15574. (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) Fever To Tell
15575. (Matt Dusk) Two Shots
15576. (Wailin’ Jen­nys) 40 Days
15577. (Ludacris) Chicken-N-Beer
15578. (Gor­don Down­ie) Bat­tle of the Nudes
15579. (Anton Bruck­n­er) Mass #1 in D Minor Read more »

For­tu­nately, this 1955 record­ing on a small Cal­i­for­nia label is in good con­di­tion. It pre­serves some of the lit­tle-remem­bered “San Fran­cisco Sound” of the ear­ly 1940s. In a time when the swing and big band sounds dom­i­nated, a minor­ity of jazzmen sought to revive the more inti­mate sound of Dix­ieland. There were three local­izes “schools” of this “back to the basics” move­ment: one in New Orleans, anoth­er in Chica­go, and a third in San Fran­cisco, lead by Lu Wat­ters and Turk Mur­phy. The 1941 and 1942 ses­sions on my disc, record­ed on Van Ness Avenue in San Fran­cisco, have Lu Wat­ters and Bob Scobey on cor­nets, Turk Mur­phy on trom­bone, Ellis Horne on clar­inet, Wal­ly Rose on piano, Quire Girs­back on tuba, Bill Dart on drums, and two ban­jo play­ers, Cla­cy Hayes and Russ Ben­nett. The inter­play is between Wat­ters, Mur­phy and Horne (whose clar­inet is par­tic­u­larly sweet). Wat­ters was most influ­enced by King Oliver’s band, with Louis Arm­strong, in its hey­day, but there are also echoes of W. C. Handy and Jel­ly Roll Mor­ton. Some of the mate­r­ial they played was vir­tu­ally anti­quar­ian even in 1941: they do an excel­lent, slow-paced ver­sion of the Tiger Rag, a piece that can be traced to the French quadrilles of Old New Orleans. The San Fran­cisco sound fea­tured ban­jo and tuba in the rhythm sec­tions, which played in a 2‑to-the-bar rhyth­mic style. There was a light­heart­ed “good time” feel­ing to it, which dis­tin­guishes it from the more plain­tive sound of the New Orleans revival.

For­got­ten by all but con­cert dou­ble-basists, Bottesi­ni was the most renowned soloist and com­poser on that instru­ment in the nine­teenth cen­tury. An Ital­ian from Lom­bardy, he worked var­i­ously in Amer­ica, Cuba and Eng­land. Much of his music sounds like Brahms or Schu­mann, and not much of it is strik­ingly orig­i­nal, but most of it is quite pret­ty. I have twelve pieces, ten ot them slight [an Alle­gretto Capric­cio, an Alle­gro di Con­certo “Alla Mendelssohn” , a Bolero, a Capric­cio di Bravu­ra, three Ele­gies, an Intro­duc­tion and Gavotte, a Melo­dia, and a Rêver­ie, all for Dou­ble Bass and Piano]. Two more are fair­ly seri­ous works. The Con­certo #2 in B Minor would be well known if it was for cel­lo. It’s as good as many cel­lo con­cer­tos in stan­dard reper­toire. Best of all is his Gran Duo Con­cer­tante for Vio­lin and Dou­ble Bass, which was orig­i­nally scored for two bass­es. It is an intel­li­gent work, and I sus­pect that I would pre­fer it in its orig­i­nal form. How­ever, the ver­sion with vio­lin seems to be the only one available.

