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obit
Karlheinz Stockhausen
In every sense, the composer was on a different wavelength.
By Matthew Guerrieri
Updated Friday, Dec. 21, 2007, at 5:20 PM ET
Around 1911, William S. Sadler, a Chicago physician whose hobby was debunking paranormal claims, found a case that perplexed even him. "This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities," Sadler wrote. Eventually, "this man" (quite possibly Sadler's brother-in-law Wilfrid C. Kellogg, of the cornflake family) became the conduit for 2,097 pages of quasi-Jungian Christian cosmology, purportedly communicated by extraterrestrial beings, and published in 1955 as The Urantia Book.
The 14th section of the book maps the hierarchical waystations of the ascending soul, from Urantia (the Earth) all the way up to Havona, the last, billion-world stop before Paradise. "Love of adventure, curiosity, and dread of monotony … were not put there just to aggravate and annoy you during your short sojourn on earth," it reads, "but rather to suggest to you that death is only the beginning of an endless career of adventure, an everlasting life of anticipation, an eternal voyage of discovery." On Dec. 5, the 216th anniversary of Mozart's death, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen began his endless career of adventure.
Stockhausen borrowed from The Urantia Book in his last completed major work, the seven-opera cycle Licht, which occupied him from 1977 until 2002 (and remains only five-sevenths performed). The book was one of a long line of spiritual systems—Catholicism, Sufism, the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo—that Stockhausen embraced. But they were adjuncts to his true creed: Stockhausen was first and foremost a priest of sound, a clearinghouse for the coming and going of vibrations.
"We are all transistors in the literal sense," he proclaimed. Orphaned by the war—his mentally ill mother euthanized by the Nazis, his officer father killed near the conflict's end—he turned to the cosmos for guidance. "I closed my eyes and stood somewhere in the road or on the street—or, during the war, in a field where bombs were falling," he said, "and I wouldn't move until I heard a message." He came to consider himself an antenna for tuning in the music of the spheres.
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould included among his stable of satirical characters one Karlheinz Klopweisser: donning a long wig, brandishing an enormous electric wand, ruminating about the resonance of organic silence. It wasn't much of an exaggeration. The perception was that, as the summers of love faded, Stockhausen had lost his way, that the leading avant-garde composer of the 1950s and '60s—who gave electronic music a soul and made the arid calculations of serialism dazzlingly, confrontationally vivid—had gone off the psychedelic deep end. Once, prefacing some typically esoteric statement, Stockhausen himself inadvertently summed up critical opinion. "At this point, my argument is about to become metaphysical," he warned. "Most people have no intention of following me to this level."
But the metaphysics had been there from the outset. The landmark Gesange der Jünglinge, possibly the most epochal five-channel tape in musical history, grew out of a proposed Catholic mass for voices and electronic sounds, nixed by the Archbishop of Cologne on the now-quaint grounds that loudspeakers didn't belong in church. Gruppen, a three-conductor extravaganza that reinvented the orchestral showpiece with clangingly dissonant exhilaration (excerpt), included in its mathematical blueprint the contour of the Swiss Alps, as viewed from the room where Stockhausen composed: a communion with nature embedded in the code.
Stockhausen's relentless spiritual quest gave his works an exigent power, their arithmetic construction infused with cabalistic zeal. Completed in 1960, Kontakte (excerpt) especially in its incarnation for piano, percussion, and prerecorded sound, still stuns with its uncompromising fervor, its jagged utterances piling up with the lengthy, sustained intensity of a hellfire preacher. (Inori, a later piece for dancer and orchestra, cataloged worshipful postures from various cultures into a "chromatic scale of prayer gestures.")
A brief late-'60s flirtation with textual works—koanlike instructions for improvisation ("Play a vibration in the rhythm of your enlightenment")—had mixed results. In the aftermath of his second marriage, Stockhausen had a vision of a universe where the music he imagined would happen spontaneously; the problem was, nobody spontaneously imagined music quite the way Stockhausen did. Instead, beginning with the hypnotic Mantra (1970), Stockhausen took back control, with intuitively composed melodies becoming the recombinant seeds for a labyrinthine structure. The idea would fuel the rest of Stockhausen's output, including the cathedral of Licht: musical "formulas" schematically stretched across hours or compressed to a singularity. Alpha and omega.
The man Jonathan Cott once called "an agent provocateur for the divine" caused one last scandal after 9/11, when news reports quoted him calling the destruction of the World Trade Center "the biggest work of art there ever has been." Stockhausen protested, with justification, that his words had been taken out of context—but by that time, his context was so individual that almost anything would be. The evangelist had become an anchorite, publishing his own music, selling his own recordings, starting his own school, working primarily with a close group of companions and offspring. Interviewed by Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk (like the Beatles and Miles Davis, a fan), the guru shrugged: "I have concentrated on composition and I have missed almost everything that the world offers to me." In every sense, he was on a different wavelength.
Stockhausen's death rendered the musical world less outlandish and more reasonable—but also less ambitious and more boring. Detractors called him a charlatan. If so, Stockhausen—who, as a young man, spent a year as a touring accompanist for an illusionist—never undermined the act with so much as a wink. His fierce earnestness made even his most baffling manifestos hard to dismiss out of hand. He was, in the end, the leading character in his own fantastic fable: Baron Stockhausen, riding on cannonballs, floating to the moon, telling his epic, tall musical tales, which, for all their implausibility, just might be true. As of Dec. 5, concerts on the Havona worlds are a lot more interesting.
Matthew Guerrieri writes the classical music blog Soho the Dog and regularly contributes to the Boston Globe.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2180463/
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
New York Times
December 23, 2007
Scene Stealer
The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES
TIME was, a movie studio could pack up a picture and all of its assorted bloopers, alternate takes and other odds and ends as soon as the production staff was done with them, and ship them off to the salt mine. Literally.
Having figured out that really big money comes from reselling old films — on broadcast television, then cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and so on — companies like Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures for decades have been tucking their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material into archives, some of which are housed in a Kansas salt mine, or in limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.
A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of “Barton Fink,” with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.
It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)
But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.
The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.
Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.
All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence.
In a telephone interview earlier this month, Milton Shefter, a longtime film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report, said the problems associated with digital movie storage, if not addressed, could point the industry “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”
Mr. Shefter and his associates do not contend that films are actually on the verge of becoming quite that ephemeral. But they do see difficulties and trends that could point many movies or the source material associated with them toward “digital extinction” over a relatively short span of years, unless something changes.
At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process — and this is what becomes stored for the ages.
But over the next couple of decades, archivists reason, the conversion of theaters to digital projection will sharply reduce the overall demand for film, eventually making it a sunset market for the main manufacturers, Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. At that point, pure digital storage will become the norm, bringing with it a whole set of problems that never troubled film.
To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.
DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.
All of that makes digital archiving a dynamic rather than static process, and one that costs far more than studios have been accustomed to paying in the past — no small matter, given that movie companies rely on their libraries for about one-third of their $36 billion in annual revenue, according to a recent assessment by the research service Global Media Intelligence.
“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations and chief technology officer, said of the archiving quandary.
One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production like “Superman Returns” is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save. Such pile-ups can occur, for instance, when a director or cinematographer who no longer has to husband film stock simply allows cameras to remain running for long stretches while working out scenes.
Much of the resulting data may be no more worth saving that the misspellings and awkward phrases deleted from a newspaper reporter’s word-processing screen. Then again, a telling exchange between star and filmmaker might yield gold as a “special feature” on some future home-viewing format — so who wants to be responsible for tossing it into the digital dustbin?
For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess. (And archiving practices in the independent film world run the gamut, from studied preservation to complete inattention, noted Andrew Maltz, director of the academy’s science and technology council.)
According to Mr. Shefter, a universal standard for storage technology would go far toward reducing a problem that would otherwise grow every time the geniuses who create digital hardware come up with something a little better than their last bit of wizardry.
As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.”
In other words, we could be watching Wallace Beery long after more contemporary images are gone.
December 23, 2007
Scene Stealer
The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES
TIME was, a movie studio could pack up a picture and all of its assorted bloopers, alternate takes and other odds and ends as soon as the production staff was done with them, and ship them off to the salt mine. Literally.
Having figured out that really big money comes from reselling old films — on broadcast television, then cable, videocassettes, DVDs, and so on — companies like Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures for decades have been tucking their 35-millimeter film masters and associated source material into archives, some of which are housed in a Kansas salt mine, or in limestone mines in Kansas and Pennsylvania.
A picture could sit for many, many years, cool and comfortable, until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for, say, a Wallace Beery special collection timed to a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of “Barton Fink,” with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.
It was a file-and-forget system that didn’t cost much, and made up for the self-destructive sins of an industry that discarded its earliest works or allowed films on old flammable stock to degrade. (Indeed, only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive.)
But then came digital. And suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren’t as durable as they used to be.
The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.
Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.
All of this may seem counterintuitive. After all, digital magic is supposed to make information of all kinds more available, not less. But ubiquity, it turns out, is not the same as permanence.
In a telephone interview earlier this month, Milton Shefter, a longtime film preservationist who helped prepare the academy’s report, said the problems associated with digital movie storage, if not addressed, could point the industry “back to the early days, when they showed a picture for a week or two, and it was thrown away.”
Mr. Shefter and his associates do not contend that films are actually on the verge of becoming quite that ephemeral. But they do see difficulties and trends that could point many movies or the source material associated with them toward “digital extinction” over a relatively short span of years, unless something changes.
At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like “Click” or “Miami Vice” that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more. For film aficionados, the current practice is already less than perfect. Regardless of how they are shot, most pictures are edited digitally, and then a digital master is transferred to film, which can result in an image of lower quality than a pure film process — and this is what becomes stored for the ages.
But over the next couple of decades, archivists reason, the conversion of theaters to digital projection will sharply reduce the overall demand for film, eventually making it a sunset market for the main manufacturers, Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. At that point, pure digital storage will become the norm, bringing with it a whole set of problems that never troubled film.
To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries. Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.
DIFFICULTIES of that sort are compounded by constant change in technology. As one generation of digital magic replaces the next, archived materials must be repeatedly “migrated” to the new format, or risk becoming unreadable. Thus, NASA scientists found in 1999 that they were unable to read digital data saved from a Viking space probe in 1975; the format had long been obsolete.
All of that makes digital archiving a dynamic rather than static process, and one that costs far more than studios have been accustomed to paying in the past — no small matter, given that movie companies rely on their libraries for about one-third of their $36 billion in annual revenue, according to a recent assessment by the research service Global Media Intelligence.
“It’s been in the air since we started talking about doing things digitally,” Chris Cookson, president of Warner’s technical operations and chief technology officer, said of the archiving quandary.
