Crowd­ed House has a tremen­dous per­sonal sig­nif­i­cance for me. I have not had many days of undi­luted hap­pi­ness, but per­haps the best of them end­ed with putting on Tem­ple of Low Men for the first time. For some strange rea­son, I had nev­er heard it, though I had been famil­iar with oth­er Crowd­ed House albums for years. So I can’t be objec­tive about the song “Into Temp­ta­tion”. But I think that even with­out the per­sonal asso­ci­a­tions, I would rec­og­nize it as a superbly craft­ed song. And that about sums up Neil Finn’s song­writ­ing: superb crafts­man­ship and intel­li­gence applied to intense­ly emo­tional sub­jects. I am not a sen­ti­men­tal per­son, and musi­cal treat­ments of the joys and dis­ap­point­ments of love don’t usu­ally tug at my heart. But noth­ing seems arti­fi­cial or child­ish when Neil Finn writes it.

For this Focus, I’m lis­ten­ing to the entire cor­pus of Crowd­ed House, and and much it’s pre­de­ces­sor Split Enz, as well as the solo work of broth­ers Tim and Neil Finn. My col­lec­tion is fair­ly com­plete. I have all of the orig­i­nal Crowd­ed House stu­dio albums [ Crowd­ed House (1986); Tem­ple of Low Men (1988); Wood­face (1990); Togeth­er Alone (1993)], as well as the post-breakup sin­gles col­lec­tion After­glow (1999) and the com­pi­la­tion album Recur­ring Dream (1996), which also includ­ed three unre­leased songs. In addi­tion, I have the Bonus Live album which had a lim­ited release as a pro­mo­tion for Recur­ring Dream . This con­tains some unusu­al live per­for­mances, some of which eclipse the stu­dio ver­sions. The ten minute rework­ing of “Hole in the Riv­er” is a com­plete meta­mor­pho­sis. In addi­tion, I have a per­sonal anthol­ogy of down­loads of mis­cel­la­neous live per­for­mances, includ­ing odd-ball col­lab­o­ra­tions with Sinead O’Connor and Cheryl Crow. The only thing I’m miss­ing is Farewell to the World (1996), their last live con­cert in Sid­ney. This is not even list­ed on Amazon.com, so I pre­sume it can be found only in Aus­tralia or New Zealand. Read more »

A large reper­toire of “new age” music has come out of Chi­na in the last few years. There, the term seems to mean more or less what “elec­tron­ica” means in North Amer­i­can par­liance. Some of it is equiv­a­lent to the sooth­ing stuff called “new age” here, but much of it is quite dif­fer­ent. You can find dance and tech­no mixed with Chi­nese pop vocals, both Asian and Euro­pean clas­si­cal ele­ments, and the kind of spooky elec­tronic stuff that used to come out of aca­d­e­mic music labs. Liu Xing (not to be con­fused with the young go mas­ter of the same name) is one of the big shots in this genre, and I’ve got two of his albums: Inde­fin­able, and To Do Noth­ing, as well as three pieces on com­pi­la­tions. Inde­fin­able def­i­nitely fits into the “spooky exper­i­men­tal” cat­e­gory. To Do Noth­ing is essen­tially a show­case for Liu per­form­ing on the zhon­gruan, a tra­di­tional stringed instru­ment. He is famous for his pro­fi­ciency on this instru­ment, and com­posed a con­certo for it, which I have not yet had the plea­sure of hear­ing. In this album, this instru­ment comes across like a sort of mel­low span­ish gui­tar as if Joaquin Rodri­go had some­how picked up sheet ­mu­sic of tra­di­tional Chi­nese melodies while stoned, and gone with the flow. The album’s title cut “To Do Noth­ing” is a good exam­ple. I liked best “Chaishi Fes­ti­val” which has a sort of Vaugh­an Williams feel­ing to it, although “Late Autumn Rain” came a close sec­ond. Some of the stray pieces I have, like “Still Clouds and a Soli­tary Crane”, and “Fad­ing Vil­lage”, which can be found on the com­pi­la­tion “Chi­na Chill” are imme­di­ately appeal­ing pop­u­lar music, with strong melodies etched out against sharp pizzi­cati. Both would be extreme­ly evoca­tive music in an appro­pri­ate movie. Liu was born in north­ern Manchuria, stud­ied and first flour­ished in Shang­hai, and made his first impact with a con­certo sub­ti­tled “mem­o­ries of Yun­nan”, which gives him about as broad spir­i­tual roots in Chi­na as any­one could man­age. He was one of pio­neers who strug­gled to open Chi­nese music to cos­mopoli­tan music, and is now giv­ing back as good as he got.

16832. (John Tav­ern­er) Kyrie “Leroy”, for 4 voices
16833. (John Tav­ern­er) Mis­sa Glo­ria Tibi Trini­tatis for 6 voices
16834. (John Tav­ern­er) Dum tran­sis­set sab­ba­tum (i), motet for 5 voices
16835. (Weath­er Report) I Sing the Body Electric
16836. (Fer­rante & Teich­er) Moon­light Melodies
16837. (Heitor Vil­la-Lobos) Bachi­anas Brazileira #1 for Eight Cellos
16838. (Heitor Vil­la-Lobos) Suite for Voice and Violin
16839. (Heitor Vil­la-Lobos) Pre­ludes and Fugues from Bach’s “48” for Orches­tra of Cellos
16840. (Franz Josef Haydn) String Quar­tet in B‑flat, Op.71 #1
Read more »

Haider Ali (or Ali Haider, علی حیدر ) is prob­a­bly the most pop­u­lar light pop singer to come out of Pak­istan. His sev­en albums will be hard for a Cana­dian to accu­mu­late, but it is easy to find the two Best of Haider Ali discs, which I have. He is not as much of a light-weight as you might guess. Yes, the arrange­ments are pure pop, but he choos­es melodies that have some folk­loric roots, and his per­for­mances are flaw­less. There is also notice­able devel­op­ment. He finds his feet with the fourth album, Qarar. This con­tained the hit “Purani Jeans”, which I’m told found a cross-gen­er­a­tional audi­ence. After this, the songs became sub­tler, and bet­ter craft­ed, with touch­es of clas­si­cal Urdu style embed­ded in the euro-pop orches­tra­tion. Some of the lat­er songs have live flute, tabla, dho­lak, sitar and ban­jo. “Papa Mumi”, a hit from his best-regard­ed fifth album Das­taan, is more than just a pop song, and it comes across emo­tion­ally to some­one like me, who doesn’t under­stand Urdu.

