Value Village Find: Jennifer Warnes

This is a terrible collection, but I was desperate. My wife and I love both of Jennifer Warnes' Arista albums ("Jennifer Warnes" and "Shot Through the Heart"), and this collection cherry-picks from them, and adds a few soundtrack cuts. As with most 'best-of' collections, it's usually not. Sometimes it's just sloppy programming, and as someone in the music biz once explained to me, they still want you to buy the original albums, so a 'best-of' is missing some tracks on purpose.

Oh well. On to Jennifer Warnes. As I mentioned, she's done soundtrack work, and that's how most people know her, and that's how she wins Grammys. But Jennifer Warnes is one of probably 3 singers who can make me cry, just with the sound of her voice. (The other 2 are Paul Buchanan and June Tabor, but they have the added heft of tragic lyrics.) I hear something in Jennifer's voice that really wants to communicate something to me, and even some B material chokes me up because she sounds so sincere. "I have something I need to tell you, and I really want you to hear me."  The other day, I said to my wife "Let's listen to this song ("I'm Restless") and you walk me through the vocal tricks she uses." I'm sure there's actual terms for these techniques, but I'll just do my best to describe them. She employs the 'break' in her voice for sincerity, she'll swoop up an octave, she gets breathy on some words, or sings some bolder ala Laura Nyro -- but I want to be clear, these aren't tricks, but Jennifer's been quoted saying how much she tries to convey the meaning in the lyrics, and she's a superbly gifted singer who has an embarrassing array of tools she can use.

The 2 albums I mentioned are mired in the production sound popular at the time, and a later album like "The Hunter" is mired in different production tricks of its era. But I think I noticed something different about her later vocal style (and I have nothing to base this on except my own theory). She's done great work with Leonard Cohen over the years, and I wonder if she took a cue from Leonard's vocal approach. I don't think you could ever accuse Leonard of over-emoting, so maybe Jennifer tried stripping back her own approach. It's a Zen thing, I think. Her latest album (from 2007) was produced by her without the usual record company meddling, so I plan to track it down, and see if my theory proves correct. Whatever she does, I just hope she keeps on singing.

Finding New Music Part 2

While I was thinking about this post, I read the book pictured above. "Let's Talk About Love" is the title of a Celine Dion album that writer Carl Wilson totally hates, but has sold gazillions, so he resolves to find out where the disconnect is. What is 'taste', and why do you have such terrible taste? How does something I may find totally unlistenable find such a large audience ?  It was an eye (ear) opener for me, though the discussion of the sociology of culture towards the end made my brain hurt. But it was helpful as I thought about how to recommend music.

Here's the deal: I was all prepared to offer my suggestions about where to find new music, until I realized, that's where I go -- you may have a totally different agenda. Where to go? 

Many people hear new music on TV -- commercials, soundtracks to TV shows. YouTube is good, and so is (trade secret) the library. Physically, my library's CD collection is pretty mainstream; mostly current rap/country/pop (minus the copies that were stolen),  new music by established artists that peaked years ago (the 'safe bet'), Jazz? You may have a fighting chance. Classical?   Good luck -- like western paperbacks, it's a market that is shrinking as us old farts die off.

Streaming services? So far, Hoopla is a winner. Use your library card, download complete albums, listen for a week, and deep, deep catalog. How deep? "The Return of The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of", a fantastic collection of  -- no kidding -- 78's from  the 1920's. 

Many, many years ago, I first heard Miles Davis on a record borrowed from the library. That's also how I first heard Debussy, and Thomas Tallis, and the complete "Nutcracker". I try to encourage people to take a chance; if you don't like it, just return it. No harm, no foul. And don't just stick with "current" music -- 90% of music from ANY era is junk, so don't be afraid to listen to something 'old'. I figure, we now have literally a thousand years of music available to us. There's lots of exciting things out there to hear.