One of the most perplexing realities of a digital production like “Superman Returns” is that it sometimes generates more storable material than conventional film, creating new questions about what to save. Such pile-ups can occur, for instance, when a director or cinematographer who no longer has to husband film stock simply allows cameras to remain running for long stretches while working out scenes.
Much of the resulting data may be no more worth saving that the misspellings and awkward phrases deleted from a newspaper reporter’s word-processing screen. Then again, a telling exchange between star and filmmaker might yield gold as a “special feature” on some future home-viewing format — so who wants to be responsible for tossing it into the digital dustbin?
For now, studios are saving as much of this digital ephemera as possible, storing it on tapes or drives in vaults not unlike those that house traditional film. But how much of that material will be migrated when technology shifts in 7 or 10 years is anyone’s guess. (And archiving practices in the independent film world run the gamut, from studied preservation to complete inattention, noted Andrew Maltz, director of the academy’s science and technology council.)
According to Mr. Shefter, a universal standard for storage technology would go far toward reducing a problem that would otherwise grow every time the geniuses who create digital hardware come up with something a little better than their last bit of wizardry.
As the report put it, “If we allow technological obsolescence to repeat itself, we are tied either to continuously increasing costs — or worse — the failure to save important assets.”
In other words, we could be watching Wallace Beery long after more contemporary images are gone.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace
From the New York Times
December 19, 2007
Abroad
In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
MARSEILLE, France — The other day, a dozen or so teenage rappers in baggy jeans and hoodies gathered outside a community arts center called Le Mille-Patte in Noailles, a poor immigrant neighborhood here, hard by the Old Port.
One of this city’s most successful hip-hop artists, M’Roumbaba Saïd, who calls himself Soprano, lately wrote a track called “Melancholic Anonymous”: “I can’t help it, expressing my feelings, my melancholy in my lyrics,” he rapped. “I can laugh at my sadness. It helps.”
When the slums outside Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg exploded last month, repeating the violence that erupted two years ago, here in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, all remained calm. Back in July, in one of this city’s impoverished northern neighborhoods, a 14-year-old boy named Nelson Lobry-Gazelle was killed by a police car. Four hundred people demonstrated peacefully, so the incident barely made headlines. As it happens, it was also a police car’s killing two teenagers in Villiers-le-Bel, a destitute suburb about 10 miles north of Paris, that sparked the trouble that broke out across France in November. A bus-burning here in October 2006 was considered an isolated incident and failed to ignite a local chain reaction.
The Marseillais have plenty of explanations for this disparity, aside from the obvious one that the poor areas here aren’t segregated on the city outskirts, as they are in Paris — but it is hip-hop, as much a source of local pride as the town’s soccer team, that turns out to be a lens through which to examine why this city didn’t burn.
Melancholy is the word often used to describe the local rap style: melancholy as a reflective state of mind. In contrast to the city’s sun-and-sea context, melancholy actually suits lots of its culture. A Marseille novelist, Jean-Claude Izzo, who died just a few years ago, became famous in France for writing grim, pessimistic detective stories. Robert Guédiguian, also from Marseille, is a filmmaker whose reputation is based on dark movies.
Rappers in Marseille, some of the most original and distinctive ones anyway, compose sad odes to their local neighborhoods and hymns to the whole melting-pot city. The sound of Paris hip-hop, slicker and more aggressive, adopts much from American gangsta rap, as Marseille hip-hop does too, but Marseille boasts a groovier style. It mixes in blues, flamenco, Jamaican ragga.
The number that a decade or more ago helped fixed IAM, the Marseille group, on the French charts, borrows from George Benson to lay down a mellow beat. "Belsunce Breakdown," about one of the city’s downtown neighborhoods, by Bouga, a rapper from there, begins with a hypnotic piano riff, jazzily syncopated — a little Steve Reich crossed with 50 Cent.
Here the basic interconnectedness of all modern music expresses a local truth about the city’s cultural identity. An ancient, gritty seaport, Marseille flaunts its history as an immigrant magnet. Its population of 820,000 includes 200,000 Muslims, 80,000 North African Jews, 80,000 Armenians. One of the largest immigrant groups is made up of Muslims from the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar. Three of the four musicians in PSY4 de la Rime, Soprano’s band, are Comorians who grew up in the northern part of Marseille where Mr. Lobry-Gazelle died. The fourth member of the band, DJ Sya Styles (of Moroccan background, born Rachid Aït Baar), like many of the teenagers at Le Mille-Patte, comes from Noailles.
Marseille lyrics can be full of rage but they’re not violent, the way those of certain Parisian bands are. Two years ago 152 conservatives in the French Parliament brought suit against seven rap groups, but notably none from Marseille, for fostering hatred and racism against whites and for what one politician called “anti-French ” sentiments.
PSY4, by contrast, wrote a rap not long ago called “Justicier”: “I know all the cops are not that bad, but why do you always ask me for my ID? To your violence I prefer responding with my lyrics. Can’t we have a proper dialogue?”
The other evening PSY4 occupied a recording studio in Grottes Loubières, just northeast of the city. During a break the members talked about the way rappers help one another here, and about how success comes not from landing studio contracts but from earning respect, ground up.
“Rap’s not a business here, the way it is in Paris,” DJ Sya Styles said. “It’s not like Paris, where the suburbs are just concrete. Here you first have to prove yourself in the neighborhoods.”
Stéphane Gallard put it another way: “Paris is more hard-core.” He is the quiet, suave young man in charge of music programming for the nonprofit Radio Grenouille, the city’s most popular hip-hop station. “The fact that hip-hop artists sell their music on their own blocks contributes to their identifying with Marseille, and this explains why there’s no car burning,” he said. “Different communities in Marseille are still quite separate, there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which you have the freedom to move among communities if you choose.”
It’s also true that this city has a contrarian streak going back at least 2,000 years, to when it backed Pompey over Caesar. You might say Marseillais rappers reflect the tradition of “pays,” or local communities, to which their inhabitants maintain more powerful loyalties than to France. At the same time, it’s a place proud of its old Corsican and French-Italian mob heritage (a popular downtown clothing store was named for a famous mob boss), and the prevalence of drug dealers and North African gangs does partly explain why there’s relative calm in destitute areas: Calm is maintained for the sake of their businesses.
Unemployment nears 40 percent in those same parts of town among those 18 to 25; it’s 13 percent citywide, much more than the national average of 8 percent. So clearly job opportunities alone, or their lack, don’t account for the absence of urban violence recently.
It helps that an old, Mediterranean-style civic patronage system doles out favors to earn loyalty and keep the peace. And, as everybody says, unlike Paris, where immigrant poor occupy huge concrete blocks cut off from the city center, Marseille has its neighborhoods, like Noailles, that are smack in the middle of town, while the hard-pressed quarters to the north are linked to the center by cheap public transport and remain inside city limits. So residents feel that they belong to Marseille, because they do, and in turn they feel that Marseille belongs to them.
Out of these communities, where musicians have their own version of a patronage system, the hip-hop scene has emerged — besides PSY4 de la Rime, IAM and Bouga, others, like Keny Arkana, FAF Larage, Fonky Family, DJ Rebel and Prodige Namor, have made it big here.
“Marseille rap never integrated violence the way Paris did,” Philippe Fragione told me. He’s Akhenaton, the leader of IAM. He, like other older musicians here, supports younger Marseille rappers. It was his studio in Grottes Loubières that PSY4 was using. Marseille rap is “more socially conscious,” Mr. Fragione added. “That’s because there is a real sense of community.”
I stopped in the waterfront office of Paul Colombani, the deputy director of the redevelopment program Euroméditerranée. With more than $5 billion in public and private investments, it plans, by 2012, to turn some 2.5 miles of downtown into office towers, mixed-income apartments, museums and esplanades. Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and other archistars have signed on. Outside the porthole office window, the Danielle Casanova, an enormous white ferry, waited to carry passengers to Algeria. Passengers coming back often bring knockoff goods that merchants hawk on sidewalks. “Les jeunes errants,” as migrant street children, some as young as 12, are called, hide in boats, then head for Noailles when they land. A few have become aspiring rappers through community cultural centers like Le Mille-Patte.
Mr. Colombani noticed my gaze. “That will be moved out of this area,” he said about the ferry. He meant to L’Estaque, far to the north, “easier for customs,” he explained. Luxury cruise ships will dock here instead.
Marseille can surely use the money, but hardly at the cost of undoing the social chemistry that has kept the peace and fostered, among other things, the city’s musical life. At Le Mille-Patte those dozen or so young rappers outside were a typical Marseille mix: first-, second- or third-generation immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, the Comoro Islands, Eastern Europe, Argentina.
Habib was a skinny 18-year-old with a doleful face and a band called Urban Revolution. “We all get along because we share music,” he explained. Le Mille-Patte had first encouraged him to rap as a young boy: “I didn’t know what to do with my days, so this place was very important.”
Bacariane, a slightly older rapper wearing a New York Yankees cap, its brim pressed down over his eyes, piped in: “This is a rough neighborhood, but there’s not violence here without meaning, like in Paris. I lived there for a while,” he said, meaning in the isolated suburbs outside the capital. He paused to consider the difference. “Here there is a culture of respect,” he said. “We’re all Marseillais.”
December 19, 2007
Abroad
In Marseille, Rap Helps Keep the Peace
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
MARSEILLE, France — The other day, a dozen or so teenage rappers in baggy jeans and hoodies gathered outside a community arts center called Le Mille-Patte in Noailles, a poor immigrant neighborhood here, hard by the Old Port.
One of this city’s most successful hip-hop artists, M’Roumbaba Saïd, who calls himself Soprano, lately wrote a track called “Melancholic Anonymous”: “I can’t help it, expressing my feelings, my melancholy in my lyrics,” he rapped. “I can laugh at my sadness. It helps.”
When the slums outside Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg exploded last month, repeating the violence that erupted two years ago, here in Marseille, France’s second-largest city, all remained calm. Back in July, in one of this city’s impoverished northern neighborhoods, a 14-year-old boy named Nelson Lobry-Gazelle was killed by a police car. Four hundred people demonstrated peacefully, so the incident barely made headlines. As it happens, it was also a police car’s killing two teenagers in Villiers-le-Bel, a destitute suburb about 10 miles north of Paris, that sparked the trouble that broke out across France in November. A bus-burning here in October 2006 was considered an isolated incident and failed to ignite a local chain reaction.
The Marseillais have plenty of explanations for this disparity, aside from the obvious one that the poor areas here aren’t segregated on the city outskirts, as they are in Paris — but it is hip-hop, as much a source of local pride as the town’s soccer team, that turns out to be a lens through which to examine why this city didn’t burn.
