issue number 6 is (has been) available online. Read more at the new-fangled CultureCandy website
Alex V. Cook - Author, Journalist, Critic, Teacher
Friday, July 31, 2009
next scene, please
Darcy Jame Argue's Secret Society - Infernal Machines (listen) This lovely and lush album on the fence of jazz and not-jazz was briefly mentioned in Nico Muhly's recent post about the notions and boundaries of scenes in New Music in New York. At first, I read this thinking I wish I had that problem, enough like-minded interesting people doing interesting things that they gather into clumps, but of course that happens here. It is difficult to write about the cultures of a place that instinctively keep to their respective owns.
itsnotyouitsme - Walled Gardens (listen) This group shares the New Amsterdam label, and thereby, maybe, a scene with the former, and has been one I keep in my handy on my phone for its quiet, slightly sad, calming qualities. My daughter and I were playing one of our bumbling beginner's chess games. Really, I am the only bumbler here because she soundly and strategically beat me while I was half- listening to this on my phone. She requested some "Harry Potter music, like the stuff without any words" and this was the only atmospheric, instrumental, to-a-kid-listenable alternative stuff on hand. I was thinking about this album while having my ass handed to he in the game: I love it, the NYTimes loved it, I'm sure their friends love it, but is that far as it goes? Should you be happy anybody at all loves what you do? Loves what you love?
Brad Mehldau - Largo (listen) - A lala listener to the Darcy James Argue records said of it:
Wow. Just plain wow. After one listen, it seems like this is my favorite jazz album since (and perhaps including) Brad Mehldau's "Largo." Unlike so many recent jazz records, it's fun to listen to, with a strong sense of texture and mood, without losing its modern adventurousness.which is enough of a recommendation to draw me in. But, I suppose, I'm easy. I love everybody. I'm a magpie. I make my nest out of all y'all's stuff. Who needs a scene when I have everything right here, at my fingertips?
BTW, this jazz Radiohead cover is tight... it should bisect at least one of your scenes, and therefore, be safe for you to check out.
The Tunes of Two Cities
The Residents - The Tunes of Two Cities (listen) This was one of the albums I couldn't work into the Oxford American article I wrote on the band last year, though it is one I love dearly. It is a tone poem about the two sides to a city, the sunny optimistic side where the decision makers live and play, and the supposedly sinister dangerous side where the others all live. Baton Rouge is very much one of those cities, with an invisible wall running down the middle of Florida Blvd that people generally, outside of downtown, don't cross. Baton Rouge is a place where streets change name as the race of people that live on them changes; it can be argued that "Jura" is ghetto for "Wisteria." I don't for a second believe this to be a uniquely local phenomenon - across the country Eisenhower's interstate system finished the job that train tracks started. It is just one that is locally palpable, and one that the work of this mysterious band explores. As the album progresses, the two sides of the city commingle, adopting each others alleged virtues and shortfalls, never quite becoming one but at least acknowledging the other, which would in most places, be a start.
The Dead by Stan Brakhage
This was the first Stan Brakhage film I ever saw, screened in a Philosophy of Film class in college. I remember a number or people being moved by the thing and I spoke up at the end, declaring this a total misfire, hastily patched and overlain, underdeveloped tourist footage from Paris, and I still stand by that physical assessment. Philosophically, though I can see it now. This is the fleeting eye of someone who no longer knows everything. At twenty, I knew everything and was thereby repulsed by this notion. This thing is not aiming for profundity, but for experience, which I suppose is all we ever have. I particularly like the wobbly gait through the cemetery at the end - nothing captures the raw human condition like walking past the graveyard.
A reader of these musings on Brakhage suggests that the rest of you, assuming there are more of you reading this than just him, might like the Brakhage documentary simply titled "Brakhage" available on iTunes, and I am happy to pass that info along.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
can you say "bobo motion"
Willie Bobo - Bobo Motion (listen) Just say it with me: "bobo motion." See? You feel better already.
Lou Donaldson - Alligator Bogalloo (listen) So much jazz in the world... here is a groovy slab of it with Mr. Donaldson blues it up on alto sax, Mr. George Benson laying down some crisp tasty guitar years before he created some of the all time worst songs to get stuck in your head and the possibly one-fingered Dr. Lonnie Smith piloting the organ in a gentle geosynchronous orbit around yr soul.
5 Artists who should do a misguided, overblown, wondrous "With Strings" album
Eels with Strings - Live at Town Hall (listen)
Vitamin Strings Quartet - Performs Radiohead's In Rainbows (listen)
Nina Simone - Nina Simone with Strings (listen)
5 Artists who should do a misguided, overblown, wondrous "With Strings" album
- Prince
- Shaun Ryder from Primal Scream (here is "The Ecstacy and the Agony" - a great, excruciating hour-long BBC documentary about him)
- Kate Bush
- Julian Cope
- RYAN ADAMS
his idea of hot is John Philips Sousa and hula hoops
Sufjan Stevens - trailer for "The BQE" - I don't care what the rocker keep-it-simple lobby is grumbling about over in the corner, I love crazy old Sufjan Stevens and his giant ideas about America. America is a big place with big problems and big things to love. It requires a prism to see it; you can't just look at one thing. You have to go bananas on it like Walt Whitman to get a sense of the place. I can't wait to see the full movie or concerto or whatever "The BQE" is. I love that it is about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I love that his idea of hot is John Philips Sousa and hula hoops. I love that Mr. Stevens doesn't compress anything; instead, he spreads it out on his bed and picks through it like a teenage amateur archaeologist.
THE BQE- A Film By Sufjan Stevens from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.
Van Dyke Parks - Jump (listen) I'll be honest, I can't really get into Van Dyke Parks, despite his being an obvious antecedent to Sufjan Stevens, but I'm perpetually compelled to give him a shot because I am certain he is onto something particular and unique, and the cornball way he goes about it is essential to getting this very important point. Like this 1984 star-spangled banterer about Uncle Remus - it is a bit hard to swallow. It's like if Busby Berkely had made it to the disco era, but once you are inured to it, there are moments of sublime beauty. I adore Ghetto Bells, the album he arranged and co-wrote with Vic Chesnutt, and one can immediately see traces of it in this.Dizzy Gillespie & His Operatic Strings Orchestra - Jazz in Paris (listen) I say I like the dazzle of America in its kalliedoscpode wonder, but just now I had to sift through email, facebook email, text messages, and all other forms of communication to find a goddamn putt-putt golf birthday party invitation so I could coordinate it with a sleepover and the effect is not unlike having all of Coney Island in the 70's crash on top of you.
You know, Sufjan should do write an opera about Coney Island, get Van Dyke Parks and Stephin Merrit on the case, tap Tim Burton to direct the movie and Johnny Depp to play a carnival barker down on his luck and Jack Nicholson as the ghost of Lawrence Ferlinghetti narrating the whole thing. Meanwhile, I will bask in the warm albumen of lush strings of the Operatic Strings Orchestra and occasional outbursts of Dizzy Gillespie's weird-looking trumpet.
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