From the Los Angeles Times
POP MUSIC
Paul McCartney is a man on the run
He has a new album, a new record label, new living arrangements and even a new plan about putting the Beatles' music catalog online this year.
By Kim Murphy
Times Staff Writer
June 3, 2007
Winchelsea, England — HE noticed it when his cellphone, stuffed with too many text messages, voicemails and phone numbers, started flashing at him: "Memory almost full." It was remarkably like his own brain, weighted down with half-written songs, daughter Bea's schedule, the lyrics to old Beatles B-sides, the blurring faces of long-buried loves and friends.
Delete? Re-record? Which parts go, and which — the carpets of bluebells outside Liverpool in spring, sitting on twin beds in a hotel room with John Lennon writing "She Loves You" — stay locked in the hard drive of time?
"Your memory is always almost full these days. There's so much going on, so I thought it was a poetic way to sum up modern life. Just overload, information overload," Paul McCartney says of his 21st solo album, "Memory Almost Full," which explores the persistence of memory, preparing for the settling of scores and a life too full to hold it all.
"It's been pointed out to me that since the album is heavy on retrospective stuff, there's a sort of finality about it. 'Memory almost full,' any second now it will be full, and, 'Goodbye cruel world.' It's not what I meant about it at all, but I can see that meaning, and I like, you know, people to have different interpretations. "Abbey Road" to us was a crossing outside the studio. I'm sure to some people, it meant Monastery Lane, and we liked that sort of quasi-religious feel of it too."
The album (out Tuesday) marks the 64-year-old McCartney's plunge into another kind of digital age. Ending his relationship with Capitol Records/EMI that began in 1962, McCartney has hooked up with Starbucks' new Hear Music Label and unlocks the new album (along with the rest of his solo catalog) for online downloads. McCartney also says the Beatles catalog is on deck for online release near the end of the year, although EMI has not announced a date.
The video for "Dance Tonight," the party-tune, mandolin-laced foot-tapper that opens the record, made its world premiere on YouTube, in a bid to charm a third generation with the kind of winsome songs their grandmother should know.
"I was bored with the old record company's jaded view," McCartney says, plopped on a sofa in the large, comfortable farmhouse that doubles as a rehearsal studio here in the rolling, tree-studded hills of rural East Sussex. Outside, there is an old windmill, and in the near distance, the hazy blue carpet of the English Channel.
"They're very confused, and they will admit it themselves: that this is a new world, and they're a little bit at a loss as to what to do. So they've got millions of dollars and X budget … for them to come up with boring ways — because they've been at it for so long — to what they call 'market' it. And I find that all a bit disturbing.
"I write it, I play it, I record it, and that's all fun. And you go to the record company, and it gets very boring. You sit around in rooms with people, and you're almost falling asleep" — he rolls his head down midchest —"and they're almost falling asleep.
"My record producer [David Kahne] said the major record labels these days are like dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid. They know it's going to hit. They don't know when, they don't know where it's coming from. But it's sort of hit already. With iTunes, and all of that."
McCartney heard that Starbucks' content development guy, Alan Mintz, loved his music; better, he was a bass player. They arranged to meet in New York, along with Howard Schultz, the chief executive who turned Starbucks from a high-fallutin' bean roaster in Seattle into a multibillion-dollar global purveyor of expensive coffee drinks and cool ambience.
The vision from Starbucks and its Concord Music Group partner in Hear Music: Roll out "Memory Almost Full" across time zones on the in-store music systems at more than 10,000 coffeehouses in 29 countries (copies available as you pay for your latte, and at dinosaur record stores too, of course). That means an estimated 6 million people get a listen on the first day.
"We felt we were in a unique position to really transform the way music is discovered and delivered to the music consumer," said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment in Los Angeles.
"When we heard the album, we just knew it was really a landmark in a number of ways. Musically, it's the most personal and revealing album that Paul's created in his solo career. Thematically, many of the songs are a reflection of his life, his career, his jobs and the tragedies, a reflection of the remarkable journey his life has been."
McCartney had the same reaction to Apple founder Steve Jobs — with whose company Apple records was locked in trademark litigation for years — as he had to Schultz. "He too is very cool, very passionate, they really care about working with your music.
"I just thought, right, I'm going to put a package together on that side of things that will keep me and my producer excited. And that's what we've done. So we're working with websites, Internet things, young kids. Just people who are hungry. People who come up with ideas rather than people who've been at it too long and are frightened for their jobs."
Contrary to British media reports, he said, longtime Apple Corps chief Neil Aspinall's departure in April had nothing to do with clearing the way to the online music market.
"He wanted to retire. Simple as that. I've known Neil longer than I've known anyone in the music business, including all the Beatles. Neil was at school with me when we were 11, he was in my class. But he just wanted to retire. He's 65. So he did. So we have a new guy now [Jeff Jones], he's very good. Nobody considers he's going to replace Neil, you know, emotionally, because we grew up with Neil…. But there are new sorts of things, new openings, the online thing is a huge opening, and so it's a new chapter now."
McCartney and the band are rehearsing for an upcoming trio of "surprise" live gigs in the U.K., New York and Los Angeles, and there is a definite bachelor air around the place, now that wife Heather has split in the messiest divorce to hit the London tabloids since Chelsea soccer team owner Roman Abramovich dumped his wife for leggy young "Dasha" Zhukova.
The band is playing with enough volume these days that they're annoying daughter Bea, a frequent visitor. "We play a bit loud, just because we can," McCartney says with a sly smile. "We're allowed to, there's no grown-ups around. We're allowed to turn our amps up, you see?"
The off-limits topic
WHAT he won't talk about are Heather Mills McCartney's allegations about what went on during their four-year marriage: that McCartney slashed her arm with a broken wine glass, ordered her not to breastfeed Beatrice because "I don't want a mouthful of breast milk," and refused to let her keep a chamber pot in the bedroom, forcing her, because she is missing a leg, to crawl to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
"I don't like to talk about it, because we're still in the middle of a divorce," he says. "A somewhat public divorce. And you know we have a 3 1/2 year-old daughter. So I'm trying to make every effort to say as little as possible about it. I'm moving through it, hopefully with some kind of dignity."
It's hard not to find a hint of Heather and the apparent pride McCartney once must have felt in his determined and ambitious young wife in "See Your Sunshine" from the new album: "Step out in front of me baby / They want you in the front line / They want to see your sunshine."
But many of the songs were written even before 2005's Grammy-nominated "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," and the memory files they plumb go deep into a boy's lush and lovely summers (on the exquisite "Tell Me"), McCartney's days as a Boy Scout, beaning his friends on the head with chestnuts. Then, less-ancient files: the Beatles "sweating cobwebs" and playing the Cavern Club in Liverpool. In a final, five-song suite similar in form to the "Abbey Road" medley but progressing through the milestones of a life, McCartney reaches the surreal and unsettling "House of Wax," where "poets spill out on the street / To set alight the incomplete / Remainders of the future."
And there is the "End of the End" — a swan song so McCartney in its essential optimism: "It's the start of a journey to a much better place / And a much better place would have to be special," he reassures. "No reason to cry."
He has buried Linda McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison. By now, he is surely accustomed to partings. Yet he seems to remember, like the bluebell forests of England (that once formed the backdrop to a frolic in "Help"), the tender times, the days when it was easy to bend over a guitar with Lennon on the other rumpled bed and work magic on cue.
"We were writing 'She Loves You' because we'd been told by our manager that we needed a single. And we were just, 'OK.' It was great. We just responded well to direction. They'd say, 'You're going into studio next week, so you'll need to write the album.' And we'd go, 'OK.' Ha! Never once do I remember us going, 'A whole album in a week?' Which, you know, we should've thought.
"But we go, 'Yeah, great, OK.' We were just so innocent and enthusiastic. So yeah, that's what we did all the time. We wrote just under 300 songs, and that was done in about 300 sessions. We never had a dry session."
How could that be?
"Because we were bloody brilliant. Pure genius, that's all. 'We were very good,' he said modestly,' " and he smiles for his failure to conjure up the requisite humility. "The good thing is, now you can say that. People used to say, 'Don't you think you're a bit conceited?' And I'd say, 'I know what you mean, you could say it's conceited, but I really do know we're good. I can feel it every time we write a song.' Because John and I were very good collaborators. We really helped each other massively and admired each other greatly."
He thinks for a moment. "It was a joy," he says.
He trips into the rustic farm kitchen, where the band is swallowing whole a spread of mozzarella sandwiches and samosas before heading back to the studio. He cuts a few roses from the garden and rummages for a glass to put them in water, singing the trippy chorus of "The things I think I did / I di-i-di-i did" from "Ever Present Past" under his breath.
Almost time for the imperious and charming Bea to show up. Time to play "very, very, very quietly," he says.
M&C note: here's a great quote from his New York Times story:
The major record labels are having major problems. They’re a little puzzled as to what’s happening. And I sympathize with them. But as David Kahne said to me about a year ago, the major labels these days are like the dinosaurs sitting around discussing the asteroid.”
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Mr. Colón's Opus: 1970s Bandleader Johnny Colón
Village Voice
Jazz Supplement
Mr. Colón's Opus
The heyday of Johnny Colón's venerable East Harlem Jazz School may be yet to come
by Carol Cooper
June 5th, 2007 12:37 PM
The creeping commercial disillusionment that caused East Harlem bandleader Johnny Colón to stop recording in the early '70s may have been the best thing to ever happen to music education in New York City.
He scored his first hit, the Latin/blues hybrid "Boogaloo Blues," in 1966 for George Goldner's newly formed Cotique label. Rumor was that George had lost his previous company, Tico, to rival Morris Levy on a bet, and was determined to make his new Latin imprint even hotter. Established Latin acts like Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri initially frowned upon the fusion of r&b, jazz, and Latin preferred by younger players like Colón at the time, despite early breakthrough fusions like Mongo Santamaria's "Watermelon Man" and Pete Rodriguez's "I Like It Like That." But the youth market, already grooving to rock and soul, were ready to hear new hybrids, and Colón, who was influenced as much by the Moonglows, Horace Silver, and Cal Tjader as by the infectious Charanga trend then challenging the Latin Boogaloo movement, was always more adventurous and idiosyncratic than his peers.
Convinced by Johnny's club performances that the public would go for his bold, fresh sound, Goldner put all his street muscle behind the single. " 'Boogaloo Blues' had a controversial lyric," Johnny admits now over dinner at an easygoing bar & grill on East 79th Street. "It was, 'L.S.D. has a hold on me.' We always said it meant 'Love, Sincere, Divine,' but radio jocks told Goldner they didn't want to play it. Only Symphony Sid at WEVD said, 'No problem.' "
After Symphony Sid broke the record, massive caller requests made other jocks follow suit. Johnny was immediately in demand on all the right stages and hot radio shows. He was working more than ever before, but the money wasn't right—no royalties or increased concert fees. A staunch member of the musician's union, Johnny went public with his discontent, questioning the Latin industry powers that be. But his band lost important gigs and radio support as a result. He recorded five more albums, first at Cotique and then at Fania's request. But by the early '70s, Johnny was convinced that teaching music and playing noncommercial community gigs were better ways to serve his muse.
Although he didn't incorporate his nonprofit East Harlem Music School until 1972, he'd already been giving free music lessons out of his mother's apartment for almost a decade. Expanding this initiative into a rented workspace with phones, a staff, and a sign over the door was to prove his life's calling. Johnny, an avid multi-instrumentalist who mastered the guitar by age 8 (and bass, piano, trombone, and the human voice before he left high school), still gigged with his band, but he poured everything he made into running his school. Music theory and instrumental instruction remained completely free for many years, until some of his official funding sources demanded the school charge something, if only to remain eligible for various grants. So by 1988 or '89, kids (ages 8 and up) were paying $1 a week, while adults paid $3.25. "Funny thing was," Johnny recalls wryly, "class attendance during summer months improved the minute we began charging a fee!"
The wider renown that eluded Colón as a pop star eventually fell on famous alumni like singer Tito Nieves, percussionist Robin Loeb, pianist/arranger Hilton Ruiz, and Marc Anthony, who stars opposite Jennifer Lopez in the upcoming Hector LaVoe biopic El Cantante. Johnny remembers Anthony coming to the school with his siblings as an earnest young 7-year-old, hungry to learn every aspect of the music business; Johnny also recalls once sharing a stage with salsa legend LaVoe himself, and later teaching LaVoe's son at the school.
But it's not just his world-famous graduates Colón remembers. Johnny still sees ex-students who thank him for facilitating their more modest goals: a central Harlem woman who learned to play piano for her church, a young man who'd almost dropped out of school but now feeds his family by playing music, and various teachers and administrative staffers he trained who went on to help establish similar programs elsewhere. Furthermore, what always made EHMS special was the presence of working musicians like pianist Charlie Palmieri (Eddie's brother), who taught piano at the school for three years. Johnny was especially proud of that hire, since decades earlier Charlie had been among the first pros to encourage Johnny as a 16-year-old bandleader. These circles of mutual empowerment and mutual obligation are part of the value system Johnny instills along with every music lesson.
In 1994, Johnny's second wife, Stephanie, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, leaving him without the administrative backbone of his organization. Public funding had never allowed them to purchase a building or pay competitive wages to retain permanent supplemental staff, so while Johnny was able to limp along without Steph for a few years, by the start of the new millennium he'd had to reduce the scope of his school's operations to a shadow of what they'd been.
Then, around 2004, when his band was asked to play a benefit for several community organizations, he met with Lewis Zuchman, executive director of SCAN New York, who asked Johnny if he'd be willing to outsource his teaching staff and technique in partnership with specific SCAN initiatives. The Supportive Childrens' Advocacy Network is funded to devise and administrate educational programs serving at-risk youth in various urban locations; they struck a deal, and through them Johnny now runs daily classes for second graders at P.S. 114 in the Bronx, and teaches a group of teens at the Isla del Barrio BEACON program, part of the Academy for Environmental Sciences in East Harlem. "I would say without reservation that Johnny is the best music educator in the city," enthused Zuchman by phone. "Especially in using music to teach math and literacy skills."
While Johnny has travelled as far as Germany to demonstrate his unique pedagogic style, his technique still intimidates those who prefer dull, dictatorial, rote strategies. He believes he can get anyone to read music in 15 minutes. "In Germany, I taught 'Jingle Bells,' " he says. "I taught the rhythmic structure first, and in minutes they were reading basic rhythm notation." While he is always willing to outsource his methodology to anyone who asks for it, he finds that more traditional institutions reject his core idea that learning should always be fun and liberating to the student. But recent lecture/presentations he's done for the Caribbean Cultural Center and the Jazz Museum in Harlem suggest that now, when cities most need better music education, Johnny's name quickly comes up.
Eventually, someone may come along to offer the funding and infrastructure needed to relaunch his own institution. But until then, Johnny's decided to start recording again. He's already completed one album of modern American standards as a singer with his jazz trio, and plans to return to the studio soon with his Latin orchestra, in part to challenge some of the foreign reissues of his early work that have been circulating without his permission (or compensation) since the 1990s. The industry's malfeasance hasn't gone away, but Johnny's disillusionment has.
Jazz Supplement
Mr. Colón's Opus
The heyday of Johnny Colón's venerable East Harlem Jazz School may be yet to come
by Carol Cooper
June 5th, 2007 12:37 PM
The creeping commercial disillusionment that caused East Harlem bandleader Johnny Colón to stop recording in the early '70s may have been the best thing to ever happen to music education in New York City.
He scored his first hit, the Latin/blues hybrid "Boogaloo Blues," in 1966 for George Goldner's newly formed Cotique label. Rumor was that George had lost his previous company, Tico, to rival Morris Levy on a bet, and was determined to make his new Latin imprint even hotter. Established Latin acts like Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri initially frowned upon the fusion of r&b, jazz, and Latin preferred by younger players like Colón at the time, despite early breakthrough fusions like Mongo Santamaria's "Watermelon Man" and Pete Rodriguez's "I Like It Like That." But the youth market, already grooving to rock and soul, were ready to hear new hybrids, and Colón, who was influenced as much by the Moonglows, Horace Silver, and Cal Tjader as by the infectious Charanga trend then challenging the Latin Boogaloo movement, was always more adventurous and idiosyncratic than his peers.
Convinced by Johnny's club performances that the public would go for his bold, fresh sound, Goldner put all his street muscle behind the single. " 'Boogaloo Blues' had a controversial lyric," Johnny admits now over dinner at an easygoing bar & grill on East 79th Street. "It was, 'L.S.D. has a hold on me.' We always said it meant 'Love, Sincere, Divine,' but radio jocks told Goldner they didn't want to play it. Only Symphony Sid at WEVD said, 'No problem.' "
After Symphony Sid broke the record, massive caller requests made other jocks follow suit. Johnny was immediately in demand on all the right stages and hot radio shows. He was working more than ever before, but the money wasn't right—no royalties or increased concert fees. A staunch member of the musician's union, Johnny went public with his discontent, questioning the Latin industry powers that be. But his band lost important gigs and radio support as a result. He recorded five more albums, first at Cotique and then at Fania's request. But by the early '70s, Johnny was convinced that teaching music and playing noncommercial community gigs were better ways to serve his muse.
