Alan Tam [谭咏麟] was, along with Leslie Cheung, a big name in Hong Kong cantopop during the 1980s. All I have is a cassette made in HK, with no English on it. The songs are all “laid-back” ballads that would satisfy any Perry Como or Barry White fan. The ones I like best on the tape are “水中花” and “擁抱”, strictly on the basis of the smoothness of the singing. Not for anyone who has a low threshold for mush.
Listening to A Taste of Throbbing Johnson, an amateurishly produced indie tape that I somehow acquired in 1999 or 2000. Just the bare tape in a blank case, so no names to go on. It has a mildly amusing audio skit at the end. A total mystery… someone must have given me the cassette, perhaps a street busker or someone I met in a club, but I can’t remember who or under what circumstances. I accumulate a lot of music that way, which tells you something about my life. No trace of the band anywhere on the web. It’s not bad music, tho.
This lineup of Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins and Glenn Campling was an ephemeral intermediate stage between Bauhaus and Love And Rockets. The Album Pop (1984), which I have only in a poor quality copy, was one of two cassette-only configurations of songs taken from seven and twelve inch vinyl singles. The songs are moody and surrealistic, quite interesting, and very similar to the fine work that subsequently appeared on Love and Rockets’ Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. I have no idea where you could find this particular item, but the 1998 CD compilation Everything! must contain the same tracks.
This is an interesting British techno group from the 1990’s. Dubnobasswithmyheadman (first album, 1994) makes me want to step into my time machine and visit the London clubs around that time. Most of the club stuff from that era hasn’t worn well ― listening to the average Chris Sheppard compilation can be pretty painful. But Karl Hyde (vocals), Rick Smith and Darren Emerson made a creative mélange of techno-house-dub-funk that can still be played without embarrassment. The vocals actually fit in to the mix, rather than simply being a kind of hallelujah chorus thrown in so you can remember which set you’re listening to. But the strongest element is its progression, the necessary build-up of emotion, in this case starting with harsh cynicism (“Dark and Long”) through contemplative (“Mmmm Skyscraper I Love You”), recharging (“Spoonman”) and climax (“Cowgirl”). This must have made for one of those deliriously satisfying dance floor experiences that the club scene was all about. I have a different mix of “Dark and Long” labeled “Dark Train Mix” on the entertaining compilation UK Tribal Gathering ’95.
The second album, Second Toughest In the Infants (1996) shifts to what came to be called “Progressive House”, influenced by the multi-layered art-rock of the seventies, but retaining the danceable techno beat. There are audible hints of Yes and Genesis. As in the first album, many of the songs are dark and moody. The re-release of this album includes a bonus track of “Born Slippy .NUXX”, which had widespread exposure through the film Trainspotting. I also have “2 Months Off [King Unique Sunspots Vocal Mix]” and “King Of Snake [Fatboy Slim Remix]” on two different Sheppard collections. These songs appear on later albums, which I’ve never heard.
18062. (Oscar Peterson) A Tribute to Oscar Peterson Live at Town Hall [with Neils-Henning
. . . . . Ørsted Pederson, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis, Benny Green, Roy Hargrove, Shirley Horn,
. . . . . Milt Jackson, Lewis Nash, Clark Terry, Stanley Turrentine, Manhattan Transfer]
18063. (Oscar Peterson & Ben Webster) Ben Webster Meets Oscar Peterson [with Ray Brown
. . . . . and Ed Thigpen]
18064. (Oscar Peterson) A 75th Birthday Celebration [Canadian exclusive release]
18065. (John Blow) Ode on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell
18066. (Henry Purcell) “Why should men quarrel?”
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Christmas in Canada was saddened by the death of Oscar Peterson, who is acknowledged by many as one of the greatest of our countrymen. During his immensely productive lifetime, Oscar exemplified everything that Canadians tend to admire: calm, equilibrium, gentle good humour, an inate and effortless democracy, a complete lack of pomposity and chest-beating, combined with a delight in life and pleasure, and an exact precision in execution. Every flash of fingers on the keyboard was like a Gretsky goal. In other words, he was the complete opposite of what modern consumer culture elevates as virtues. As long as we had him with us, perhaps, we could not be entirely corrupted.
The son of a Canadian Pacific Railway porter, Peterson grew up in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood of Montreal. It was a predominantly black neighbourhood that was filled with music, both classical and jazz. His musical family encouraged him in a classical training, and he studied with Paul de Marky, a student of Franz Liszt. He was psychologically a perfectionist, and practiced four to six hours a day, even in early childhood. By the age of fourteen, his astonishing virtuosity had led him to win a national radio competition. His strongest influences included Art Tatum, Bach, Rachmaninov, Nat “King” Cole, Teddy Wilson, and, most notably, his own sister, a music teacher who nurtured several Canadian jazz stars. He was at his greatest strength in trios, an artform which he perfected with the Ray Brown and Herb Ellis, with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith, and with virtuoso guitarist Joe Pass and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass.
Peterson’s modest decorum, always part of his particular charm, was exemplified when he was offered the position of Lieutenant Governor of Ontario (in Canada, this position, not the Premiership, is the political Head of State). Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a lifelong friend, was the instigator of this tribute, but Peterson turned it down. But Chrétien did manage to orchestrate a highly emotional meeting between Peterson and Nelson Mandela. His last years, despite ill-health, were concentrated on teaching. He always insisted that jazz pianists should master Bach as part of their basic training.
