…by Mentasms, who I fear is going to be vaguely disgusted at my unregenerate rockism:
“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”
Evidently this one has been doing the rounds for quite a while – I think my spring has already been quite extensively shaped and is now sitting there looking as ugly and misshapen as countless seasons past.
1. “These Foolish Things” – Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra, Lady Day: The Master Takes & Singles
There’s been a little flurry of bloggers outing themselves as not liking jazz now that Steve Albini has taken the curse off it. But really, what is it that you’re saying you can’t get your head round? The musicianly polish and tastefully funky jams on Blue Note leave me pretty cold, doubly underwhelming because they’re so rafted with all the signifiers of jazz sophistication. But Black Saint & The Sinner Lady? Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard? A Tribute To Jack Johnson? Or what about something as warm and full of life as this? The grain and phrasing of every second of this song knock me out.
2. Percy’s Song – Bob Dylan, Biograph
I’ve been listening to Fairport Convention’s cover of this on Unhalfbricking for years now without finding anything remotely memorable about it – if anything, it was a major bringdown after the shimmering high of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”. Maybe it’s just too cluttered arranged for a full band, and it’s the intimacy of this recording of a very young Dylan that makes it work.
3. “Power” – The Dead C, Vain, Erudite & Stupid
Kicking the corpse of rock music uphill.
4. “Lontano” – Ligeti/Nott/Berlin Philharmonic, The Ligeti Project Vol. 2
First fruit of the list from The Rest Is Noise. If the Rite of Spring was so insurrectionary, what would that audience have made of this? At least the Rite has roots in folk dance and pagan ritual, but Lontano and Atmospheres have something unearthly about them, something ominous and implacable in their sinuous, alien textures.
5. “So I Si Sa” – Super Boiro Band, African Pearls 2: Guinee – Cultural Revolution
Although fundamentally the work of the devil, mp3 players redeem themselves every time they cough something like this up from the depths of random shuffle, something that I must have heard half a dozen times before without ever really registering just how hot it is. Exhibit B – that Quintete Sextete track that is a dead ringer for an early Pentangle track off the self-same disc.
6. “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)” – Pissed Jeans, Hope For Man
Pure genius. The more you look around, the more you realise that people in western society can no longer muster enough super-ego to keep the bruised, self-indulgent child side of their character in check. I can’t believe that Pissed Jeans decided not to stick with the name Unrequited Hard-On…must have felt they couldn’t live up to it. It’d be a lot of pressure, having a name that good.
7. “The Big Takeover” – Bad Brains, Bad Brains
Look, I didn’t say it had been a great spring.
I’m not sure I even read seven blogs which haven’t already been infected and it seems a bit pointless asking all the Frank’s Apa people but let’s say: Inuit Scarlet Bikini Carwash, Lexicon Devil, Accentmonkey, any of the lads from Soundtracks For Them but especially Krossphader, Chocolate Court, Old Style Rabbit Tales Of Furry Fury and Undersea Community.
[...] there’s a request for you to give us a run down on seven songs you’re fond of at the moment. It’s one of [...]
Pingback by Soundtracksforthem » Misc » Taking a Hammer To Conor’s Head. — June 13, 2008 @ 5:49 pm
‘vaguely disgusted’
LOL
Thanks for doing this, some mad stuff here.
The Albini quote is a funny one though, as much as it is ludacrous and ill-informed, it does contain one good point. I mean, from my rather limited experience with Jazz, it does seem as though the best stuff is also the most orchestrated (like Black Saint and pretty much all of Mingus’ stuff) or constrained somehow, even something like Interstellar Space is seems quite firmly grounded by his history and explicit conceptualisations.
Whereas the stuff that is more self-consciously ‘free’ and liberated from explicit constraints, doesn’t seem as good (though I’m basing this assertion mostly on more recent stuff that has been played to me, a la Pat Metheny – I probably just dont like him because he plays the guitar!).
Comment by mentasms — June 16, 2008 @ 10:55 pm
This chimes with something I was thinking a while ago. The biggest obstacle with respect to jazz is that it can be a startlingly conservative musical form. Post-Charlie Parker you have twenty-five years of an avante-garde dedicated to blowing away harmonic restrictions in a quest for complete freedom of artistic expression, yet they’re choosing to do this through the basic forms of the quartet or trio. So the freedom is freedom in the context of drums-bass-piano-sax and playing head-solo-chorus-solo. Few of the players in that era seem to have been that interested in either varying the orchestration or exploring the sonic possibilities presented by the studio. Mingus stands out because he did the former, Miles Davis in part because he went for the latter, but otherwise you’re just left standing around saying “man, those cats can blow” which generally isn’t any more interesting to me than listening to Eric Clapton.
The other aspect is that in some measure we need structure in music or else we can no longer understand it as music. The definition of music as being organised sound comes into play here – where freedom starts to resemble randomness I can no longer parse it as music. Presumably it made some measure of sense to the people who made it. To the extent that you can learn an appreciation for music that is out there, I think it rests on your understanding of an organisation that is implicit in the music.
What this also brings to mind is the Vladislav Delay album Anima, if you remember that – it was an hour long piece of music that was continually morphing. It proved to be completely unmemorable – no matter how many times I listened to it, I could never retain any sense of what it sounded like or any emotional impact afterwards. I guess it proved a point.
Comment by rottenhat — June 17, 2008 @ 12:47 pm