We stumbled across this music while watching Lisbon Story recently. The movie was pretty boring, but the music was great. They have a female singer and a wide variety of instrumentation (all acoustic). Some of the tracks are instrumentals. It sounds a lot like gypsy music, but, as nearly as I can tell, it is sung in Portuguese. I just tracked down several of their albums (including the soundtrack to the film) at Amazon.com. Most of the listed items seem to be $2-3 cheaper at www.towerrecords.com, though, so you may want to look over there first. You can listen to sound bites at both sites.
Shawn Colvin
Just recently, we discovered "A Few Small Repairs" which has to be one of the best albums I've heard in several years. Since then, I've checked out others such as Fat City and Steady On. None of these even comes close to AFSR, though. Click on the links above and listen to some samples from them and see if you agree. Cover Girl is all covers from famous songwriters. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I did her own songwriting, although it is interesting from the standpoint of which songs she chose and how she chose to perform them. (Sting, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young are among the songwriters whose songs she sings).
Milton Nascimento and other Brazilian songwriters:
I recently checked out a CD called Milagre dos Peixes (1973) from my library which I found pretty disappointing. Nascimento shows real talent, but the entire CD sounded as if he had made it while drunk or on drugs. Very little effort seemed to have gone into quality control (similar to some tracks on McCartney's Ram from 1971, for example). I suspect some of his other releases may be better, though, because the first Gilberto Gil CD I heard was close to the same low quality of MdP. But once I had heard two or three other Gil releases, I was hooked.
If you're interested in hearing something from Gil, I recommend Acoustic (a live set from 1994), Tropicalia II (a 1994 collaboration with fellow Tropicalian, Caetano Veloso) and his most recent (to my knowledge) release, Quanta (1997).
Speaking of Caetano Veloso, he recently released a new CD, as well. It's entitled Livro (1999), and it's very good. These guys are contemporaries of the 60s psychedelic movement in America and Europe, and their music is very colorful and enjoyable to listen to right from the first hearing.
Poi Dog Pondering's 1992 release entitled Volo Volo
I originally heard this band on a track from the Grooves series. That track was quite good, so I was pretty excited when I found this CD at my local used CD/used book store (McKay's in Centerville, VA). But I ended up being very disappointed. It's not that the tracks are bad. It's just that they are mind-numblingly mediocre like so much of the music being released these days. There is really very little of musical or lyrical value here, although I did find "I've Got My Body" mildly interesting lyrically. My advice is not to waste your time. Perhaps other releases are better, I don't know.
Inspiration, Religious and Otherwise: The Miracle of the Loaves and Phish
A couple of my family members had an interesting exchange recently in which a Miles Davis album called Kind of Blue (1958 or -9) came up. I mentioned that I recently become familiar with
another Miles Davis CD from very close to the same
time period called Sketches of Spain which is very unlike other
Miles Davis music I have heard. I didn't care for it
much the first couple of times I heard it, but it has
really grown on me. I wouldn't really even classify it
as jazz, I don't think. Some tracks are almost purely classical à la Albeniz or somebody similar.
I admire artists who can
venture out of their specialty, and I think he has, at
least to some degree, done that here. In fact, Miles
Davis is considered one of the major innovators in
jazz, and many consider his later album Bitches Brew
(weird title, I know) to be the first 'fusion' album
(combination of rock with jazz).
Speaking of jazz, I've thought for a long time that
what passes for jazz these days (and by 'these days' I
mean virtually my entire lifetime or at least from the
70s onward) is really not very jazz-like at all. To
me, jazz implies (among other things) improvisation
and innovation which, I would argue, most contemporary
musicians who call themselves jazz artists (eg. Kenny
G, Harry Connick Jr, and even the Yellowjackets) don't
really know much about.
There's a band called
Phish out of Burlington, Vermont (a neat little town
on the shore of Lake Champlain just across from
upstate New York and very close to Canada) that is sort of this generation's Grateful Dead. Amy's
brother used to follow them around Europe and America
and collect tapes of different live performances.
Anyway, I'm not a big fan, but I would have to say
that I find the spirit of jazz alive in their recordings more than just about anywhere else today. They certainly wouldn't consider themselves jazz artists, but there is definitely that
element in their music.
The main song that comes to mind is one called "Stash"
which can be found on a CD entitled A Picture of
Nectar (1992). The lead guitar work on this recording
is mind boggling -- particularly toward the end where
they wander off into a blur of weird keys. I'd like to
sit down sometime and see if they are following some
modified sonata form or something because when they go off into the weird keys it seems as though there's something going on there formwise that I'm just not quite astute enough to grasp.
Another great song from that album is Guelah Papyrus.
These guys have some of the weirdest but most creative
lyrics I've heard in a long time. This song is
certainly no exception. Some of the other tunes are a
little over the top for my taste (Tweezer and, if that
weren't enough, Tweezer Reprise, for example), but all
in all, this is a superb piece of artistry and well
worth the price.
I haven't been nearly as crazy about other Phish
recordings, but, as my nephew Michael has said, even the stuff you don't like is very interesting and worth listening to. In any case, though, almost every track on A Picture of Nectar is fantastic.
