Back when I was a thrift-store record fiend, one of my holy grails was the 1958 country gospel album Satan Is Real by The Louvin Brothers. The cover featuring Charlie and Ira Louvin in white Western suits singing on a fiery infernal plane looked like the ultimate album kitsch. I never did come across it. Years later, I fell for The Byrds’ Sweethearts of the Rodeo, particularly the harmonies and unapologetic moral declaration “The Christian Life,” and I was surprised to trace that very song back to the Louvin Brothers and Satan Is Real. I started picking up the Louvin collection and found it contained melodies and arrangements that trumped any kitsch value their covers previously held for me.
The Louvin Brothers disbanded in 1963, and Charlie Louvin had a couple of solo country hits in the mid-1960s with “See the Big Man Cry” and “I Don’t Love You Any More.” Fortunately a number of hip listeners kept up with Louvin, and in 2007, Tompkins Square Records released Charlie Louvin, a collection of classic country gospel delivered in his weathered voice and accompanied by Elvis Costello, George Jones and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. That led to the reissue of many of his classic albums, a guest spot on Lucinda Williams’ Little Honey, two new records of his own and a 2009 GRAMMY nomination for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album.
Louvin will be in town April 3 for a rare, intimate performance at the Red Dragon Listening Room at the venue’s new location at 2401 Florida Street. Contact Chris Maxwell at cmaxwell@premier.net for tickets. I’m personally thrilled to witness a national treasure like Louvin in person, but a little part of me regrets not ever tracking down a copy of Satan Is Real for him to sign. charlielouvinbros.com
Leonard Cohen - New Skin for the Old Ceremony (lala) So drunk and so dirty. Other people might be able to sing it with a stronger voice or play it with more complimentary settings, but he can say it better.
Northern Lights over the Twin Cities - (1985) I already like a piece whose opening movement is titled "Battles of Gods" and is credited to the Combined Musical Forces of Macalester College, consisting of:
The Macalester Festival Chorale, Amy Snyder conducting, prepared by Kathy Romey The Macalester Concert Choir, Kathy Romey conducting The Macalester Symphonic Band, Henry Brant conducting, prepared by Edouard Forner The Macalester Symphony Orchestra, Edouard Forner conducting Mac Jazz, Carleton Macy conducting The Macalester Pipe Band, Andrew Hoag conducting The Macalester Special Percussion Group, prepared by Carleton Macy Ten-Piano Ensemble, prepared by Donald Betts The Macalester Dance Ensemble, prepared by Becky Heist
Vocal soloists, prepared by Alvin King: Sarita Roche, Coloratura Soprano Cindy Lambert, Soprano Rick Penning, Tenor Alvin King, High Baritone Wayne Dalton, Baritone
This is suffice to say, monster: 100 minutes, requiring six conductors managing orchestras, choirs, singers, percussion, all carefully and purposefully placed around a hall to maximize the acoustic potential of the building. Spatial music is the key phrase with Brant, arranging things around the room, but I suspect focusing primarily on that is like looking at Jackson Pollock's paint-crusted dipsticks in deference to his paintings - especially when experiencing it in the limited auspices of a twenty-year-old recording streamed over the Internet.
Here are the liner notes from the Innova recording. Therein lies this description: The gastronomic equivalent of his music, Brant says, would be a sumptuous meal where Mexican enchiladas, New York steak, and French bouillabaisse were prepared simultaneously.“If you were to put them together in a bowl, you would kill them all.If they are sufficiently separated, you can enjoy them all even if they’re eaten — or, in this case played — at the same time.”
There are the odd moments of Caribbean steel drums against moody dark-sky dissonance, but this is more of an emotionally controlled affair than one is led to believe. it reminds me a little of those giant Mahler pieces, where the universe is being depicted by the undulating enormity of the orchestra, but here Brant is just romanticizing the Aurora Borealis as he saw it over Minneapolis in 1982, and is using a wider brush than Mahler generally does. In the "Rarefied Air" segment, a stately Souza regiment of the damned meets a misguided yet determined jazz big band on the park gazebo to duke it out under the ionospheric psychedelics, and instead of jarring, it is rather funny, as if modern suburbanites were suddenly called from their dens and PTA meetings to stage an impromptu storm ritual for this event.
Northern Lights does get a little monotonous at points, but in the "Pulsating Arcs" movement toward the end there is great contemplative beauty, a trumpet sunrise over a static of strings and protuberance of the choir.
It is humanity rising above the din of life, the din which serves Brant as his architectural inspiration, to meet the the electric bullwhip of the heavens. Even the baby crying in the audience finds a place of sweetness in this movement. There is similarity to Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question, but this is no existential test for competing string orchestras (The Unanswered Question is that and a whole lot more, mind you) but palpable honest wonder at the firmament. If I were an editor here, I would point to "Pulsating Arcs" and say more of this, less of all that.
Like all dreams, tranquility is rudely dispelled by bagpipes and a clamor of percussion, a shocking silence (twelve seconds of it in fact), and a movement named the same as the piece, where the reappearance of the townsfolk regaling what they just experienced, and the reemergence of the din tainted by the collective trans formative experience, and like all crowds, the experience instead gets absorbed into the mass. It is hard to tell whether this is a harsh critique of the American tendency to suck the life out of wonder, or a testament to Midwestern resolve that takes in wonder with the same strides as they do the mundane. Whichever is intended, the piece closes with what sound the world like a moony TV show ending theme from the golden era followed by a pastiche of incidental moments over the roll of the credits, life systematically returning to regular programming after Zeus ceased to reveal his blinding, luminous form.
