If all the people who love to quote :A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Granted it's one of the ten most malapplied phrases, but it seems to work.
So having posted the second reprint in three postings, I start it with the disclaimer that I seldom do that sort of thing.
So that grump of Emerson's floats in the back of my head like an irritating floating thing. But all is not lost. At least I'm hearing the Streisand use of the line in what is arguably her funniest film.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
I don't usually do reprints, but.....
..... this one falls into the classification of "THAT"S what I've been trying to say for the last seven drafts!!"
Since I'm not hearing anything one way or the other from the San Francisco Folk Music Club, from whose newsletter Harmony I draw the following, I'm going to reprint it, and claim that it's part of the folk process to increase understanding of the music and its practitioners. So go blame Pete Seeger.
I was going to put some commentary at the end of this, but I'll leave it until another time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:01:28 -0700
From: Adam Miller <autoharper@earthlink.net>
Subject: [Harmony] Mary Travers
To: SFFMC` LIST <harmony@sffmc.org>
Message-ID: <e61471f7bc99814b6b690fe0fb8d1500@earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
Subject: Mary Travers
Date: September 25, 2009 8:44:30 AM PDT
RRC subscriber John Ross writes:
In the days leading up to the Iraq war nothing made that modern media invention–the conscience-stricken hawk–quite as queasy as the spectre of the “Peter, Paul and Mary” liberal turning the new adventure into “another Viet Nam.”
That kind of insight was, of course, less than brilliant on infinite levels, but there was some justice in the basic conclusion: the special relationship between music and politics that’s now called to mind by the catch-all phrase “the sixties” was not, after all, just some weird accident.
The stark, unsettling contradictions that boiled to the surface in that generation have been wallowing in the American psyche since the beginning and are with us still, while the notion that musicians and other artists should confront them is, if not quite that old, at least far, far older than the recording industry.
By contrast, a reality where this very confrontation could produce gold records–and the powerful, insidious, earworm relevance in modern American life that this has always implied–was entirely modern and called forth very specifically by three earnest folkies who, as if to prove history really does have a sense of humor, were assembled by a quasi-corporate process not all that different from the one that produced the Monkees.
Partly for those reasons, the group was something of a punching bag among the hipper-than-thou left long before their massive success began to haunt bigots and mad bombers.
At least some of that was envy, but for art to work as politics the art has to come first and P,P&M had two elements of genius. The first was the magical “other” that is created when the members of any great harmony group blend their voices.
The second was Mary Travers.
It was Travers who gave the group’s sleek sound the gravitas it needed to become a dividing line and a cultural force that went far beyond selling records. A lot of what Peter, Paul and Mary did–children’s songs, stale stage-patter, tiresome renditions of “true” folk songs by way of Merry Olde England–was innocuous or worse and can safely be consigned to the nostalgia bin if not the dust bin.
What’s left are a couple of dozen diamond-pure sides that did what art very, very rarely does–changed things.
Nearly every one of those sides featured Mary Travers as either lead or de facto soloist.
It was her voice that put Bob Dylan on the charts for the first time.
Her voice that brought Pete Seeger back to the top ten after nearly a decade in blacklisted exile–not with Weavers-style balladry but with a political anthem. Her voice wailing on the key line in Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” that makes it sound even now like something college kids really would call forth as naturally as breathing when they were being beaten with night-sticks and tossed into paddy wagons at the “liberal” Democratic Convention in 1968.
The poetry of “the whole world is watching” was Dylan’s but it was almost certainly Travers who Middle America heard when the fragment was recited for evening newscasts or morning newspapers just as it was effectively Travers, almost alone, who first put “protest” music into the proverbial million living rooms where Martin Luther King might as well have been the antichrist.
It wasn’t for nothing that Civil Rights paragon Ossie Davis–as righteous a defender as African-American culture will ever have–called her white-bread folk group “the movement set to music.”
All of that would make her one of the most important voices of the century but she could be even better.
“500 Miles” was recorded in 1962 and, with the tumult still largely in front of her, Travers used that completely artificial confection as a vehicle for collapsing time. Standing on the cusp of a cultural earthquake that would not have been entirely possible without her, she made a commercial folk song sound as if it had always existed and always would, as if everything that was about to happen had already been and gone and she was the only one left to speak of it. Much like the sixties themselves, her version can make you smile behind the eyes or rip your heart out–can be steeped in as much hope or damnation as a listener chooses.
Where “500 Miles” was a pure abstraction–a reach for something that could be grasped but not quite held–“Leaving on a Jet Plane” was utterly prosaic. Travers simply took John Denver’s best song–a fine, if conventional lament on that most jealously guarded male prerogative, i.e., the freedom to come and go and have the little woman wait for you to make up your mind–and turned it inside out.
What was left was possibly the strangest record of the entire rock and roll era. At once supremely radical and profoundly reassuring, recorded just as the women’s movement was taking off, it made no grand statements in the manner of “Respect” or “I Am Woman,” or even “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” but instead simply took for granted everything genuinely useful such a movement might achieve. Where others had proclaimed, Travers simply made the most powerful assumption of all. That the right to make the most profound decisions in a relationship was no more than her–or anyone’s–just due. She called special attention to nothing–and missed nothing. The freedom and attendant responsibility that lay behind her bold assumptions got exactly the weight they deserved and no more, lessons that have been missed by generations of male rock critics and upper-class “feminist” scholars alike, but were likely not lost on the wave of female singer-songwriters (Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, et al) who were about to leave their own deep mark.
It was perhaps appropriate for “Jet Plane” to hit number one in the last month of a decade synonymous with tumult. It seems at least possible that after a deluge of assassination and war and riot, the culture simply took that highly symbolic occasion to draw a deep breath and reach back for some sense of itself, for some reminder of the bedrock that would be waiting when the brick and mortar stopped flying. If cultures can do such things–and if ours did such a thing at that moment–it is both heavily ironic and completely unsurprising that it was Travers’ voice we reached for.