Although he didn't incorporate his nonprofit East Harlem Music School until 1972, he'd already been giving free music lessons out of his mother's apartment for almost a decade. Expanding this initiative into a rented workspace with phones, a staff, and a sign over the door was to prove his life's calling. Johnny, an avid multi-instrumentalist who mastered the guitar by age 8 (and bass, piano, trombone, and the human voice before he left high school), still gigged with his band, but he poured everything he made into running his school. Music theory and instrumental instruction remained completely free for many years, until some of his official funding sources demanded the school charge something, if only to remain eligible for various grants. So by 1988 or '89, kids (ages 8 and up) were paying $1 a week, while adults paid $3.25. "Funny thing was," Johnny recalls wryly, "class attendance during summer months improved the minute we began charging a fee!"
The wider renown that eluded Colón as a pop star eventually fell on famous alumni like singer Tito Nieves, percussionist Robin Loeb, pianist/arranger Hilton Ruiz, and Marc Anthony, who stars opposite Jennifer Lopez in the upcoming Hector LaVoe biopic El Cantante. Johnny remembers Anthony coming to the school with his siblings as an earnest young 7-year-old, hungry to learn every aspect of the music business; Johnny also recalls once sharing a stage with salsa legend LaVoe himself, and later teaching LaVoe's son at the school.
But it's not just his world-famous graduates Colón remembers. Johnny still sees ex-students who thank him for facilitating their more modest goals: a central Harlem woman who learned to play piano for her church, a young man who'd almost dropped out of school but now feeds his family by playing music, and various teachers and administrative staffers he trained who went on to help establish similar programs elsewhere. Furthermore, what always made EHMS special was the presence of working musicians like pianist Charlie Palmieri (Eddie's brother), who taught piano at the school for three years. Johnny was especially proud of that hire, since decades earlier Charlie had been among the first pros to encourage Johnny as a 16-year-old bandleader. These circles of mutual empowerment and mutual obligation are part of the value system Johnny instills along with every music lesson.
In 1994, Johnny's second wife, Stephanie, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, leaving him without the administrative backbone of his organization. Public funding had never allowed them to purchase a building or pay competitive wages to retain permanent supplemental staff, so while Johnny was able to limp along without Steph for a few years, by the start of the new millennium he'd had to reduce the scope of his school's operations to a shadow of what they'd been.
Then, around 2004, when his band was asked to play a benefit for several community organizations, he met with Lewis Zuchman, executive director of SCAN New York, who asked Johnny if he'd be willing to outsource his teaching staff and technique in partnership with specific SCAN initiatives. The Supportive Childrens' Advocacy Network is funded to devise and administrate educational programs serving at-risk youth in various urban locations; they struck a deal, and through them Johnny now runs daily classes for second graders at P.S. 114 in the Bronx, and teaches a group of teens at the Isla del Barrio BEACON program, part of the Academy for Environmental Sciences in East Harlem. "I would say without reservation that Johnny is the best music educator in the city," enthused Zuchman by phone. "Especially in using music to teach math and literacy skills."
While Johnny has travelled as far as Germany to demonstrate his unique pedagogic style, his technique still intimidates those who prefer dull, dictatorial, rote strategies. He believes he can get anyone to read music in 15 minutes. "In Germany, I taught 'Jingle Bells,' " he says. "I taught the rhythmic structure first, and in minutes they were reading basic rhythm notation." While he is always willing to outsource his methodology to anyone who asks for it, he finds that more traditional institutions reject his core idea that learning should always be fun and liberating to the student. But recent lecture/presentations he's done for the Caribbean Cultural Center and the Jazz Museum in Harlem suggest that now, when cities most need better music education, Johnny's name quickly comes up.
Eventually, someone may come along to offer the funding and infrastructure needed to relaunch his own institution. But until then, Johnny's decided to start recording again. He's already completed one album of modern American standards as a singer with his jazz trio, and plans to return to the studio soon with his Latin orchestra, in part to challenge some of the foreign reissues of his early work that have been circulating without his permission (or compensation) since the 1990s. The industry's malfeasance hasn't gone away, but Johnny's disillusionment has.
Alice Coltrane tribute
Jazz Supplement
Village Voice
Songs of Faith and Devotion
Alice Coltrane's legacy boldly mingles the spiritual with the musical
by D. Strauss
June 5th, 2007 12:12 PM
Alice McLeod came from the church, but who would've thought that by the end of her life, she would be the church? When the late pianist and harpist died of respiratory failure in January at the age of 69, she was long known, by her followers at the Sai Anantam Ashram in the Santa Monica hills, as Swamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda.
Jazz devotees, of course, know her by another name. "I can't say enough about the genius of Alice Coltrane," says bassist Charlie Haden, who recorded with both Alice and her husband, John. "Her musical spontaneity was incredible. Alice was open—she didn't see music in categories. When you played music with her, you had the feeling of no category. You were just trying to find beauty. That's really what it's about."
But that beauty, for some, takes an entirely religious form. Alice was feted last month with an Ascension Day ceremony at St. John the Divine in Harlem—organized by her son, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, it included theologians such as JJ Hurtak (and, by proxy, Cornel West) joining followers and ashram bureaucrats in singing her praises, and not necessarily focusing on her music. The night featured performances from Coltrane compatriots both senior (Haden himself, as well as bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Jack De Johnette) and slightly junior (Ravi and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts), as well as those simply under her influence (pianist Geri Allen and harpist Brandee Younger). But Alice's musical acumen wasn't necessarily a priority.
Ravi sounds very earnest when he speaks about his mother. "I don't consider her a jazz musician," he stresses a few weeks later, echoing claims Alice made in her own interviews. "Her contribution was very broad, and roots have many things in them. The devotional aspect is what tied it together."
There is little doubting the devotion. Alice Coltrane is best known as the second wife of the saxophone polymath John Coltrane, a musician whose following—for a short, beatific period—tipped from adulation into worship. (An actual Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church still exists in San Francisco.) And while the deification that came with the Coltrane cult has abated somewhat (the original space for the John Coltrane church has since been replaced by the equally deified cult of condo development), he remains no less a figurehead—even, as is so often the case for seminal artists, as his greatest breakthroughs are ignored in favor of his more accessible works.
Where did this leave his widow? The general opinion is that the death of her husband deepened Alice's spiritual commitment: She claimed to speak regularly with JC. If Trane was sainted after his death in 1967, then his wife was anointed to priesthood. And there exists a parallel musical universe in which Alice is a greater figure than her husband. While John believed in a universal religion, Alice did not, and dedicated her life to spiritual specifics in the same way her husband did to mathematics, studying with the controversial Swami Satchidananda—leader of Yogaville, beloved by everyone from Rivers Cuomo to Donna Karan—and forming the Vedantic Center in the mid '70s, a role that eventually led to her withdrawal from public performance altogether. That's great for narrative, but terrible for discographies, although, like Ravi's ceremony, it did put a period on a Period.
The image of jazz has long seesawed in the public eye between sharp suits and African robes. John didn't live quite long enough to don a dashiki, and that contributes to the uncanniness of his appeal—the man whose instrument rattled chains through 1965's Ascension was dressed like a Reservoir Dog.
But the irony behind that contrast doesn't explain his music, nor Alice's. Her devotional image can mask her innovations. "I loved the way Alice played—she came up with a whole different way of playing the piano," notes drummer Rashied Ali, who shared the bandstand with Alice in John's late, fierce quartet, and performed during Alice's own posthumous Ascension. "Alice was dealing more with pedal tones, and she had a natural, calm sound, like running water. I'm sure living with Coltrane, you have to think of something different to play."
She did. For while she may have dedicated herself to the mysteries of the inner universe, one thing you could not call the sound of Alice Coltrane's playing is "centered." Sure, there was often a solid and slow ostinato bass to ground her flights of fancy (most famously provided by Cecil McBee on the title track to 1970's Journey in Satchidananda, her archetypical album, its cyclical and stately rise and decline mimicking the pathway of humankind), but the keening seesaw of her organ playing and the full glissando of her harp rarely suggested direction so much as a desire to hit as many directions as possible at once. Only Alice could make the Jan Hammer–y pitch shifts on her version of John's "Leo"—as heard on Translinear Light, her oh-were-you-gone-for-30-years? 2005 comeback and swan song—sound fervently soulful, less like show-offy blurts and more like leaps of faith.
Another way of looking at this is that her husband's early passing may have driven her a bit mad, or driven her general musician's madness into something specific and beautiful. And weird. Religion may be used to beatify, but Alice's was a weird religion, and this is weird, weird music. Harry Smith weird, with a similar jumbling of influences both high and low. It was the period of Kozmik hippie jazzmakers. Some were trendy, some were switching from narcotics to hallucinogens (why choose?), some believed in something deeper, and some probably shouldn't have. But while her fellow late-'60s jazzbos were delving into ersatz Africa, Coltrane was, like many of the rock artists of the time, more concerned with Eastern modalities. Mix in the Kozmik elements and that might explain why she, like Sun Ra (another jazz artist who used spiritual topography to materialize personal pain), remains highly important while having only a minor impact on jazz itself. Her influence should have been greater: The mixture of harp, organ, modernist strings, and modal avant-garde had never been approximated before, nor fully since.
Instead we see her legacy not in current jazz—even free jazz—but in the freak-folk underground, which is why you're more likely to see Alice's albums in Other Music than at the Blue Note. The nü-natural mannerisms of Devendra Banhart, (ornate harpist!) Joanna Newsom, repsychled rockers Comets on Fire, and urban primitivists Aa and Sunburned Hand of the Man all draw from Alice's outsider abstractions.
Not to suggest she's a fail-safe hipper-than-thou influence—just as John Fahey inspired a lot of Windham Hill coke-folk, so did Alice suffer with a new-age (and worse: acid-jazz) connotation for a period. Many artists now use tribal spirituality as a mask for boorish decadence. Spiritual isn't a sonic category, nor necessarily a positive. Wasn't Charles Manson a spiritual musician? The Jonestown cult released an album. L. Ron Hubbard's keyboard stylings are available on CD. But a personal cosmology is a deep well to draw on, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
"When you're young and presented with these ideals by your mother, you think, 'Man, I just want to ride my bike around,' " Ravi recalls. "Sacrifice and devotion: These things are hard to grasp." They are. But some did. There will be at least one more Alice Coltrane album released: one of devotional music.
Village Voice
Songs of Faith and Devotion
Alice Coltrane's legacy boldly mingles the spiritual with the musical
by D. Strauss
June 5th, 2007 12:12 PM
Alice McLeod came from the church, but who would've thought that by the end of her life, she would be the church? When the late pianist and harpist died of respiratory failure in January at the age of 69, she was long known, by her followers at the Sai Anantam Ashram in the Santa Monica hills, as Swamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda.
Jazz devotees, of course, know her by another name. "I can't say enough about the genius of Alice Coltrane," says bassist Charlie Haden, who recorded with both Alice and her husband, John. "Her musical spontaneity was incredible. Alice was open—she didn't see music in categories. When you played music with her, you had the feeling of no category. You were just trying to find beauty. That's really what it's about."
But that beauty, for some, takes an entirely religious form. Alice was feted last month with an Ascension Day ceremony at St. John the Divine in Harlem—organized by her son, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, it included theologians such as JJ Hurtak (and, by proxy, Cornel West) joining followers and ashram bureaucrats in singing her praises, and not necessarily focusing on her music. The night featured performances from Coltrane compatriots both senior (Haden himself, as well as bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Jack De Johnette) and slightly junior (Ravi and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts), as well as those simply under her influence (pianist Geri Allen and harpist Brandee Younger). But Alice's musical acumen wasn't necessarily a priority.
Ravi sounds very earnest when he speaks about his mother. "I don't consider her a jazz musician," he stresses a few weeks later, echoing claims Alice made in her own interviews. "Her contribution was very broad, and roots have many things in them. The devotional aspect is what tied it together."
There is little doubting the devotion. Alice Coltrane is best known as the second wife of the saxophone polymath John Coltrane, a musician whose following—for a short, beatific period—tipped from adulation into worship. (An actual Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church still exists in San Francisco.) And while the deification that came with the Coltrane cult has abated somewhat (the original space for the John Coltrane church has since been replaced by the equally deified cult of condo development), he remains no less a figurehead—even, as is so often the case for seminal artists, as his greatest breakthroughs are ignored in favor of his more accessible works.
Where did this leave his widow? The general opinion is that the death of her husband deepened Alice's spiritual commitment: She claimed to speak regularly with JC. If Trane was sainted after his death in 1967, then his wife was anointed to priesthood. And there exists a parallel musical universe in which Alice is a greater figure than her husband. While John believed in a universal religion, Alice did not, and dedicated her life to spiritual specifics in the same way her husband did to mathematics, studying with the controversial Swami Satchidananda—leader of Yogaville, beloved by everyone from Rivers Cuomo to Donna Karan—and forming the Vedantic Center in the mid '70s, a role that eventually led to her withdrawal from public performance altogether. That's great for narrative, but terrible for discographies, although, like Ravi's ceremony, it did put a period on a Period.
The image of jazz has long seesawed in the public eye between sharp suits and African robes. John didn't live quite long enough to don a dashiki, and that contributes to the uncanniness of his appeal—the man whose instrument rattled chains through 1965's Ascension was dressed like a Reservoir Dog.
But the irony behind that contrast doesn't explain his music, nor Alice's. Her devotional image can mask her innovations. "I loved the way Alice played—she came up with a whole different way of playing the piano," notes drummer Rashied Ali, who shared the bandstand with Alice in John's late, fierce quartet, and performed during Alice's own posthumous Ascension. "Alice was dealing more with pedal tones, and she had a natural, calm sound, like running water. I'm sure living with Coltrane, you have to think of something different to play."
She did. For while she may have dedicated herself to the mysteries of the inner universe, one thing you could not call the sound of Alice Coltrane's playing is "centered." Sure, there was often a solid and slow ostinato bass to ground her flights of fancy (most famously provided by Cecil McBee on the title track to 1970's Journey in Satchidananda, her archetypical album, its cyclical and stately rise and decline mimicking the pathway of humankind), but the keening seesaw of her organ playing and the full glissando of her harp rarely suggested direction so much as a desire to hit as many directions as possible at once. Only Alice could make the Jan Hammer–y pitch shifts on her version of John's "Leo"—as heard on Translinear Light, her oh-were-you-gone-for-30-years? 2005 comeback and swan song—sound fervently soulful, less like show-offy blurts and more like leaps of faith.
Another way of looking at this is that her husband's early passing may have driven her a bit mad, or driven her general musician's madness into something specific and beautiful. And weird. Religion may be used to beatify, but Alice's was a weird religion, and this is weird, weird music. Harry Smith weird, with a similar jumbling of influences both high and low. It was the period of Kozmik hippie jazzmakers. Some were trendy, some were switching from narcotics to hallucinogens (why choose?), some believed in something deeper, and some probably shouldn't have. But while her fellow late-'60s jazzbos were delving into ersatz Africa, Coltrane was, like many of the rock artists of the time, more concerned with Eastern modalities. Mix in the Kozmik elements and that might explain why she, like Sun Ra (another jazz artist who used spiritual topography to materialize personal pain), remains highly important while having only a minor impact on jazz itself. Her influence should have been greater: The mixture of harp, organ, modernist strings, and modal avant-garde had never been approximated before, nor fully since.
Instead we see her legacy not in current jazz—even free jazz—but in the freak-folk underground, which is why you're more likely to see Alice's albums in Other Music than at the Blue Note. The nü-natural mannerisms of Devendra Banhart, (ornate harpist!) Joanna Newsom, repsychled rockers Comets on Fire, and urban primitivists Aa and Sunburned Hand of the Man all draw from Alice's outsider abstractions.
Not to suggest she's a fail-safe hipper-than-thou influence—just as John Fahey inspired a lot of Windham Hill coke-folk, so did Alice suffer with a new-age (and worse: acid-jazz) connotation for a period. Many artists now use tribal spirituality as a mask for boorish decadence. Spiritual isn't a sonic category, nor necessarily a positive. Wasn't Charles Manson a spiritual musician? The Jonestown cult released an album. L. Ron Hubbard's keyboard stylings are available on CD. But a personal cosmology is a deep well to draw on, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
"When you're young and presented with these ideals by your mother, you think, 'Man, I just want to ride my bike around,' " Ravi recalls. "Sacrifice and devotion: These things are hard to grasp." They are. But some did. There will be at least one more Alice Coltrane album released: one of devotional music.
Does Russell Simmons Serve Hip-Hop?