Melancholy is the word often used to describe the local rap style: melancholy as a reflective state of mind. In contrast to the city’s sun-and-sea context, melancholy actually suits lots of its culture. A Marseille novelist, Jean-Claude Izzo, who died just a few years ago, became famous in France for writing grim, pessimistic detective stories. Robert Guédiguian, also from Marseille, is a filmmaker whose reputation is based on dark movies.
Rappers in Marseille, some of the most original and distinctive ones anyway, compose sad odes to their local neighborhoods and hymns to the whole melting-pot city. The sound of Paris hip-hop, slicker and more aggressive, adopts much from American gangsta rap, as Marseille hip-hop does too, but Marseille boasts a groovier style. It mixes in blues, flamenco, Jamaican ragga.
The number that a decade or more ago helped fixed IAM, the Marseille group, on the French charts, borrows from George Benson to lay down a mellow beat. "Belsunce Breakdown," about one of the city’s downtown neighborhoods, by Bouga, a rapper from there, begins with a hypnotic piano riff, jazzily syncopated — a little Steve Reich crossed with 50 Cent.
Here the basic interconnectedness of all modern music expresses a local truth about the city’s cultural identity. An ancient, gritty seaport, Marseille flaunts its history as an immigrant magnet. Its population of 820,000 includes 200,000 Muslims, 80,000 North African Jews, 80,000 Armenians. One of the largest immigrant groups is made up of Muslims from the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar. Three of the four musicians in PSY4 de la Rime, Soprano’s band, are Comorians who grew up in the northern part of Marseille where Mr. Lobry-Gazelle died. The fourth member of the band, DJ Sya Styles (of Moroccan background, born Rachid Aït Baar), like many of the teenagers at Le Mille-Patte, comes from Noailles.
Marseille lyrics can be full of rage but they’re not violent, the way those of certain Parisian bands are. Two years ago 152 conservatives in the French Parliament brought suit against seven rap groups, but notably none from Marseille, for fostering hatred and racism against whites and for what one politician called “anti-French ” sentiments.
PSY4, by contrast, wrote a rap not long ago called “Justicier”: “I know all the cops are not that bad, but why do you always ask me for my ID? To your violence I prefer responding with my lyrics. Can’t we have a proper dialogue?”
The other evening PSY4 occupied a recording studio in Grottes Loubières, just northeast of the city. During a break the members talked about the way rappers help one another here, and about how success comes not from landing studio contracts but from earning respect, ground up.
“Rap’s not a business here, the way it is in Paris,” DJ Sya Styles said. “It’s not like Paris, where the suburbs are just concrete. Here you first have to prove yourself in the neighborhoods.”
Stéphane Gallard put it another way: “Paris is more hard-core.” He is the quiet, suave young man in charge of music programming for the nonprofit Radio Grenouille, the city’s most popular hip-hop station. “The fact that hip-hop artists sell their music on their own blocks contributes to their identifying with Marseille, and this explains why there’s no car burning,” he said. “Different communities in Marseille are still quite separate, there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which you have the freedom to move among communities if you choose.”
It’s also true that this city has a contrarian streak going back at least 2,000 years, to when it backed Pompey over Caesar. You might say Marseillais rappers reflect the tradition of “pays,” or local communities, to which their inhabitants maintain more powerful loyalties than to France. At the same time, it’s a place proud of its old Corsican and French-Italian mob heritage (a popular downtown clothing store was named for a famous mob boss), and the prevalence of drug dealers and North African gangs does partly explain why there’s relative calm in destitute areas: Calm is maintained for the sake of their businesses.
Unemployment nears 40 percent in those same parts of town among those 18 to 25; it’s 13 percent citywide, much more than the national average of 8 percent. So clearly job opportunities alone, or their lack, don’t account for the absence of urban violence recently.
It helps that an old, Mediterranean-style civic patronage system doles out favors to earn loyalty and keep the peace. And, as everybody says, unlike Paris, where immigrant poor occupy huge concrete blocks cut off from the city center, Marseille has its neighborhoods, like Noailles, that are smack in the middle of town, while the hard-pressed quarters to the north are linked to the center by cheap public transport and remain inside city limits. So residents feel that they belong to Marseille, because they do, and in turn they feel that Marseille belongs to them.
Out of these communities, where musicians have their own version of a patronage system, the hip-hop scene has emerged — besides PSY4 de la Rime, IAM and Bouga, others, like Keny Arkana, FAF Larage, Fonky Family, DJ Rebel and Prodige Namor, have made it big here.
“Marseille rap never integrated violence the way Paris did,” Philippe Fragione told me. He’s Akhenaton, the leader of IAM. He, like other older musicians here, supports younger Marseille rappers. It was his studio in Grottes Loubières that PSY4 was using. Marseille rap is “more socially conscious,” Mr. Fragione added. “That’s because there is a real sense of community.”
I stopped in the waterfront office of Paul Colombani, the deputy director of the redevelopment program Euroméditerranée. With more than $5 billion in public and private investments, it plans, by 2012, to turn some 2.5 miles of downtown into office towers, mixed-income apartments, museums and esplanades. Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and other archistars have signed on. Outside the porthole office window, the Danielle Casanova, an enormous white ferry, waited to carry passengers to Algeria. Passengers coming back often bring knockoff goods that merchants hawk on sidewalks. “Les jeunes errants,” as migrant street children, some as young as 12, are called, hide in boats, then head for Noailles when they land. A few have become aspiring rappers through community cultural centers like Le Mille-Patte.
Mr. Colombani noticed my gaze. “That will be moved out of this area,” he said about the ferry. He meant to L’Estaque, far to the north, “easier for customs,” he explained. Luxury cruise ships will dock here instead.
Marseille can surely use the money, but hardly at the cost of undoing the social chemistry that has kept the peace and fostered, among other things, the city’s musical life. At Le Mille-Patte those dozen or so young rappers outside were a typical Marseille mix: first-, second- or third-generation immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, the Comoro Islands, Eastern Europe, Argentina.
Habib was a skinny 18-year-old with a doleful face and a band called Urban Revolution. “We all get along because we share music,” he explained. Le Mille-Patte had first encouraged him to rap as a young boy: “I didn’t know what to do with my days, so this place was very important.”
Bacariane, a slightly older rapper wearing a New York Yankees cap, its brim pressed down over his eyes, piped in: “This is a rough neighborhood, but there’s not violence here without meaning, like in Paris. I lived there for a while,” he said, meaning in the isolated suburbs outside the capital. He paused to consider the difference. “Here there is a culture of respect,” he said. “We’re all Marseillais.”
With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind
From the New York Times
December 18, 2007
With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind
By ADAM NOSSITER
LAKE CHARLES, La. — With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.
They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.
This vast diaspora — largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling — stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.
The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor’s race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not — resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council — the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.
Now, they are adjusting to places where the pace is slower, restaurants are fewer, existence is centered on the home, and streets are lonely and deserted after 5 p.m., as in this city in southwest Louisiana. These exiles, still in semi-limbo and barely established in a routine, describe their new lives less in terms of what it now consists of than of what they left behind.
“I told them, ‘I love turtle soup.’ People here go, ‘What’s that?’ ” said Pauline Hurst, a former therapy technician at a New Orleans hospital who settled here after her home was destroyed in the post-hurricane flood.
Dreadlocks, accepted in New Orleans, might mean a reservation at a fancy restaurant is suddenly “lost,” as in the telling of one exile here. A burst of gunfire might mean an instant police response rather than none at all, as in New Orleans, in the amazed recounting of another. Late-night cravings mean the IHOP rather than the famous Camellia Grill; going to work means hourlong trips on country roads, rather than, say, a 10-minute hop across the Industrial Canal from the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.
Warily, they praise the quiet, the friendliness and the absence of crime.
“It’s the country, but it’s — lovely,” said Barbara Shanklin, a retired city bus driver who has settled 50 miles to the southwest of New Orleans in a Terrebonne Parish hamlet, Gray. Still, Ms. Shanklin added quickly, “I miss New Orleans.”
The precise calculus that went into these painful choices was complex, a mix of emotion and reason, in the telling of former New Orleanians. They voted in 2006 clinging to a hope of return, and in some cases a desire to protect decades of black political gains by returning an African-American, C. Ray Nagin, to the mayor’s office. But while 113,000 voted in May 2006, only 53,000 did last October. The mirage of the old, comfortable life in a city of densely woven neighborhoods, beguiling if sometimes dangerous street life, and inviting po’ boy sandwich shops contrasted too sharply with the grimmer present-day reality of New Orleans for these exiles.
The old house was gone. The neighborhood was empty. The friends were missing. The job had vanished. Rents were high, when you could find them. Murder had returned (with about 200 victims so far this year), even if many of their friends had not.
And the city seemed frozen in its half-ruined state, strangely alien and unfamiliar. The current population remains stuck at somewhere between 200,000 and 280,000, far below the pre-hurricane level of 450,000. These exiles do not see the New Orleans that has picked itself up; instead, they see the one that remains largely destroyed.
Away from the city, a less threatening existence awaited: blander and demanding adjustment, yet less oppressive. The quiet of languid country-town streets was deemed preferable to the absolute silence of whole abandoned blocks. Outside New Orleans, it was easier to deal with the still-fresh trauma of being homeless and losing “everything,” as several put it.
“In the beginning, I thought I might go back,” said Ms. Hurst, who came here with her sister and 88-year-old mother, also chased out by the hurricane, and lived with them for five months in a single large room at St. Mary’s Missionary Baptist Church. They now work at the church, which has become a regional relief center for storm evacuees.
The 2005 flood, Ms. Hurst said, turned everything in her home at the edge of the Broadmoor section of New Orleans “black, purple and green,” as though somebody had “just put everything in a blender.” Yet the city had not relinquished its grip on her, and she voted in the 2006 New Orleans election, at a special polling place in the white-columned Calcasieu Parish courthouse here.
Voting for the familiar New Orleans candidates was an act of normalcy. But that election, once over, did not magically conjure up the old New Orleans. Going back was a jolt.
“Everything was gone,” Ms. Hurst said. “All that was gone — community, friends — scattered. You feel like, when you go there, you’re walking into a strange country. It’s just totally different. It just feels like you’re in outer space.”
Each return visit to New Orleans brings sharp reminders of what was lost. “It hurts me, every time I go back,” said Ms. Hurst’s sister, Cynthia Jones.
Others spoke of being alienated from their old surroundings.
“There is nothing to go back to,” said Renee Roussell, whose husband found a job as a manager at a casino restaurant in Lake Charles.
Sylvia Young, a former public school teacher in the Lower Ninth Ward, now works as a mental health counselor in La Place, just up the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Her old school and job are gone.
“I go, and I get depressed,” Ms. Young said.
She drove to New Orleans to vote in 2006 — “I thought for a minute I could possibly move back,” she said — but not this year.