The critic Ralph Gleason once famously called Peter, Paul and Mary “two rabbis and a hooker,” and to be honest that’s one of the funniest things any critic has ever said. But the real joke is that it was the hooker–not the rabbis or the critic–who turned out the have the biblical voice.
Before her, the great voices of American protest music remained in the underground or on the sidelines. Before her, if a “folk” group had a really big hit it was “Good Night Irene” or “Tom Dooley” or, “Michael” (as in row the boat gently and safely ashore). Before her, when Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” it scraped the charts for a week before being banned. Before her there was no way Woody Guthrie
singing “Deportee” or Louis Armstrong singing “Black and Blue” or, for that matter, Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ In The Wind,” could get anywhere near a chart. After her, there was no way “Turn, Turn, Turn,” or “For What It’s Worth,” or “Fortunate Son,” or “Ohio,” or “A Change Is Gonna’ Come” or “Born In the U.S.A.” or “The World Is a Ghetto,” or “What’s Going On” or “Fight the Power” could miss.
As we head into an age when the party of “limited” government (which, laughably, still goes by the name Republican) has laid the groundwork for an assumption of draconian federal powers the old House Un-American Activities Committee that hounded Pete Seeger would never have dreamed possible, the American music charts are, in most ways, as free of pointed relevance as they were in 1961 and every year prior. These days even so-called “hardcore” rappers and punks confine their protests to their albums. Few others bother with even that much.
I’d like to think that the moment is always right for some new version of Mary Travers to take over those charts but I won’t be holding my breath.
Truth is, the blonde chick in Peter, Paul and Mary has gone to her reward and I have a funny feeling they only made one of her.
John Ross
Havana, Florida
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Since I'm not hearing anything one way or the other from the San Francisco Folk Music Club, from whose newsletter Harmony I draw the following, I'm going to reprint it, and claim that it's part of the folk process to increase understanding of the music and its practitioners. So go blame Pete Seeger.
I was going to put some commentary at the end of this, but I'll leave it until another time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:01:28 -0700
From: Adam Miller <autoharper@earthlink.net>
Subject: [Harmony] Mary Travers
To: SFFMC` LIST <harmony@sffmc.org>
Message-ID: <e61471f7bc99814b6b690fe0fb8d1500@earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
Subject: Mary Travers
Date: September 25, 2009 8:44:30 AM PDT
RRC subscriber John Ross writes:
In the days leading up to the Iraq war nothing made that modern media invention–the conscience-stricken hawk–quite as queasy as the spectre of the “Peter, Paul and Mary” liberal turning the new adventure into “another Viet Nam.”
That kind of insight was, of course, less than brilliant on infinite levels, but there was some justice in the basic conclusion: the special relationship between music and politics that’s now called to mind by the catch-all phrase “the sixties” was not, after all, just some weird accident.
The stark, unsettling contradictions that boiled to the surface in that generation have been wallowing in the American psyche since the beginning and are with us still, while the notion that musicians and other artists should confront them is, if not quite that old, at least far, far older than the recording industry.
By contrast, a reality where this very confrontation could produce gold records–and the powerful, insidious, earworm relevance in modern American life that this has always implied–was entirely modern and called forth very specifically by three earnest folkies who, as if to prove history really does have a sense of humor, were assembled by a quasi-corporate process not all that different from the one that produced the Monkees.
Partly for those reasons, the group was something of a punching bag among the hipper-than-thou left long before their massive success began to haunt bigots and mad bombers.
At least some of that was envy, but for art to work as politics the art has to come first and P,P&M had two elements of genius. The first was the magical “other” that is created when the members of any great harmony group blend their voices.
The second was Mary Travers.
It was Travers who gave the group’s sleek sound the gravitas it needed to become a dividing line and a cultural force that went far beyond selling records. A lot of what Peter, Paul and Mary did–children’s songs, stale stage-patter, tiresome renditions of “true” folk songs by way of Merry Olde England–was innocuous or worse and can safely be consigned to the nostalgia bin if not the dust bin.
What’s left are a couple of dozen diamond-pure sides that did what art very, very rarely does–changed things.
Nearly every one of those sides featured Mary Travers as either lead or de facto soloist.
It was her voice that put Bob Dylan on the charts for the first time.
Her voice that brought Pete Seeger back to the top ten after nearly a decade in blacklisted exile–not with Weavers-style balladry but with a political anthem. Her voice wailing on the key line in Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” that makes it sound even now like something college kids really would call forth as naturally as breathing when they were being beaten with night-sticks and tossed into paddy wagons at the “liberal” Democratic Convention in 1968.
The poetry of “the whole world is watching” was Dylan’s but it was almost certainly Travers who Middle America heard when the fragment was recited for evening newscasts or morning newspapers just as it was effectively Travers, almost alone, who first put “protest” music into the proverbial million living rooms where Martin Luther King might as well have been the antichrist.
It wasn’t for nothing that Civil Rights paragon Ossie Davis–as righteous a defender as African-American culture will ever have–called her white-bread folk group “the movement set to music.”
All of that would make her one of the most important voices of the century but she could be even better.
“500 Miles” was recorded in 1962 and, with the tumult still largely in front of her, Travers used that completely artificial confection as a vehicle for collapsing time. Standing on the cusp of a cultural earthquake that would not have been entirely possible without her, she made a commercial folk song sound as if it had always existed and always would, as if everything that was about to happen had already been and gone and she was the only one left to speak of it. Much like the sixties themselves, her version can make you smile behind the eyes or rip your heart out–can be steeped in as much hope or damnation as a listener chooses.
Where “500 Miles” was a pure abstraction–a reach for something that could be grasped but not quite held–“Leaving on a Jet Plane” was utterly prosaic. Travers simply took John Denver’s best song–a fine, if conventional lament on that most jealously guarded male prerogative, i.e., the freedom to come and go and have the little woman wait for you to make up your mind–and turned it inside out.