NPR
Does Russell Simmons Serve Hip-Hop?
by Farai Chideya
News & Notes, June 4, 2007 ·
If 50 Cent, Nas and Kanye West are the modern face of big-money hip-hop, Russell Simmons is the man who made hip-hop a big-money game. Simmons founded the record label Def Jam with producer Rick Rubin in 1984, and since then his reach has extended beyond music to include clothing companies, arts nonprofit organizations, and the diamond industry.
Simmons brings all his skills to bear in his new self-help book, Do You! Laws To Access The Power In You To Achieve Happiness And Success. In it, he explains how readers can use yoga and Buddhism to find what he calls the "sweet spot": one's life's work and mission. Despite Simmons' new spiritual frame of mind, though, his tour to promote the new book has been bumpy, with conversation inevitably turning from his spiritual philosophy to the societal effect of the music he produces.
As Simmons explains in our interview, the focus on those issues has been frustrating: "I had a book tour about peace and love, and everyone wants to talk about bitches and hos."
One radio DJ hung up on Simmons after the topic of the role of misogyny came up, while a reporter at WGN-TV in Chicago wrote in a post-interview blog entry that "all of the book's quotes from Ghandi about peace and love are fine, but it's all hard to take seriously when the author is cussing on two phones at the same time."
I recently took a deep breath and sat down with Simmons face-to-face at our NPR West studios. I started by asking him to share a memory, something that stood out to him as a magical moment in hip-hop.
"I have so many memories," Simmons said, "but this particular one stands out: Run-DMC at [New York City's Madison Square] Garden. I remember bringing the head of Adidas, and Run says 'Hold your sneakers in the air!' and everyone held up their shell-toed Adidas. That was the beginning of the endorsement process, and everyone got involved in trying to use hip-hop to sell their product. But when everyone held their Adidas in the air, it was crazy. It was a great image."
That the moment is as much about marketing as music gives you a sense of Simmons' worldview and drive. He turned Def Jam Records into a powerhouse and then sold it to Universal. He runs the Phat Farm and Baby Phat clothing labels, has a nonprofit called the Hip-hop Summit Action Network, and does financial lectures with Donald Trump.
But when he's asked if he feels that the kind of music his company produces can have harmful effects, the conversation can turn volatile, as it did during our sit-down. At one point, Simmons characterized our discussion in less-than-family-friendly terms. You'll have to listen to the interview to get Simmons in full feather, but let me take you into the studio at that moment: Russell is sitting a few feet from me, wearing spotless white athletic shoes, a shirt with a yoga theme, and a crisp baseball cap tilted to the side. While he is going off, he is leaning off — away from the mic, that is. He's talking to his assistant in studio, complaining about the interview, and I'm thinking, "Is he about to run the heck out of here?"
Luckily, he didn't. In the end, after a long back-and-forth, Simmons explained that his role is to promote all of hip-hop, good and bad, not to be a judge or a gate-keeper.
"Did they tell you why I came here?" Simmons asks once things cool down. "My job is as a servant of hip-hop. That's my job, and people who criticize are not able to serve properly. I'm on the inside, so when I walk into a new business, I open doors. When there's not one black person in the clothing business, I walk in and now it's a hip-hop convention. Or I walk into the diamond business and the Diamond Empowerment Fund starts, and I try to switch the whole industry to try to understand about Africa. I can do that because of the resources I have."
Those are words to the wise, from rap mogul Russell Simmons — even if it took a bit of agita to get there. And, believe it or not, after all that, we walked out of the studio and shook hands, and his signature joined those of politicans, religious leaders and actors on our NPR West Wall of Fame.
M&C note: go to the original to hear the story.
Does Russell Simmons Serve Hip-Hop?
by Farai Chideya
News & Notes, June 4, 2007 ·
If 50 Cent, Nas and Kanye West are the modern face of big-money hip-hop, Russell Simmons is the man who made hip-hop a big-money game. Simmons founded the record label Def Jam with producer Rick Rubin in 1984, and since then his reach has extended beyond music to include clothing companies, arts nonprofit organizations, and the diamond industry.
Simmons brings all his skills to bear in his new self-help book, Do You! Laws To Access The Power In You To Achieve Happiness And Success. In it, he explains how readers can use yoga and Buddhism to find what he calls the "sweet spot": one's life's work and mission. Despite Simmons' new spiritual frame of mind, though, his tour to promote the new book has been bumpy, with conversation inevitably turning from his spiritual philosophy to the societal effect of the music he produces.
As Simmons explains in our interview, the focus on those issues has been frustrating: "I had a book tour about peace and love, and everyone wants to talk about bitches and hos."
One radio DJ hung up on Simmons after the topic of the role of misogyny came up, while a reporter at WGN-TV in Chicago wrote in a post-interview blog entry that "all of the book's quotes from Ghandi about peace and love are fine, but it's all hard to take seriously when the author is cussing on two phones at the same time."
I recently took a deep breath and sat down with Simmons face-to-face at our NPR West studios. I started by asking him to share a memory, something that stood out to him as a magical moment in hip-hop.
"I have so many memories," Simmons said, "but this particular one stands out: Run-DMC at [New York City's Madison Square] Garden. I remember bringing the head of Adidas, and Run says 'Hold your sneakers in the air!' and everyone held up their shell-toed Adidas. That was the beginning of the endorsement process, and everyone got involved in trying to use hip-hop to sell their product. But when everyone held their Adidas in the air, it was crazy. It was a great image."
That the moment is as much about marketing as music gives you a sense of Simmons' worldview and drive. He turned Def Jam Records into a powerhouse and then sold it to Universal. He runs the Phat Farm and Baby Phat clothing labels, has a nonprofit called the Hip-hop Summit Action Network, and does financial lectures with Donald Trump.
But when he's asked if he feels that the kind of music his company produces can have harmful effects, the conversation can turn volatile, as it did during our sit-down. At one point, Simmons characterized our discussion in less-than-family-friendly terms. You'll have to listen to the interview to get Simmons in full feather, but let me take you into the studio at that moment: Russell is sitting a few feet from me, wearing spotless white athletic shoes, a shirt with a yoga theme, and a crisp baseball cap tilted to the side. While he is going off, he is leaning off — away from the mic, that is. He's talking to his assistant in studio, complaining about the interview, and I'm thinking, "Is he about to run the heck out of here?"
Luckily, he didn't. In the end, after a long back-and-forth, Simmons explained that his role is to promote all of hip-hop, good and bad, not to be a judge or a gate-keeper.
"Did they tell you why I came here?" Simmons asks once things cool down. "My job is as a servant of hip-hop. That's my job, and people who criticize are not able to serve properly. I'm on the inside, so when I walk into a new business, I open doors. When there's not one black person in the clothing business, I walk in and now it's a hip-hop convention. Or I walk into the diamond business and the Diamond Empowerment Fund starts, and I try to switch the whole industry to try to understand about Africa. I can do that because of the resources I have."
Those are words to the wise, from rap mogul Russell Simmons — even if it took a bit of agita to get there. And, believe it or not, after all that, we walked out of the studio and shook hands, and his signature joined those of politicans, religious leaders and actors on our NPR West Wall of Fame.
M&C note: go to the original to hear the story.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Chicken bones say Polynesians beat Europeans to New World
LA Times
Chicken bones say Polynesians beat Europeans to New World
Researchers use genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating of bones found in Chile to turn previously held ideas on their head.
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer
6:18 PM PDT, June 4, 2007
After decades of contention, New Zealand researchers have provided the first direct evidence that Polynesians sailed across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean to reach South America long before the arrival of the Spanish around AD 1500.
Their proof? Chicken bones.
Using genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating of chicken bones found in Chile, the researchers showed that the fowl originated in Polynesia, not Europe as was previously believed, the researchers said Monday.
"The Polynesian contact probably didn't change the course of prehistory, but I think maybe it makes us recognize the ethnocentrism in our long-standing views of the prehistory of the New World," said archeologist Terry L. Jones of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, who was not involved in the research.
"The basic premise has always been that there was only one civilization capable of crossing the ocean and discovering the New World," he said. The new findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that "the prehistory of the New World was probably a little bit more complicated than we thought in the past."
The possibility of contact between Polynesia and the New World has been a subject of contention since Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's famous 1947 voyage aboard his crude raft Kon-Tiki.
Heyerdahl believed that an ancient, fair-haired race originating high in the Andes around Lake Titicaca sailed to the Pacific islands.
He attempted to prove his ideas by setting off on a trip from the west coast of South America on a raft based on Inca designs.
The 4,300-mile trip from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands took 101 days, but subsequent trips were much faster once researchers learned how to steer the boats properly.
Despite Heyerdahl's demonstration, the idea that Polynesians could have routinely — or even occasionally — navigated across the Pacific was considered farfetched, primarily because of the lack of proof.
"Scientists have not been willing to fully accept the idea" of prehistoric contact between Polynesia and South America, Jones said, "but it is hard to understand why."
The most convincing previous evidence of cultural contact was the presence of sweet potatoes — a native American plant — at archeological sites throughout Polynesia.
Most notably, sweet potatoes dating from about AD 1000 have been found on the Cook Islands. Equally important, Jones noted, the name of the potato used throughout Polynesia is the same name given it by South Americans.
Heyerdahl's trip and the discovery of the sweet potatoes showed that South Americans could have taken the sweet potato to the islands but did not demonstrate that the islanders could have come to South America.
The new findings show that definitively, said archeologist Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith of the University of Auckland, the senior author of the new report.
The chicken bones studied were recovered from a site called El Arenal-1 in south-central Chile, about a mile and a half inland on the southern side of the Arauco Peninsula. Thermoluminescent dating of ceramics from the site indicates it was occupied from AD 700 to 1390.
Analysis of the bones was conducted by graduate student Alice A. Story in Matisoo-Smith's lab.
Matisoo-Smith said she didn't expect much from the study because finding evidence of Polynesian contact would be like "finding a needle in a haystack."
But radiocarbon dating showed the bones were about 622 years old. Even with potential errors, they dated from AD 1321 to 1407 — before Spaniards first trod the New World.
Genetic analysis of the chickens showed that they were identical to genetic sequences of chicken from that same time period in American Samoa and Tonga, both more than 5,000 miles from Chile.
The sequences were very similar to those of chickens from Hawaii, also about 5,000 miles distant, and Easter Island, located about 2,500 miles away.
"I was pretty excited when the dates came back as clearly pre-European," Matisoo-Smith said. "There were no questions. The Europeans didn't pick them up in Polynesia and bring them back" to South America, she said.
Sailing into the wind from the islands to South America "requires significant sailing technology and navigational skills," she said. "But if you look at the winds, leaving from Easter Island, you would actually land [in South America] around the area where El Arenal-1 is located. You could then make the return voyage further north."
Jones of Cal Poly is particularly pleased because the find supports his theory that Polynesians also landed in the Northern Hemisphere. He and linguist Kathryn A. Klar of UC Berkeley have argued that the Chumash Indians of Southern California learned to build their sewn-plank canoes from the Polynesians, in part because the names of the ships are very similar in the two unrelated languages.
Composite bone fishhooks used by the Indians also closely resembled those used in Polynesia.
If we know they landed in Chile, he said, "then why is it so difficult to imagine they couldn't have made it to Southern California from Hawaii?"
thomas.maugh@latimes.com
Chicken bones say Polynesians beat Europeans to New World
Researchers use genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating of bones found in Chile to turn previously held ideas on their head.
By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer
6:18 PM PDT, June 4, 2007
After decades of contention, New Zealand researchers have provided the first direct evidence that Polynesians sailed across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean to reach South America long before the arrival of the Spanish around AD 1500.
Their proof? Chicken bones.
Using genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating of chicken bones found in Chile, the researchers showed that the fowl originated in Polynesia, not Europe as was previously believed, the researchers said Monday.
"The Polynesian contact probably didn't change the course of prehistory, but I think maybe it makes us recognize the ethnocentrism in our long-standing views of the prehistory of the New World," said archeologist Terry L. Jones of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, who was not involved in the research.
"The basic premise has always been that there was only one civilization capable of crossing the ocean and discovering the New World," he said. The new findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that "the prehistory of the New World was probably a little bit more complicated than we thought in the past."
The possibility of contact between Polynesia and the New World has been a subject of contention since Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's famous 1947 voyage aboard his crude raft Kon-Tiki.
Heyerdahl believed that an ancient, fair-haired race originating high in the Andes around Lake Titicaca sailed to the Pacific islands.
He attempted to prove his ideas by setting off on a trip from the west coast of South America on a raft based on Inca designs.
The 4,300-mile trip from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands took 101 days, but subsequent trips were much faster once researchers learned how to steer the boats properly.
Despite Heyerdahl's demonstration, the idea that Polynesians could have routinely — or even occasionally — navigated across the Pacific was considered farfetched, primarily because of the lack of proof.
"Scientists have not been willing to fully accept the idea" of prehistoric contact between Polynesia and South America, Jones said, "but it is hard to understand why."
The most convincing previous evidence of cultural contact was the presence of sweet potatoes — a native American plant — at archeological sites throughout Polynesia.
Most notably, sweet potatoes dating from about AD 1000 have been found on the Cook Islands. Equally important, Jones noted, the name of the potato used throughout Polynesia is the same name given it by South Americans.
Heyerdahl's trip and the discovery of the sweet potatoes showed that South Americans could have taken the sweet potato to the islands but did not demonstrate that the islanders could have come to South America.
The new findings show that definitively, said archeologist Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith of the University of Auckland, the senior author of the new report.
The chicken bones studied were recovered from a site called El Arenal-1 in south-central Chile, about a mile and a half inland on the southern side of the Arauco Peninsula. Thermoluminescent dating of ceramics from the site indicates it was occupied from AD 700 to 1390.
Analysis of the bones was conducted by graduate student Alice A. Story in Matisoo-Smith's lab.
Matisoo-Smith said she didn't expect much from the study because finding evidence of Polynesian contact would be like "finding a needle in a haystack."
But radiocarbon dating showed the bones were about 622 years old. Even with potential errors, they dated from AD 1321 to 1407 — before Spaniards first trod the New World.
Genetic analysis of the chickens showed that they were identical to genetic sequences of chicken from that same time period in American Samoa and Tonga, both more than 5,000 miles from Chile.
The sequences were very similar to those of chickens from Hawaii, also about 5,000 miles distant, and Easter Island, located about 2,500 miles away.
"I was pretty excited when the dates came back as clearly pre-European," Matisoo-Smith said. "There were no questions. The Europeans didn't pick them up in Polynesia and bring them back" to South America, she said.
Sailing into the wind from the islands to South America "requires significant sailing technology and navigational skills," she said. "But if you look at the winds, leaving from Easter Island, you would actually land [in South America] around the area where El Arenal-1 is located. You could then make the return voyage further north."
Jones of Cal Poly is particularly pleased because the find supports his theory that Polynesians also landed in the Northern Hemisphere. He and linguist Kathryn A. Klar of UC Berkeley have argued that the Chumash Indians of Southern California learned to build their sewn-plank canoes from the Polynesians, in part because the names of the ships are very similar in the two unrelated languages.
Composite bone fishhooks used by the Indians also closely resembled those used in Polynesia.
If we know they landed in Chile, he said, "then why is it so difficult to imagine they couldn't have made it to Southern California from Hawaii?"
thomas.maugh@latimes.com
Nevada adds law against fake bands
BBC
Law hits Las Vegas 'fake' bands
Nevada has become the latest US state to make it illegal for musicians to falsely claim they are connected to well-known groups. Bands must now call themselves 'tribute' acts unless they have at least one member historically linked to the original. The law covers Las Vegas, which is renowned for its live entertainment. Mary Wilson of The Supremes lobbied for the law after unsuccessfully suing five other acts performing as the group. Surviving stars from The Drifters, Sha Na Na, and other bands also welcomed the move.
Authenticity
Platters star Sonny Turner said: "Nevada is the entertainment capital of the world, so this was one of our major goals." Maxine Porter, manager for original Drifter Bill Pinkney, said: "In a town like [Las Vegas], where you have a constant flow of tourists, this is a place where people expect to have authenticity. "You don't need to see the Drifters advertised on three different marquees," she said. She added that she hoped to see the bill become law in at least 20 US states by the end of the year.
If bands make false claims, it will be considered as deceptive trading practice under the new legislation. Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois are among the other states with similar legislation.
Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2007/06/01 10:23:13 GMT
Law hits Las Vegas 'fake' bands
Nevada has become the latest US state to make it illegal for musicians to falsely claim they are connected to well-known groups. Bands must now call themselves 'tribute' acts unless they have at least one member historically linked to the original. The law covers Las Vegas, which is renowned for its live entertainment. Mary Wilson of The Supremes lobbied for the law after unsuccessfully suing five other acts performing as the group. Surviving stars from The Drifters, Sha Na Na, and other bands also welcomed the move.
