’s Music Hall was featured in a Michael Grade documentary which aired while we were speaking. It’s called The Story of Music Hall with Michael Grade]

MMM: How did the Spike Milligan preface, or ‘Overture’, come about?

J: I think through Wilton’s Music Hall. But Peter was a very well known performer in the West End, anyway, so possibly through Equity.

MMM: The book is very positive about the halls, with none of the doom and gloom about the death of a way of life. In fact, Peter appeared in a production of Beyond the Fringe in 1966, a show often said to be the death-knell of variety. Is it an age that we’ve lost?

J: No… Peter’s idea was that music hall is present-day. Today’s top-liners are today’s music hall. The likes of Elton John are the present-day music hall.

MMM: Some would argue that some modern talent shows, like Britain’s Got Talent, recapture the spirit of the halls. What do you think? Do you watch the show?

J: We have occasionally. But there are other programmes we happen to like! But again, we do see that as present-day music hall. They would be the Marie Lloyds of the present day.

MMM: Quite right. Peter was a Shakespearean too, which reminds me that the Music Hall was not just about sentiment and cheap gags. In particular, in the book, Percy’s show Concordia comes across as being a real spectacular.

J: Yes; full of innovations.

MMM: And did you meet Percy [Peter’s grandfather] yourself?

J: No. But I knew Grandma and his wife – and, also, I was approved of by the family up in Blackpool!

MMM: Of course! Now, the accordion – or the concertina – is quite a tough instrument, isn’t it?

J: It is, yes.

MMM: My granddad played the accordion up until very recently. Does Peter still play?

J: He does, yes. Unfortunately, because of the Alzheimer’s, he still thinks he should be doing a show. So I have to ration the concertina, because it can get a bit over the top – Peter standing at the front door wanting to go out with it!

MMM: I’m glad to hear he still plays, though! It’s been really nice to chat to you and I wish you and Peter well for the future.

J: Thanks. And don’t forget to keep your eye out for a copy of Music Hall Warriors! [Available from Greenwich Exchange]

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I would also like to thank Whitchurch Arts for making this interview possible, as well as everything they have done to recognise the Honris’ achievements.

Timbre! Unusual Instrumentation Playlist - Vol. I

Timbre, as Frank Zappa says in the Real Frank Zappa Book, is everything. But it’s also confusing. To a Westerner, the sitar eternally signifies the mysterious allure of the East, while – as Talvin Singh once pointed out – ‘in Bombay, an electric guitar is exotic’. Why is this?

ABOVE: A rare and dangerous example of the urethra flute.

This playlist argues that context, rather than the instrument itself, is the key. I hope to demonstrate this by putting fifteen instruments in an unexpected context.

It’s a playlist that plunges into the world of exotic tones with a banjo in one hand and an ocarina in the other, and comes out the other side with a sore head, yodelling.

It would be doing the merely obvious
to include such gimmicky instruments
as the trapezoidal harp (ABOVE).

I have deliberately steered clear of the more familiar examples of instruments being used in an unusual context. Much as I love the sitar on the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood, or Jethro Tull’s use of rock flute, and the whole of the Tubular Bells album, I’m looking here for juxtapositions of timbre that still have the power to surprise.

I hope you find yourself marvelling at the sound of a violin screeching across a dub track, or a sousaphone powering an rock tune, as much as I did.

Jungle Flute – Don Tracy & the Voodoo Family

Flute

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(Dance to the Music of) The Ocarina – Irving Berlin

Ocarina

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The Twisted Nerve – Bernard Hermann

Harp

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Jan Pahechan ho – Mohammed Rafi

Electric guitar

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Got a Match – Frank Gallop

Harpsichord

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I Touch Myself – Rolf Harris

Wobble board

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A Day In The Life – The Koto Ensemble

Koto

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K.G.’s Half Way Tree – Augustus Pablo & The Simplicity People

Violin

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Yaman (The Colonel’s Lady) – The Indo-British Ensemble

Sitar

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Donna Lee – Tom Slavicek

Banjo

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Prodigy Medley – The Banana Sessions

Sousaphone

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Take Five – Cayman Islands Steel Pan Jazz Trio

Steel pans

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Bag’s Groove – Leon Thomas

The yodel

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Oboe Mambo – Machito And His Afro-Cuban Orchestra

Oboe

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It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ’N’ Roll) – AC/DC

Bagpipes

Timbre! Unusual Instrumentation Podcast – Vol. I

 
If you can suggest any more for the next playlist, please leave a comment or contact me.

Oh, and have a happy new year!

Two Visuals: The Contents of Music Makes Me, Represented Visually

The Venn diagram shows the overlap of the different tags which accompany each post on the site; the bar graph shows how many posts there are under each tag.

Click on either pic to be taken to a list of all the mp3-related posts. It makes it a lot easier to search for content.

The Festive Five (2011) - A Garden Full of Sensi

Oh, look what Santa brought! Yes, everything from the sentimental to the chemically-enchanced is there, right there under the tree! And what’s that? A DMCA takedown notice? Oh, Santa, you shouldn’t have!