What was left was possibly the strangest record of the entire rock and roll era. At once supremely radical and profoundly reassuring, recorded just as the women’s movement was taking off, it made no grand statements in the manner of “Respect” or “I Am Woman,” or even “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” but instead simply took for granted everything genuinely useful such a movement might achieve. Where others had proclaimed, Travers simply made the most powerful assumption of all. That the right to make the most profound decisions in a relationship was no more than her–or anyone’s–just due. She called special attention to nothing–and missed nothing. The freedom and attendant responsibility that lay behind her bold assumptions got exactly the weight they deserved and no more, lessons that have been missed by generations of male rock critics and upper-class “feminist” scholars alike, but were likely not lost on the wave of female singer-songwriters (Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, et al) who were about to leave their own deep mark.
It was perhaps appropriate for “Jet Plane” to hit number one in the last month of a decade synonymous with tumult. It seems at least possible that after a deluge of assassination and war and riot, the culture simply took that highly symbolic occasion to draw a deep breath and reach back for some sense of itself, for some reminder of the bedrock that would be waiting when the brick and mortar stopped flying. If cultures can do such things–and if ours did such a thing at that moment–it is both heavily ironic and completely unsurprising that it was Travers’ voice we reached for.
The critic Ralph Gleason once famously called Peter, Paul and Mary “two rabbis and a hooker,” and to be honest that’s one of the funniest things any critic has ever said. But the real joke is that it was the hooker–not the rabbis or the critic–who turned out the have the biblical voice.
Before her, the great voices of American protest music remained in the underground or on the sidelines. Before her, if a “folk” group had a really big hit it was “Good Night Irene” or “Tom Dooley” or, “Michael” (as in row the boat gently and safely ashore). Before her, when Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” it scraped the charts for a week before being banned. Before her there was no way Woody Guthrie
singing “Deportee” or Louis Armstrong singing “Black and Blue” or, for that matter, Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ In The Wind,” could get anywhere near a chart. After her, there was no way “Turn, Turn, Turn,” or “For What It’s Worth,” or “Fortunate Son,” or “Ohio,” or “A Change Is Gonna’ Come” or “Born In the U.S.A.” or “The World Is a Ghetto,” or “What’s Going On” or “Fight the Power” could miss.
As we head into an age when the party of “limited” government (which, laughably, still goes by the name Republican) has laid the groundwork for an assumption of draconian federal powers the old House Un-American Activities Committee that hounded Pete Seeger would never have dreamed possible, the American music charts are, in most ways, as free of pointed relevance as they were in 1961 and every year prior. These days even so-called “hardcore” rappers and punks confine their protests to their albums. Few others bother with even that much.
I’d like to think that the moment is always right for some new version of Mary Travers to take over those charts but I won’t be holding my breath.
Truth is, the blonde chick in Peter, Paul and Mary has gone to her reward and I have a funny feeling they only made one of her.
John Ross
Havana, Florida
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Speaking of cheap instruments
A few weeks ago, I was driving through the town of Downey en route to my Doctor's office, when I spotted a little independent music store. Deciding I had the time, and with the available of that California rarity -- a parking space -- I decided to take a look. Nice guitars, even better prices. I'd not heard of the brands before, but the feel was good, as was the sound. Unfortunately, the guy at the counter was taking care of a customer, with another one waiting, so I saved the questions for later and headed on to see the Doctor.
A couple days later, in a posher neighborhood, I stopped in at a Big Box music store, and saw the same instruments with a BRAND NAME (Ta-daaaaaaa!!!), for only three times the price. Same feel, same tap sounds, and the only difference was better strings. But I gave them a fair trial, and left with some questions in the back of the head. A couple hours later, I'm back in Downey, giving a couple guitars a more thorough playover.
As may have mentioned, I'm spending an increasing percentage of the year down in Southern California taking care of my mother. I've been schlepping a guitar back and forth, and the poor thing is starting to show the trials of the process. So I needed something I could take to jams and song circles without worrying about it a bunch. The six-string banjo and the nine-string parlor guitar are more robust (or, in the case of the banjo have passed that point where minor damages become character ... sort of like myself), but the guitar.... not so much.
So, we have a no-name instrument who needs a home, and a part-time folkie who has never subscribed to the "price tag equals level of wonderfulness" theory.
Obviously, we should have gotten along well. This is the point where I have to fess up to a whole raft of glitches that I could have avoided for just a few hundred dollars more. Sorry. I like the sound, the shop gave me a new set of strings, and I got 75% off of the price of a gig bag. OK, the bag has the store name on the side, but as long as I don't take it to places outside of the state, I should be fine. The treble is a little weak, and the bass is a tad overbalanced, but with a name like Carter, that just has to be useful. Price: under USD150. I like the plain spruce top for purely cosmetic reasons, but it turns out to gentle the sound better than the one with a top that matched the sides and back.
A couple days later, in a posher neighborhood, I stopped in at a Big Box music store, and saw the same instruments with a BRAND NAME (Ta-daaaaaaa!!!), for only three times the price. Same feel, same tap sounds, and the only difference was better strings. But I gave them a fair trial, and left with some questions in the back of the head. A couple hours later, I'm back in Downey, giving a couple guitars a more thorough playover.
As may have mentioned, I'm spending an increasing percentage of the year down in Southern California taking care of my mother. I've been schlepping a guitar back and forth, and the poor thing is starting to show the trials of the process. So I needed something I could take to jams and song circles without worrying about it a bunch. The six-string banjo and the nine-string parlor guitar are more robust (or, in the case of the banjo have passed that point where minor damages become character ... sort of like myself), but the guitar.... not so much.
So, we have a no-name instrument who needs a home, and a part-time folkie who has never subscribed to the "price tag equals level of wonderfulness" theory.
Obviously, we should have gotten along well. This is the point where I have to fess up to a whole raft of glitches that I could have avoided for just a few hundred dollars more. Sorry. I like the sound, the shop gave me a new set of strings, and I got 75% off of the price of a gig bag. OK, the bag has the store name on the side, but as long as I don't take it to places outside of the state, I should be fine. The treble is a little weak, and the bass is a tad overbalanced, but with a name like Carter, that just has to be useful. Price: under USD150. I like the plain spruce top for purely cosmetic reasons, but it turns out to gentle the sound better than the one with a top that matched the sides and back.