“When I go to Gentilly,” Ms. Young said, “and I see my son’s school is not back, and the house we lived in is gone, and the house next door to Tammy and them is gone. Everything is just gone. It’s either torn down or partially being rebuilt or just nothing done to it at all.”
But, in the accounts from people who left New Orleans after the storm, the missing or ruined physical landscape is barely half of it. Even more absent now is the human landscape — the network of friends, relations and acquaintances that often, in New Orleans, helps compensate for fragmentary families and neighborhoods that can be dangerous. Life in the city takes place outside the home as much as inside; now, that would not be possible.
“It’s not New Orleans to me,” said Ms. Shanklin, the retired bus driver in Terrebonne Parish. “And I find myself asking, Where are all the people? I see all the empty houses, and I knew once there was people in all those houses.”
“Where are the people, you know? Where are the people?” Ms. Shanklin said. “It’s like somebody threw a bomb on it.”
Now, she lives in a trim little house that Habitat for Humanity built in a curving subdivision of similar dwellings definitely unlike New Orleans. The town of Houma is nearby, but there are fields all around, and it is quiet enough to hear birds. New Orleans noises — police sirens, traffic, honking car horns, children, hip-hop music — can be conjured only with difficulty. At night, Ms. Shanklin boasted, she opens her window and listens to the cows in the pasture.
But a year ago, she had a nervous breakdown and spent 10 days in the hospital. She missed New Orleans.
Ms. Roussell, in Lake Charles, said, “If anybody asks me where I’m from, I say New Orleans. It’s not easy to let go. But why go back home, when nothing is what it used to be?”
December 18, 2007
With Regrets, New Orleans Is Left Behind
By ADAM NOSSITER
LAKE CHARLES, La. — With resignation, anger or stoicism, thousands of former New Orleanians forced out by Hurricane Katrina are settling in across the Gulf Coast, breaking their ties with the damaged city for which they still yearn.
They now cast their votes in small Louisiana towns and in big cities of neighboring states. They have found new jobs and bought new houses. They have forsaken their favorite foods and cherished pastors. But they do not for a moment miss the crime, the chaos and the bad memories they left behind in New Orleans.
This vast diaspora — largely black, often poor, sometimes struggling — stretches across the country but is concentrated in cities near the coast, like this one, or Atlanta or Baton Rouge or Houston, places where the newcomers are still reaching for accommodation.
The break came fairly recently. Sometime between the New Orleans mayor’s race in spring 2006, when thousands of displaced citizens voted absentee or drove in to cast a ballot, and the city election this fall, when thousands did not — resulting in a sharply diminished electorate and a white-majority City Council — the decision was made: there was no going back. Life in New Orleans was over.
Now, they are adjusting to places where the pace is slower, restaurants are fewer, existence is centered on the home, and streets are lonely and deserted after 5 p.m., as in this city in southwest Louisiana. These exiles, still in semi-limbo and barely established in a routine, describe their new lives less in terms of what it now consists of than of what they left behind.
“I told them, ‘I love turtle soup.’ People here go, ‘What’s that?’ ” said Pauline Hurst, a former therapy technician at a New Orleans hospital who settled here after her home was destroyed in the post-hurricane flood.
Dreadlocks, accepted in New Orleans, might mean a reservation at a fancy restaurant is suddenly “lost,” as in the telling of one exile here. A burst of gunfire might mean an instant police response rather than none at all, as in New Orleans, in the amazed recounting of another. Late-night cravings mean the IHOP rather than the famous Camellia Grill; going to work means hourlong trips on country roads, rather than, say, a 10-minute hop across the Industrial Canal from the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans.
Warily, they praise the quiet, the friendliness and the absence of crime.
“It’s the country, but it’s — lovely,” said Barbara Shanklin, a retired city bus driver who has settled 50 miles to the southwest of New Orleans in a Terrebonne Parish hamlet, Gray. Still, Ms. Shanklin added quickly, “I miss New Orleans.”
The precise calculus that went into these painful choices was complex, a mix of emotion and reason, in the telling of former New Orleanians. They voted in 2006 clinging to a hope of return, and in some cases a desire to protect decades of black political gains by returning an African-American, C. Ray Nagin, to the mayor’s office. But while 113,000 voted in May 2006, only 53,000 did last October. The mirage of the old, comfortable life in a city of densely woven neighborhoods, beguiling if sometimes dangerous street life, and inviting po’ boy sandwich shops contrasted too sharply with the grimmer present-day reality of New Orleans for these exiles.
The old house was gone. The neighborhood was empty. The friends were missing. The job had vanished. Rents were high, when you could find them. Murder had returned (with about 200 victims so far this year), even if many of their friends had not.
And the city seemed frozen in its half-ruined state, strangely alien and unfamiliar. The current population remains stuck at somewhere between 200,000 and 280,000, far below the pre-hurricane level of 450,000. These exiles do not see the New Orleans that has picked itself up; instead, they see the one that remains largely destroyed.
Away from the city, a less threatening existence awaited: blander and demanding adjustment, yet less oppressive. The quiet of languid country-town streets was deemed preferable to the absolute silence of whole abandoned blocks. Outside New Orleans, it was easier to deal with the still-fresh trauma of being homeless and losing “everything,” as several put it.
“In the beginning, I thought I might go back,” said Ms. Hurst, who came here with her sister and 88-year-old mother, also chased out by the hurricane, and lived with them for five months in a single large room at St. Mary’s Missionary Baptist Church. They now work at the church, which has become a regional relief center for storm evacuees.
The 2005 flood, Ms. Hurst said, turned everything in her home at the edge of the Broadmoor section of New Orleans “black, purple and green,” as though somebody had “just put everything in a blender.” Yet the city had not relinquished its grip on her, and she voted in the 2006 New Orleans election, at a special polling place in the white-columned Calcasieu Parish courthouse here.
Voting for the familiar New Orleans candidates was an act of normalcy. But that election, once over, did not magically conjure up the old New Orleans. Going back was a jolt.
“Everything was gone,” Ms. Hurst said. “All that was gone — community, friends — scattered. You feel like, when you go there, you’re walking into a strange country. It’s just totally different. It just feels like you’re in outer space.”
Each return visit to New Orleans brings sharp reminders of what was lost. “It hurts me, every time I go back,” said Ms. Hurst’s sister, Cynthia Jones.
Others spoke of being alienated from their old surroundings.
“There is nothing to go back to,” said Renee Roussell, whose husband found a job as a manager at a casino restaurant in Lake Charles.
Sylvia Young, a former public school teacher in the Lower Ninth Ward, now works as a mental health counselor in La Place, just up the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Her old school and job are gone.
“I go, and I get depressed,” Ms. Young said.
She drove to New Orleans to vote in 2006 — “I thought for a minute I could possibly move back,” she said — but not this year.
“When I go to Gentilly,” Ms. Young said, “and I see my son’s school is not back, and the house we lived in is gone, and the house next door to Tammy and them is gone. Everything is just gone. It’s either torn down or partially being rebuilt or just nothing done to it at all.”
But, in the accounts from people who left New Orleans after the storm, the missing or ruined physical landscape is barely half of it. Even more absent now is the human landscape — the network of friends, relations and acquaintances that often, in New Orleans, helps compensate for fragmentary families and neighborhoods that can be dangerous. Life in the city takes place outside the home as much as inside; now, that would not be possible.
“It’s not New Orleans to me,” said Ms. Shanklin, the retired bus driver in Terrebonne Parish. “And I find myself asking, Where are all the people? I see all the empty houses, and I knew once there was people in all those houses.”
“Where are the people, you know? Where are the people?” Ms. Shanklin said. “It’s like somebody threw a bomb on it.”
Now, she lives in a trim little house that Habitat for Humanity built in a curving subdivision of similar dwellings definitely unlike New Orleans. The town of Houma is nearby, but there are fields all around, and it is quiet enough to hear birds. New Orleans noises — police sirens, traffic, honking car horns, children, hip-hop music — can be conjured only with difficulty. At night, Ms. Shanklin boasted, she opens her window and listens to the cows in the pasture.
But a year ago, she had a nervous breakdown and spent 10 days in the hospital. She missed New Orleans.
Ms. Roussell, in Lake Charles, said, “If anybody asks me where I’m from, I say New Orleans. It’s not easy to let go. But why go back home, when nothing is what it used to be?”
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Japanese Monks Stage Fashion Show
Japanese Monks Stage Fashion Show
Japanese Buddhists trying to spread religion to younger generations
The Associated Press
updated 1:15 p.m. PT, Sat., Dec. 15, 2007
TOKYO - Japanese monks and nuns hit the catwalk in Tokyo on Saturday in a bid to spread Buddhism among younger people in this rapidly aging society.
The fashion show opened with a Buddhist prayer set to a hip-hop beat at the centuries-old Tsukiji Honganji temple, where nearly 40 monks and nuns from eight major Buddhist sects showed off elaborate robes in an effort to win back believers.
Five monks from each school walked on the runway, then chanted prayers and wrapped up in a grand finale with confetti resembling lotus petals.
Buddhist monks traditionally wear simple black robes. But to appeal to more fashion-conscious youth, the monks wore green and yellow clothes, some with gold embroidery. Others wore elaborate, multilayered robes.
"Their robes were gorgeous," said Sayaka Anma, one of the audience in her 20s, after the monks' show. "I was a bit surprised in the beginning, but it was very moving."
Buddhism in crisis?
More than 1,200 years after it first arrived from mainland Asia, Buddhism in Japan is in crisis, priests say.
Almost three-quarters of Japan's population of 120 million are registered as Buddhist, but for many, the only time they enter a temple is to attend a funeral. That has sent many of the country's 75,000 temples into financial trouble.
Japan's aging population has meant more funerals, but the declining population and birth rate means fewer young people to share the bill to keep temples afloat.
"We wanted to show the young people that Buddhism is cool, and temples are not a place just for funerals," said Koji Matsubara, a chief monk at Tsukiji.
The Tsukiji Honganji offers theological seminars in English for foreign visitors, and has fitted its main hall with a pipe organ for Western-style weddings to attract young couples. Some other temples have also introduced cafes, art galleries and other innovations to reach out to young people who are interested in a different lifestyle.
"Many of us priests share the sense of crisis, and a need to do something to reach out to people," said priest Kosuke Kikkawa, 37, one of the organizers of Saturday's event. "We won't change Buddha's teachings, but perhaps we need a different presentation that can touch the feelings of the people today."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22273859/
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The Deaf Audiophile: What's so good about bad sound? Plenty
WSJ
The Deaf Audiophile
What's so good about bad sound? Plenty
November 10, 2007; Page W14
Of all the clever inventions of the past decade, the most culturally consequential just might be the iPod. In case you've been asleep since 2001, that's Apple's proprietary name for the MP3 player, a hand-held hard drive that stores and plays the audio files used to transmit recorded sound over the Web. It's the postmodern equivalent of the Walkman, only better, since an iPod can hold as many as 40,000 songs in its digital memory. Yet these ingenious devices are driving producers and engineers nuts.