Finding New Music These Days, Part One

There was a fine New York Times article by Jennifer Finney Boylan titled "When Music Was Strange" (May 10 -- Google it, the link is way too long to type here). It's about how the search to find new ("strange") music has changed from 1975 when she was a teenager. (Her experience with the Miles Davis album "Bitches Brew" ?-- I'll talk about that in a later post. It won't be pretty.)

She, like a lot of us at that age, had similar avenues then to explore new music: the radio (FM, not AM), and friends in the know ("Hey, you have to hear this!") Independent record stores? Not yet. But now we have online music services that pretend to be your personal radio, programmed, as the Firesigns once said, "with your mind in mind". Did you like that last song? Here's one that sounds just like it! As Boylan says, it's "the musical equivalent of Fox News and MSNBC" -- a closed system with your own taste "reflected endlessly back". 

A lot of the music I enjoy, I liked immediately. But many of my favorites now weren't at first; they were too angular, too many rough edges, too...wrong. It takes work to listen past the familiar, to hear with different ears. Boylan mentions learning to love the difficult music of American classical composer Charles Ives (very much worth checking out  -- again, we'll talk later). Boylan suggests that the online streaming services would block this one -- too weird! -- and what a loss that would be.

I still listen to the radio: KING, KSER, CBC (there's good music to be found there, despite their best efforts to bury it under utter crap), but with the caveat that radio now plays a track without explaining "Yeah, great song, but the rest of the album, not so much..." Friends pass along recommendations, but many times, they're just echoing some magazine's "best of", and that's pretty dicey advice. Like Boylan, my son clues me in to what he's currently listening to, and I'd guess I like maybe 15%. Hey, it's HIS music, more power to him.

But I realized quite a long time ago that "new" means "new to me" -- it's new if I've never heard it before. I've been listening to a few collections of 78's -- yes, dusty shellac recorded in the '20s -- and there's truly great stuff there, including a track by Geeshy Wiley, recently profiled in ... the Sunday New York Times magazine! 

Part Two: Okay smarty, where DO I find new tunes, and not just rewarmed versions of songs I already like?

Terence Boylan? Never Heard of Him...

Working at a record store for a number of years had many advantages, one of which was exposure to way more artists that radio could ever play.

Today's example: Terence Boylan. You've probably never heard of him, and I only did because I got a promo copy of his first album. I liked it well enough, liked his second "Suzy" even better. After 1980, he fell off my radar, but he worked on film music and made demos on his own. "Terence Boylan" was released in 1999, and it includes most of his first album, half of his second, and 3 or 4 new songs that fit right in.

Many albums in the late 70s featured a lot of the same studio musicians and guest stars, so Little Feat started sounding like the Doobie Brothers who started sounding like Steely Dan. Terence Boylan drew from the same stock characters, but his songs always were a bit more East Coast Urban rather than Southern California Cosmic Cowboy. And I enjoyed his slightly more sophisticated lyrics. One of my favorites was referring to a college girl returning from summer vacation "brown as a banged-up peach". And then there's the one that quoted T.S. Eliot -- well, this English major was smitten.

 

I've been weeding my collection more earnestly lately; as I get older, I just don't have time for third-rate music.  Terence Boylan never made it out of the singer-songwriter ghetto, but I've always enjoyed his work, and I'm still finding new things in the production and musicianship. And one song features a Chevy Chase Fender Rhodes solo!

My first real introduction to Bluegrass

Like many of us, I probably first heard bluegrass on TV: "The Ballad of Jed Clampett", the theme song from "The Beverly Hillbillies". There was some bluegrass sprinkled throughout "The Andy Griffith Show", and then later the movies "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Deliverance". Once in a while on car trips, my wife and I would pick up cheapo cassettes from K-Mart from labels like Starday, King and Gusto featuring bluegrass (and trucker tunes!) So I'd heard bluegrass, but I didn't really hear it until I found "The Bluegrass Album" featuring a bluegrass super-group of younger performers like my man Tony Rice, Bobby Hicks, J.D. Crowe and Doyle Lawson. The songs were all traditional, a mix of Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt and others, along with a gospel song tossed into the mix.