Suspicions Confirmed?
Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/09/090914111418.htm
Fungus-treated Violin Outdoes Stradivarius
ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2009) — At the 27th “Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen” (one of Germany’s most important annual conferences on all aspects of forest husbandry), Empa researcher Francis Schwarze’s "biotech violin" dared to go head to head in a blind test against a stradivarius – and won! A brilliant outcome for the Empa violin, which is made of wood treated with fungus, against the instrument made by the great master himself in 1711.
September 1st 2009 was a day of reckoning for Empa scientist Francis Schwarze and the Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer. The violin they had created using wood treated with a specially selected fungus was to take part in a blind test against an instrument made in 1711 by the master violin maker of Cremona himself, Antonio Stradivarius. In the test, the British star violinist Matthew Trusler played five different instruments behind a curtain, so that the audience did not know which was being played. One of the violins Trusler played was his own strad, worth two million dollars. The other four were all made by Rhonheimer – two with fungally-treated wood, the other two with untreated wood. A jury of experts, together with the conference participants, judged the tone quality of the violins. Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number – 90 persons – felt the tone of the fungally treated violin "Opus 58" to be the best. Trusler’s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that "Opus 58" was actually the strad! "Opus 58" is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.
Skepticism before the blind test
Judging the tone quality of a musical instrument in a blind test is, of course, an extremely subjective matter, since it is a question of pleasing the human senses. Empa scientist Schwarze is fully aware of this, and as he says, “There is no unambiguous scientific way of measuring tone quality.” He was therefore, understandably, rather nervous before the test. Since the beginning of the 19th century violins made by Stradivarius have been compared to instruments made by others in so called blind tests, the most serious of all probably being that organized by the BBC in 1974. In that test the world famous violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman together with the English violin dealer Charles Beare were challenged to identify blind the "Chaconne" stradivarius made in 1725, a "Guarneri del Gesu" of 1739, a "Vuillaume" of 1846 and a modern instrument made by the English master violin maker Roland Praill. The result was rather sobering – none of the experts was able to correctly identify more than two of the four instruments, and in fact two of the jurors thought that the modern instrument was actually the "Chaconne" stradivarius.
Biotech wood, a revolution in the art of violin making
Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the “Little Ice Age” which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly – ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities.
Horst Heger of the Osnabruck City Conservatory is convinced that the success of the “fungus violin” represents a revolution in the field of classical music. “In the future even talented young musicians will be able to afford a violin with the same tonal quality as an impossibly expensive Stradivarius,” he believes. In his opinion, the most important factor in determining the tone of a violin is the quality of the wood used in its manufacture. This has now been confirmed by the results of the blind test in Osnabruck. The fungal attack changes the cell structure of the wood, reducing its density and simultaneously increasing its homogeneity. “Compared to a conventional instrument, a violin made of wood treated with the fungus has a warmer, more rounded sound,” explains Francis Schwarze.
Adapted from materials provided by Empa, via AlphaGalileo.
So it wasn't the blood of bats in the varnish, and it wasn't secret techniques found in a cave. Like so many folk who try to get sounds out of wood and strings, the guys got lucky with the wood supply. So does that mean people will stop paying the price of a really nice yacht for a violin that was once stored in the same vault as a Strad?
So it wasn't the blood of bats in the varnish, and it wasn't secret techniques found in a cave. Like so many folk who try to get sounds out of wood and strings, the guys got lucky with the wood supply. So does that mean people will stop paying the price of a really nice yacht for a violin that was once stored in the same vault as a Strad?
Thursday, August 27, 2009
In Praise of Less Expensive Instruments
Several weeks ago, I was killing a little time in the "try the acoustic guitars" room of a certain big box music store. I go into one one of these every so often just to see who is building what, and identify the current "show off how good I am" riffs being played (to a given value of "played"). Over the years, there have been changes, and observation is a harmless hobby.
As so often happens, a parent type had brought a couple of kids in to try out guitars with an eye to buying the kids something to learn on. To his credit, the salesperson started out with guiding the kids toward less expensive, but still well-made instruments, but Mama wasn't having any of it.
"I'm paying for private lessons with a top flight instruction person and I don't want my children to be embarrassed going into the process. I don't drive a second rate car, and I don't want my children to be handicapped by second rate guitars"
This way-too-wrong-on-way-too-many-levels statement was delivered in that Orange County mega-WASP accent that could cut glass. It slipped occasionally, so I think she was a transplant, but the general effect made Ann Coulter sound smart.
So here we have these two elementary school students, who had to be shown about pushing the strings down, deciding on their instruments based on the label, the price tag, and how they looked when the kids struck poses in front of the curiously ubiquitous full-length mirror one finds in such places. At the end of the day, Mama sunk a couple grand into instruments that were (a) likely to gather dust in closets within a few months, (b) were not any easier to play than instruments costing a fraction of the final prices, and (c) were probably NOT going to be the investment instruments that payed for these kids' college.
I know people who have more invested in guitars and other instruments than they do in the house that keeps the rain off them. Great. I collect sunrises. sunsets, memories of people, and WAY too many books. OK, the books are more a matter of accumulation than collection. But instruments? I like the unusual, and the sounds of the variants to what has become the absolute-no-kidding-only-way-a-guitar-should-look-and don't-even get-close-to-this-jam-with-that-thing school of thought. I think the most I ever was asked to pay was $480.00 ..... and we settled on $325.00.
Would I like to pay 5K for something that has a famous label and is an EXACT duplicate of what Leadbelly played in the slammer? No. If I had the money, and I could go back up the line to sit down for an hour or so and WATCH Leadbelly play just about anything? Oh yeah. Also an hour with any of a number of folks who are no longer with us. But absent those possibilities, I have better things to do with the bucks. Besides, I have had the opportunity to spend time with a fair number of folks from whom I learned a lot, and I'm not sure my memory is up to keeping all of them straight. Maybe the impulse is more a matter of wishing these people were with us again.