In September the Journal's Lee Gomes reported in his "Portals" column that "those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry -- producers, engineers, mixers and the like -- say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player." Accordingly, these audio professionals are now custom-tailoring their product to sound best on iPods, the same way that pop record producers of the early '60s are said to have tailored their product to sound best on car radios.
[Sightings illustration]
The trouble with this approach, Mr. Gomes explained, is that MP3 files are highly compressed in order to make them easier to store and transmit. Thus a piece of recorded music that is loaded onto an iPod and listened to on inexpensive earbuds doesn't sound as good as the same music recorded on a CD and played back on a stereo system equipped with high-quality speakers or headphones. The result, Mr. Gomes was repeatedly told by industry professionals, is "music that is loud but harsh and flat, and thus not enjoyable for long periods of time."
True? Incontestably. As a trained musician with many years of performing experience under my belt, I'm well aware that the MP3 is, musically speaking, something of a blunt instrument. Yet I find it hard to get bent out of shape over its burgeoning ubiquity. Indeed, I spend a great deal of time listening to digital audio files on my iPod or through a pair of compact desktop speakers connected to my MacBook.
Why do I settle for inferior sound quality? Partly because of the near-miraculous convenience of MP3s, which not only can be stored and retrieved with the greatest of ease but are equally easy to purchase over the Web via services like Apple's iTunes. But I have another reason, one that I share with millions of other iPod users: I'm middle-aged.
Like a third of my fellow baby boomers, I'm experiencing one of the more predictable consequences of growing older, which is that I now suffer from a mild but noticeable case of presbycusis, the medical term for age-related hearing loss. Not only are the sensory cell receptors in my inner ear gradually degenerating as a result of advancing age, but when young I spent countless happy hours playing loud music, which fried more than a few of those same receptors. I can still enjoy music of all kinds, but I don't hear it quite as well as I did 20 years ago, because I now find it harder to perceive the high-frequency sounds that are such an important part of recorded music.
That's the bad news. The good news is that I don't care . . . much. For one of the unintended consequences of presbycusis is that it liberates you from the snare and delusion of audiophilia. When I was younger, I longed for bigger, better, ever more expensive sound systems, sure that they would enhance the pleasure I took in listening to recorded music. And did they? Up to a point. But somewhere along the way I forgot that every dollar I spent on speakers was a dollar I could no longer spend on records -- not to mention tickets to live performances. Like so many sound-crazy audiophiles, I had not only put the cart before the horse, but I'd come close to cutting the reins.
Now that my hearing isn't what it used to be, I understand more clearly than ever before that recorded music can never hope to be more than a substitute for the real thing. A priceless and irreplaceable substitute, to be sure, and one that has clearly changed the world of music for the better. I've been listening to old records for most of a lifetime, yet it never quite ceases to amaze me that simply by pushing a button, I can hear Igor Stravinsky conducting "The Rite of Spring" or Louis Armstrong rapping out that golden introduction to "West End Blues." Yet the fact remains that sitting down in your living room and throwing on a CD is simply not the same thing as going to a concert, much less playing for your own pleasure. Yes, it can be intensely meaningful, but it is still experience once removed, no matter how fancy your speakers are. Conversely, Stravinsky is still Stravinsky when you experience him through a $10 pair of earbuds. He's the point, not the earbuds.
That's why I'm more than content to listen to "The Rite of Spring" on my trusty iPod. Would that my presbycusic ears were capable of distinguishing between great and good sound -- but at least they still know the infinitely more important difference between sound and silence.
Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
The Deaf Audiophile
What's so good about bad sound? Plenty
November 10, 2007; Page W14
Of all the clever inventions of the past decade, the most culturally consequential just might be the iPod. In case you've been asleep since 2001, that's Apple's proprietary name for the MP3 player, a hand-held hard drive that stores and plays the audio files used to transmit recorded sound over the Web. It's the postmodern equivalent of the Walkman, only better, since an iPod can hold as many as 40,000 songs in its digital memory. Yet these ingenious devices are driving producers and engineers nuts.
In September the Journal's Lee Gomes reported in his "Portals" column that "those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry -- producers, engineers, mixers and the like -- say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player." Accordingly, these audio professionals are now custom-tailoring their product to sound best on iPods, the same way that pop record producers of the early '60s are said to have tailored their product to sound best on car radios.
[Sightings illustration]
The trouble with this approach, Mr. Gomes explained, is that MP3 files are highly compressed in order to make them easier to store and transmit. Thus a piece of recorded music that is loaded onto an iPod and listened to on inexpensive earbuds doesn't sound as good as the same music recorded on a CD and played back on a stereo system equipped with high-quality speakers or headphones. The result, Mr. Gomes was repeatedly told by industry professionals, is "music that is loud but harsh and flat, and thus not enjoyable for long periods of time."
True? Incontestably. As a trained musician with many years of performing experience under my belt, I'm well aware that the MP3 is, musically speaking, something of a blunt instrument. Yet I find it hard to get bent out of shape over its burgeoning ubiquity. Indeed, I spend a great deal of time listening to digital audio files on my iPod or through a pair of compact desktop speakers connected to my MacBook.
Why do I settle for inferior sound quality? Partly because of the near-miraculous convenience of MP3s, which not only can be stored and retrieved with the greatest of ease but are equally easy to purchase over the Web via services like Apple's iTunes. But I have another reason, one that I share with millions of other iPod users: I'm middle-aged.
Like a third of my fellow baby boomers, I'm experiencing one of the more predictable consequences of growing older, which is that I now suffer from a mild but noticeable case of presbycusis, the medical term for age-related hearing loss. Not only are the sensory cell receptors in my inner ear gradually degenerating as a result of advancing age, but when young I spent countless happy hours playing loud music, which fried more than a few of those same receptors. I can still enjoy music of all kinds, but I don't hear it quite as well as I did 20 years ago, because I now find it harder to perceive the high-frequency sounds that are such an important part of recorded music.
That's the bad news. The good news is that I don't care . . . much. For one of the unintended consequences of presbycusis is that it liberates you from the snare and delusion of audiophilia. When I was younger, I longed for bigger, better, ever more expensive sound systems, sure that they would enhance the pleasure I took in listening to recorded music. And did they? Up to a point. But somewhere along the way I forgot that every dollar I spent on speakers was a dollar I could no longer spend on records -- not to mention tickets to live performances. Like so many sound-crazy audiophiles, I had not only put the cart before the horse, but I'd come close to cutting the reins.
Now that my hearing isn't what it used to be, I understand more clearly than ever before that recorded music can never hope to be more than a substitute for the real thing. A priceless and irreplaceable substitute, to be sure, and one that has clearly changed the world of music for the better. I've been listening to old records for most of a lifetime, yet it never quite ceases to amaze me that simply by pushing a button, I can hear Igor Stravinsky conducting "The Rite of Spring" or Louis Armstrong rapping out that golden introduction to "West End Blues." Yet the fact remains that sitting down in your living room and throwing on a CD is simply not the same thing as going to a concert, much less playing for your own pleasure. Yes, it can be intensely meaningful, but it is still experience once removed, no matter how fancy your speakers are. Conversely, Stravinsky is still Stravinsky when you experience him through a $10 pair of earbuds. He's the point, not the earbuds.
That's why I'm more than content to listen to "The Rite of Spring" on my trusty iPod. Would that my presbycusic ears were capable of distinguishing between great and good sound -- but at least they still know the infinitely more important difference between sound and silence.
Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Influential Composer and Avant-Garde Guru, Dies at 79
New York Times Music
December 8, 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Influential Composer and Avant-Garde Guru, Dies at 79
By PAUL GRIFFITHS
Karlheinz Stockhausen, an original and influential German composer who began his career as an inventor of new musical systems and ended it making operas to express his spiritual vision of the cosmos, died on Wednesday at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg, Germany. He was 79.
His death was announced on Friday by the Stockhausen Foundation; no cause was disclosed.
Mr. Stockhausen had secured his place in music history by the time he was 30. He had taken a leading part in the development of electronic music, and his early instrumental compositions similarly struck out in new directions, in terms of their formal abstraction, rhythmic complexity and startling sound.
More recently, he made news for his public reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center. Not widely known outside the modern-music world in 2001, he became infamous for calling the attack “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” His comments drew widespread outrage, and he apologized, saying that his allegorical remarks had been misunderstood.
Mr. Stockhausen produced an astonishing succession of compositions in the 1950s and early ’60s: highly abstract works that were based on rigorous principles of ordering and combination but at the same time were vivid, bold and engaging.
In “Song of the Youths” (1956), he used a multichannel montage of electronic sound with a recorded singing voice to create an image of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego staying alive in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. In “Groups” (1957), he divided an orchestra into three ensembles that often played in different tempos and called to one another.
Such works answered the need felt in postwar Europe for reconstruction and logic, the logic to forestall any recurrence of war and genocide. They made Mr. Stockhausen a beacon to younger composers. Along with a few other musicians of his generation, notably Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, he had an enormous influence. Though performances of his works were never plentiful, his music was promoted by radio stations in Germany and abroad as well as by the record company Deutsche Grammophon, and he gave lectures all over the world.
By the 1960s his influence had reached rock musicians, and he was an international subject of acclaim and denigration.
The intellectual and physical excitement of his earlier music diminished in the later 1960s, when he devoted himself largely to performing semi-improvised music with a chosen group of performers. The tone of his lectures and essays also changed. Earlier he had based his thinking on psychoacoustics and the nature of musical time; now he presented himself as the receiver of messages about a spiritual drama being played out in the cosmos.
Between 1977 and 2002, he concentrated his creative efforts on “Light,” a cycle of seven operas intended to bring that cosmic drama to the human stage. The project was extravagantly egomaniacal. Mr. Stockhausen devised the music, the scenario and the words for his operas, and he made stipulations about sets, costumes and lighting. During the period of “Light” and after, Mr. Stockhausen was venerated within his own circle of performers and family members (often the same people) but largely ignored outside it. His home at Kuerten, which he designed, became the center of a publishing, recording and promoting enterprise removed from the wider world. Formerly a star, he had turned into a guru.
Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on Aug. 22, 1928, near Cologne, the first child of Simon Stockhausen, a schoolteacher, and his wife, Gertrud. His mother began suffering deep depressions when he was still a boy and was committed to a mental hospital, where, according to Mr. Stockhausen, she was “officially killed” in 1941. His father later volunteered for the army and was killed in Hungary.