Authenticity
Platters star Sonny Turner said: "Nevada is the entertainment capital of the world, so this was one of our major goals." Maxine Porter, manager for original Drifter Bill Pinkney, said: "In a town like [Las Vegas], where you have a constant flow of tourists, this is a place where people expect to have authenticity. "You don't need to see the Drifters advertised on three different marquees," she said. She added that she hoped to see the bill become law in at least 20 US states by the end of the year.
If bands make false claims, it will be considered as deceptive trading practice under the new legislation. Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois are among the other states with similar legislation.
Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2007/06/01 10:23:13 GMT
Marley's "Exodus" reissue includes flashdrive edition
NYT
June 4, 2007
Tiny Bit of Hardware With Marley Software
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
When reggae singer Bob Marley released “Exodus” in 1977, fans most likely bought it as a vinyl record, then over the decades went on to purchase it on CD or to download it. But those same boomers now can buy the album in a format that will impress even their computer-using children: on a U.S.B. flash drive.
For the 30th anniversary of “Exodus,” which Time magazine called the best album of the 20th Century, Island Records, a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group, produced 4,000 of the gizmos, which are loaded not only with the original 10 songs but also with additional tracks and concert video footage of Marley, who died in 1981. The memory sticks, which plug in to a computer’s U.S.B. ports, will be priced at $44.99.
The high price reflects not only the extra content on the memory stick, but also the fact that the stick itself can be reused for other purposes. U.S.B. flash drives are generally sold empty, for the purpose of transferring data from one computer to another, but with the Bob Marley U.S.B. stick — as with others that store music — the entertainment can be downloaded to a computer and the device wiped clean.
While the flash-drive format appears unlikely to reshape the recording industry anytime soon, a few bands are experimenting with it. Last year the Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies released its album “The Barenaked Ladies Are Me” on U.S.B. sticks along with CDs. So far the memory-stick version, at $25, has sold nearly 1,000 copies in North America, compared with 166,000 CDs, which cost $18.98.
“By no means is it overtaking the traditionalists, but it’s a good start,” said Adam Smith, who manages artists at the Nettwerk Music Group, the band’s Canadian label. On recent tours, the Barenaked Ladies have been recording live performances and making them available on U.S.B. sticks at concert sites right after the last song is played. So far the band has sold about 3,000, for $40 each.
That is more expensive than a CD, but buying music on a flash drive is akin to buying a Big Mac on a piece of Fiestaware. Mr. Smith pointed out that, unlike CDs, once the songs on a flash drive are transferred to a computer, they can be erased from the device, which can then be used to store data. Some flash drives sell for more than $30.
“Once you upload the music to your computer, you have a piece of hardware,” Mr. Smith said. “If you’re buying a U.S.B. stick, the cost is not so much different to buy it loaded with music from your favorite band.” ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
June 4, 2007
Tiny Bit of Hardware With Marley Software
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
When reggae singer Bob Marley released “Exodus” in 1977, fans most likely bought it as a vinyl record, then over the decades went on to purchase it on CD or to download it. But those same boomers now can buy the album in a format that will impress even their computer-using children: on a U.S.B. flash drive.
For the 30th anniversary of “Exodus,” which Time magazine called the best album of the 20th Century, Island Records, a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group, produced 4,000 of the gizmos, which are loaded not only with the original 10 songs but also with additional tracks and concert video footage of Marley, who died in 1981. The memory sticks, which plug in to a computer’s U.S.B. ports, will be priced at $44.99.
The high price reflects not only the extra content on the memory stick, but also the fact that the stick itself can be reused for other purposes. U.S.B. flash drives are generally sold empty, for the purpose of transferring data from one computer to another, but with the Bob Marley U.S.B. stick — as with others that store music — the entertainment can be downloaded to a computer and the device wiped clean.
While the flash-drive format appears unlikely to reshape the recording industry anytime soon, a few bands are experimenting with it. Last year the Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies released its album “The Barenaked Ladies Are Me” on U.S.B. sticks along with CDs. So far the memory-stick version, at $25, has sold nearly 1,000 copies in North America, compared with 166,000 CDs, which cost $18.98.
“By no means is it overtaking the traditionalists, but it’s a good start,” said Adam Smith, who manages artists at the Nettwerk Music Group, the band’s Canadian label. On recent tours, the Barenaked Ladies have been recording live performances and making them available on U.S.B. sticks at concert sites right after the last song is played. So far the band has sold about 3,000, for $40 each.
That is more expensive than a CD, but buying music on a flash drive is akin to buying a Big Mac on a piece of Fiestaware. Mr. Smith pointed out that, unlike CDs, once the songs on a flash drive are transferred to a computer, they can be erased from the device, which can then be used to store data. Some flash drives sell for more than $30.
“Once you upload the music to your computer, you have a piece of hardware,” Mr. Smith said. “If you’re buying a U.S.B. stick, the cost is not so much different to buy it loaded with music from your favorite band.” ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Profile of North African/Tuareg Band Tinariwen
SLATE
music box
Enter Sandmen
Is Tinariwen the greatest band on earth?
By Jody Rosen
Posted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 3:42 PM ET
For rockers and rappers of a certain stripe, a hard-bitten back story is an indispensable part of their mystique and a bold-face item in their press releases. What would 50 Cent be without the gun battle that left a bullet shard lodged in his tongue? (Answer: about $50 million poorer.) Of course, there's hard-bitten and there's hard-bitten. These self-styled rebels and gangstas would do well to consider the case of Tinariwen, a rock group, of sorts, from the swath of the Sahara that stretches northeast of Timbuktu. Tinariwen is made up of Tuareg, Berber nomads who waged a decades-long separatist struggle against the Malian government that disposed them of their traditional territories. The band was formed in the early 1980s by three teenagers, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Hassan Ag Touhami, and Inteyeden Ag Ableline, living in exile in southern Algeria. The musicians were typical of the Tuareg youth of their generation—adrift and nearly destitute, hungry for self-determination and revenge—and they poured their emotions into confessional songs sung in Tamashek and French, and laced with rough-hewn guitar work. Eventually, the three friends found themselves in Muammar Qaddafi's's Tuareg training camps in Libya, and then back in Mali, fighting in a brief, bloody guerilla war. They were rock 'n' roll rebels whose rebellion, for once, wasn't just metaphorical.
A lesser band could build a following on the strength of that colorful past alone. But Tinariwen, now featuring eight members, happens to make extraordinary music. The songs are modal vamps, with gruff call-and-response vocals, congas, handclaps, and layered guitar riffs, which build to trancelike fugues. For years, the band's recordings circulated through the Sahara samizdat-style, on cassette tapes, but Westerners began to take notice in 2001, after a performance at Le Festival au Désert, an annual concert in Essakane, Mali. In 2004, Tinariwen released a superb CD, Amassakoul (Traveler), and toured Europe, collecting admirers (including some famous ones, like Robert Plant). Now comes another, even better record, Aman Iman (Water Is Life) (produced by Plant's guitarist Justin Adams), whose spellbinding dozen songs make a case that Tinariwen is one of finest bands on earth.
They certainly know how to play their guitars. On the new album, nearly all the songs open with ruminative riffing on a lone guitar before settling into inexorable grooves, with guitar lines stacked in counterpoint above a propulsive bass. Tinariwen has six guitarists, and they're all aces. In many songs, the rhythm players are so crisp, cutting, and lyrical that they sound like they are playing leads. You don't need the lyric sheet's Tamashek-English translation to know that "Tamatant Tilay" ("Death Is Here") is a battle hymn: You can hear fear and blood-lust in Hassan Ag Touhami's scrappy picking. Mali is famous for great guitarists like Boubacar Traoré and the late Ali Farka Touré, and while Tinariwen makes use of a similar mélange of influences—mashing up the ancient modal scales of Arab and West African music with American blues—its sound is fiercer, and thicker. Call Tinariwen a rock band, if you like. Guitar orchestra might be more accurate.
Frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib definitely looks the part of guitar hero, glowering beneath an extravagant mop of curls on the Aman Iman album cover. Ag Alhabib plays guitar like he sings, in a rugged staccato style, but his songwriting is full of yearning and tenderness, laments for lost love and lost land. He is a George Jones of the Sahara, a weeper specialist. In "Cler Achel" ("Spent the Day"), he sings: "You've gone, Mila, you've already gone, and I've plunged deeper into my dreams/ Whatever my thoughts, she occupies them all, and my heart cries out still." The one-chord drone in "Imidiwan Winaklin" ("Friends of My Country") is jaunty, but the lyrics are wrenching: "I'm in a motherless land and my soul burns with unhappiness/ I consume my thoughts with the smoke of cigarettes, and it amplifies my pain." Homesickness is Tinariwen's great theme, but in addition to plaints, the band sings pastoral reveries, songs whose lyrics and vast, ringing sound evoke the majesty of the "white, naked, and empty" desert. (Tinariwen means "empty places" in Tamashek.)
Empty places, camels beneath beating sun, poet-warriors crisscrossing an ocean of sand: Tinariwen is an Orientalist fantasy come to life, and it's hard for a Western listener not to exoticize the musicians, particularly when the ululating cries of Mina Wallet Oumar, the group's sole female member, ripple over the churning music. Like any successful band, Tinariwen has learned to exploit its image—just check out the Aman Iman album package, with its photos of the band in billowing traditional garb framed against forbidding desert landscapes. Robert Plant has spoken of his discovery of Tinariwen as an epiphany—"I felt this was the music I'd been looking for all my life"—and many reviewers have described Tinariwen as a throwback to "roots of the blues."
It's true that Tinariwen's music is steeped in ancient folk melodies. It's also true that Ag Alhabib's first guitar was a contraption fashioned from a stick, a jerrycan, and some bicycle brake wire. But some of the earliest songs he learned on that guitar were American rock and pop hits. (Carlos Santana was a favorite—no surprise given Ag Alhabib's look.) And while Tinariwen's desert odes inspire romantic thoughts of a distant past, this is not a band on a nostalgia trip. One of the best songs on the new album, "Mano Dayak," is an anthem about the Tuareg freedom struggle that ends with a striking image of modernity: "Now I've seen something that fills me with joy/ A Tamashek whose living well/ And communicating through a satellite phone/ Tied to the tree under which he rests." It's an ecstatic ode to the globalized present, and Aman Iman sounds as gleamingly contemporary as any record I've heard this year—great 21st-century dance music, made with just a few guitars and a lot of clapping hands.
Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2166480/
music box
Enter Sandmen
Is Tinariwen the greatest band on earth?
By Jody Rosen
Posted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 3:42 PM ET
For rockers and rappers of a certain stripe, a hard-bitten back story is an indispensable part of their mystique and a bold-face item in their press releases. What would 50 Cent be without the gun battle that left a bullet shard lodged in his tongue? (Answer: about $50 million poorer.) Of course, there's hard-bitten and there's hard-bitten. These self-styled rebels and gangstas would do well to consider the case of Tinariwen, a rock group, of sorts, from the swath of the Sahara that stretches northeast of Timbuktu. Tinariwen is made up of Tuareg, Berber nomads who waged a decades-long separatist struggle against the Malian government that disposed them of their traditional territories. The band was formed in the early 1980s by three teenagers, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Hassan Ag Touhami, and Inteyeden Ag Ableline, living in exile in southern Algeria. The musicians were typical of the Tuareg youth of their generation—adrift and nearly destitute, hungry for self-determination and revenge—and they poured their emotions into confessional songs sung in Tamashek and French, and laced with rough-hewn guitar work. Eventually, the three friends found themselves in Muammar Qaddafi's's Tuareg training camps in Libya, and then back in Mali, fighting in a brief, bloody guerilla war. They were rock 'n' roll rebels whose rebellion, for once, wasn't just metaphorical.
A lesser band could build a following on the strength of that colorful past alone. But Tinariwen, now featuring eight members, happens to make extraordinary music. The songs are modal vamps, with gruff call-and-response vocals, congas, handclaps, and layered guitar riffs, which build to trancelike fugues. For years, the band's recordings circulated through the Sahara samizdat-style, on cassette tapes, but Westerners began to take notice in 2001, after a performance at Le Festival au Désert, an annual concert in Essakane, Mali. In 2004, Tinariwen released a superb CD, Amassakoul (Traveler), and toured Europe, collecting admirers (including some famous ones, like Robert Plant). Now comes another, even better record, Aman Iman (Water Is Life) (produced by Plant's guitarist Justin Adams), whose spellbinding dozen songs make a case that Tinariwen is one of finest bands on earth.
They certainly know how to play their guitars. On the new album, nearly all the songs open with ruminative riffing on a lone guitar before settling into inexorable grooves, with guitar lines stacked in counterpoint above a propulsive bass. Tinariwen has six guitarists, and they're all aces. In many songs, the rhythm players are so crisp, cutting, and lyrical that they sound like they are playing leads. You don't need the lyric sheet's Tamashek-English translation to know that "Tamatant Tilay" ("Death Is Here") is a battle hymn: You can hear fear and blood-lust in Hassan Ag Touhami's scrappy picking. Mali is famous for great guitarists like Boubacar Traoré and the late Ali Farka Touré, and while Tinariwen makes use of a similar mélange of influences—mashing up the ancient modal scales of Arab and West African music with American blues—its sound is fiercer, and thicker. Call Tinariwen a rock band, if you like. Guitar orchestra might be more accurate.
Frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib definitely looks the part of guitar hero, glowering beneath an extravagant mop of curls on the Aman Iman album cover. Ag Alhabib plays guitar like he sings, in a rugged staccato style, but his songwriting is full of yearning and tenderness, laments for lost love and lost land. He is a George Jones of the Sahara, a weeper specialist. In "Cler Achel" ("Spent the Day"), he sings: "You've gone, Mila, you've already gone, and I've plunged deeper into my dreams/ Whatever my thoughts, she occupies them all, and my heart cries out still." The one-chord drone in "Imidiwan Winaklin" ("Friends of My Country") is jaunty, but the lyrics are wrenching: "I'm in a motherless land and my soul burns with unhappiness/ I consume my thoughts with the smoke of cigarettes, and it amplifies my pain." Homesickness is Tinariwen's great theme, but in addition to plaints, the band sings pastoral reveries, songs whose lyrics and vast, ringing sound evoke the majesty of the "white, naked, and empty" desert. (Tinariwen means "empty places" in Tamashek.)
Empty places, camels beneath beating sun, poet-warriors crisscrossing an ocean of sand: Tinariwen is an Orientalist fantasy come to life, and it's hard for a Western listener not to exoticize the musicians, particularly when the ululating cries of Mina Wallet Oumar, the group's sole female member, ripple over the churning music. Like any successful band, Tinariwen has learned to exploit its image—just check out the Aman Iman album package, with its photos of the band in billowing traditional garb framed against forbidding desert landscapes. Robert Plant has spoken of his discovery of Tinariwen as an epiphany—"I felt this was the music I'd been looking for all my life"—and many reviewers have described Tinariwen as a throwback to "roots of the blues."
It's true that Tinariwen's music is steeped in ancient folk melodies. It's also true that Ag Alhabib's first guitar was a contraption fashioned from a stick, a jerrycan, and some bicycle brake wire. But some of the earliest songs he learned on that guitar were American rock and pop hits. (Carlos Santana was a favorite—no surprise given Ag Alhabib's look.) And while Tinariwen's desert odes inspire romantic thoughts of a distant past, this is not a band on a nostalgia trip. One of the best songs on the new album, "Mano Dayak," is an anthem about the Tuareg freedom struggle that ends with a striking image of modernity: "Now I've seen something that fills me with joy/ A Tamashek whose living well/ And communicating through a satellite phone/ Tied to the tree under which he rests." It's an ecstatic ode to the globalized present, and Aman Iman sounds as gleamingly contemporary as any record I've heard this year—great 21st-century dance music, made with just a few guitars and a lot of clapping hands.
Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2166480/
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Concert Hall? How About Music Museum?
NYT
June 3, 2007
Music
Concert Hall? How About Music Museum?
By LAWRENCE KRAMER
NOT long ago the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra decided to sell off its recently acquired collection of vintage string instruments, including 13 made by the legendary Antonio Stradivari. The orchestra is losing money partly because it bought the instruments in the first place, hoping — artistic value aside — that their glamour would attract donations. After all, if museums can flourish by housing objects that are old and valuable, why not orchestras? Most of the music the orchestras play is old and valuable too. The match seemed perfect.
For classical music lovers, this mismatch, as it turned out, is a parable for our times. Whenever people discuss the familiar plight of classical music in America — financial problems; aging audiences; above all, a loss of cultural authority — someone is sure to bring up the museum analogy. Classical music, we are told, may be old and valuable, but it is as remote from contemporary life as an old fiddle. Its culture is a museum culture. The public doesn’t care about new works, and the old ones have been worn out with reuse like antique coins with faded faces.
