Soul!

Okay, this is a must see. The series, Soul!, was produced by New York public television back in the 1970s. Each of the six episodes WNET has put on the web is a sixty minute concert by a great R&B or jazz group of the day. Earth, Wind, and Fire, Ashford and Simpson, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Max Roach and (best of all) a blistering episode with both Tito Puente and Willie Colon and their respective Orquestas. The sixty minute length really gives them time to stretch out. And of course, come for the music and stay for the dashikis and afros. I don't remember this show at all. Maybe it wasn't shown here in Austin. Public TV stations have always had their mix of local and national shows. For example, I don't think I've ever met anyone who wasn't born in Texas who remembers Carrascolendas, the little bilingual children's show our KLRU produced back in the day. 

Anyway, the six episodes of Soul! WNET has put on the net are each spectacular and the episode list suggests that there's more gold in the vault--Curtis Mayfield, The Delfonics, early Kool and the Gang, Herbie Hancock--the list goes on and on and hopefully the station will put more shows online or make them available in some other form. But for now, click for a consciousness raising trip back to the early seventies. 

Lukas Foss

Lukas Foss died last week. He probably wasn't much of a household name. Foss spent years as the conductor of the Buffalo Symphony Orhestra, where he championed and recorded a lot of 20th century music. I suspect a lot of composers' only commercial recordings--many for Naxos--were done by Foss. He himself was a composer of note. Like a lot of his contemporaries, his early work was very out there in terms of tonality or the lack thereof. As time went on, Fossapparently embraced more mainstream style, even writing an opera based on Twain's The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. 

Personally, I knew him from one piece. Years ago, and I have no idea why I bought it, I had a cassette (that's how long ago it was) of his Baroque Variations (1967). This was a clever little thing, very 60s, that consisted of three movements, each based on a classic composer of the period. So the first movement was "On a Handel Larghetto," the second "on a Scarlatti Sonata," and the third "On a Bach Prelude 'Phorion'." 

Baroque Variations is the sort of mid-century classical that feels old in newness, if that makes any sense. It sounds very time specific. Like a lot of science fiction, you could probably guess its creation date within a year or two. Foss took the scores of each one of these small classical works and sort of played with them. For instance, with the Handel, he went through and simply erased some of the notes. Writing that sounds ridiculous, but the result is that the music, which would normally gather a narrative drive isn't allowed to do so. It has a weird start and stop to it, the music seems to drift in and out. In the liner notes (remember those?), Foss said simply: "I composed the holes." 

The movement derived from the Bach is just outrageous. Again, the familiar underlying music is there, but it jitters in and out of the foreground, loud then soft, while all around it are out of place snaps and bangs of percussion instruments, an organ providing bottom at the end. The liner notes quote a New Yorker review of the original performance: "The thing reminded me of Marcel Duchamp's celebrated gesture of painting a mustache on Leonardo's 'Mona Lisa'. Shortly after that, Mr. Duchamp stopped creating art altogether and devoted himself to chess. A similar move by Mr. Foss might benefit the future of the art of music."

That's the sort of review you dream of getting. All I know is that I found Baroque Variations compelling. To the point that I still had the cassette years after I no longer had a cassette player and would think about it now and then hoping that it might come out on CD. As far as I can tell, it never did. About a month ago, I was thinking about the music, went on eBay and bought an old copy of the record. Baroque Variations is side 2. Side 1 and no doubt the big draw at the time was John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra. I got the record a day or so before reading that Foss had died.

You have no doubt been looking for a link to Baroque Variations or some of Foss' music. Sorry, I tried but I couldn't find any online. And I don't have one of those newfangled space age USB turntables that would let me create an audio clip. But to give you a taste of a similarly Duchampian piece of the era, here's a link for some of John Cage's 4'33''

East Bound and Down

Sad news that Jerry Reed has died. I thought about him just the other day. I was watching Hurricane Gustav coverage and somebody mentioned that the storm was heading over Thibodaux, Louisiana and I spent the next couple of minutes trying to figure out why I knew that town's name. The answer, I finally remembered, was Reed's great song Amos Moses ("about 45 minutes southeast of Thibodaux, Louisiana/lived a man named Doc Milsap and his pretty wife Hannah").

I'm not a huge country music fan, but Jerry Reed is some of the good stuff---one of those good natured artists that transcends genre. Besides having an incredibly distinctive voice, when I was growing up, Reed was one of the kings of the novelty song--Amos Moses, When You're Hot You're Hot, She Got the Goldmine (I Got The Shaft). Not to mention starring in Smokey and The Bandit (and stealing The Survivors out from under Robin Williams and Walter Matthau if you remember that obscure movie constantly shown on HBO in the 80s) .

Up Up Down Down Left Right . . .in B Flat

Take a look at this half time performance by Cal Berkeley in the fine "marching band too smart for its own good" tradition of Rice's MOB. My favorite band is still Texas' own Prairie View A&M Marching Band (The Storm!) but this here is undeniably good. I'm guessing it will be a cold day in hell before we see or hear something similarly witty from the Show Band of the Southwest.

PKD+Burt Bacharach=??

An article on the inevitable combination of Philip K. Dick, Dionne Warwick, and Burt Bacharach in this week's New York Times. Three great things that don't go together at all. There's an audio link to one of the songs to the left of the article---I don't think Prince has anything to worry about.

Tikhon Khrennikov

So this probably lies way out of this blog's normal subject matter, but oh well. I noticed Russian composer's Tikhon Khrennikov's obituary in the Times yesterday. I was shocked he was still alive. His main claim to fame today is that when Stalin needed a composer to ride herd over his fellows, Khrennikov took the job and most famously put his knife squarely in the middle of Dmitri Shostakovich's back. (I recommend Shostokovich's autobiography Testimony for a sense of what he went through; the man was lucky to survive). Khrennikov is a bit like the Russian version of American artists who named names to HUAC. So I should hold him in complete contempt, right? But here's the thing-----I love Khrennikov's music.
This performance of The Song of Drunken People is the only clip of his work I was able to find.