The young Mr. Stockhausen himself served as an orderly to a military hospital during the last year of World War II, after which he studied at the State Academy of Music in Cologne. He took composition lessons from Frank Martin, but his training was as a music teacher. He also played jazz in Cologne bars, directed an amateur operetta theater and, as he later remembered, “prayed a lot.”
His ambitions changed in July 1951, when he attended a summer music course at Darmstadt and heard a recording of Olivier Messiaen’s piano piece “Mode of Values and Intensities,” which he described as “incredible star music.” On his return to Cologne, he began studying the music of Messiaen, writing his own similarly conceived work, “Crossplay,” for piano, percussion and two wind instruments.
As “Crossplay” shows, he understood at once how Messiaen’s single notes could be organized by applying Schoenberg’s serial principle to every dimension of sound: pitch, duration, loudness and tone color. A few formal rules would be set up, and the notes would fall into patterns as of themselves. Here his admiration for Hermann Hesse joined with his intense Roman Catholic faith to give him confidence in a kind of music that would be new and pure, reflecting the unity of the divine creation.
He arrived in Paris in January 1952 and stayed 14 months, during which he wrote two big orchestral scores; “Counter-Points,” an exuberant ensemble piece with instrumental flourishes; and the first four of a continuing series of piano pieces. He also composed his first electronic piece. When he went back to Cologne, it was to assist in the foundation of an electronic music studio, as well as to marry his student sweetheart, Doris Andreae, with whom he had four children during the next decade: Christel, Suja, Markus and Majella.
Between 1953 and 1955, he wrote more piano pieces (influenced by a first meeting with John Cage and with Cage’s regular pianist, David Tudor) and two electronic studies. Then came works on a more public scale: “Song of the Youths” and “Groups.” He was attracted by the idea that pitch, timbre, rhythm and even musical form could all be understood as forms of vibration, and by the notion of an entire musical work as a kind of photographic blowup of a single sound or sequence of sounds.
The first performance of “Groups,” in 1958, confirmed his dominant position within the European avant-garde. But he kept moving on. His music became slower and more enveloping in the electronic “Contacts” (1960) and in “Moments” for solo soprano, choir, brass, percussion and electric organs (1964). At the same time, his Catholic piety began giving way to a broader spirituality that embraced Eastern thought. He also fell in love with the American visual artist Mary Bauermeister. He divorced his first wife to marry her in 1967; they had two children, Simon and Julike.
His first visit to Japan, in 1966, was crucial to his artistic development. He was impressed by traditional Japanese culture and gained an awareness of himself as an artist in a global context. In Tokyo he composed the electronic piece “Telemusic,” in which recordings of music from around the world are made to intermingle. On his return to Cologne, he produced “Anthems” (1967), an electronic composition based on national anthems. For a few years after that, much of his work was devised for his own live-electronic performing group.
Working with his chosen musicians, he simplified his notation, until, in “From the Seven Days” (May 1968), he was offering his players only a text on which to meditate in performance. He spoke not of improvisation but of “intuitive music,” the idea being that his words would guide the performers to a metaphysical connection with music beyond themselves.
With “Mantra” for two pianos and electronics (1970) he returned to precise notation and introduced a new style, in which entire compositions were to be elaborated from basic melodies. The method gave him the means to fill long stretches of time, and from then on his major works were of full-evening length. They included “Starsound” for several groups in a public park (1971) and“Inori” for orchestra (1974).
Once again, a turn in Mr. Stockhausen’s music coincided with a new page in his emotional life. In 1974 the American clarinetist Suzanne Stephens entered his entourage, and she remained his companion to the end, joined from the early 1980s by the Dutch flutist Kathinka Pasveer. These two, along with his son Markus, a trumpeter, and his son Simon, on saxophone and synthesizer, gave him a new ensemble.
They also became the central performers of “Light”: Markus, who shared his father’s striking good looks, as the hero Michael; Ms. Stephens or Ms. Pasveer as the lover-mother figure, Eva; and often a trombonist as Lucifer, the spirit of negation.
The first three “Light” operas were introduced by La Scala, the next two by the Leipzig Opera; the remaining two have not been staged. Mr. Stockhausen’s final project was “Sound,” a sequence of compositions for the 24 hours of the day.
Mr. Stockhausen is survived by his companions, his six children and several grandchildren.
Right from his early 20s he never doubted that he was a great composer, and this conviction guided all his actions. It made him authoritarian in his dealings with others, whether fellow musicians or administrators. It pulled him through the creative challenges he set for himself as a young man. But it left him an isolated figure at the end.
December 8, 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Influential Composer and Avant-Garde Guru, Dies at 79
By PAUL GRIFFITHS
Karlheinz Stockhausen, an original and influential German composer who began his career as an inventor of new musical systems and ended it making operas to express his spiritual vision of the cosmos, died on Wednesday at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg, Germany. He was 79.
His death was announced on Friday by the Stockhausen Foundation; no cause was disclosed.
Mr. Stockhausen had secured his place in music history by the time he was 30. He had taken a leading part in the development of electronic music, and his early instrumental compositions similarly struck out in new directions, in terms of their formal abstraction, rhythmic complexity and startling sound.
More recently, he made news for his public reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center. Not widely known outside the modern-music world in 2001, he became infamous for calling the attack “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.” His comments drew widespread outrage, and he apologized, saying that his allegorical remarks had been misunderstood.
Mr. Stockhausen produced an astonishing succession of compositions in the 1950s and early ’60s: highly abstract works that were based on rigorous principles of ordering and combination but at the same time were vivid, bold and engaging.
In “Song of the Youths” (1956), he used a multichannel montage of electronic sound with a recorded singing voice to create an image of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego staying alive in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. In “Groups” (1957), he divided an orchestra into three ensembles that often played in different tempos and called to one another.
Such works answered the need felt in postwar Europe for reconstruction and logic, the logic to forestall any recurrence of war and genocide. They made Mr. Stockhausen a beacon to younger composers. Along with a few other musicians of his generation, notably Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, he had an enormous influence. Though performances of his works were never plentiful, his music was promoted by radio stations in Germany and abroad as well as by the record company Deutsche Grammophon, and he gave lectures all over the world.
By the 1960s his influence had reached rock musicians, and he was an international subject of acclaim and denigration.
The intellectual and physical excitement of his earlier music diminished in the later 1960s, when he devoted himself largely to performing semi-improvised music with a chosen group of performers. The tone of his lectures and essays also changed. Earlier he had based his thinking on psychoacoustics and the nature of musical time; now he presented himself as the receiver of messages about a spiritual drama being played out in the cosmos.
Between 1977 and 2002, he concentrated his creative efforts on “Light,” a cycle of seven operas intended to bring that cosmic drama to the human stage. The project was extravagantly egomaniacal. Mr. Stockhausen devised the music, the scenario and the words for his operas, and he made stipulations about sets, costumes and lighting. During the period of “Light” and after, Mr. Stockhausen was venerated within his own circle of performers and family members (often the same people) but largely ignored outside it. His home at Kuerten, which he designed, became the center of a publishing, recording and promoting enterprise removed from the wider world. Formerly a star, he had turned into a guru.
Karlheinz Stockhausen was born on Aug. 22, 1928, near Cologne, the first child of Simon Stockhausen, a schoolteacher, and his wife, Gertrud. His mother began suffering deep depressions when he was still a boy and was committed to a mental hospital, where, according to Mr. Stockhausen, she was “officially killed” in 1941. His father later volunteered for the army and was killed in Hungary.
The young Mr. Stockhausen himself served as an orderly to a military hospital during the last year of World War II, after which he studied at the State Academy of Music in Cologne. He took composition lessons from Frank Martin, but his training was as a music teacher. He also played jazz in Cologne bars, directed an amateur operetta theater and, as he later remembered, “prayed a lot.”
His ambitions changed in July 1951, when he attended a summer music course at Darmstadt and heard a recording of Olivier Messiaen’s piano piece “Mode of Values and Intensities,” which he described as “incredible star music.” On his return to Cologne, he began studying the music of Messiaen, writing his own similarly conceived work, “Crossplay,” for piano, percussion and two wind instruments.
As “Crossplay” shows, he understood at once how Messiaen’s single notes could be organized by applying Schoenberg’s serial principle to every dimension of sound: pitch, duration, loudness and tone color. A few formal rules would be set up, and the notes would fall into patterns as of themselves. Here his admiration for Hermann Hesse joined with his intense Roman Catholic faith to give him confidence in a kind of music that would be new and pure, reflecting the unity of the divine creation.
He arrived in Paris in January 1952 and stayed 14 months, during which he wrote two big orchestral scores; “Counter-Points,” an exuberant ensemble piece with instrumental flourishes; and the first four of a continuing series of piano pieces. He also composed his first electronic piece. When he went back to Cologne, it was to assist in the foundation of an electronic music studio, as well as to marry his student sweetheart, Doris Andreae, with whom he had four children during the next decade: Christel, Suja, Markus and Majella.
Between 1953 and 1955, he wrote more piano pieces (influenced by a first meeting with John Cage and with Cage’s regular pianist, David Tudor) and two electronic studies. Then came works on a more public scale: “Song of the Youths” and “Groups.” He was attracted by the idea that pitch, timbre, rhythm and even musical form could all be understood as forms of vibration, and by the notion of an entire musical work as a kind of photographic blowup of a single sound or sequence of sounds.
The first performance of “Groups,” in 1958, confirmed his dominant position within the European avant-garde. But he kept moving on. His music became slower and more enveloping in the electronic “Contacts” (1960) and in “Moments” for solo soprano, choir, brass, percussion and electric organs (1964). At the same time, his Catholic piety began giving way to a broader spirituality that embraced Eastern thought. He also fell in love with the American visual artist Mary Bauermeister. He divorced his first wife to marry her in 1967; they had two children, Simon and Julike.
His first visit to Japan, in 1966, was crucial to his artistic development. He was impressed by traditional Japanese culture and gained an awareness of himself as an artist in a global context. In Tokyo he composed the electronic piece “Telemusic,” in which recordings of music from around the world are made to intermingle. On his return to Cologne, he produced “Anthems” (1967), an electronic composition based on national anthems. For a few years after that, much of his work was devised for his own live-electronic performing group.
Working with his chosen musicians, he simplified his notation, until, in “From the Seven Days” (May 1968), he was offering his players only a text on which to meditate in performance. He spoke not of improvisation but of “intuitive music,” the idea being that his words would guide the performers to a metaphysical connection with music beyond themselves.
With “Mantra” for two pianos and electronics (1970) he returned to precise notation and introduced a new style, in which entire compositions were to be elaborated from basic melodies. The method gave him the means to fill long stretches of time, and from then on his major works were of full-evening length. They included “Starsound” for several groups in a public park (1971) and“Inori” for orchestra (1974).