A Plan of the Air - A 1975 24-minute tone explication of a poem by his first wife; the poem and the piece both inspired by an inventory of things from Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks. A choir and interwoven singers offer data like "Item: two figures in perspective.Item: a cat." Leaner in form than the above colossus, its calmer tonalities and spartan percussive routines, where instruments are seeming hit one at a time as if the performer is inventorying his kit the same way the libretto inventories the notebooks, is a relief. The singers nearly devolve into chant at points, and the orchestration drifts off into its own clouded thoughts, leaving you to the listener to yours.
At first I didn't think I liked Brant's music, or, rather, I thought it didn't really work, but I'm starting to see what it's doing: exactly as he stated, he is simulating the mundane, elevating it the way the Surrealists did with everyday objects, but unlike them, pulling back the same way the world pulls you back, leaving you to wonder if your thoughts are real or things as nebulous as you fear they might be.
No matter how much I think I know about something, there is always something else to be known.
And that heretofore unknown thing, in this case the compositions of Henry Brant, is discussed in terms that you should already be familiar with this when it is mentioned, such as with this article about a poorly thought out staging of a Charles Ives performance in Baltimore.
Obscure as that thing I don't know may be, it is never tiny, always vast. I don't discover a composer that wrote just a handful of pieces, they created a whole genre and there are ensembles dedicated to performing them at afternoon recitals in far flung Universities. There are books in the library about them.
The more obscure the composer (to me) the more comprehensive the collected works package is and suddenly, I go from not knowing anything about a composer to knowing, or at least experiencing, everything. Added occasional bonus: great covers.
Except there is always a chunk missing - in this case, where has vol. 7 gone, lala.com?
Arvo Pärt - Stabat Mater(Naxos) Performed by the Studio De Musique Ancienne De Montreal. Listening to Arvo Pärt is not unlike seeking refuge from an avalanche in a hastily dug but effective snow cave which is moments later buried by a sudden rain of meteors, his music being the sigh of relief between the two events. I also rather like this sepia video set to Pärt's Magnificat
itsnotyouitsme - Walled Gardens (lala) While more informal and less catastrophically heavy as the preceding master of the Estonian deep brood, new music outfit itsnotyouitsme has a touch of that same gravitas. I was talking with a coworker the other day about the word gravitas; it's a word that implies incredible seriousness but is usually invoked in the service of mockery. In this case, I mean actual incredible seriousness. The metamorphosis from sweetness to growling menace under a hypnotic roll gives this music a tense atmosphere, but one where you are too concerned watching the shadows of clouds slowly encroach your vantage point and then pass on by to be bothered by the relentlessness of gravity's pull. It is as much indie rock as it is chamber music as it is gorgeous.
Nazz - 13th & Pine (lala) The collection of rarities is a bit of a wild mess compared to the sublime pop genius of Nazz (lala) but is further evidence that richest unexplored territory of popular music is what turns up if I start at Strawberry Alarm Clock and keep searching. Perhaps I was led to this by divine guidance, what with Todd being God and all. Tommy James - A Night in Big City: An Audio Movie(lala) Wow. Tommy James took his Shondells money and whatever he had left from "Draggin' the Line" thought about it all for 20 years, and sunk it all into this 1995 concept epic about the city. The cover looks a little like an Atari game simulation of my senior prom. It opens with a mayor declaring "Tommy James Day" as Tommy and his band (one with "Rocky Balboa" voice) tearing off in a limo with synth-rock abandon. This is batshit, terrible stuff, songs bridged by skits, like if Kurt Weill V decided to revive his great-great-grandfather's tradition of folk opera, cowriting it with Huey Lewis, or perhaps Joe Piscopo. The peak is this dream of 21st century unity, "Megamation Man"
No more border in the new world order. It's a Beautiful Day - s/t (lala) I know little about this late 60's psychedelic group except that they were led by a violinist named David LaFlamme (former member of Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks) and their idiosyncratic male-female harmony style is spoke of as an influence of those of John Doe and Exene from X. I can hear it, and I dig it. And it is a beautiful day....
Philip Glass - Music in Twelve Parts (lala) When I can't make a decision about where to go, I hand over the wheel to the nearest serial minimalist and let him or her drive for the next four hours or so. In doing this, I contend to be freed by this restriction, thinking that the composers that write four hours of barely changing repetition feel the same way - the repeated phrase is the sonnet form but more severe - and in submission to it I adopt their devotion by proxy. I love this music, especially the big, long pieces, but like any reasonable person, listening to to them drives me a little mad, temporarily. We are not built for the concentration for which this work calls, or I'm not anyway, but I am called to it. I used to think of it as endurance test listening, to see how much I can take and to see if I can ride through the breakers to really get out to sea, where the water is too deep and vast to attempt swimming back, to where repetition becomes sacred, to borrow a phrase from George Clinton.
I'm less philosophical, or at least less philosophically rigid, about listening to this kind of music as I once was. I'm not expecting some sort of enlightenment after standing the the waterfall kind of thing to happen. I can approach it as music, the same way I approach other music finding things in it other than the bullshit coming at it from the space between the headphones, even on occasions when said bullshit is more fun for me than the music itself. I can still nurse the big thoughts, imagine the stop-motion God movie of glaciers as Glass and crew slog through these workouts, but I feel less obliged to these ideas now. I'm free to love it because I love it. I'm not controlling my experience (per se, I did choose to click play and can choose to click stop) but rather controlling my need to control the experience, making my control preventative rather reactive, which is how I understand successful people wield the control they have.
In the March 2009 issue of 225 Magazine.