But the museum analogy shortchanges both the music and the museum. Good museums today are anything but chambers of solemn irrelevance, and if classical concerts had half the appeal of traveling exhibitions, the New Jersey Symphony would not be losing money. Perhaps it is time to stand the museum analogy on its head. The classical music world may have something to learn from the success of today’s museums, where the art of the present elicits fascination, and the art of the past impresses visitors as the very reverse of stifling, myopic or merely out of date.
Reaffirming the museum analogy makes good historical sense. Classical music and the museum grew up together in the late 18th century. The revolutionary government in France decreed in 1792 that a “Musée” at the Louvre would become the first space for the public exhibition of art in Europe. The decree came just a year after the death of Mozart, the first important composer to have made a public career with instrumental as well as theatrical music. The essential factor in both cases is the idea of the public. By the 1790s instrumental music had been written for concert performance for several centuries; paintings and other objects, including curiosities in “wonder cabinets,” had been exhibited in collections even longer. But the places where the performances were held and the collections too were mostly private and predominantly aristocratic.
Mozart helped change all that; so did the Louvre. Music does not become “classical” until its performance becomes an event addressed to a general public. Paintings and sculptures do not become “art” until they are exhibited in public institutions. This conception was epoch making. It changed the past of the arts as well as their future.
For a long time, to judge from 19th-century descriptions, concert halls were livelier places than museums. Concerts roused passions and helped create the fan culture of modern life. Museums had a reputation for sedateness. When Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, the would-be illicit lovers of Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence,” need someplace dull and quiet to meet in turn-of-the-century New York, they know just where to go: the Metropolitan Museum.
The story of how this state of affairs reversed itself is too long to retell here, but anyone who has felt that the familiar rituals of the symphony concert are outmoded, even a bit surreal, will get the gist. Museumgoers today do not have similar feelings; they obviously feel right at home. Classical music no longer has that effect. But perhaps it can regain a natural place in the lives of its public by courting the museum culture so often brought up against it.
The museum in its original conception was an archive, and so it is still. But it is an archive animated by the activities of public spectatorship: the walking, pausing, looking, talking, meandering and just standing still that goes on there. Perhaps we should think of museums as prop rooms where people can go to try on the past and link it to the present. The maps, guides, tours, services and merchandise that museums provide encourage this attitude. A visit to a museum is the visitor’s own in a way that the concertgoer’s attendance almost never is.
Yet concerts and museums purvey the same experience: revival. As collections, museums house objects — paintings and sculptures, artifacts and the paraphernalia of past life — that people often go not just to visit but to revisit. Many of us have favorite objects in museums. When in Philadelphia I generally make sure to spend a few moments with Thomas Eakins’s “Concert Singer”; in Chicago I try to spend at least part of Sunday in the park with George: Georges Seurat and his “Sunday La Grande Jatte — 1884.” Building an assembly of such favorite things is a primary means of experiencing and sustaining cultural values. In this way a museum visit can refresh our feeling for the meaningfulness of experience.
But that is exactly what classical music is supposed to do, and in the same way. The work of art does not change on the wall, and the fully composed work of music, though it does change from one performance to another, remains recognizably and durably itself. We keep returning to these works as cultural resources. But although we are comfortable with the idea of seeing things differently when we see them again, we have no parallel comfort when it comes to listening.
Despite the changes that performance can bring, our musical perception is supposed to be consistent and disciplined. The concert manners of the performers say so; the demeanor of the audience says so; the program notes say so; the mystique of the great composer says so. We are supposed to hear precisely the same old thing. We are supposed to hold our thoughts still. Normal listening is not too much like looking in a museum but too little.
The museum today offers a space for unhurried and indeed untimed reflection that is hard to find elsewhere; the museum has become a secular cloister. Classical music offers a similar opportunity. Listening to it, at least to its larger, paradigmatic works, is akin to such free reflection. Contrary to the cliché, the dwindling attention spans of contemporary life are no obstruction to this sort of experience. Movies last longer than string quartets; football games last longer than movies. The obstruction lies in the difference between the spectator’s power to loiter at will and the listener’s assumed powerlessness. We are supposed to hear what the music wills. The concert model asks for submission, while the museum model offers renewal.
I have often wondered if our listening is so docile. My own tendency is quite otherwise, and the sheer multiplicity of patterns and textures offered by classical music suggests that the music encourages acoustic loitering. Perhaps we should take the hint without guilt and listen the way we stare at a painting, lost in our thoughts as we could never be at work or in the street. Advocates of classical music have historically discouraged such selective listening, though it may be the most vivid and most meaningful kind. Perhaps we should adopt the museum model as fast as we can.
Reluctance to do that may help explain another of classical music’s contemporary troubles. The museum’s role as a revival house is consistent with its role as a display space for new or unfamiliar work. By concert hall standards museums are hotbeds of experimentation even if some of them, like concert halls, guard their success by overemphasizing the classics.
New classical music notoriously lacks the appeal of new art. There is no classical musical equivalent of the contemporary-art market. Sometimes this is the music’s fault, but more often it comes from context. The concert format imposes the music rather than exposing it. A looser format — some talk, some imagery, some demonstration, some room to loiter — might produce a more convivial sound even though every note remained the same. The more convivial the experience of listening becomes, the less remote the music will appear.
The museum thrives on conviviality. Its galleries are places of distinct civility in which the ebb and flow of others, the hum of their voices and the movement of their gazes blend into the perception of the art on exhibition. This is a way of experiencing public space generally denied outside the cloister. The concert hall ought to be the same sort of environment. If it isn’t, despite the good manners that prevail there, one likely reason is that the concert hall deprives its visitors of the means of personalizing their experience that the museum now supplies in abundance. Museums are stimulus-rich environments; concert halls tend to be the opposite.
The remedy could be as simple as well-placed display cases, video monitors and computer screens, together with some art on the walls, related, ideally, to the music being played. It would be nice, for example, to hear the slow movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, which is based on a weird, whiny version of the folk song best known as “Frère Jacques,” after seeing an interactive display of the movement’s visual inspiration, a woodcut widely reproduced in 19th-century German books for children.
And perhaps instead of relying solely on pre- or postconcert talks (yes, I give them too, and they have their merits), we could have conductors and performers talk with audiences or demonstrate different possibilities of performance during the concert itself. It would be nice to hear the double-bassist play the “Frère Jacques” solo without the orchestra to get a firsthand sense of just how the tune becomes so bizarre. It might even be nice to have a gift shop in which to linger after the concert; no self-respecting contemporary museum would be without one.
But why bother? Museums are robust and concerts unsteady: Why not just accept the inevitable and let one flourish while the other declines? Why, that is, does classical music still matter? With this question too the museum model offers help.
The museum as I have described it — convivial, stimulus-rich, liberal with time and space for reflection — creates a public space in which we can be privately inspired or disturbed. The classical concert ought to do the same thing, whether we are actually present or attending a purely imaginary concert by listening to a recording. Museums are places where a painting may dazzle us; the classical concert is an event in which the music may not only move and excite us, as any music might, but also possibly startle, amaze, challenge and disturb.
Classical music is very good at this. In the right circumstances even a work as overfamiliar as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can become a relentless assault on complacency. But for classical music to be taken to heart in an era when its expressive vocabulary is no longer seamlessly integrated with the rhythms and routines of everyday life, the concert must become a virtual museum. It must become the exact opposite of the clichéd museum invoked by the dismissive version of the museum metaphor.
More is involved in this than the public opportunity to pay close, undistracted attention. There must also be a social license to follow one’s perceptions wherever they lead. If you like, forget about everything but that solo double-bass; pick out its whining, and let it grate on you; watch the soloist’s bow arm; squirm in your seat. Listen to Mahler the way you would look at Klimt.
The modern concert-museum is or should be a space of liberty and self-invention. My trouble with the classical music world I try to serve is that it discourages this possibility by its mimicry of the museum of legend rather than the museum of contemporary fact, the old bones rather than the life and color. Classical music should only be so lucky as to have — and keep — its museum culture.
Lawrence Kramer is a professor of English and music at Fordham University and the author of “Why Classical Music Still Matters,” just published by University of California Press.
June 3, 2007
Music
Concert Hall? How About Music Museum?
By LAWRENCE KRAMER
NOT long ago the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra decided to sell off its recently acquired collection of vintage string instruments, including 13 made by the legendary Antonio Stradivari. The orchestra is losing money partly because it bought the instruments in the first place, hoping — artistic value aside — that their glamour would attract donations. After all, if museums can flourish by housing objects that are old and valuable, why not orchestras? Most of the music the orchestras play is old and valuable too. The match seemed perfect.
For classical music lovers, this mismatch, as it turned out, is a parable for our times. Whenever people discuss the familiar plight of classical music in America — financial problems; aging audiences; above all, a loss of cultural authority — someone is sure to bring up the museum analogy. Classical music, we are told, may be old and valuable, but it is as remote from contemporary life as an old fiddle. Its culture is a museum culture. The public doesn’t care about new works, and the old ones have been worn out with reuse like antique coins with faded faces.
But the museum analogy shortchanges both the music and the museum. Good museums today are anything but chambers of solemn irrelevance, and if classical concerts had half the appeal of traveling exhibitions, the New Jersey Symphony would not be losing money. Perhaps it is time to stand the museum analogy on its head. The classical music world may have something to learn from the success of today’s museums, where the art of the present elicits fascination, and the art of the past impresses visitors as the very reverse of stifling, myopic or merely out of date.
Reaffirming the museum analogy makes good historical sense. Classical music and the museum grew up together in the late 18th century. The revolutionary government in France decreed in 1792 that a “Musée” at the Louvre would become the first space for the public exhibition of art in Europe. The decree came just a year after the death of Mozart, the first important composer to have made a public career with instrumental as well as theatrical music. The essential factor in both cases is the idea of the public. By the 1790s instrumental music had been written for concert performance for several centuries; paintings and other objects, including curiosities in “wonder cabinets,” had been exhibited in collections even longer. But the places where the performances were held and the collections too were mostly private and predominantly aristocratic.
Mozart helped change all that; so did the Louvre. Music does not become “classical” until its performance becomes an event addressed to a general public. Paintings and sculptures do not become “art” until they are exhibited in public institutions. This conception was epoch making. It changed the past of the arts as well as their future.
For a long time, to judge from 19th-century descriptions, concert halls were livelier places than museums. Concerts roused passions and helped create the fan culture of modern life. Museums had a reputation for sedateness. When Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, the would-be illicit lovers of Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence,” need someplace dull and quiet to meet in turn-of-the-century New York, they know just where to go: the Metropolitan Museum.
The story of how this state of affairs reversed itself is too long to retell here, but anyone who has felt that the familiar rituals of the symphony concert are outmoded, even a bit surreal, will get the gist. Museumgoers today do not have similar feelings; they obviously feel right at home. Classical music no longer has that effect. But perhaps it can regain a natural place in the lives of its public by courting the museum culture so often brought up against it.
The museum in its original conception was an archive, and so it is still. But it is an archive animated by the activities of public spectatorship: the walking, pausing, looking, talking, meandering and just standing still that goes on there. Perhaps we should think of museums as prop rooms where people can go to try on the past and link it to the present. The maps, guides, tours, services and merchandise that museums provide encourage this attitude. A visit to a museum is the visitor’s own in a way that the concertgoer’s attendance almost never is.
Yet concerts and museums purvey the same experience: revival. As collections, museums house objects — paintings and sculptures, artifacts and the paraphernalia of past life — that people often go not just to visit but to revisit. Many of us have favorite objects in museums. When in Philadelphia I generally make sure to spend a few moments with Thomas Eakins’s “Concert Singer”; in Chicago I try to spend at least part of Sunday in the park with George: Georges Seurat and his “Sunday La Grande Jatte — 1884.” Building an assembly of such favorite things is a primary means of experiencing and sustaining cultural values. In this way a museum visit can refresh our feeling for the meaningfulness of experience.
But that is exactly what classical music is supposed to do, and in the same way. The work of art does not change on the wall, and the fully composed work of music, though it does change from one performance to another, remains recognizably and durably itself. We keep returning to these works as cultural resources. But although we are comfortable with the idea of seeing things differently when we see them again, we have no parallel comfort when it comes to listening.
Despite the changes that performance can bring, our musical perception is supposed to be consistent and disciplined. The concert manners of the performers say so; the demeanor of the audience says so; the program notes say so; the mystique of the great composer says so. We are supposed to hear precisely the same old thing. We are supposed to hold our thoughts still. Normal listening is not too much like looking in a museum but too little.
The museum today offers a space for unhurried and indeed untimed reflection that is hard to find elsewhere; the museum has become a secular cloister. Classical music offers a similar opportunity. Listening to it, at least to its larger, paradigmatic works, is akin to such free reflection. Contrary to the cliché, the dwindling attention spans of contemporary life are no obstruction to this sort of experience. Movies last longer than string quartets; football games last longer than movies. The obstruction lies in the difference between the spectator’s power to loiter at will and the listener’s assumed powerlessness. We are supposed to hear what the music wills. The concert model asks for submission, while the museum model offers renewal.
I have often wondered if our listening is so docile. My own tendency is quite otherwise, and the sheer multiplicity of patterns and textures offered by classical music suggests that the music encourages acoustic loitering. Perhaps we should take the hint without guilt and listen the way we stare at a painting, lost in our thoughts as we could never be at work or in the street. Advocates of classical music have historically discouraged such selective listening, though it may be the most vivid and most meaningful kind. Perhaps we should adopt the museum model as fast as we can.
Reluctance to do that may help explain another of classical music’s contemporary troubles. The museum’s role as a revival house is consistent with its role as a display space for new or unfamiliar work. By concert hall standards museums are hotbeds of experimentation even if some of them, like concert halls, guard their success by overemphasizing the classics.
New classical music notoriously lacks the appeal of new art. There is no classical musical equivalent of the contemporary-art market. Sometimes this is the music’s fault, but more often it comes from context. The concert format imposes the music rather than exposing it. A looser format — some talk, some imagery, some demonstration, some room to loiter — might produce a more convivial sound even though every note remained the same. The more convivial the experience of listening becomes, the less remote the music will appear.
The museum thrives on conviviality. Its galleries are places of distinct civility in which the ebb and flow of others, the hum of their voices and the movement of their gazes blend into the perception of the art on exhibition. This is a way of experiencing public space generally denied outside the cloister. The concert hall ought to be the same sort of environment. If it isn’t, despite the good manners that prevail there, one likely reason is that the concert hall deprives its visitors of the means of personalizing their experience that the museum now supplies in abundance. Museums are stimulus-rich environments; concert halls tend to be the opposite.
The remedy could be as simple as well-placed display cases, video monitors and computer screens, together with some art on the walls, related, ideally, to the music being played. It would be nice, for example, to hear the slow movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, which is based on a weird, whiny version of the folk song best known as “Frère Jacques,” after seeing an interactive display of the movement’s visual inspiration, a woodcut widely reproduced in 19th-century German books for children.
And perhaps instead of relying solely on pre- or postconcert talks (yes, I give them too, and they have their merits), we could have conductors and performers talk with audiences or demonstrate different possibilities of performance during the concert itself. It would be nice to hear the double-bassist play the “Frère Jacques” solo without the orchestra to get a firsthand sense of just how the tune becomes so bizarre. It might even be nice to have a gift shop in which to linger after the concert; no self-respecting contemporary museum would be without one.
But why bother? Museums are robust and concerts unsteady: Why not just accept the inevitable and let one flourish while the other declines? Why, that is, does classical music still matter? With this question too the museum model offers help.
The museum as I have described it — convivial, stimulus-rich, liberal with time and space for reflection — creates a public space in which we can be privately inspired or disturbed. The classical concert ought to do the same thing, whether we are actually present or attending a purely imaginary concert by listening to a recording. Museums are places where a painting may dazzle us; the classical concert is an event in which the music may not only move and excite us, as any music might, but also possibly startle, amaze, challenge and disturb.
Classical music is very good at this. In the right circumstances even a work as overfamiliar as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can become a relentless assault on complacency. But for classical music to be taken to heart in an era when its expressive vocabulary is no longer seamlessly integrated with the rhythms and routines of everyday life, the concert must become a virtual museum. It must become the exact opposite of the clichéd museum invoked by the dismissive version of the museum metaphor.
More is involved in this than the public opportunity to pay close, undistracted attention. There must also be a social license to follow one’s perceptions wherever they lead. If you like, forget about everything but that solo double-bass; pick out its whining, and let it grate on you; watch the soloist’s bow arm; squirm in your seat. Listen to Mahler the way you would look at Klimt.
The modern concert-museum is or should be a space of liberty and self-invention. My trouble with the classical music world I try to serve is that it discourages this possibility by its mimicry of the museum of legend rather than the museum of contemporary fact, the old bones rather than the life and color. Classical music should only be so lucky as to have — and keep — its museum culture.