Once again, a turn in Mr. Stockhausen’s music coincided with a new page in his emotional life. In 1974 the American clarinetist Suzanne Stephens entered his entourage, and she remained his companion to the end, joined from the early 1980s by the Dutch flutist Kathinka Pasveer. These two, along with his son Markus, a trumpeter, and his son Simon, on saxophone and synthesizer, gave him a new ensemble.
They also became the central performers of “Light”: Markus, who shared his father’s striking good looks, as the hero Michael; Ms. Stephens or Ms. Pasveer as the lover-mother figure, Eva; and often a trombonist as Lucifer, the spirit of negation.
The first three “Light” operas were introduced by La Scala, the next two by the Leipzig Opera; the remaining two have not been staged. Mr. Stockhausen’s final project was “Sound,” a sequence of compositions for the 24 hours of the day.
Mr. Stockhausen is survived by his companions, his six children and several grandchildren.
Right from his early 20s he never doubted that he was a great composer, and this conviction guided all his actions. It made him authoritarian in his dealings with others, whether fellow musicians or administrators. It pulled him through the creative challenges he set for himself as a young man. But it left him an isolated figure at the end.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
The hidden gem: A walk through San Diego jazz history with tenor saxophone legend Daniel Jackson
San Diego City Beat
The hidden gem
A walk through San Diego jazz history with tenor saxophone legend Daniel Jackson
By D.A. Kolodenko 11/27/2007
Daniel Jackson is reading a small bronze plaque affixed to the side of the Starbucks at Fourth Avenue and Market Street. It says that the building once housed The Crossroads, “San Diego’s first live jazz nightclub.” Not only is it a shame that the ubiquitous coffee mega-chain replaced the venerable club—which, after about 15 years, closed its doors in 1984 due to noise complaints (prior to the Gaslamp revitalization that made the question of noise superfluous)—but the plaque, Jackson assures me, is inaccurate.
“Downtown had jazz before that. The Creole Palace in the Douglas Hotel at Third and Market had live shows going back to the ’20s. They called it the ‘Harlem of the West.’ Those were shows with dancers and comedians. But the first real jazz club in San Diego was the Black and Tan up on Imperial.” Jackson points a long index finger toward the Southeast.
He knows what he’s talking about. A San Diego native and acclaimed tenor saxophonist, the 70-year-old is a legend among West Coast jazz musicians. Alto superstar Charles MacPherson considers Daniel “an excellent, very knowledgeable musician… who has his own way of doing things, his own style.” And tenor giant James Moody “can’t say enough about Daniel” and calls him “a wonderful saxophonist” who “if he was in L.A. or New York would be a much, much bigger name.”
But Jackson, with his reputation as private and maybe even eccentric—who has been known to pack up his horn and walk right off a gig if the audience is unruly—is not well-known outside of his hometown.
We’ve left downtown now, driven east, parked and started to stroll up Imperial Avenue, Logan Heights’ busy commercial heart. It’s a warm but breezy day and Jackson—exceptionally cool in a white rayon dress shirt, black vest, black slacks, dress shoes, shades and a black beret—takes long but measured strides, greeting everybody we pass, including kids.
Now a predominantly Latino neighborhood, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Logan Heights was home to much of San Diego’s African-American community, and Imperial Avenue was the musical Mecca of San Diego’s black nightlife.
That avenue of jazz history, however, has largely been ignored, as San Diego’s black musical legacy has often been subordinated to that of the well-documented Central Avenue jazz scene of Los Angeles, memorably depicted in the Walter Mosley novel Devil with a Blue Dress and the popular Denzel Washington film based on it.
Case in point: In published mentions of the late Harold Land, tenor star of the brilliant Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet, Land is usually referred to as a Los Angeles player, while the years he spent mastering his instrument in the juke joints, hotels and dance halls of San Diego remain overlooked.
In West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960, Ted Gioia does quote Land’s point that “there was a strong jazz scene in San Diego,” which attracted top players from L.A. like Sonny Criss, Hampton Hawes and Teddy Edwards. Gioia also acknowledges that Land honed his skills in the band of San Diego’s famed trumpeter Fro Brigham, who had turned down offers from the likes of Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine to remain the “King” of San Diego’s club scene. Gioia points out that by the 1940s “some twenty clubs flourished on the black side of town—none of which has survived to the present day.”
But one gets the sense that without Land’s success in Los Angeles, San Diego might not have made it into the book at all: Gioia’s primary concern is documenting the professional lives of the stars of jazz and not its overlooked regional scenes and players; the discussion of San Diego takes up less than two of the book’s 400 pages.
As San Diego jazz languished in the shadow of its flashier sister to the north, local musicians who wanted to make it big knew they’d have to leave. In the mid-’50s, Land moved to L.A. Jackson’s stubbornness in staying put, like Brigham’s, is responsible to a large extent for his obscurity.
And now, some 40 years later, walking past the decrepit shells of those “twenty clubs that flourished on the black side of town,” Jackson pauses and gazes through the weathered facades into that past where, after a hard working week, sharply dressed African-American men and women came to escape, dance, laugh, drink, flirt and listen to the musicians wail.
“Now, you see that right there?” Jackson points across the street at the one-story building that currently houses the Western Service Worker’s Association, the social-justice organization founded by San Diego’s beloved Episcopalian priest and activist, the late Art Elcombe. “That was the first jazz club—the Black and Tan,” Jackson says. “It was a nightclub chain like The Cotton Club. It was the one club down here where white people would come.” The only evidence of the building’s former life are the faded glass brick windows and heavy art deco doors. No plaque.
Further down the block, he points out a large, refurbished two-story building that houses a Muslim Mosque. “There was a black doctor, Doctor Jackson—no relation—and he decided the black neighborhood needed a real ballroom. And this is it: The Ebony Ballroom. I saw Big Jay MacNeeley play here one night, and he came out onto the sidewalk playing his horn and the police arrested him.”
Jackson recalls the incident with an impassioned, searching expression on his face—a look you’ll see each time he confronts the memory of an event ripe with implications of social injustice.
You’ll see the look a lot if you hang out with Jackson.
“With the military buildup of World War II,” he recalls, “a lot of people came out here from the South. And they brought their prejudice with them.” He cites an example—but one not culled from the African-American experience: “I remember the Japanese families in Logan Heights being shipped off to internment camps, man.” He pauses and lets that probing look of his stand as commentary.
We keep walking. Jackson lingers in front of storefronts along the way, pointing out the former sites of The Two-Five Club (now Gabriel’s Mercadito), The Silver Slipper (now Imperial Electronics) and the still-standing Elks Lodge just off Imperial on Hensley Street, where Jackson would attend teenage dances and hear the likes of Bobby “Blue” Bland and local blues shouter Big Daddy Rucker.
At the clubs that served alcohol, young Jackson would stand outside and listen to his older brother, Fred, play piano inside with Fro Brigham’s band.
“Fred and Harold [Land] played in Fro’s band—Fro ran all the gigs in San Diego—and I was just a kid, but when I heard Harold play tenor, I said, ‘Man, I want to play that!’”
Prior, Jackson had been “more interested in marbles than music,” as he puts it, but with Land as his inspiration—literally rehearsing in the Jacksons’ living room—he began taking saxophone lessons from local teacher Max Dalby.
The lessons were paid for by his mother, the late Mrs. Johnnie B. Jackson, a native of Waco, Texas, who, widowed since 1946, raised Daniel, Fred and their sister. Mrs. Jackson could hardly afford the lessons, supporting her family as a single mother on the pay she earned performing domestic work. After graduating from San Diego High School in 1955, Jackson joined the Air Force, securing a spot in the marching band, which he says helped him develop a disciplined approach as a performer.
The Air Force took Jackson to Illinois, where he played in regular jam sessions with guitarist Wes Montgomery and organist Jimmie Smith, honing his chops, learning on the fly.
When he returned to California a more seasoned improviser, Jackson heard Charlie Parker play at a boxing ring downtown. Legend has it that hearing Bird play in person made some players put down their horns forever. But not Jackson. “You knew you could never reach that. It was on a different level. But it made you want to try,” he says.
Within a few years of leaving San Diego, Harold Land had risen to star status in Los Angeles. “I went and heard him at The Flame in Hillcrest, after he had joined Clifford Brown and Max Roach. It was amazing.”
“One of Max Roach’s students,” Jackson recalls, “was one of the greatest drummers in jazz at the time, this cat named Lenny McBrowne.” In 1959, McBrowne asked Jackson to take Land’s place as a member of McBrowne’s Four Souls, which Land had left to join the Roach/Brown Quintet. Jackson took the gig and performed on McBrowne’s two highly regarded and collectable LPs recorded in 1960 and 1961 for the Pacific Jazz label, which feature Jackson’s compositions and arrangements. These classics of the hard bop idiom have been re-released by EMI.
By mid-decade, Jackson had landed a gig with Ray Charles and toured Europe with the legendary genius. He likes to tell stories about those days. Charles was a tough taskmaster with a wicked sense of humor. “One time the weather was so bad that the pilot was reluctant to take off and some guys in the band were afraid, but we had this gig in another city. So Ray says, ‘We’re gonna take off in this motherfucker if I have to fly it myself.’”
He loved being in the band and listening to Charles play piano and alto sax, but by that time, Jackson had already developed the heroin addiction—a habit he shared with Charles—that he believes held him back.
Although he composed music for the likes of Cannonball Adderly, and went on to perform with jazz greats from Freddie Hubbard to Willie Bobo, Jackson says he “didn’t have any sense of self-worth.”
At one point, his addiction became so bad that Jackson pawned his horn; he played only piccolo flute for many years and became accomplished on the instrument. In the ’70s, Jackson spent some time living in Veracruz, Mexico, where he says that for the first time, he felt what it was like to be accepted and not judged by the color of his skin. “It was something to get a sense of that, of what it was like to live without prejudice.”
In the ’80s, back in San Diego, Jackson entered a methadone clinic. He kicked heroin and started picking up teaching and performing gigs, one of which was as the first performer at Croce’s jazz bar, on Fifth Avenue and F Street. Ingrid Croce helped him pay for the Selmer he plays now, and the legendary tenor player James Moody gave him the mouthpiece he performs with to this day. “I saw him once a few years back, and he asked me how that mouthpiece is working out, and I said, ‘Man, I still haven’t found out all the things it can do.’”
Before the end of the ’90s, Jackson found himself paid to play piano nearly as much as saxophone and took a gig as the house pianist at the upscale Prince of Wales Room at the Hotel Del Coronado, which he wryly refers to as “Ice Cube Island” for the chilly atmosphere he endured for six years. With a recent remodel, the bar was demolished and Jackson’s stint ended.