17982. (William Byrd) Dileges Dominum
17983. (William Byrd) Ad Dominum cum tribulater
17984. (William Byrd) Mass for 5 Voices [version with Prospers (4) for the Feast of All Saints]
. . . . . [see regular version [2060]
(Armen Grigoryan, douduk, with ensemble) Douduk, the Sound of Armenia:
. . . . 17985. (Anon.) Gyoumrva Parer
. . . . 17986. (Sayat Nova) Es Me Gharib Blbuli Pes
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We don’t know much about the life of the Neapolitan composer Rinaldo di Capua, who was born somewhere around 1710 and died, in poverty and obscurity, in 1780. But, briefly, he achieved some fame as a composer of opera, and made one of the key innovations in the transformation of the symphony from a mere suite of vignettes, which could be shuffled or substituted like a deck of cards, to its later form as a coherent whole, the “symphony-sonata” form that makes, say, a Beethoven symphony appear as narrative as a play, and saw it’s ultimate degree of logical development in Sibelius’ Seventh. According to the diary of Charles Burney, a musician traveling in Italy in 1770, di Capua had the same tendency to solidify the opera buffa into something more resembling our idea of a dramatic opera. Burney relates that, after a period of celebrity for many operas (all but one of which are lost), he found him “living, or rather starving in 1770 at Rome, the chief scene of his former glory! This composer, whose productions were, during many years, the delight of all Europe, was reduced at Rome to the utmost indigence. Diogenes the Cynic was never more meanly clad through choice, than Rinaldo through necessity: a patched coat, and stockings that wanted to be patched or darned.” Burney reports that the old man was particularly bitter because he had hoped to provide for his old age by publishing his collected works, only to discover that his son had burned all his manuscipts! Hence, we know little about a fairly important composer of the Rococo period. Toronto Public Library’s huge collection contains nothing by him, though the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library [one of the little-known treasures of the city, by the way], has a libretto of one of his operas, and elsewhere the University has some scraps of sheet music. But one, random example of his operas survives, apparently a minor early work. It is La Zingara, an Intermezo in Two Parts. This was later reworked into something more unified opera, but what survives is in the original opera buffa form. It was performed by the Mainz Chamber Orchestra, with Annelies Mokewitz (soprano), Rodolfo Malacarne (tenor) and Laerte Malaguti (bass). The performance exists on a Turnabout recording which I obtained in a yard sale in my neighborhood, where yard sales can turn up anything. If this one, minor work is any hint, di Capua was a talented man. The melodies are fine, the ritornellos are dramatically effective. I don’t urge anyone to run out and listen, because their chances of finding the piece are remote.
After listening to Nana Mouskouri’s Nouvelles chansons de la Vieille France (1978), I dug up the album that preceded it, Vieilles chansons de France (1973). Both albums, covering a wide variety of traditional French melodies, some dating from the middle ages, acted as a useful reminder that Canadian folk music owes something to France. The Canadian folk tradition is so saturated with Celtic elements — one musicologist classified the whole country as a “Celtic out-island” — that one forgets that many of the oldest songs do come from France. Listening to these two albums, I found it easy to guess what part of France a song came from. If the song sounded vaguely familiar and had a “Canadian feeling” to it, it turned out to have come from Britanny, Normandy, or the Lower Loire. These are, of course, the places where the bulk of the first settlers in Canada originated, the maritime villages of the west coast of France. Many of these settlers did not even speak French, but were Bretons, whose Celtic language is closest to Welsh, so the earliest Canadian music already started out on a quasi-Celtic footing. Subsequently, wave after wave of Scottish and Irish music deeply Celticized the folk music of all of Canada, whether it was sung in French, English, Gaelic, or aboriginal languages. But in many cases, the original melody does come from France, and occasionally has survived in both countries. It’s interesting to hear them sung by a European singer, though I suppose my own heritage will ensure that the Celticized Canadian versions will always feel “the right way” to me.
Mouskouri has been called “the the best selling female singer of all time” (though I suspect Lata Mangeshkar has a better claim to that title). A Greek, born at Chania, on Crete, she is still going strong, performing many concerts yearly at the age of 74. She sings in many languages, but she is best known for her work in French, and also American Jazz. Both these albums are delightful.
I’ve written before about Ali Farka Touré, the sublime guitarist and song writer Timbuktu [in blog entry Thinking of Timbuktu]. In the Heart of the Moon was the second last album he released before his death in March of 2006. Here, he is teamed up with master kora player Toumani Diabaté, in a spontaneous jam session, without rehearsal. A few overdubs (some by Ry Cooder) were later added, but these are discreet, and not intrusive to the effortless flow of the session. All twelve tracks are superb. It is also more traditional, harking back to the pre-electric days of the griot performers of classical Malian music, and mixing both Songhai and Bambara strains. The cumulative mood is hypnotically pleasurable. There is no hint of rivalry in the duets. The kora is built from a calabash gourd cut in half and covered with cow skin, with a notched bridge, putting it roughly in the mandolin family. But it’s played somewhat like a flamenco guitar, and the strings give a distinctly harp-like sound. Diabaté is perhaps the finest interpreter of this instrument. Touré, as the more famous musician, doesn’t hog the show. He lets the Diabaté’s kora shine in the limelight for most of the songs. The subtlety of their collaboration hits the listener only as one gets well into the album. If you are going to buy three albums to introduce yourself to the glories of the Malian Renaissance (for that is what is going on in that country), then I recommend this album, Touré’s The Source, and Amadou et Mariam’s Dimanche à Bamako.