Twelve Days Of Christmas - Peter Brogs

“On the first day of Christmas my Jah Jah gave to me/ A garden full of sensi.” And what says ‘Christmas’ like highly potent cannabis plants?

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Swingin’ Them Jingle Bells - Fats Waller

The wonderful thing about Waller is that every record is a chance for a party, so a novelty record by him swings as hard as Twelfth Street Rag.

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Sleigh Ride - The Avalanches

The Avalanches recreate the feeling of a good sleigh ride, but with more acid involved.

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God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Jimmy Smith

I defy you to find a record where such an atmosphere of pomp and circumstance dissolves so blithely into utter coolness.

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Please Come Home for Christmas - The Platters

This is an incredibly short song that conjures up images of cardigan-clad crooners — until the surprisingly soulful chorus hits you.

Not had enough? Here is the link to last year’s Festive Five, subtitled Allen Ginsburg’s Dreams. With that you can make a less alliterative Festive Ten!

And if that doesn’t whet your appetite for Christmas-themed records, check out George Cole’s Christmas Record – What Are We Gonna Get For ’Er Indoors?

Links of the Month - November 2011

Very much indulging in shellac and that sort of thing this month: a reminder that there are many, many good blogs on 78s at the moment.

Dark Sweets - Soothing Sounds of Shellac for a Long Winter At the top of my list is this delicious compilation of obscure 78s. Even the cassette tape cover art is spot on, in an anachronistic kind of way.

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Symphonies on American Odeon A 1921 recording of Schubert’s 8th Symphony conducted by Eduard Mörike. (The 8th is the Unfinished, for those among us who love classical music but can’t count.)

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Thomas Mann’s Top 12 78rpm Records Alex Ross looks at the Death in Venice and Magic Mountain author’s pick of classical records.

Links of the Month - October 2011

Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition A selection of photographs created using a microscope. The objects are sometimes shown 2000 times their original size.

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Bizarre Love Triangle – Frente Lovely cover of an already beautiful song. The soaring melody is sung against guitar arpeggios.

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The Composer as Accompanist This site posts some astounding classical 78s, including a solo piano piece by John Ireland. The Shellackophile have some really nice pieces.

Finnegans Wake (James Joyce) - Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack (1959)

I’m going to do something which betrays the philistine in me and post up two extracts from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, recorded nearly thirty years after they were written. Philistine because I must admit I haven’t read the book, but these recordings are quite captivating in themselves, as is the link to Joyce reading from Anna Livia Plurabelle.

The cover of Nino Frank’s translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle (1938)

A Concert-in-a Turn - The Honris (Narrated by Peter Honri) (1974)

This post gives those with an interest in the history of music hall a chance to sample a wonderful book about the remarkable Honri family. It’s called Working the Halls by Peter Honri. Like many such books on the subject, it’s now out of print, but this post is a chance for you to read a few excerpts and listen to tracks from the accompanying flexidisc, called Concert-in-a Turn.

ABOVE: Sickert’s Old-Fashioned Mother Of Mine, a portrait of Talbot O’Farrell, in etching and pastel form, respectively.

It features a loving preface (or ‘Overture’) by Spike Milligan which laments the fact that “a few etchings and paintings by Sickert are the only colourful evidence we have of a great age”, a period “that began with gas-lit stages and ended in the tense days before World War II”.

Sickert’s Brighton Pierrots

The Billy Eckstine Transition – Can Crooners Change?

A singer who made the transition from jazz crooner to funk-edged soul singer (on Stax records, no less) completely plausible.

Four tracks will illustrate his mastery of both musical forms:

An Evening With Alistair Cooke (1955)

The great broadcaster made only a few vinyl recordings, but they are all fabulous. I have featured one of his spoken word records previously: Talk About America.

This LP, however, features him at the piano, whistling, singing and telling stories. I realise that to the youngsters of today, that sounds almost insane. They let him do this? Why didn’t someone sedate him, send him to a nursing home or put him on a stairlift?

There is even a wonderful moment where he demonstrates, with impish glee, the results of an experiment in multi-tracking his own voice.

The album tells a coherent narrative, so is perhaps best listened right through, but once you’ve done that you’ll keep coming back to many of these tracks for more.

Wanda Landowska - A Treasury of Harpsichord Music (RCA Victor)

From a beautiful set of 78s showcasing the keyboard works of classical composers.

Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-Flat

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Sonata in D (Scarlatti)

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Sonata in Dm (Scarlatti)

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La Dauphine (Rameau)

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Rondo in D (Mozart)

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Turkish March (Mozart) - Menuetto in D

The quality varies from disc to disc, but the playing renders this a venial sin.

