Another Doomed Tragic Figure

There's quite the facination with the "live fast, die young" artist, but there's even more allure to the "tortured genius, unknown poet, dead too young artist" (though my attempt at defining the marketing aspect is dreadful!) Janis, Jimi, Jim Morrison -- there's your first example, Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley are in the second, sensitive camp (and I think part of Kurt Cobain's appeal is that he could stand in both). Add Judee Sill to the list: jail time, junkie time, Jesus time -- she did it all. 2 wonderful but woefully unknown albums, an accident that saw her slide back into illegal pain relief, and then the accidental OD. Her two albums are suffused with Catholic/gospel chords and metaphors, coupled with a laconic drawl and startingly inventive melodic meandering. Reissued and rediscovered on a small scale, she really is worth finding. I put her away for a while (there is a whiff of mothball that keeps her of her time), but a recent re-listening reminded me of our loss and her great gifts.

I Go Ape! (A Real Song)

Exotica borrows/mutates native musics, adds a truckload of kitsch, and sends it to America a Disney-fied jungle ride cartoon. Les Baxter, "Quiet Village", the whole tiki-lounge thing. The collection "Jungle Exotica" is loosely based on a Tarzan movie matinee version of Africa, but even there the theme falls apart and pretty soon it's just a collection of politically incorrect ethnic music parodies. Not that that's a bad thing. Think mutiple variations of "Tequila", honking sax and surf guitars, spiced up with the occasional fake bird call or bad imitation tribal grunt. What's great about this album is that there really are a couple of good songs buried here. The rest is fun in a junk food kind of way. Exotica was revived later as 'bachelor pad' music, and then there's the whole 'world music' thing to worry about, but this album is entertaining in its naive version of bandwagon-jumping.

No, not that one, the other one...

Fleetwood Mac: the name brings to mind billowy scarves, manic guitars, silky vocals, internal soap-opera strife and enough vinyl sold to roof a city. But there was an earlier FMac (actually, there were several editions of the band before mega-platinum status) -- but I'm thinking of the original Fleetwood Mac, blues band. No, really. While my wife still sings the praises of Mr. Clapton as the epitome of '60s/'70s era blues guitar, I place my pounds on Peter Green. Peter's had his share of rough times (at one point he dropped music altogether, became a gravedigger, and threatened a record company employee who attempted to deliver a royalty check) and his eventual return to music was as the ghost of the man who gave us "Albatross", "Oh Well" and "The Green Manalishi". So pick up on the early stuff, with one caveat: the box set is great, BUT you have to refer to the box booklet for the correct track info, since the CD sleeves just list the original tracks. But far worse is the fact that yes, you get studio chatter and false starts -- but you can't skip past them, they're all part of the same track. I enjoyed it once, but why do I have to hear 3 or 4 flubs before the full track commences?!?

White Sandy Beach

My first exposure to Israel Kamakawiwoole was a TV special some years back about contemporary Hawaiian music and its political/environmental aspects. With his former band The Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau, Iz performed "Hawaii '78", a version of which opens "Facing Future". Iz is most famous for his ubiquitous medley of "Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World". I never really liked that medley; for one thing, the sentiment of one song seemed the polar opposite of the other. And then there's "Take Me Home,Country Road" , a variation on the cover that Toots and the Maytals recorded, and the best argument for your CD player's 'skip' button. But reading the recently released book by Dan Kois (one of the best in the excellent 33 1/3 series) helped me put the dichotomy of "Rainbow/Wonderful" in perspective, and offered real insights into the plight of Native Hawaiians and Iz in particular. (I still skip right past "Country Road", though...)

The Snoqualmie/Seattle Connection (and it's not just rain)

Jesse Sykes is from the Pacific Northwest, with a voice like Dusty Springfield dragged through David Lynch Twin Peaks swamp-surf guitar muck, dipped in Sandy Denny's smoky patina, sometimes descending into Marianne Faithfull rasp. "Reckless Abandon" is from 2002, and that one has the Lynch/Badalamenti stamp. 2004's "Oh My Girl" moves from Lynch territory to an alt-country-ish Cowboy Junkies feel, narcotic, soporific -- nothing much even gets into mid-tempo. Yeah, your first reaction may be "Isn't this a little too artfully affected?" but she's got the talent to back it up.

Two Rites Don't Make a Left

In keeping with the season...I first heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) when my father brought home a box set of classical music for his college-credit night class. The early stuff I'd heard before, but the last LP or two -- Menotti's "The Medium" (sp-p-p-ooky!), Debussy, Copland -- and the first part of The Rite. Yikes! I can understand why Disney wanted this piece in "Fantasia" -- it is soundtrack writ large. So I imprinted the Pierre Boulez version -- dry, surgically precise (Stravinsky is not given to sweeping dramatically grand gestures). It was THE version. Now, you have to understand that this music caused quite the uproar when first presented -- Igor Stravinsky, classical music's Johnny Rotten. Much later I heard Gergiev's version: loud, boorish, the horns blat and the strings smear -- what IS this noise? Then I realized -- I've grown too comfortable with this music, and Gergiew rudely presents it as it must have sounded to that first audience. I still listen to the Boulez version, but Gergiev's is refreshing . (And watch the "Russian Ark" DVD for Gergiev's appearance as the conductor in the penultimate scene.)

A Short Soundtrack Rant Here

Is it that hard to choose the best music for a soundtrack? I'll just give a small example: travel shows. Isn't practically every piece of classical music in the public domain by now? How hard can it be to get it right, or at least, not glaringly wrong? Case in point: another 'travels through Britain' show, lovely shots of English countryside accompanied by...Vivaldi. He's ITALIAN -- could you not find ANY British composers? Or last night, watching Ken Burn's National Parks series, there was a sequence where the voice-over quote refers to the magnificent expanse as being worthy of Beethoven -- and what's playing during this segment? Aaron Copland's music for "Our Town". I love that music, warm, bucolic, aching in tenderness for small-town life, but not something that indicates the panoramic vistas of the West --- and didn't they hear the part about BEETHOVEN!!?! More examples to follow, I'm sorry to say...