But please listen to me, parents: above a certain basic level, you can't buy a better sound. If your kid has talent, or the motivation to practice, or a talented teacher, or the ability to go watch people play and come home and work out how they did that, or any combination of the above, that's worth more than all the abalone inlay in the world.
As so often happens, a parent type had brought a couple of kids in to try out guitars with an eye to buying the kids something to learn on. To his credit, the salesperson started out with guiding the kids toward less expensive, but still well-made instruments, but Mama wasn't having any of it.
"I'm paying for private lessons with a top flight instruction person and I don't want my children to be embarrassed going into the process. I don't drive a second rate car, and I don't want my children to be handicapped by second rate guitars"
This way-too-wrong-on-way-too-many-levels statement was delivered in that Orange County mega-WASP accent that could cut glass. It slipped occasionally, so I think she was a transplant, but the general effect made Ann Coulter sound smart.
So here we have these two elementary school students, who had to be shown about pushing the strings down, deciding on their instruments based on the label, the price tag, and how they looked when the kids struck poses in front of the curiously ubiquitous full-length mirror one finds in such places. At the end of the day, Mama sunk a couple grand into instruments that were (a) likely to gather dust in closets within a few months, (b) were not any easier to play than instruments costing a fraction of the final prices, and (c) were probably NOT going to be the investment instruments that payed for these kids' college.
I know people who have more invested in guitars and other instruments than they do in the house that keeps the rain off them. Great. I collect sunrises. sunsets, memories of people, and WAY too many books. OK, the books are more a matter of accumulation than collection. But instruments? I like the unusual, and the sounds of the variants to what has become the absolute-no-kidding-only-way-a-guitar-should-look-and don't-even get-close-to-this-jam-with-that-thing school of thought. I think the most I ever was asked to pay was $480.00 ..... and we settled on $325.00.
Would I like to pay 5K for something that has a famous label and is an EXACT duplicate of what Leadbelly played in the slammer? No. If I had the money, and I could go back up the line to sit down for an hour or so and WATCH Leadbelly play just about anything? Oh yeah. Also an hour with any of a number of folks who are no longer with us. But absent those possibilities, I have better things to do with the bucks. Besides, I have had the opportunity to spend time with a fair number of folks from whom I learned a lot, and I'm not sure my memory is up to keeping all of them straight. Maybe the impulse is more a matter of wishing these people were with us again.
But please listen to me, parents: above a certain basic level, you can't buy a better sound. If your kid has talent, or the motivation to practice, or a talented teacher, or the ability to go watch people play and come home and work out how they did that, or any combination of the above, that's worth more than all the abalone inlay in the world.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Folk, Art Song, Performance or what?
CAVEAT: Very little of the following is original, but I'm trying to sort some ideas out in order to get them into a coherent framework (see, Dr. Wilson? I truly did listen to what you said!) I make no apologies for relying on decades of conversations, readings, attendance at lectures and similar events, or participation in seminars and workshops without proper citations. I don't have the time to go through notes and files to cite exact dates, places, or publications. Frankly, being just over a thousand miles away from these things is, if not a royal pain, at least an academic one. Having said all of that, please accept that when I refer to a person or book, I am, in fact referring to my memory of that encounter and what I carried away from it in the back of my head.
[You know, I should have used that little bit of weaselly prose on several other things I've written recently. No idea why it debuts here. I'm definitely going to boilerplate it for future use. But I digress.]
Tommy Makem said that Irish musical traditions fall into three loose divisions.
First there is the music that the serfs played for the gentry. Picture Anglo-Irish aristocracy gathering in the great house to hear the Gaelic-Speaking peasants adapt the "better" music of the times to their own techniques of string, voice, pipe, or percussion. Some of the more talented were sometimes sent to study the "proper" way of playing, and returned to blend their own tunes more closely into the styles and sensibilities of their betters. The dynamic remained the same; somebody played or sang and somebody sat quietly (if the musicians were lucky) and listened.
If dance was involved, it was either a planned performance demonstrating "wild Gaelic" dance to the gentry, or a matter of "the peasants play the music and the gentry dance." Depending on the era, it might be the peasants playing music for a "proper" dance of some sort, or a gentrified version of a local dance. Over on YouTube, there used to be a clip of the British Royal Family doing "Scottish Country Dancing" at Balmoral. There are records of British Army officers who retired to the Wicklow hills teaching the locals to play sets of Regimental tunes.
Third (yes, I'm aware of the lack of numeric flow. just stay with me, I think it's going to work) we have the music the serfs and servants sang among themselves. Work songs to keep the pace or synchronize some activity, or simply help the day along. Songs around the hearth, be it cot or tavern, to lament things as they might have been, or to ring up the vision of things as they might be. Teaching songs, worship songs, or songs with no more utility than making a child giggle or help it to sleep. People sang as a group, or when there was one singer who knew all the words, there would be a chorus and the people would sing it sweetly, or roar it out with a grin in the voice, as appropriate. The dynamic was collective and interactive.
Dance was usually established traditional figures, or it might be improvised. Solo dancing, according to some of my relatives, was pretty much a performance (urban, music hall) thing, not found up the country very often.
The second division, lying as it does between two ends of a broad spectrum, blends something of both. It's fairly recent in some cultures, possibly as a result of the continuing demand for novelty, or as the society got more complex, or as a reaction to the ascendancy of one of the two extremes. People singing and playing for other people, without distinction of status or class, other than the idea that we're singing and playing and you've paid to listen. Mostly performance based, with a spectrum much like that between the American "Old-Timey" music and "Bluegrass".
The middle ground would also include "re-enactment" or revived (frequently invented) versions of Traditional Music. This can be as earnest a process as the Chieftans (at least in the early days) or, at the other extreme, Riverdance.
If the people in the cottages sang it for themselves, it was folk. If the people from the cottages sang it for the people in the castle, it was performance. If the people sang their songs in the manner of the castle folk, it usually gets preserved as "Art Song".