The Astonishing Sound of the CORDOVOX - Mike Timoney (1971)

I’m a big fan of accordions, so I knew I had to have this. I was nonetheless perturbed by a perusal of the liner notes:

Many musicians who’ve gone over to electronics have tended to use them for either novelty or bizarre effects. Not so Mike Timoney; he displays restraint, discretion and impeccable taste.

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you can imagine how my heart sank.

Turns out Timoney is an accordion prodigy who, when he saw this Leslie-speaker-clad beast, had to have one — at a cost of over £2,000.

I mean, look at some of this kit:
The album’s got some weird programming (‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ AND ‘Je T’aime’ on the same record?), but two tracks amused me enough to rip and here they are:

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (Theme)

Wheels

Poor Folk: The Old Sow and Ilkla Moor Baht 'At – Traditionals on 78

While it might produce some great song collectors, England has a frustratingly poor record when it comes to actually recording our own folk songs. English-born recordists such as Hugh Tracey and even the great Cecil Sharp often went further afield for their field recordings (to Southern and Central Africa and north America, respectively).

The trend can be seen in America too (Native American songs were recorded as early as 1890), but it is a fact that many of the earliest wax cylinders that could be considered folk music fall into the ethnographic category, with English recordists often casting their nets beyond Europe.

Of course, we have these recordists to thank for capturing on shellac many cultures which have since vanished, but that surprisingly few people found home-grown folk music worth recording is a constant surprise to me.

Leslie Sarony	Albert Richardson

All this is a preamble to these curious recordings. Whenever English singers or composers touch ‘folk’ material, there is often a sense of condescension there; you can be fairly sure the material will either be popularised (embellished with fashionable harmonies or Bowlderised for crudities) or classicised (by being notated and sung by trained singers – the Vaughan Williams approach) in some way.

These recordings are interesting in trying to deal more honestly with their material. They are not field recordings, so they should not be judged as such. But I would say that Richardson’s ‘Old Sow’ is one of the bravest and most successful attempts to produce a folk recording in a studio setting ever captured on shellac.

The Old Sow - Leslie Sarony (and male vocal choir)

This is the version of the song included on compilations such as Vintage Children’s Favourites 1926-1959. It’s given a little tarting up, with a Gilbert & Sullivan-style chorus bookending the song (which works better on Ilkla Moor Baht ’At, below). It rather irritates me, though, that Sarony fails to make some of the lines scan.

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The Old Sow - Albert Richardson, bass (a capella)

In 1929 Zonophone recorded an unaccompanied rendition of the song by a young sexton whose jobs at the time included “bell-ringing, grave-digging and gardening for the Rector”. The song had been around for at least a century, a version of this song dating back to a broadside of 1828. Richardson later claimed that the recording company had refused to include one stanza that began, “Now, these little pigs shit in the farmer’s hat”.

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On Ilkla Moor Baht ’At - Leslie Sarony (and male vocal choir)

Rather a reversal of the old phrase about the devil not having the best tunes, here is an example of a hymn (‘Cranbrook’ by Thomas Clarke) with secular lyrics. I’m rather dubious about Sarony’s Yorkshire accent, but the Gramophone review of 1934 does credit him for his clarity: “for the first time I have heard the words of this classic”.

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Buttercup Joe - Albert Richardson, bass (with piano accompaniment)

Here Richardson sings another folksy song (it has more of an air of music hall parody of folk music) with earthy subject matter. I think the piano is unnecessary, and creates a slightly odd image of a rustic figure standing by a grand piano at odds with the song’s message.

Nat Cole - Wild is Love (1960)

Cole experiments here in an LP of love songs by Ray Rasch and Dotty Wayne tied together by a narrative concerning the vicissitudes of love. I think it would have made a fantastic one-man show. There are some spoken word interludes helping to tie the tracks together, and these may well be my favourite parts.

Beggar for the Blues

Clearly the stand-out track. A stripped-down 6/8 pulses throughout while Cole squeezes everything out of those portamento notes (When love pulls me iiiiiiiiin...).

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Pick-Up

I like this as an example of a jazz carpe diem. Cole’s pitch-perfect sleaziness is quite a contrast with the next track.

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Hold Her Tight

This is an example of the spoken word interludes that punctuate the album. Cole has got such a trustworthy voice that what could be interminably cheesy sounds genuine.

A Brass Band Swinging - Lansdowne Jazz Series (rec. engineer Joe Meek) (1959)

“They’re a brass band that play jazz,” are words that make any sane jazz addict blanch in trepidation. But not me.

Idly reading the sleevenotes, I spotted Joe Meek was the recording engineer (at the time the real names on this record would have been Kenny Baker and John Lusher), and I wondered if Meek’s engineering talents had been praised by any contemporary magazines. (I strongly suspected not: the sound was a little brash for my liking.) To my surprise, I found a reference in Gramophone magazine’s archives. The reviewer – a certain C.F. – had this to say:

Peggy Lee Sings The Man I Love (Arr. Riddle, Cond. Sinatra)

Featuring an orchestra conducted by Sinatra. And he does a good job. This post is no longer displayed here. You can find it here now.