Lawrence Kramer is a professor of English and music at Fordham University and the author of “Why Classical Music Still Matters,” just published by University of California Press.
The Best Buildings You’ll Ever Hear
Computer renderings of Elbe Philharmonic Hall, planned to open in Hamburg, Germany, in 2010.NYT
June 3, 2007
Architecture
The Best Buildings You’ll Ever Hear
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
COULD it be that we’re entering a golden age in concert hall design?
The very idea may sound a little crazy, given how adamantly some people insist that the audience for classical music is slowly dying off.
To those skeptics the current explosion of new concert spaces may seem nothing but a last-ditch attempt to attract younger audiences. And there is some truth in the observation that the global cultural construction boom has more to do with drawing tourists than with satisfying a thirst for classical performances or the arts in general.
But plenty of the partnerships forged recently between orchestras and architects cannot be dismissed as acts of desperation or boosterism. Frank Gehry’s completed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the Elbe Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg, Germany; Jean Nouvel’s new Paris Philharmonie project: these are not only breathtaking architectural forays but a radical rethinking of the concert hall itself. Their exuberant forms and fluid interiors make the great halls of the late 19th century — from Vienna’s Musikverein to Carnegie Hall to Boston’s Symphony Hall — seem fusty by comparison.
The new halls seek to root classical music firmly in the present and forge an intimate bond among orchestra, audience and music. Such experimentation surely has its risks: As architects push the limits of design, acousticians are venturing into uncertain territory. Yet if these projects succeed, they could open the way to the rarest of achievements: a blissful balance between form and sound.
For more than a century the conventional wisdom for creating a great acoustical hall was a narrow, high, rectangular “shoe box” model with a maximum of 2,500 or so seats. The holy grail was Vienna’s 1870 Musikverein, a Greek Revival invention of the Danish-born architect Theophil von Hansen.
But to contemporary architects the gold standard dates from 1963: Hans Scharoun’s 2,440-seat Berlin Philharmonie, an odd-looking cluster of concrete forms clad in yellow metal panels. Scharoun’s masterpiece, erected alongside the barbed-wire and concrete barriers of the Berlin Wall, was an aggressive attempt to tear down the traditional social hierarchies of the classical music world. Gone were the grand stairs, classical colonnades or golden interiors. Instead he planted the concrete bowl of his main performance space on canted columns, so that the underbelly of the hall became an extension of the street life outside. Draped over this interior, the strange yellow, tentlike skin was a joyfully democratic expression of the hall’s public character and a landmark of communal solace in a divided city.
Yet what most intimidates today’s architects is the performance space; 44 years after its completion, it feels even more radical than it did then. Rejecting the classical proscenium stage and uniform rows of seats, Scharoun created a vineyard pattern, a terraced landscape spilling down toward the stage on all sides. A few subtle shifts in the design break the symmetry, charging the room with energy.
In an instant Scharoun’s creation seemed to wipe away a century of bourgeois formality and jolt classical music into the present. If the Musikverein in Vienna remained the model of acoustic perfection to some listeners, his hall offered a more relaxed, egalitarian experience that was in tune with a modern audience.
Acoustically the hall may not have quite the resonance of Vienna. But after a bit of fine-tuning it was soon considered one of the best halls in Europe. What is more, it reinforced the importance of what some experts describe as psycho-acoustics: the idea that a hall’s visual characteristics could affect the way the audience takes in the music.
Yet the real lesson of Berlin, some orchestra managers and conductors say, was that the late-19th-century hall was no longer necessarily the ideal. Given the striking changes in musical programming, there was no longer a single acoustic recipe. That realization has encouraged architects to push creative limits.
“I think even Vienna is a bit of a myth,” said Ernest Fleischmann, the former general manager for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “The hall is rather small. You can’t put the really big orchestras on that stage. A Mahler symphony there is terribly cramped. The Eighth can hardly be accommodated at all.”
Of the current crop of architects challenging Scharoun’s supremacy, the first out of the gate was Mr. Gehry, with his 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. When he got started in 1987, Mr. Gehry was beginning to work with a sculptural freedom that Scharoun could barely have imagined.
He was captivated by the intimacy of Scharoun’s performance space. “I went to maybe five or six concerts there, and I was knocked out by it,” he told me recently. “The floors were concrete, the handrails were painted metal — all the things that when you’re designing that sort of thing seem antithetical. But there’s this human feeling in it. It engaged you. It encouraged talk. It was the first time I experienced that in a concert hall.”
But if Mr. Gehry was buoyed by the interior’s free-spiritedness, he eventually began to pursue a more compact, symmetrical form for his own. “I was intent on making a beautifully proportioned room,” he said. “I knew my architecture would be difficult for the community already, and I thought of the symmetry as a kind of handrail to help you along.”
And then there was the endless fretting over the acoustics. Mr. Gehry recalls an argument that arose one evening when he was dining in Berlin with the Japanese acoustician Minoru Nagata, an early adviser on Disney Hall, and Lothar Cremer, who had worked with Scharoun in Berlin.
Both were well respected in the music world, but over dinner they could not agree on a preferable acoustical model. As Mr. Gehry remembers it, Mr. Cremer said the hall should be shaped like a coffin, wider at the orchestra. Mr. Nagata firmly favored a wedge.
“It wasn’t quite a food fight,” Mr. Gehry said. “But it was a big argument. So I said innocently, ‘You’re both the best acousticians in the world, and you can’t agree on this?’ There was no answer.
“I realized it was like art,” he said. “You could make it great, but it was intuitive. There wasn’t a formula for it.”
As a result he designed a building that is more voluptuous than Scharoun’s yet also more cautious in some respects.
Unfolding along Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles the building’s bold stainless steel ribbons enliven an alienating urban strip. Mr. Gehry lifted the bowl of the hall off the ground, allowing the streetscape to wind its way up through the building.
Inside, Mr. Gehry wraps the 2,265 audience seats around the stage as Scharoun did. But the design’s luxurious wood surfaces seem almost Baroque, a perfectly symmetrical play of convex and concave forms that seem to press in on the stage.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director, said the close physical proximity prompted the musicians to reconsider their relationship with the audience. “Everyone is physically close, which means that everyone is mentally very close,” he said. “We didn’t have to overplay. We didn’t have to use excess physical energy.”
“We understood that we couldn’t just continue to play as we used to play things,” he added.
Since then the appreciative response to Disney Hall has emboldened orchestral institutions and architects to experiment far more aggressively, raising the question of when the risks outweigh the dividends.
Acoustically, some of the most respected concert halls built over the past decade are in Japan: Suntory Hall in Tokyo, for example, and Kitara Hall in Sapporo. But neither hall is particularly adventurous. With its kitschy facade Kitara Hall could even be called an architectural dud.
By contrast,the swooping concrete curves of Santiago Calatrava’s recent concert hall in Tenerife, the Canary Islands, are an exercise in self-indulgence, and the acoustics are considered unremarkable.
Such mixed results suggest the daunting challenges architects and their clients must surmount to create a great hall.
“Simply speaking, the hall is the instrument of the orchestra,” said Christoph von Dohnanyi, the chief conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony. “If you mess it up, the orchestra will be a mess. There are some orchestras that don’t sound good because they play all the time in a bad hall.”
Not that the high stakes have dulled the architects’ ambitions. One of the most tantalizing designs to emerge is Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg, scheduled to open in 2010. Its gritty site, a pier at the edge of the industrial harbor on the Elbe River, evokes the city’s long commercial shipping history. In an ingenious stroke these Swiss architects proposed to place the translucent glass hall directly atop an abandoned 1960s-era brick warehouse at the end of the pier rather than demolish it. (The warehouse will serve as a parking garage.) Conceived as an extrusion of the brick base and crowned by a series of crystalline peaks, the hall evokes a ship drifting in the harbor.
The design reaffirms how inventive some architects have become in situating their work in a city’s specific physical and historical context. By placing the hall atop the warehouse, for example, Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron have embraced the tough, heroic landscape of the European industrial age rather than trying to obscure or supplant it. The roof of the warehouse will be transformed into an enormous public terrace just below the gentle contours of the concert hall’s underside, with a panoramic view of the harbor on one side and of the city skyline on the other. The terrace’s vast scale and low height should create an intense sense of compression in the interstices between old and new.
Inside the 2,400-seat hall itself, balancing past and present becomes trickier. Like Mr. Gehry, Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron began by obsessively studying the layout of Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonie. There are unmistakable similarities. Seats envelop the stage on all sides. Balconies tilt gently toward the stage, and a subtle asymmetry sets the room slightly on edge.
Eventually, however, Mr. Herzog decided to stop pondering Berlin. “It was too perfect,” he said in an interview. “You can only fail. You can never do better.”
Taking a cue from their recent work on stadiums, the architects decided to include more seats for the audience at the back of the stage, so that the feel of the space would be somewhat like that of a bowl. The curving ceiling, designed as a result of acoustic analysis by Yasuhisa Toyota, who also worked on Disney Hall, will add to the enveloping effect. The balconies’ forms undulate back and forth as they rise, setting the entire room in dynamic motion.
If the space succeeds, one imagines, it could be a wondrous experience for concertgoers. But the bolder architects and their acousticians become, the further they move into uncharted territory, leaving us to wonder what the ultimate result will actually be.
Of all the concert halls on the horizon, Mr. Nouvel’s Paris Philharmonie may be taking the biggest risks of all.
Mr. Nouvel established a reputation in Europe as a concert hall designer with his KKL cultural and congress center in Lucerne, Switzerland. Although the exterior is spectacular — its handsome, streamlined form jutting over a magnificent Swiss lake — the hall itself is more or less a sober classical design, with a series of stacked balconies wrapped in a tight U around a rectangular room.
A more daring hall for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, now under construction in Copenhagen, can be read partly as a homage to Scharoun: The interior is similar to the Berlin Philharmonie’s, although the architect nudges the asymmetry slightly further. The auditorium is encased in a rectangular glass box, suggestive of a space enclosing a precious object. At night video images will stream across the exterior, transforming the enveloping world of the concert into a voyeuristic spectacle.
In his design for the Paris Philharmonie, Mr. Nouvel advances another step, brazenly tossing aside accepted conventions. Paris has never had a great concert hall. (Its resident institution, the Orchestre de Paris, is also viewed as a second-tier orchestra.) And part of his mandate was to generate excitement about the site, a barren strip of land on the edge of La Villette park in working-class northeastern Paris.
Mr. Nouvel first started working on his design while on vacation at a resort in the hills above Cannes, where he spent his evenings playfully moving food around his plate, contemplating potential configurations for the building’s layout.
The result resembles a series of gigantic metal plates stacked loosely atop one another, forming a dreamy mountainous vista at the park’s edge. Broad ramps rising from the park connect the structure to the Cité de la Musique conservatory by Christian de Portzamparc to the south and to the artery that rings the city to the east. In this science-fiction landscape people can ascend the ramps to terraces and restaurants before slipping inside the hall, or continue up to the top of the mound for a sweeping view of the park.
Embedded in the stack is the silvery, amorphous form of the 2,400-seat auditorium, as hypnotic as a pool of mercury. Viewed from above, its interior layout looks vaguely familiar, with part of the audience wrapped around the back of the stage. Yet the rest is an unsettling if exhilarating trip into the unknown. Concertgoers will make their way across narrow bridges to reach balconies suspended like horizontal pods inside the space. Once in their seats they should feel as though they have entered a womb and are floating within the music.
Will it work? We’ll have to wait and see: The hall is not scheduled to open until 2012, and Mr. Nouvel is still working out his design. We have no way of knowing whether his Paris space or Herzog & de Meuron’s Hamburg hall will equal or surpass the wonders of the Berlin Philharmonie or Disney Hall.
Still, the striking range of design approaches here suggests that the classical music world is entering a heady era. Each of these projects, in its own way, celebrates the communal experience, the links between musicians and audiences and the city that envelops them. They are reminders, in the end, that all great architecture is also an exercise in empathy.
M&C note: See original article for image slideshow.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Lovely Review of 1987 film "Let's Get Lost"
NYT
June 3, 2007
A Jazzman So Cool You Want Him Frozen at His Peak
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
AT the very end of Bruce Weber’s seductive, unsettling “Let’s Get Lost,” the movie’s subject, the semi-legendary cool-jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker, looks back on the shooting of the film and says, in a quavery, almost tearful voice, “It was a dream.” Although in the preceding two hours Mr. Baker has delivered a fair number of dubiously reliable utterances, you’re inclined to believe him on this one because that’s what the movie feels like to the viewer too. It’s nominally a documentary (Oscar-nominated in that category in 1989), but it documents something that only faintly resembles waking reality. And Mr. Baker, who wanders through “Let’s Get Lost” with the eerie deliberateness of a somnambulist, appears to be a man who knows a thing or two about dreams.
Film Forum, which gave the movie its New York premiere 18 years ago, is reviving it for a three-week run (beginning Friday) in a restored 35-millimeter print, and Mr. Weber’s black-and-white hipster fantasia is as beautiful, and as nutty, as ever. Now, as in 1989, the filmmaker seems bent on stopping time in its tracks, preserving the illusion that nothing important has changed since the early 1950s, when Mr. Baker was a handsome young man with a sweet-toned horn, the great white hope of West Coast jazz.
He doesn’t look the same of course; actually he looks like hell. When “Let’s Get Lost” was shot, Mr. Baker was in his late 50s, and after 30-plus years of dedicated substance abuse (he wasn’t picky about the substance, though heroin was generally his first choice) his face is ravaged, cadaverous — groovy in entirely the wrong way. He often appears to be having some difficulty remaining awake, even while he’s performing, whispering standards like “My Funny Valentine” at tempos so languid that the songs kind of swirl and hover in the air like cigarette smoke until they finally just drift away.
The really peculiar thing about “Let’s Get Lost” is that its subject’s physical decrepitude and narcoleptic performance style seem not to bother Mr. Weber at all. This isn’t one of those documentaries that poignantly contrast the beauty and energy of youth with the sad debilities of age. Far from it. The picture cuts almost randomly between archival clips and 1987 footage to create a sort of perverse continuum, a frantic insistence that the essence of Chetness is unvarying, eternal. And you can’t always see much difference between the young Mr. Baker and the old. Even in his prime his cool was so extreme that he often looked oddly spectral, like someone trapped in a block of ice.
Chet Baker’s brand of frosty hipness was, in the ’50s, considered a sexy alternative to that era’s prevailing ethos of earnest, striving respectability (at least until rock ’n’ roll, which was more fun, came along). Maybe you had to have grown up in that nervous decade, as Mr. Weber did, to find Mr. Baker’s ostentatious laid-backness subversive, to imbue it with so much bad-boy allure. Mr. Weber, who is also a fashion photographer, is a glamorizer both by trade and by nature, and when something imprints itself as strongly on his fantasy life as the image of the young Chet Baker clearly did, he holds onto it tightly — cherishes it, embellishes it, uses it to transport himself back to his own hard-dreaming youth. “Let’s Get Lost” is his “Remembrance of Things Past,” with this strung-out trumpeter as his madeleine.
And what Mr. Weber winds up doing in this original, deeply eccentric movie is giving Mr. Baker a luxurious fantasy world to live in, a holiday condo of the imagination, where age and time are utterly irrelevant. The filmmaker supplies his weary but grateful subject with a ready-made entourage of shockingly good-looking young people (Chris Isaak and Lisa Marie among them) who, in shifting combinations, drink with him, ride in snazzy convertibles with him, giggle with him on a bumper-car ride and gaze on him reverently while he croons a breathy tune in the recording studio. Mr. Weber takes him to the Cannes Film Festival, where paparazzi surround him and he sings “Almost Blue” for celebrities at a glittery party. No wonder Mr. Baker gets misty-eyed at the end of the movie. The dream he’s been dreaming, courtesy of his devoted director, is the sweetest one a performer could ask for in his declining years: the dream that he still matters.
Chet Baker hadn’t mattered for a while when Mr. Weber was filming him. The movie’s release rekindled a bit of interest in his music, partly because he was dead by the time it came out: In 1988, at the age of 58, he was found on the street in Amsterdam, having apparently fallen from the window of his hotel. He’s practically forgotten now.
Jazz history hasn’t been kind to him; his talent, though real, was thin. Unlike his rival Miles Davis, he persisted, with a stubbornness that suggests a fairly serious failure of imagination, in playing the cool style long past the point at which it had begun to sound mannered and even a little silly. When you hear Mr. Baker’s stuff, you can’t help picturing his ideal listener as one of those lupine swingers of the Playboy era, decked out in a velvet smoking jacket and loading smooth platters onto the hi-fi to get a hot chick in the mood for love. The ’50s die before your eyes in “Let’s Get Lost.” It feels like the last stand of something that may not have been worth fighting for in the first place.