THe coming of the tourist industry, happening late as it did in Ireland (compared, for example, to Italy and the Grand Tour), brought its own musical divisions. Within my own experiences, it would seem to be based on the origins of the tourists.
Returning recent emigres wanted to hear the music they or their parents remembered from before their individual diaspora. People whose connection was multiple generations back (and usually part of a more varied cultural background) tended to want music that they knew from whichever New World their ancestors had gone. At one time, this was things like "In My Liverpool Home," "when Irish Eyes Are Shining," or "The Wild Colonial Boy." The Great Folk Scare added an entire packet of songs, some of the originally Irish, others (40 Shades of Green is an easy example) pretty much cut out of whole cloth in a distant land, but relying on the forms and conventions the original emigres carried with them from Ireland.
In 1967, you could go into just about any pub in Cork, ask "Where do we find a ballad session tonight?" and get directions. In 1990, the same question would get you a blank look and directions to wherever a formal band or group of semi-locals were playing "Traditional Celtic Music" .... usually on such traditional instruments as the Spanish/Moroccan guitar, the Northumbrian "Elbow" pipes, the Greek Bouzouki, the Def (a frame drum that a dozen people claim they or their father brought back from North Africa in the 1940's or 1950's), the French/Italian violin, the Hungarian Cimbalom, and the English Flageolet.
Sean O'Rearda not withstanding, I'll go with Mick Kearns, who used to declaim about how the only traditional instrumentation was pounding feet and the human voice. Anything else, he claimed, was an add-on from somewhere. Nice to listen to, no matter what naturalized instruments are used, but it's stupid to get snotty about how my adopted instruments are more traditional than your adopted instruments.
The Scots have the same problem. It's a standing joke that the Hogmany celebrations held in Scotland tend to feature songs about how great it would be if we were in Scotland for the holiday ("blythly ignoring the minor detail that they're IN Bloody Scotland" as one "traditional" performer was fond of saying), set in a welter of Victorian Anglo-Scottish reconstructions of a culture the English (amongst others) had spent centuries trying to obliterate.
To save time, if you hear of a performance of "The Sheep, The Cheviot, And The Black, Black Oil" within a day's drive of you, go. It was originally designed as a piece for the Edinburgh Festival, then adapted to tour schools in Scotland, and then upgraded (simplified in some passages) to be performed to Scottish Heritage groups throughout the world. It explains the whole ironic thing a lot better, and it's much funnier than I.
Sarah Makem said that music was the soul of the world captured in sound. I like that. It puts the whole folk/non-folk/traditional/commercial dispute into a nice context. But on the other hand, without disagreement about music, we would have missed out on a number of wonderful all-night sessions of several descriptions.
Malvina Reynolds, of blessed memory, once wound up such a discussion in the candle hours of the morning with a wonderful summation: "I play something and people sing along, it's folk. I sing something and they sit back and listen, it's commercial."
[You know, I should have used that little bit of weaselly prose on several other things I've written recently. No idea why it debuts here. I'm definitely going to boilerplate it for future use. But I digress.]
Tommy Makem said that Irish musical traditions fall into three loose divisions.
First there is the music that the serfs played for the gentry. Picture Anglo-Irish aristocracy gathering in the great house to hear the Gaelic-Speaking peasants adapt the "better" music of the times to their own techniques of string, voice, pipe, or percussion. Some of the more talented were sometimes sent to study the "proper" way of playing, and returned to blend their own tunes more closely into the styles and sensibilities of their betters. The dynamic remained the same; somebody played or sang and somebody sat quietly (if the musicians were lucky) and listened.
If dance was involved, it was either a planned performance demonstrating "wild Gaelic" dance to the gentry, or a matter of "the peasants play the music and the gentry dance." Depending on the era, it might be the peasants playing music for a "proper" dance of some sort, or a gentrified version of a local dance. Over on YouTube, there used to be a clip of the British Royal Family doing "Scottish Country Dancing" at Balmoral. There are records of British Army officers who retired to the Wicklow hills teaching the locals to play sets of Regimental tunes.
Third (yes, I'm aware of the lack of numeric flow. just stay with me, I think it's going to work) we have the music the serfs and servants sang among themselves. Work songs to keep the pace or synchronize some activity, or simply help the day along. Songs around the hearth, be it cot or tavern, to lament things as they might have been, or to ring up the vision of things as they might be. Teaching songs, worship songs, or songs with no more utility than making a child giggle or help it to sleep. People sang as a group, or when there was one singer who knew all the words, there would be a chorus and the people would sing it sweetly, or roar it out with a grin in the voice, as appropriate. The dynamic was collective and interactive.
Dance was usually established traditional figures, or it might be improvised. Solo dancing, according to some of my relatives, was pretty much a performance (urban, music hall) thing, not found up the country very often.
The second division, lying as it does between two ends of a broad spectrum, blends something of both. It's fairly recent in some cultures, possibly as a result of the continuing demand for novelty, or as the society got more complex, or as a reaction to the ascendancy of one of the two extremes. People singing and playing for other people, without distinction of status or class, other than the idea that we're singing and playing and you've paid to listen. Mostly performance based, with a spectrum much like that between the American "Old-Timey" music and "Bluegrass".
The middle ground would also include "re-enactment" or revived (frequently invented) versions of Traditional Music. This can be as earnest a process as the Chieftans (at least in the early days) or, at the other extreme, Riverdance.
If the people in the cottages sang it for themselves, it was folk. If the people from the cottages sang it for the people in the castle, it was performance. If the people sang their songs in the manner of the castle folk, it usually gets preserved as "Art Song".
THe coming of the tourist industry, happening late as it did in Ireland (compared, for example, to Italy and the Grand Tour), brought its own musical divisions. Within my own experiences, it would seem to be based on the origins of the tourists.