After the success of the first (1981) album, many more followed (5 volumes?) and they naturally called themselves "The Bluegrass Album Band". Listening now with ears a little more travelled, the album sounds a bit homogenized -- nobody singing through their nose or scraping away drunkenly on fiddle -- and I miss the, shall we say, piquant nature of an Uncle Dave Macon or Gid Tanner. But they all are excellent musicians, playing at the top of their game in a traditional setting, with exceptional quality production and sound. This is the album where I went from a curious explorer to a committed fan. From here, it was onto the Skaggs & Rice album and many, many more in the days to follow. Thanks, guys!

RIP, Wayne Henderson

 

 

Wayne Henderson recently passed, so I pulled out "Scratch" by the Crusaders (Wayne, the trombone player, was the ostensible leader -- I guess -- I mean, on this live album, he introduces the other band members, so that makes him the boss, right?) I'm guessing the band was pretty tight-knit (what do I know?) only because musicians who played with them are introduced as "friends". The band is the band, anyone else is...not.

I probably already blogged about this album (sorry, my research team was busy), but I just wanted to give a shout out to Wayne. This live album is (as albums were then) about 40 minutes long, they come back for an encore after the 30 minute mark -- and then the last song, lasting almost 9 minutes, spends two-thirds of the time introducing the band members. Value for your dollar? Yes, yes, yes. Stomping intro ("Scratch") written by Wayne, a funky version of "Eleanor Rigby" (no, really), "Hard Times", which sounds like the Saturday Night Live outro music, and "So Far Away", a shorter version than the studio version but features the l-o-n-g l--o--n--g held note (circular breathing?) that totally excites the audience (and that's what you want in a live album, right?)

I love the Crusaders, at least the first 4 that I own (I can't vouch for the cross-over years that followed), but those first 4 albums cemented a musical relationship for me, and for that, I thank Wayne Henderson. I love jazz trombone because of you, and that's a big debt. Scratch daddy, indeed      

New Age (Yeah, I Know...)

 

 

There was a time, dear reader, when the term "new age" hadn't been sticker-slapped over every piano solo/harp/synthesizer/flute/cello/ or any-combinations-thereof album, because it still actually referred to a fairly specific type of music, found in health food stores and little catalogs featuring incense, LPs and cassettes. Then the Windham Hill label exploded, and anyone who could noodle aimlessly on piano or guitar suddenly was releasing albums by the truckload. Any music considered soothing or soporific was labeled "new age", and even though Windham Hill honcho Will Ackerman resisted the label, too late -- it was now a Godzilla-sized marketing ploy.

I like many of Windham Hill's original artists, but a lot of the music seemed mournful and lethargic, like all the joy and spark had been drained out. The weird thing is, a lot of "real" new age music is sparkly, relaxing and joyful. Heck, a lot of Iasos' music sounds like Tinkerbell's yoga class.

Iasos also loves the l-o-n-g fadeout, and Aeoliah favors long forms too, more like organ drones or Eno's ambient pieces, but where Eno's music can be cool and contemplative, Aeoliah's is more warm and soothing. It's great music to go to sleep to, and I mean that as a compliment!

"Structures from Silence" is an early Steve Roach album, and it's basically Side One of Eno's "Discreet Music", except where Eno's piece is as much process as it is composition, "Structures" feels more random and floating, though I suspect the process is similar.

Some "artists" hit while the iron was hot, then went off to do other hack work, while some of the originals kept plowing the same row. I assumed someone like Iasos occupied his own space out of touch with the rest of the world, so I was pleasantly surprised to see his recent career overview CD reviewed in a British rock magazine. Seems that all sorts of contemporary British bands cite Iasos as an influence and an inspiration. Who would have guessed?