In a funny way, the movie gives the lie to the nostalgic illusions it seems to want to embody, just because the construction of this fragile, faded jazzman as the epitome of cool is so elaborate and so obviously effortful. It’s killing work to be this cool. When Mr. Weber starts interviewing people who loved the musician not from afar, as he did, but from too close — his bitter wife, a few girlfriends, three of his neglected kids — you see how tough it’s been: how many drugs it took, how much willful indifference, how much hollowing out of whatever self may once have inhabited the pale frame of Chet Baker.
The enduring fascination of “Let’s Get Lost,” the reason it remains powerful even now, when every value it represents is gone, is that it’s among the few movies that deal with the mysterious, complicated emotional transactions involved in the creation of pop culture — and with the ambiguous process by which performers generate desire. Mr. Baker isn’t so much the subject of this picture as its pretext: He’s the front man for Mr. Weber’s meditations on image making and its discontents.
If you want the true story of Chet Baker, you’d do better to look up James Gavin’s superb, harrowing 2002 biography, “Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker,” where you can also find, in the words of a pianist named Hal Galper, perhaps the most perceptive review of Mr. Weber’s slippery movie. “I though it was great,” Mr. Galper says, “because it was so jive. Everybody’s lying, including Chet. You couldn’t have wanted a more honest reflection of him.” That’s “Let’s Get Lost,” to the life: the greatest jive movie, or maybe the jivest great movie, ever made.
Does Virtual Reality Need a Sheriff?
Does Virtual Reality Need a Sheriff?
Reach of Law Enforcement Is Tested When Online Fantasy Games Turn Sordid
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 2, 2007; A01
Earlier this year, one animated character in Second Life, a popular online fantasy world, allegedly raped another character.
Some Internet bloggers dismissed the simulated attack as nothing more than digital fiction. But police in Belgium, according to newspapers there, opened an investigation into whether a crime had been committed. No one has yet been charged.
Then last month, authorities in Germany announced that they were looking into a separate incident involving virtual abuse in Second Life after receiving pictures of an animated child character engaging in simulated sex with an animated adult figure. Though both characters were created by adults, the activity could run afoul of German laws against child pornography, prosecutors said.
As recent advances in Internet technology have spurred millions of users to build and explore new digital worlds, the creations have imported not only their users' dreams but also their vices. These alternative realms are testing the long-held notions of what is criminal and whether law enforcement should patrol the digital frontier.
"People have an interest in their property and the integrity of their person. But in virtual reality, these interests are not tangible but built from intangible data and software," said Greg Lastowka, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law at Camden in New Jersey.
Some virtual activities clearly violate the law, like trafficking in stolen credit card numbers, he said. Others, like virtual muggings and sex crimes, are harder to define, though they may cause real-life anguish for users.
Simulated violence and thievery have long been a part of virtual reality, especially in the computer games that pioneered online digital role-playing. At times, however, this conduct has crossed the lines of what even seasoned game players consider acceptable.
In World of Warcraft, the most popular online game, with an estimated 8 million participants worldwide, some regions of this fantasy domain have grown so lawless that players said they fear to brave them alone. Gangs of animated characters have repeatedly preyed upon lone travelers, killing them and making off with their virtual belongings.
Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money.
Julian Dibbell, a prominent commentator on digital culture, chronicled the first known case of sexual assault in cyberspace in 1993, when virtual reality was still in its infancy. A participant in LambdaMOO, a community of users who congregated in a virtual California house, had used a computer program called a "voodoo doll" to force another player's character to act out being raped. Though this virtual world was rudimentary and the assault simulated, Dibbell recounted that the trauma was jarringly real. The woman whose character was attacked later wept -- "post-traumatic tears were streaming down her face" -- as she vented her outrage and demand for revenge in an online posting, he wrote.
Since then, advances in high-speed Internet, user interfaces and graphic design have rendered virtual reality more real, allowing users to endow their characters with greater humanity and identify ever more closely with their creations.
Nowhere is this truer than in Second Life, where more than 6 million people have registered to create characters called avatars, cartoon human figures that respond to keyboard commands and socialize with others' characters. The breadth of creativity and interaction in Second Life is greater than on nearly any other virtual-reality Web site because there is no game or other objective; it is just an open-ended, lifelike digital environment.
Moreover, Linden Labs, which operates Second Life, has given users the software tools to design their characters and online setting as they see fit; some avatars look like their real-life alter egos, while others are fantastical creations.
This virtual frontier has attracted a stunning array of immigrants. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has opened a virtual campaign headquarters. Reuters and other news agencies have set up virtual bureaus. IBM has developed office space for employee avatars. On May 22, Maldives became the first country to open an embassy in Second Life, with Sweden following this week.
Second Life is intended only for adults, and about 15 percent of the properties on the site -- in essence, space on computer servers that appear as parcels of land -- have been voluntarily flagged by their residents as having mature material. Though some is relatively innocent, in some locations avatars act out drug use, child abuse, rape and various forms of sadomasochism.
"This is the double-edged sword of the wonderful creativity in Second Life," Dibbell said in an interview.
One user found herself the unwilling neighbor of an especially sordid underage sex club. "Tons of men would drop in looking for sex with little girls and boys. I abhorred the club," wrote the user on a Second Life blog under the avatar name Anna Valeeva. She even tried to evict the club by buying their land, she wrote.
The question of what is criminal in virtual reality is complicated by disagreements among countries over what is legal even in real life. For example, virtual renderings of child abuse are not a crime in the United States but are considered illegal pornography in some European countries, including Germany.
After German authorities began their investigation, Linden Labs issued a statement on its official blog condemning the virtual depictions of child pornography. Linden Labs said it was cooperating with law enforcement and had banned two participants in the incident, a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman, from Second Life.
Some Second Life users objected on the blog that Linden Labs had gone too far.
"Excuse me. You banned two residents, both mature, who did a little role-playing? No children, I repeat no children, were harmed or even involved in that act," protested another user on the Second Life blog. "Since when is fantasy against the fricking law?"
Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, said in an interview that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. He recounted, for example, that his company has called in the FBI several times, most recently this spring to ensure that Second Life's virtual casinos complied with U.S. law. Federal investigators created their own avatars and toured the site, he said.
In coming months, his company plans to disperse tens of thousands of computer servers from California and Texas to countries around the world in order to improve the site's performance. Also, he said, this will make activities on those servers subject to laws of the host countries.
Rosedale said he hopes participants in Second Life eventually develop their own virtual legal code and justice system.
"In the ideal case, the people who are in Second Life should think of themselves as citizens of this new place and not citizens of their countries," he said.
Reach of Law Enforcement Is Tested When Online Fantasy Games Turn Sordid
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 2, 2007; A01
Earlier this year, one animated character in Second Life, a popular online fantasy world, allegedly raped another character.
Some Internet bloggers dismissed the simulated attack as nothing more than digital fiction. But police in Belgium, according to newspapers there, opened an investigation into whether a crime had been committed. No one has yet been charged.
Then last month, authorities in Germany announced that they were looking into a separate incident involving virtual abuse in Second Life after receiving pictures of an animated child character engaging in simulated sex with an animated adult figure. Though both characters were created by adults, the activity could run afoul of German laws against child pornography, prosecutors said.
As recent advances in Internet technology have spurred millions of users to build and explore new digital worlds, the creations have imported not only their users' dreams but also their vices. These alternative realms are testing the long-held notions of what is criminal and whether law enforcement should patrol the digital frontier.
"People have an interest in their property and the integrity of their person. But in virtual reality, these interests are not tangible but built from intangible data and software," said Greg Lastowka, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law at Camden in New Jersey.
Some virtual activities clearly violate the law, like trafficking in stolen credit card numbers, he said. Others, like virtual muggings and sex crimes, are harder to define, though they may cause real-life anguish for users.
Simulated violence and thievery have long been a part of virtual reality, especially in the computer games that pioneered online digital role-playing. At times, however, this conduct has crossed the lines of what even seasoned game players consider acceptable.
In World of Warcraft, the most popular online game, with an estimated 8 million participants worldwide, some regions of this fantasy domain have grown so lawless that players said they fear to brave them alone. Gangs of animated characters have repeatedly preyed upon lone travelers, killing them and making off with their virtual belongings.
Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money.
Julian Dibbell, a prominent commentator on digital culture, chronicled the first known case of sexual assault in cyberspace in 1993, when virtual reality was still in its infancy. A participant in LambdaMOO, a community of users who congregated in a virtual California house, had used a computer program called a "voodoo doll" to force another player's character to act out being raped. Though this virtual world was rudimentary and the assault simulated, Dibbell recounted that the trauma was jarringly real. The woman whose character was attacked later wept -- "post-traumatic tears were streaming down her face" -- as she vented her outrage and demand for revenge in an online posting, he wrote.
Since then, advances in high-speed Internet, user interfaces and graphic design have rendered virtual reality more real, allowing users to endow their characters with greater humanity and identify ever more closely with their creations.
Nowhere is this truer than in Second Life, where more than 6 million people have registered to create characters called avatars, cartoon human figures that respond to keyboard commands and socialize with others' characters. The breadth of creativity and interaction in Second Life is greater than on nearly any other virtual-reality Web site because there is no game or other objective; it is just an open-ended, lifelike digital environment.
Moreover, Linden Labs, which operates Second Life, has given users the software tools to design their characters and online setting as they see fit; some avatars look like their real-life alter egos, while others are fantastical creations.
This virtual frontier has attracted a stunning array of immigrants. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has opened a virtual campaign headquarters. Reuters and other news agencies have set up virtual bureaus. IBM has developed office space for employee avatars. On May 22, Maldives became the first country to open an embassy in Second Life, with Sweden following this week.
Second Life is intended only for adults, and about 15 percent of the properties on the site -- in essence, space on computer servers that appear as parcels of land -- have been voluntarily flagged by their residents as having mature material. Though some is relatively innocent, in some locations avatars act out drug use, child abuse, rape and various forms of sadomasochism.
"This is the double-edged sword of the wonderful creativity in Second Life," Dibbell said in an interview.
One user found herself the unwilling neighbor of an especially sordid underage sex club. "Tons of men would drop in looking for sex with little girls and boys. I abhorred the club," wrote the user on a Second Life blog under the avatar name Anna Valeeva. She even tried to evict the club by buying their land, she wrote.
The question of what is criminal in virtual reality is complicated by disagreements among countries over what is legal even in real life. For example, virtual renderings of child abuse are not a crime in the United States but are considered illegal pornography in some European countries, including Germany.
After German authorities began their investigation, Linden Labs issued a statement on its official blog condemning the virtual depictions of child pornography. Linden Labs said it was cooperating with law enforcement and had banned two participants in the incident, a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman, from Second Life.
Some Second Life users objected on the blog that Linden Labs had gone too far.
"Excuse me. You banned two residents, both mature, who did a little role-playing? No children, I repeat no children, were harmed or even involved in that act," protested another user on the Second Life blog. "Since when is fantasy against the fricking law?"
Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, said in an interview that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. He recounted, for example, that his company has called in the FBI several times, most recently this spring to ensure that Second Life's virtual casinos complied with U.S. law. Federal investigators created their own avatars and toured the site, he said.
In coming months, his company plans to disperse tens of thousands of computer servers from California and Texas to countries around the world in order to improve the site's performance. Also, he said, this will make activities on those servers subject to laws of the host countries.
Rosedale said he hopes participants in Second Life eventually develop their own virtual legal code and justice system.
"In the ideal case, the people who are in Second Life should think of themselves as citizens of this new place and not citizens of their countries," he said.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Anger over DRM-free iTunes tracks
BBC
Anger over DRM-free iTunes tracks
The launch of music tracks free of digital locks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them.
Some fear this data could be used to identify the owner of the tracks if they turn up on file-sharing sites.
The tracks from record company EMI cost more and are of a better quality than standard iTunes songs.
Apple has yet to comment on what it plans to do with the information embedded in the music files.
Lock off
The tracks without the digital locks, known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, officially went on sale on 30 May under the iTunes Plus banner. The downloads cost $1.29 (99p) rather than $0.99 (79p).
Apple uses a technology known as Fairplay to limit what people can do with downloads. Fairplay can be circumvented by burning tracks to a CD and then converting them to another format.
News site Ars Technica was among the first to discover that downloaded tracks free of Fairplay have embedded within them the full name and account information, including e-mail address, of who bought them.
It suggested that this information could be an anti-piracy measure as it could help work out who was putting downloads on file-sharing sites.
But it also added that the user information was found on all the tracks that people buy on iTunes whether free of DRM or not.
It was not clear, said Ars Technica, whether the data was part of Apple's administration system for iTunes or something else. It said because the data was easy to spoof Apple needed to explain why the data was present.
The BBC has contacted Apple seeking comment but so far the company has made no official response.
Other websites said it was only a matter of time before a utility program was produced that which stripped out the identifying information.
At this point it is not yet clear how deeply the user data is buried in the track or how easy it is to remove.
EMI's decision to sell DRM-free tracks was announced in April.
At the launch event Apple boss Steve Jobs announced that the iTunes store was the first to sign up to sell them.
Tracks by artists such as Coldplay, Joss Stone, Frank Sinatra and Pink Floyd are available without DRM technology.
The EMI/Apple move followed an open letter penned by Steve Jobs in February that called for music companies to release tracks without digital locks.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6711215.stm
Published: 2007/06/01 14:26:40 GMT
Anger over DRM-free iTunes tracks
The launch of music tracks free of digital locks on iTunes has been overshadowed by the discovery that they contain data about who bought them.
Some fear this data could be used to identify the owner of the tracks if they turn up on file-sharing sites.
The tracks from record company EMI cost more and are of a better quality than standard iTunes songs.
Apple has yet to comment on what it plans to do with the information embedded in the music files.
Lock off
The tracks without the digital locks, known as Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, officially went on sale on 30 May under the iTunes Plus banner. The downloads cost $1.29 (99p) rather than $0.99 (79p).
Apple uses a technology known as Fairplay to limit what people can do with downloads. Fairplay can be circumvented by burning tracks to a CD and then converting them to another format.
News site Ars Technica was among the first to discover that downloaded tracks free of Fairplay have embedded within them the full name and account information, including e-mail address, of who bought them.
It suggested that this information could be an anti-piracy measure as it could help work out who was putting downloads on file-sharing sites.
But it also added that the user information was found on all the tracks that people buy on iTunes whether free of DRM or not.
It was not clear, said Ars Technica, whether the data was part of Apple's administration system for iTunes or something else. It said because the data was easy to spoof Apple needed to explain why the data was present.
The BBC has contacted Apple seeking comment but so far the company has made no official response.
Other websites said it was only a matter of time before a utility program was produced that which stripped out the identifying information.
At this point it is not yet clear how deeply the user data is buried in the track or how easy it is to remove.
EMI's decision to sell DRM-free tracks was announced in April.
At the launch event Apple boss Steve Jobs announced that the iTunes store was the first to sign up to sell them.
Tracks by artists such as Coldplay, Joss Stone, Frank Sinatra and Pink Floyd are available without DRM technology.
The EMI/Apple move followed an open letter penned by Steve Jobs in February that called for music companies to release tracks without digital locks.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6711215.stm
Published: 2007/06/01 14:26:40 GMT
Notable Women: Contemporary Music Series Focuses on Female Composers
June 1, 2007
From Music’s Persistent Gender Gap, a Festival Arises
By ANNE MIDGETTE
The composer Joan Tower, 69, her voice lowered a semitone by a cold, poured herself a beer in a Midtown bar and half-championed, half-defended her next project.
“I don’t think it necessarily has to be a retreat,” she said. “I view it as another kind of festival. Like a festival of Indian music, a festival of electronic music. It has a theme.”
“It” is Notable Women, Ms. Tower’s latest and most ambitious venture as curator of the contemporary chamber series of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Rather than presenting three concerts over the course of a season, Ms. Tower has grouped hers together over three consecutive weekends to create a small festival celebrating, yes, female composers. (The festival begins tomorrow and continues through June 17.)
If she sounds a little defensive, it is because many women feel that such events are no longer necessary — in Ms. Tower’s own words, that they are “ghettoizing” or “demeaning.” Concerts of music written by women may have been trailblazing in the 1970s, but they are hardly uncommon today. Women have won the Pulitzer Prize in music (Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Shulamit Ran, Melinda Wagner); held composers’ chairs with the New York Philharmonic (Tania León) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Augusta Read Thomas); received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (Ms. Tower); taught at the Curtis Institute (Jennifer Higdon).
Yet evidently music by women still needs champions; women remain strikingly underrepresented in the ranks of composers. According the American Symphony Orchestra League, 1 percent of the music American orchestras played in 2004-5 was written by women. That figure jumped to 2 percent in 2005-6, thanks to Ms. Tower, who was the most-played living composer over that season because of the project “Made in America,” a commissioned work played by 65 orchestras around the country.