Now, just to go off onto a weird tangent for a moment while
I'm waiting for Amy to come pick me up at 1 AM here at
work (am I nuts?), all this reminds me of a story a
friend of mine (Derek Larsen) told me recently -- a
parable, really -- about a spring which is meant to
represent prophecy or the inspiration of God. He
described how water would burble up in an area and
slowly people would find their way there and enjoy
drinking the water until finally powerful people moved
in and built a fence around the spring and started
charging admission. Gradually the spring would then
die down and spring up elsewhere and the whole process
would start over again.
Of course, he was talking about religion, and his
powerful people were the Catholic church or some similar example of organized religion.
For me, though, this applies well to the fields of
both classical music and jazz. Both have become so
codified with rules and regulations and prestige (the
fancy coat and tails that maestros and pianists wear,
for example) that the real music has become secondary.
In Mozart's time, it was common for classical
musicians to be able to improvise long pieces of
music. I haven't met more than 2-3 such people in my
life, however, although they are around.
Incidentally, I find it interesting that BYU has just begun offering
a Jazz degree in the music dept. What an irony. A
university run by an out-of-touch clergy offering a degree in an
out-of-date field. Anyway, this is getting too
political. Sorry. Interested in your comments as always.
One would have hoped that Paul McCartney would bring a little excitement to this gendre which is often so severely lacking in it. But this did not happen. McCartney's impression of what classical music should be seems to me to be very superficial. There's very little in the way of innovation in this and his other works, and his famous gift for melody gets lost in these heavy, belabored movements. It's almost as if McCartney feels that the closer he can come to sounding just like the Romantic masters, the better a composer he will be. To me, though, the whole idea is to create something that doesn't sound like anything else. Kind of like what the McCartney did with the Beatles. Let me say in McCartney's defense, however, that there's really very little 'classical' music being written these days that's particularly original. And the few things that are are often so unmusical that they hardly qualify as music, anyway.
Incidentally, some of my favorite contemporary pieces are the little snippets they play to introduce National Public Radio programs like All Things Considered and The Diane Reim Show. I have no idea who wrote these pieces, however, and NPR isn't very good about attributing this material.
This CD features three orchestral pieces and two string quartet pieces that weren't just transcriptions of McCartney songs. I didn't care much for the song transcriptions (there were about ten of them), although they had their interesting moments. In Maybe I'm Amazed, for example, the stridency of the strings playing that famous 7#9 chord that comes at the end of the line "that he doesn't really understand" sounds great. The Lovely Linda was nice, too, because it was kept very short and served as a nice splash to end the album on.
Of the three orchestral pieces, Spiral is by far the most interesting. In fact, it is probably McCartney's best orchestral effort yet. It starts out with an ethereal sound based on sustained strings and distant flutes with oboe echoes. There is a bit of the late Romantic era in it, but it still sounds very fresh and original, like what one would expect of an orchestral piece written in the late 1990s.
Tuesdays features some nice tone coloring in the instrumentation, but it lacks originality in that it sounds a little too much like a John Williams score with some Aaron Copland and Ralph Vaughn Williams thrown in for good measure. One thing I really like is the little horn motif about three minutes into the piece.
A Leaf also lacks originality, and the oft repeated four-chord cadence that starts in right from the very beginning of the piece gets old very fast. There's an interesting section à la Philip Glass with arpeggios played first in the flutes and later in the double basses. That bit with the double basses struck me as very McCartneyesque in that few others would have thought to try it. It reminded me of so many Beatles songs where they flout convention by doubling thirds or starting (instead of ending) a song on feedback.
Haymakers and Midwife are the two string-quartet pieces that aren't based on songs. Haymakers starts out simplistic and a little too conventional, but in the development section, some interesting contrapuntal things happen. I like the short sections where the instruments are playing three rhythmically distinct parts (the two violins sharing one part) which mesh together nicely but in a very loose and non-formulaic way. Midwife is like a folk melody from Fiddler on the Roof or something. It's a nice piece, and it is made more interesting by frequent tempo changes. On the whole, it's a bit too conventional for my taste, but it's very good for what it is. Another nice section is the section where contrapuntal stuff is going on in the violins while the cello and viola keep up a pizzicato rhythm. Toward the end, a Copland-like American folk feel is introduced. These small-ensemble pieces show what McCartney can do when he's not so overwhelmed with handling a large orchestra.
It's been awhile since I listened to this CD so I may come back and revise this soon. Here are my initial impressions, though: Aside from two or three interesting tracks, I wasn't terribly impressed. That said, though, I believe McCartney could actually create some interesting instrumental music if he were willing to exercise enough discipline to sit down and start from the beginning by writing for smaller ensembles before tackling the whole orchestra. How about a few pieces for wind quintet or brass? Or what about some small ensembles with voice like what Elvis Costello did with the Brodsky Quartet?
This CD features several of McCartney's instrumental works as arranged for flute quartet. I haven't heard it, and I don't plan to make a great effort to. It sounds absolutely uninteresting to me, and I will forego the dubious pleasure of hearing it until such a time as I stumble across it at the library or otherwise find a way of hearing it without having to shell out any money for it.