Returning recent emigres wanted to hear the music they or their parents remembered from before their individual diaspora. People whose connection was multiple generations back (and usually part of a more varied cultural background) tended to want music that they knew from whichever New World their ancestors had gone. At one time, this was things like "In My Liverpool Home," "when Irish Eyes Are Shining," or "The Wild Colonial Boy." The Great Folk Scare added an entire packet of songs, some of the originally Irish, others (40 Shades of Green is an easy example) pretty much cut out of whole cloth in a distant land, but relying on the forms and conventions the original emigres carried with them from Ireland.
In 1967, you could go into just about any pub in Cork, ask "Where do we find a ballad session tonight?" and get directions. In 1990, the same question would get you a blank look and directions to wherever a formal band or group of semi-locals were playing "Traditional Celtic Music" .... usually on such traditional instruments as the Spanish/Moroccan guitar, the Northumbrian "Elbow" pipes, the Greek Bouzouki, the Def (a frame drum that a dozen people claim they or their father brought back from North Africa in the 1940's or 1950's), the French/Italian violin, the Hungarian Cimbalom, and the English Flageolet.
Sean O'Rearda not withstanding, I'll go with Mick Kearns, who used to declaim about how the only traditional instrumentation was pounding feet and the human voice. Anything else, he claimed, was an add-on from somewhere. Nice to listen to, no matter what naturalized instruments are used, but it's stupid to get snotty about how my adopted instruments are more traditional than your adopted instruments.
The Scots have the same problem. It's a standing joke that the Hogmany celebrations held in Scotland tend to feature songs about how great it would be if we were in Scotland for the holiday ("blythly ignoring the minor detail that they're IN Bloody Scotland" as one "traditional" performer was fond of saying), set in a welter of Victorian Anglo-Scottish reconstructions of a culture the English (amongst others) had spent centuries trying to obliterate.
To save time, if you hear of a performance of "The Sheep, The Cheviot, And The Black, Black Oil" within a day's drive of you, go. It was originally designed as a piece for the Edinburgh Festival, then adapted to tour schools in Scotland, and then upgraded (simplified in some passages) to be performed to Scottish Heritage groups throughout the world. It explains the whole ironic thing a lot better, and it's much funnier than I.
Sarah Makem said that music was the soul of the world captured in sound. I like that. It puts the whole folk/non-folk/traditional/commercial dispute into a nice context. But on the other hand, without disagreement about music, we would have missed out on a number of wonderful all-night sessions of several descriptions.
Malvina Reynolds, of blessed memory, once wound up such a discussion in the candle hours of the morning with a wonderful summation: "I play something and people sing along, it's folk. I sing something and they sit back and listen, it's commercial."
Friday, August 21, 2009
Another unreconstructed folkie goes ahead
Among the people who will, with any luck, be waiting on the far side of the bridge from this world to the next, we now add Mike Seeger. Mike carved himself a niche in folk, and proceeded to define it for generations.
I only met him once, in 1965. Berkeley Folk Festival. I had been listening to him speak on guitar and banjo techniques appropriate to Old-TImey. When question time came up, a young lady rose to protest my 6-string banjo being in the room.
THis was in the days when one carried an instrument in such gatherings to participate in unstructured, non-competitive group music. Totally unlike the rigidly srtuctured, "cite the 'Rise Up Singing' page or don't play it" dreck that just about killed the whole idea. So I had the instrument in hand, when Seeger informed the group that it was "period" ..... so that was OK ...... but it didn't work too well on some songs, and it looked hard to tune.
Nothing profound, but it got me marginally accepted with the purists that year.
I only met him once, in 1965. Berkeley Folk Festival. I had been listening to him speak on guitar and banjo techniques appropriate to Old-TImey. When question time came up, a young lady rose to protest my 6-string banjo being in the room.
THis was in the days when one carried an instrument in such gatherings to participate in unstructured, non-competitive group music. Totally unlike the rigidly srtuctured, "cite the 'Rise Up Singing' page or don't play it" dreck that just about killed the whole idea. So I had the instrument in hand, when Seeger informed the group that it was "period" ..... so that was OK ...... but it didn't work too well on some songs, and it looked hard to tune.
Nothing profound, but it got me marginally accepted with the purists that year.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Sometimes, it works out
Of late, I have been showing up at jams, song circles, and what we would, in my youth, have called "singing gatherings" with the 6-string banjo and the 9-string parlor guitar.
[ If it's a strict Bluegrass or Old-Time event, I either go as part of the appreciative audience or I bring an entirely conservative 6-string acoustic guitar. Having said that, I have found an encouraging decrease in the number of "Bluegrass Police" or "More Old-timey than thou" types.]
Given that the bulk of people showing up for these events are either guitar or 5-string banjo players, the different sound quality of my two instruments seems to work very neatly. More of this anon, dear friends.
[ If it's a strict Bluegrass or Old-Time event, I either go as part of the appreciative audience or I bring an entirely conservative 6-string acoustic guitar. Having said that, I have found an encouraging decrease in the number of "Bluegrass Police" or "More Old-timey than thou" types.]
Given that the bulk of people showing up for these events are either guitar or 5-string banjo players, the different sound quality of my two instruments seems to work very neatly. More of this anon, dear friends.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
More about the new thingies
So now some words about the second thingy that is assisting my attempts to get the hands back where they were before time and arthritis make that impossible.
Dean put them out until recently, under the name of Mondo Mandolin, but I tend to think they missed the point. It's about the size and shape of the "teardrop" and "bell" parlor guitars that were popular in the early 1900's, as well as some I've seen in pictures that go back as far as the Civil War. The number of strings differ, some of them, like this one, had the treble strings doubled in unison, with the bass strings single. Others had all strings in doubled courses. Still others had six strings.
Actually, that's part of why I got the thing in the first place. I was in a music store and it yelled "look over here!"at me from the back wall. I remembered seeing somebody (possibly a relative of mine or one of his bandmates) playing something much like it when I was a kid. Maybe the shape was a little more bell-like, but the general feel is about the same.(egad moment ... I think that was why I bugged my folks for the bell-shaped Davy Crockett guitar when I was in the second grade and replaced it with another, more playable instrument of the same shape some years later).