This statistic also reflects, of course, that most orchestral music performed today comes from a core repertory of works written by a pantheon of men; 19th-century female composers are unlikely ever to become more than an interesting footnote. Yet even among living composers, women represent a distinct minority. While officials of the two leading performing-rights organizations, Frances Richard of Ascap and Ralph Jackson of BMI, did not have statistics on the male-female breakdown of their membership, they estimated that 10 to 20 percent of the applicants for their respective annual young-composer awards were women.
The issue came to the fore in the early 2000s when for three years there was not a single woman among the winners of BMI’s Student Composer Awards. BMI, sensitive to the bad publicity, last year inaugurated a new competition for women only. The prize: a commission for a new work to be played at the Notable Women festival. “By the River Near Savathi” for clarinet and string trio, by Asha Srinivasan, an Indian-American who is getting her doctorate from the University of Maryland, will have its first performance tomorrow.
Ms. Srinivasan, 27, certainly does not feel hampered by being a woman. In addition to her acoustic work, she is also active in electronic music, a field even more male-dominated than orchestral composition.
“It’s becoming more and more not a big deal to be a female composer,” she said.
Many, however, are still concerned with how to level the playing field. BMI’s is not the only composition award for women. The International Alliance for Women in Music sponsors a composing prize, and this year the Detroit Symphony Orchestra announced Stacy Garrop as the winner of its first Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award for female composers, financed by an anonymous donor and named for a local composer.
Ms. Tower cites some possible reasons for the lingering gender gap. “One problem is in academia,” she said. “For a long time there were no women teaching in academia.”
“Then there’s the whole thing of your family,” she added. “Do you have a husband that’s supportive, and is he going to take care of the kids? A lot of these women that we are featuring on the festival, the pioneers, they died by the wayside because they didn’t get any encouragement at certain points in their lives.”
Ms. Richard of Ascap said: “The question is: Who chooses what to play, and how enlightened are they? I thought things would get better when we had women in higher management. Some of the conductors have great loyalty to their teachers. It’s important that women teach. These are things we have to catch up on.”
Certainly this festival appears to be the first time some of the female players with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s have ever really confronted the issue of female composers.
“I didn’t really think about” the issue of women in music, said Daire FitzGerald, a principal cellist and co-director of chamber music at St. Luke’s, who will perform in the festival. “I went to Juilliard. They expected you to learn the Elgar and Dvorak concertos. I had five or six different chamber music groups I worked with. I always tried to fight the concerto thing, but I didn’t do much new music.”
Ms. Richard said, “In the classical music world, we have to fight for pieces that are more recent regardless of what sex they are.”
Ms. Tower said she hoped that Notable Women might be a starting point for a larger festival. The first of its three programs focuses on overlooked women of the past (Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke, Ruth Crawford Seeger). The second presents major figures of the present (Ms. Higdon, Libby Larsen, Ms. Tower); the third, of the avant-garde (Joan La Barbara, Eve Beglarian, Pamela Z, Julia Wolfe). Each program also includes a new work commissioned from a young composer: in addition to Ms. Srinivasan these are Kati Agócs (“I and Thou”) and Erin Watson (“Lullaby for Cy Twombly”).
The range of styles is broad; no one involved with the festival is trying to make any qualitative about “women’s music.”
“I have never done a blind taste test,” said Elizabeth Ostrow, the director of artistic planning for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. “But I suspect those who say there is a difference, if they did a blind taste test, would be impressed.” But the final program touches on one area in which female composers have flourished: as mavericks like Meredith Monk, forging career paths on their own terms.
In contrast the terms of the conventional classical composer’s career tend to be dictated by the traditionally male-dominated orchestra — in which “sounding like a man” remains, in the experience of many women, a stated benchmark, even a goal.
“I don’t think of music in terms of gender,” said Elizabeth Mann, the principal flutist of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. “But I realized: I’m Jewish, and I feel a sense of being Jewish. I’m a woman, and I feel a sense of being a woman. I feel quite moved to be a part of the series. It’s a missing piece of my own personal heritage.”
From Music’s Persistent Gender Gap, a Festival Arises
By ANNE MIDGETTE
The composer Joan Tower, 69, her voice lowered a semitone by a cold, poured herself a beer in a Midtown bar and half-championed, half-defended her next project.
“I don’t think it necessarily has to be a retreat,” she said. “I view it as another kind of festival. Like a festival of Indian music, a festival of electronic music. It has a theme.”
“It” is Notable Women, Ms. Tower’s latest and most ambitious venture as curator of the contemporary chamber series of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Rather than presenting three concerts over the course of a season, Ms. Tower has grouped hers together over three consecutive weekends to create a small festival celebrating, yes, female composers. (The festival begins tomorrow and continues through June 17.)
If she sounds a little defensive, it is because many women feel that such events are no longer necessary — in Ms. Tower’s own words, that they are “ghettoizing” or “demeaning.” Concerts of music written by women may have been trailblazing in the 1970s, but they are hardly uncommon today. Women have won the Pulitzer Prize in music (Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Shulamit Ran, Melinda Wagner); held composers’ chairs with the New York Philharmonic (Tania León) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Augusta Read Thomas); received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (Ms. Tower); taught at the Curtis Institute (Jennifer Higdon).
Yet evidently music by women still needs champions; women remain strikingly underrepresented in the ranks of composers. According the American Symphony Orchestra League, 1 percent of the music American orchestras played in 2004-5 was written by women. That figure jumped to 2 percent in 2005-6, thanks to Ms. Tower, who was the most-played living composer over that season because of the project “Made in America,” a commissioned work played by 65 orchestras around the country.
This statistic also reflects, of course, that most orchestral music performed today comes from a core repertory of works written by a pantheon of men; 19th-century female composers are unlikely ever to become more than an interesting footnote. Yet even among living composers, women represent a distinct minority. While officials of the two leading performing-rights organizations, Frances Richard of Ascap and Ralph Jackson of BMI, did not have statistics on the male-female breakdown of their membership, they estimated that 10 to 20 percent of the applicants for their respective annual young-composer awards were women.
The issue came to the fore in the early 2000s when for three years there was not a single woman among the winners of BMI’s Student Composer Awards. BMI, sensitive to the bad publicity, last year inaugurated a new competition for women only. The prize: a commission for a new work to be played at the Notable Women festival. “By the River Near Savathi” for clarinet and string trio, by Asha Srinivasan, an Indian-American who is getting her doctorate from the University of Maryland, will have its first performance tomorrow.
Ms. Srinivasan, 27, certainly does not feel hampered by being a woman. In addition to her acoustic work, she is also active in electronic music, a field even more male-dominated than orchestral composition.
“It’s becoming more and more not a big deal to be a female composer,” she said.
Many, however, are still concerned with how to level the playing field. BMI’s is not the only composition award for women. The International Alliance for Women in Music sponsors a composing prize, and this year the Detroit Symphony Orchestra announced Stacy Garrop as the winner of its first Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award for female composers, financed by an anonymous donor and named for a local composer.
Ms. Tower cites some possible reasons for the lingering gender gap. “One problem is in academia,” she said. “For a long time there were no women teaching in academia.”
“Then there’s the whole thing of your family,” she added. “Do you have a husband that’s supportive, and is he going to take care of the kids? A lot of these women that we are featuring on the festival, the pioneers, they died by the wayside because they didn’t get any encouragement at certain points in their lives.”
Ms. Richard of Ascap said: “The question is: Who chooses what to play, and how enlightened are they? I thought things would get better when we had women in higher management. Some of the conductors have great loyalty to their teachers. It’s important that women teach. These are things we have to catch up on.”
Certainly this festival appears to be the first time some of the female players with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s have ever really confronted the issue of female composers.
“I didn’t really think about” the issue of women in music, said Daire FitzGerald, a principal cellist and co-director of chamber music at St. Luke’s, who will perform in the festival. “I went to Juilliard. They expected you to learn the Elgar and Dvorak concertos. I had five or six different chamber music groups I worked with. I always tried to fight the concerto thing, but I didn’t do much new music.”
Ms. Richard said, “In the classical music world, we have to fight for pieces that are more recent regardless of what sex they are.”
Ms. Tower said she hoped that Notable Women might be a starting point for a larger festival. The first of its three programs focuses on overlooked women of the past (Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke, Ruth Crawford Seeger). The second presents major figures of the present (Ms. Higdon, Libby Larsen, Ms. Tower); the third, of the avant-garde (Joan La Barbara, Eve Beglarian, Pamela Z, Julia Wolfe). Each program also includes a new work commissioned from a young composer: in addition to Ms. Srinivasan these are Kati Agócs (“I and Thou”) and Erin Watson (“Lullaby for Cy Twombly”).
The range of styles is broad; no one involved with the festival is trying to make any qualitative about “women’s music.”
“I have never done a blind taste test,” said Elizabeth Ostrow, the director of artistic planning for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. “But I suspect those who say there is a difference, if they did a blind taste test, would be impressed.” But the final program touches on one area in which female composers have flourished: as mavericks like Meredith Monk, forging career paths on their own terms.
In contrast the terms of the conventional classical composer’s career tend to be dictated by the traditionally male-dominated orchestra — in which “sounding like a man” remains, in the experience of many women, a stated benchmark, even a goal.
“I don’t think of music in terms of gender,” said Elizabeth Mann, the principal flutist of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. “But I realized: I’m Jewish, and I feel a sense of being Jewish. I’m a woman, and I feel a sense of being a woman. I feel quite moved to be a part of the series. It’s a missing piece of my own personal heritage.”
Daniel Levitin: It Was 40 Years Ago Today
Washington Post
It Was 40 Years Ago Today
By Daniel J. Levitin
Friday, June 1, 2007; A15
Yes, it's been 40 years exactly since Sgt. Pepper, having labored the previous 20 years teaching his band to play, arranged for its debut in full psychedelic regalia. He leveraged a little help from his friends, notably the vocalist Billy Shears and a riverboat owner named Lucy who had apparently made her fortune in the diamond business. Pepper realized that good music-making requires the expanding of horizons. A recent "trip" inspired him to incorporate tabla and sitar into the music. The band exhorted us to sit back and let the evening go so that they could turn us on, musically, lyrically, and blow our minds for the next several decades.
It has been 45 years since Mitch Miller, head of A&R (artists and repertory) at Columbia Records, dismissed the Beatles as "the hula hoops of music." Will Beatles songs still be loved when baby boomers are 64? Will they inspire future generations? Or will their music die with those who became intoxicated by their wit and charisma during the mind-expanding '60s?
A hundred years from now, musicologists say, Beatles songs will be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people won't know who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like "Oh! Susanna," "This Land Is Your Land" and "Frère Jacques."
Great songs seem as though they've always existed, that they weren't written by anyone. Figuring out why some songs and not others stick in our heads, and why we can enjoy certain songs across a lifetime, is the work not just of composers but also of psychologists and neuroscientists. Every culture has its own music, every music its own set of rules. Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we learn what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities (instantiated as neural firings) of what chord is likely to follow what chord and how melodies are formed.
Skillful composers play with these expectations, alternately meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory, we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as eating chocolate, having sex or taking opiates. There really is a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll part of the brain: a network of neural structures including the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. But no one song does this for everyone, and musical taste is both variable and subjective.
Today the Beatles catalogue is loved cross-culturally -- the product of a six-year burst of creativity unparalleled in modern music. The Beatles incorporated classical elements into rock so seamlessly that it is easy to forget that string quartets and Bach-like countermelodies and bass lines (not to mention plagal cadences) did not always populate pop. Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.
Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Franz Schubert -- a master of melody, writing tunes anyone can sing, songs that seem to have been there all along. Most people don't realize that "Ave Maria" and "Serenade" were written by Schubert (or that his "Moment Musical in F" so resembles "Martha My Dear"). McCartney writes with similar universality. His "Yesterday" has been recorded by more musicians than any other song in history. Its stepwise melody is deceptively complex, drawing from outside the diatonic scale so smoothly that anyone can sing it, yet few theorists can agree on exactly what it is that McCartney has done.
The timelessness of such melodies was brought home to me by Les Boréades, a Quebec group that has recorded Beatles music on baroque instruments. The instruments give the sense that you're hearing Bach or Vivaldi, and for moments it's possible to forget that you're listening to Beatles songs. We're so used to hearing Beatles songs that for many of us they no longer hold any surprises. But when they're stripped of their '60s production and the personal and social associations we have with them, you can hear the intricate and beautiful interplay of rhythm, harmony and melody.
On the bus recently the radio played "And I Love Her," and a Portuguese immigrant about my grandmother's age sang along with her eyes closed. How many people can hum even two bars of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, or Mozart's 30th? I recently played 60 seconds of these to an audience of 700 -- including many professional musicians -- but not one person recognized them. Then I played a fraction of the opening "aah" of "Eleanor Rigby" and the single guitar chord that opens "A Hard Day's Night" -- and virtually everyone shouted the names.
To a neuroscientist, the longevity of the Beatles can be explained by the fact that their music created subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex, joined by a chorus of the limbic system and an ostinato from the brainstem. To a musician, each hearing showcases nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of performances and listenings. The act we've known for all these years is still in style, guaranteed to raise a smile, one hopes for generations to come. I have to admit, it's getting better all the time.
Daniel J. Levitin, a former record producer, is a professor of psychology and music at McGill University in Montreal and the author of "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession."
It Was 40 Years Ago Today
By Daniel J. Levitin
Friday, June 1, 2007; A15
Yes, it's been 40 years exactly since Sgt. Pepper, having labored the previous 20 years teaching his band to play, arranged for its debut in full psychedelic regalia. He leveraged a little help from his friends, notably the vocalist Billy Shears and a riverboat owner named Lucy who had apparently made her fortune in the diamond business. Pepper realized that good music-making requires the expanding of horizons. A recent "trip" inspired him to incorporate tabla and sitar into the music. The band exhorted us to sit back and let the evening go so that they could turn us on, musically, lyrically, and blow our minds for the next several decades.
It has been 45 years since Mitch Miller, head of A&R (artists and repertory) at Columbia Records, dismissed the Beatles as "the hula hoops of music." Will Beatles songs still be loved when baby boomers are 64? Will they inspire future generations? Or will their music die with those who became intoxicated by their wit and charisma during the mind-expanding '60s?
A hundred years from now, musicologists say, Beatles songs will be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people won't know who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like "Oh! Susanna," "This Land Is Your Land" and "Frère Jacques."
Great songs seem as though they've always existed, that they weren't written by anyone. Figuring out why some songs and not others stick in our heads, and why we can enjoy certain songs across a lifetime, is the work not just of composers but also of psychologists and neuroscientists. Every culture has its own music, every music its own set of rules. Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we learn what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities (instantiated as neural firings) of what chord is likely to follow what chord and how melodies are formed.
Skillful composers play with these expectations, alternately meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory, we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as eating chocolate, having sex or taking opiates. There really is a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll part of the brain: a network of neural structures including the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. But no one song does this for everyone, and musical taste is both variable and subjective.
Today the Beatles catalogue is loved cross-culturally -- the product of a six-year burst of creativity unparalleled in modern music. The Beatles incorporated classical elements into rock so seamlessly that it is easy to forget that string quartets and Bach-like countermelodies and bass lines (not to mention plagal cadences) did not always populate pop. Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.
Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Franz Schubert -- a master of melody, writing tunes anyone can sing, songs that seem to have been there all along. Most people don't realize that "Ave Maria" and "Serenade" were written by Schubert (or that his "Moment Musical in F" so resembles "Martha My Dear"). McCartney writes with similar universality. His "Yesterday" has been recorded by more musicians than any other song in history. Its stepwise melody is deceptively complex, drawing from outside the diatonic scale so smoothly that anyone can sing it, yet few theorists can agree on exactly what it is that McCartney has done.
The timelessness of such melodies was brought home to me by Les Boréades, a Quebec group that has recorded Beatles music on baroque instruments. The instruments give the sense that you're hearing Bach or Vivaldi, and for moments it's possible to forget that you're listening to Beatles songs. We're so used to hearing Beatles songs that for many of us they no longer hold any surprises. But when they're stripped of their '60s production and the personal and social associations we have with them, you can hear the intricate and beautiful interplay of rhythm, harmony and melody.
On the bus recently the radio played "And I Love Her," and a Portuguese immigrant about my grandmother's age sang along with her eyes closed. How many people can hum even two bars of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, or Mozart's 30th? I recently played 60 seconds of these to an audience of 700 -- including many professional musicians -- but not one person recognized them. Then I played a fraction of the opening "aah" of "Eleanor Rigby" and the single guitar chord that opens "A Hard Day's Night" -- and virtually everyone shouted the names.
To a neuroscientist, the longevity of the Beatles can be explained by the fact that their music created subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex, joined by a chorus of the limbic system and an ostinato from the brainstem. To a musician, each hearing showcases nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of performances and listenings. The act we've known for all these years is still in style, guaranteed to raise a smile, one hopes for generations to come. I have to admit, it's getting better all the time.
Daniel J. Levitin, a former record producer, is a professor of psychology and music at McGill University in Montreal and the author of "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