15513. (Good Char­lotte) The Chron­i­cles of Life and Death
15514. (Flam­ing Lips) Yoshi­mi Bat­tles the Pink Robots
15515. (Alessan­dro Stradel­la) Sin­fo­nia avan­ti il Barcheg­gio in D for Trum­pet, String
. . . . . Orches­tra, Trom­bone and Harpsichord
15516. (Alessan­dro Stradel­la) Sin­fo­nia in A Minor for Two Vio­lins, Cel­li, Dou­ble-Bass, Lute
. . . . . and Harpshichord
15517. (Alessan­dro Stradel­la) Sonata a quat­tro in D for Dou­ble Orchestra
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I’ve always been a suck­er for low-reg­is­ter instru­ments. A cel­lo or a vio­la da gam­ba will move me much more eas­ily than any vio­lin, and I get all dreamy if I hear a con­tra­bas­soon even tun­ing up. Edgar Mey­er is wide­ly regard­ed as the finest dou­ble-bassist alive. But I will con­sider him here as a com­poser. Now, many ter­rific solo per­form­ers have giv­en forth embarass­ing turkeys when they turned to com­pos­ing, but this is not the case with Mey­er. His Dou­ble Con­certo for Cel­lo and Dou­ble Bass, which he per­forms with the inim­itable cel­list Yo-Yo Ma, has none of the surly chug­ging along you expect from the instru­ment. It’s a spright­ly com­po­si­tion, with pleas­ant melodies, and some sar­cas­tic pas­sages that Prokofiev would be proud of. The Con­certo in D for Dou­ble Bass and Orches­tra, is down­right weird. It starts with lit­tle waft­ed frag­ments of melody, resolv­ing them every now and then into an orches­tral tut­ti, and plays lit­tle games of syn­co­pa­tion and call-and-answer. The sec­ond you think you know where the piece is head­ed, it twists out of it like a wrestler break­ing a Boston crab grapevine leg lock. It even­tu­ally drifts into a slight­ly sin­is­ter and puz­zling end­ing. The over­all effect is sur­pris­ingly pleasing.

Mey­er is a long-time friend of folk ban­jo vir­tu­oso Béla Fleck, and they’ve put out an album togeth­er that I’m most eager to hear. If any­one out there has heard it, send me a review. The two con­certi are togeth­er on the CD Mey­er and Bottesi­ni Con­cer­tos, along with two works by the 19th cen­tury Lom­bard com­poser, Gio­vanni Bottesi­ni, whose music I’ll dis­cuss next.

You could not find a bet­ter col­lec­tion of ear­ly French motets than this one: “The Mar­riage of Heav­en and Hell: Motets and Songs from Thir­teenth Cen­tury France” [Hype­r­ion CDA66423], per­formed by the Goth­ic Voic­es, under the direc­tion of Christo­pher Page, who is also the harpist. Most of these motets are anony­mous, but a few are cred­ited to trou­vères: Blondel de Nesle, Col­in Muset, Gau­tier de Dar­gies, and the best known, Bernart de Ven­ta­dorn. How­ever, the motet form trans­forms the feel­ing of the trou­vère songs. They lose their inti­mate qual­ity, and the poet­ry of the lyrics is sub­merged. It’s not real­ly pos­si­ble to fol­low lyrics in a motet, even if you know the lan­guage well. The best you can do is catch a word here and there. Peo­ple didn’t lis­ten to motets for the same rea­son they lis­tened to love bal­lads and hero­ic lais. The motet was a game. It took famil­iar songs and played with them, twist­ing them out of recog­ni­tion. In much the same way, 1950’s “cool” jazz took show tunes and love songs and manip­u­lated them in fash­ions com­pletely at odds with their orig­i­nal intent.

This is a British syn­th­pop band orig­i­nat­ing in Sheffield, Eng­land in the ear­ly 1980s, part­ly from for­mer mem­bers of the Human League. I have their first two (and most suc­cess­ful) albums, Pent­house and Pave­ment (1981) and The Lux­ury Gap (1983). From the first album, the sin­gle “We Don’t Need This Fas­cist Groove Thang” gained some noto­ri­ety when the BBC banned it from play for polit­i­cal rea­sons. How­ever, “Geisha Boys and Tem­ple Girls” and “We’re Going to Live For a Very Long Time“ appealed to me more. They achieved greater suc­cess with the sec­ond album, from which “Temp­ta­tion” and “Let Me Go” were the band’s biggest UK and US hits respec­tive­ly. A cur­rent lis­tener will be most tak­en by the prim­i­tive “pro­to-tech­no” ele­ments: cheesy syn­the­siz­ers and drum machines. Unlike most of the syn­th­pop bands of the time, they had catchy melodies, and used the crude elec­tron­ic tools to good effect.

15000. (Crowd­ed House) Alone Together
15001. (Neil Finn) Try Whistling This
15002. (Split Enz) The Liv­ing Enz
15003. (Tim Finn) Before & After
15004. (Crowd­ed House) Recur­ring Dream: The Very Best of Crowd­ed House
15005. (Crowd­ed House) Recur­ring Dream Bonus Live Album
15006. (Crowd­ed House) Phil’s Crowd­ed House Miscellany
15007. (Dmitri Shostakovich) String Quar­tet #1 in C, Op.49
15008. (Dmitri Shostakovich) String Quar­tet #2 in A, Op.68
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