Shortened version: I bought this little thing a couple of weeks later. The spacing is tight, given two slightly swollen fingers, and the others that were never all that skinny, anyway, but it's a lot of fun. Perfect for the sort of music made popular by the Carter Family and their ilk.
I never quite know what to call that kind of music. In the past year or so, I've met Bluegrass Purists who are adamant that it does NOT belong to them, and some Old-Timey Purists who are only happy about maybe half the catalogue.
Playparty songs like Weevly Wheat or Goin' to Boston (dating back to Colonial and/or Federal periods - and sung/played right up to today)don't even get a look-in. And you wanna shake up a bunch of Traditional Music types at a jam session? Show up with a jug. It may be authentic, but if experiences in Oregon and Northern California are anything to go on, you'll only be welcome if the thing is full and you're willing to share.
Back to my 9-string parlor guitar (Dean's marketing people can go peel grapes. With single bass strings and doubles trebles, you can play the whoopie-do out of anything with bass runs and flick strums (single or scratch). Somebody asked my why I didn't just stick to a flatpick and play it as if it were an extended mandolin. I claimed I had no idea, because there is no way to say something like "if I wanted to play a mandolin tonight, that's what I would have brought" with any degree of charm.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
"The paths we take in this life are illuminated by the people with whom we walk."
When stationed at Wiesbaden Air Base, Germany in the middle 1960's, I joined a folk group -- "The Addicted" -- in company with Jack Krieger and Ed Faulk. We had a lot of fun, made a lot of good music, a couple of other people moved in and out of the group.........but it is in the nature of the military that everybody leaves. People get transferred, people get discharged, etc. Ed and Jack did both. I stuck around the Air Force, eventually got a commission, and retired with 26 years of service.
After finding out about some of the people I knew before I joined the Air Force, I decided to look up Ed and Jack. Ed was fairly easy. He is now Deacon Ed Faulk, with ministry in churches of two different rites. He's also a biggie in the electronics field, raises shelties, and is a certified judge for dog shows and trials.
Jack Krieger is now known as "Cecil" or "CJ". Turns out "Jack" was his middle name. Why didn't I know that? Perhaps I did, and it's part of that increasing part of the personal data storage that seems to have become mushed up with the passing of years. Anyway, he's a world class martial artist, and something of a legend in the world of massage therapy. He also wrote and/or performed an impressive range of music. Did I mention his poetry?
OK, so when we were "The Addicted" Ed played guitar better than I did, and Jack (CJ) sang better than I did. I sort of did the parts in the middle, musically. Outside of a few adventures where I'm not sure about the statute of limitations, it was a good association. OK, even the weird stuff was pretty cool. I also had the opportunity of getting my head handed to me at pool and table tennis. Such things are good for the humility muscles, and I learned enough to actually win a few matches in later years.
Last night, I was noodling around on the 9-string, and found I actually remember the words (and most of the chords) to some of the stuff we did back then. Not too bad for a guy who has to look up the words to the stuff he wrote (and performed) a lot more recently.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
The Two New Thingies
Our Story thus far:
I was speaking of the two instruments I have been exploring in the process of trying to get my hands back to where they were (or, by preference, where I would like to think they were).
And so to the task:
The two new instruments are: a 12-string fretted cumbus and a 9-string teardrop shaped parlor guitar. At least that's how I see them. Lark in the Morning sells the former as a 12-string banjo, and Dean, that makes the latter, calls it the 'mondo mandolin'.
First, the cumbus. This is a Turkish instrument that was designed to take advantage of technology as defined around 1928 - 1930, when it was developed. The idea was to have an instrument that blended traditional craftsmanship and modern construction methods in the same way that the new Turkey blended the values and traditions of Europe and Asia. Named by Attaturk himself, it has interchangeable necks, and can be used in a variety of roles. The most recognizable, perhaps, is a relatively short, fretless neck and 12 unison strings in 6 courses. In recent years, a version with a fretted neck and octivated bass courses has been gaining a following. It can do things that an acoustic 12-string guitar would find difficult, and vice-versa. It is also harder to tune. You think your 12-string
guitar gets fussy? Try putting the bridge on a plastic banjo head and see what happens. Oh, and that head is measurably thinner than the usual banjo head.
Having said all that, it is a real thunderer when played in the style of using the bass strings to carry the melody and the treble strings as a semi-drone. Full-course open chords get a tad problematic, but hit one and then play single notes while the original chord is still ringing .... brill.
More of this anon, and some words of appreciation for the 9-string, as well.
Until that time, cheers.
I was speaking of the two instruments I have been exploring in the process of trying to get my hands back to where they were (or, by preference, where I would like to think they were).
And so to the task:
The two new instruments are: a 12-string fretted cumbus and a 9-string teardrop shaped parlor guitar. At least that's how I see them. Lark in the Morning sells the former as a 12-string banjo, and Dean, that makes the latter, calls it the 'mondo mandolin'.
First, the cumbus. This is a Turkish instrument that was designed to take advantage of technology as defined around 1928 - 1930, when it was developed. The idea was to have an instrument that blended traditional craftsmanship and modern construction methods in the same way that the new Turkey blended the values and traditions of Europe and Asia. Named by Attaturk himself, it has interchangeable necks, and can be used in a variety of roles. The most recognizable, perhaps, is a relatively short, fretless neck and 12 unison strings in 6 courses. In recent years, a version with a fretted neck and octivated bass courses has been gaining a following. It can do things that an acoustic 12-string guitar would find difficult, and vice-versa. It is also harder to tune. You think your 12-string
guitar gets fussy? Try putting the bridge on a plastic banjo head and see what happens. Oh, and that head is measurably thinner than the usual banjo head.Having said all that, it is a real thunderer when played in the style of using the bass strings to carry the melody and the treble strings as a semi-drone. Full-course open chords get a tad problematic, but hit one and then play single notes while the original chord is still ringing .... brill.
More of this anon, and some words of appreciation for the 9-string, as well.
Until that time, cheers.
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