16729. (Edward Elgar) Chan­tant for Piano
16730. (Edward Elgar) Pas­tour­relle, air de ballet
16731. (Edward Elgar) Rose­mary [piano version]
16732. (Edward Elgar) Griffinesque for Piano
16733. (Edward Elgar) Sonati­na [orig­i­nal version]
Read more »

There’s a tra­di­tion of folk fid­dling all across Cana­da. The vari­a­tion that devel­oped in rur­al Ontario is less well known than the rich tra­di­tions of Que­bec and the Mar­itime Provinces. To tell the truth, it’s rather tame com­pared to the east­ern styles. You get the impres­sion that the phleg­matic Old Ontar­i­ans did not let their hoe­downs get too far down. But there are some pleas­ant tunes, and some of the “old tyme fid­dlers” in the province where fine musi­cians. Clare Adlam has a pret­ty con­vinc­ing claim to hav­ing been the best. Begin­ning his pro­fes­sional career at the age of four, and hav­ing his own radio show at the age of four­teen, he dom­i­nated this lit­tle musi­cal niche for an incred­i­ble sev­en­ty-five year per­form­ing career. “Adlam’s Apple”, a vinyl issued in 1978, is the only record­ing you are like­ly to find, and it con­tains a mix of stan­dards and Adlam’s orig­i­nals, the best being “Geor­gian Bay Two Step”.

16587. (Béla Fleck & Edgar Mey­er) Music For Two
16588. (Chris­tos Hatzis) De Angelis
16589. (Chris­tos Hatzis) Ever­last­ing Light
16590. (Chris­tos Hatzis) Fer­til­i­ty Rites
16591. (Chris­tos Hatzis) Hunter’s Dream
16592. (Chris­tos Hatzis) Foot­prints In New Snow
16593. (Chris­tos Hatzis) String Quar­tet #1 “The Awakening”
16594. (101 Strings) Back­beat Symphony
16595. (George Rochberg) Con­cer­to for Oboe and Orchestra
16596. (Jacob Druck­man) Prism Read more »

The Tai­wanese boy-band “5566”, led by Tony Sun has dom­i­nated the Chi­nese pubes­cent pop mar­ket since 2002. If you think that boy-bands like N’Sync had overblown arrange­ments and stu­dio glitz, they were noth­ing com­pared to this. Every­thing from piano glis­sandi and heav­enly choirs to tech­no nois­es accom­pany these mushy songs. Some of the lyrics are in Eng­lish, though most are in Man­darin Chi­nese (peo­ple in Tai­wan usu­ally speak a vari­ety of Fukienese at home, but Man­darin is the offi­cial lan­guage, taught in school). The melodies are some­times bor­rowed. Dis­con­cert­ingly, the last song on the album is to the tune of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”.…. Actu­ally, it would be fun to have this stuff in the back­ground at a noisy party.

Eng­land pro­duces lots of wimpy art-song cycles, and even the best ones, like Vaugh­an William’s On Wen­lock Edge, seem a bit cutesy-poo. You can’t say this about Ivor Gurney’s cycles The West­ern Play­ground and Lud­low and Teme. They both have a def­i­nite “edge”. These are set­tings of A.E. Hous­man, like V.W.’s Wen­lock, but much more like Schu­bert lieder in design. Gur­ney was him­self a poet of con­sid­er­able pow­er, whose work, much of it writ­ten on the bat­tle-front in WWI, is present­ly being redis­cov­ered. Gurney’s life was trag­ic. At fif­teen, he was already a very promis­ing com­poser. With­in a few years, he was on the war front, being wound­ed and gassed. His poet­ry from the peri­od was pub­lished as, Sev­ern and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers After the war, he began stud­ies with Vaugh­an Williams, but by 1922 was com­mit­ted to a men­tal asy­lum for what would now be diag­nosed as extreme bi-polar dis­or­der. The last third of his life was lived in insti­tu­tions, and he died in 1937. Odd­ly, he only once set his own verse to music. His grave, in the small vil­lage of Twig­worth, Glouces­ter­shire, reads “a lover and mak­er of beau­ty”. (1919).

Guitarist/vocalist Patrick Mata, first came into view in Los Ange­les’ hor­ror punk-rock scene of the ear­ly 1980s, with his band Kom­mu­nity Fk. This band sound­ed a bit like Chris­t­ian Death. After near­ly a decade, Mata formed Sati­va Luvbox with drum­mer M.P. and bassist Steve Brun­dege. This band played for a cou­ple of years, and was bet­ter described as “acid punk”. It sound­ed as if an eight­ies punk band had received a drug-induced epiphany from King Crim­son. They did a cou­ple of inde­pen­dent albums, one of which, Close One Sad Eye, I remem­ber lik­ing, but can’t find any­where. Beloved Satel­lite was their 1993 MCA release, and it’s a nice album to play while enter­tain­ing low-main­te­nance friends, along with a bong and a box of donuts on the liv­ing room table.