It was, he says, “the only regular paying gig I ever had in San Diego.” Is he bitter that they let him go? “No, man, that’s just the free market system at work. I’m happy to have time to focus on the horn. There’s some things I want to do, to figure out. I’d like to record an album with strings,” as his heroes Parker and Land did before him. “And I’m organizing a foundation to get artists, musicians and other creative people in need the training or equipment they need to help shine some light in the world.”
Not long after our afternoon on Imperial, I travel with Jackson by car up the coast—avoiding the freeway almost the entire way, since he prefers surface streets, “where you can see something”—to attend a jam session in South Central Los Angeles, where Jackson is admired as a visiting sage. Young musicians seek him out after the session for advice and encouragement, which Jackson gives generously, as he has off and on for decades in university seminars on jazz improvisation and occasionally as a private saxophone teacher.
Appearances at such jam sessions have been high points of the 2000s, during which Jackson has recorded several independently produced CDs, written dozens of compositions, performed at a concert in his honor at Sushi Gallery, a sold-out 69th birthday tribute at Dizzy’s and an all-star show he organized at San Diego City College.
But infrequent concerts don’t pay the bills.
The town to which Jackson has remained loyal hasn’t entirely reciprocated. Resurgent interest in the recordings of jazz icons like John Coltrane (who once advised Jackson not to imitate others but to “do what you do”), along with a burgeoning young local jazz scene led by trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, who cites Jackson as a mentor, has yet to lead to regular work for the elder statesman. There are only a few clubs in town that feature jazz as more than background music, and Jackson’s only current steady gig is playing piano for Sunday brunch at Croce’s.
Last week, Jackson called me, discouraged, and said, “I’m thinking about maybe selling my horn.”
If he did, the dominant living voice of the post-war Imperial Avenue scene, of San Diego jazz history, would be silenced. And what a shame that would be when Jackson at 70 plays with remarkable dexterity, passion and tone, perhaps better than ever.
As James Moody says, “San Diego doesn’t know how lucky it is to have Daniel Jackson.”
Daniel Jackson is on the web at Danieljacksonmusic.com.
The hidden gem
A walk through San Diego jazz history with tenor saxophone legend Daniel Jackson
By D.A. Kolodenko 11/27/2007
Daniel Jackson is reading a small bronze plaque affixed to the side of the Starbucks at Fourth Avenue and Market Street. It says that the building once housed The Crossroads, “San Diego’s first live jazz nightclub.” Not only is it a shame that the ubiquitous coffee mega-chain replaced the venerable club—which, after about 15 years, closed its doors in 1984 due to noise complaints (prior to the Gaslamp revitalization that made the question of noise superfluous)—but the plaque, Jackson assures me, is inaccurate.
“Downtown had jazz before that. The Creole Palace in the Douglas Hotel at Third and Market had live shows going back to the ’20s. They called it the ‘Harlem of the West.’ Those were shows with dancers and comedians. But the first real jazz club in San Diego was the Black and Tan up on Imperial.” Jackson points a long index finger toward the Southeast.
He knows what he’s talking about. A San Diego native and acclaimed tenor saxophonist, the 70-year-old is a legend among West Coast jazz musicians. Alto superstar Charles MacPherson considers Daniel “an excellent, very knowledgeable musician… who has his own way of doing things, his own style.” And tenor giant James Moody “can’t say enough about Daniel” and calls him “a wonderful saxophonist” who “if he was in L.A. or New York would be a much, much bigger name.”
But Jackson, with his reputation as private and maybe even eccentric—who has been known to pack up his horn and walk right off a gig if the audience is unruly—is not well-known outside of his hometown.
We’ve left downtown now, driven east, parked and started to stroll up Imperial Avenue, Logan Heights’ busy commercial heart. It’s a warm but breezy day and Jackson—exceptionally cool in a white rayon dress shirt, black vest, black slacks, dress shoes, shades and a black beret—takes long but measured strides, greeting everybody we pass, including kids.
Now a predominantly Latino neighborhood, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Logan Heights was home to much of San Diego’s African-American community, and Imperial Avenue was the musical Mecca of San Diego’s black nightlife.
That avenue of jazz history, however, has largely been ignored, as San Diego’s black musical legacy has often been subordinated to that of the well-documented Central Avenue jazz scene of Los Angeles, memorably depicted in the Walter Mosley novel Devil with a Blue Dress and the popular Denzel Washington film based on it.
Case in point: In published mentions of the late Harold Land, tenor star of the brilliant Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet, Land is usually referred to as a Los Angeles player, while the years he spent mastering his instrument in the juke joints, hotels and dance halls of San Diego remain overlooked.
In West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California 1945-1960, Ted Gioia does quote Land’s point that “there was a strong jazz scene in San Diego,” which attracted top players from L.A. like Sonny Criss, Hampton Hawes and Teddy Edwards. Gioia also acknowledges that Land honed his skills in the band of San Diego’s famed trumpeter Fro Brigham, who had turned down offers from the likes of Duke Ellington and Billy Eckstine to remain the “King” of San Diego’s club scene. Gioia points out that by the 1940s “some twenty clubs flourished on the black side of town—none of which has survived to the present day.”
But one gets the sense that without Land’s success in Los Angeles, San Diego might not have made it into the book at all: Gioia’s primary concern is documenting the professional lives of the stars of jazz and not its overlooked regional scenes and players; the discussion of San Diego takes up less than two of the book’s 400 pages.
As San Diego jazz languished in the shadow of its flashier sister to the north, local musicians who wanted to make it big knew they’d have to leave. In the mid-’50s, Land moved to L.A. Jackson’s stubbornness in staying put, like Brigham’s, is responsible to a large extent for his obscurity.
And now, some 40 years later, walking past the decrepit shells of those “twenty clubs that flourished on the black side of town,” Jackson pauses and gazes through the weathered facades into that past where, after a hard working week, sharply dressed African-American men and women came to escape, dance, laugh, drink, flirt and listen to the musicians wail.
“Now, you see that right there?” Jackson points across the street at the one-story building that currently houses the Western Service Worker’s Association, the social-justice organization founded by San Diego’s beloved Episcopalian priest and activist, the late Art Elcombe. “That was the first jazz club—the Black and Tan,” Jackson says. “It was a nightclub chain like The Cotton Club. It was the one club down here where white people would come.” The only evidence of the building’s former life are the faded glass brick windows and heavy art deco doors. No plaque.
Further down the block, he points out a large, refurbished two-story building that houses a Muslim Mosque. “There was a black doctor, Doctor Jackson—no relation—and he decided the black neighborhood needed a real ballroom. And this is it: The Ebony Ballroom. I saw Big Jay MacNeeley play here one night, and he came out onto the sidewalk playing his horn and the police arrested him.”
Jackson recalls the incident with an impassioned, searching expression on his face—a look you’ll see each time he confronts the memory of an event ripe with implications of social injustice.
You’ll see the look a lot if you hang out with Jackson.
“With the military buildup of World War II,” he recalls, “a lot of people came out here from the South. And they brought their prejudice with them.” He cites an example—but one not culled from the African-American experience: “I remember the Japanese families in Logan Heights being shipped off to internment camps, man.” He pauses and lets that probing look of his stand as commentary.
We keep walking. Jackson lingers in front of storefronts along the way, pointing out the former sites of The Two-Five Club (now Gabriel’s Mercadito), The Silver Slipper (now Imperial Electronics) and the still-standing Elks Lodge just off Imperial on Hensley Street, where Jackson would attend teenage dances and hear the likes of Bobby “Blue” Bland and local blues shouter Big Daddy Rucker.
At the clubs that served alcohol, young Jackson would stand outside and listen to his older brother, Fred, play piano inside with Fro Brigham’s band.
“Fred and Harold [Land] played in Fro’s band—Fro ran all the gigs in San Diego—and I was just a kid, but when I heard Harold play tenor, I said, ‘Man, I want to play that!’”
Prior, Jackson had been “more interested in marbles than music,” as he puts it, but with Land as his inspiration—literally rehearsing in the Jacksons’ living room—he began taking saxophone lessons from local teacher Max Dalby.
The lessons were paid for by his mother, the late Mrs. Johnnie B. Jackson, a native of Waco, Texas, who, widowed since 1946, raised Daniel, Fred and their sister. Mrs. Jackson could hardly afford the lessons, supporting her family as a single mother on the pay she earned performing domestic work. After graduating from San Diego High School in 1955, Jackson joined the Air Force, securing a spot in the marching band, which he says helped him develop a disciplined approach as a performer.
The Air Force took Jackson to Illinois, where he played in regular jam sessions with guitarist Wes Montgomery and organist Jimmie Smith, honing his chops, learning on the fly.
When he returned to California a more seasoned improviser, Jackson heard Charlie Parker play at a boxing ring downtown. Legend has it that hearing Bird play in person made some players put down their horns forever. But not Jackson. “You knew you could never reach that. It was on a different level. But it made you want to try,” he says.
Within a few years of leaving San Diego, Harold Land had risen to star status in Los Angeles. “I went and heard him at The Flame in Hillcrest, after he had joined Clifford Brown and Max Roach. It was amazing.”
“One of Max Roach’s students,” Jackson recalls, “was one of the greatest drummers in jazz at the time, this cat named Lenny McBrowne.” In 1959, McBrowne asked Jackson to take Land’s place as a member of McBrowne’s Four Souls, which Land had left to join the Roach/Brown Quintet. Jackson took the gig and performed on McBrowne’s two highly regarded and collectable LPs recorded in 1960 and 1961 for the Pacific Jazz label, which feature Jackson’s compositions and arrangements. These classics of the hard bop idiom have been re-released by EMI.
By mid-decade, Jackson had landed a gig with Ray Charles and toured Europe with the legendary genius. He likes to tell stories about those days. Charles was a tough taskmaster with a wicked sense of humor. “One time the weather was so bad that the pilot was reluctant to take off and some guys in the band were afraid, but we had this gig in another city. So Ray says, ‘We’re gonna take off in this motherfucker if I have to fly it myself.’”
He loved being in the band and listening to Charles play piano and alto sax, but by that time, Jackson had already developed the heroin addiction—a habit he shared with Charles—that he believes held him back.
Although he composed music for the likes of Cannonball Adderly, and went on to perform with jazz greats from Freddie Hubbard to Willie Bobo, Jackson says he “didn’t have any sense of self-worth.”
At one point, his addiction became so bad that Jackson pawned his horn; he played only piccolo flute for many years and became accomplished on the instrument. In the ’70s, Jackson spent some time living in Veracruz, Mexico, where he says that for the first time, he felt what it was like to be accepted and not judged by the color of his skin. “It was something to get a sense of that, of what it was like to live without prejudice.”
In the ’80s, back in San Diego, Jackson entered a methadone clinic. He kicked heroin and started picking up teaching and performing gigs, one of which was as the first performer at Croce’s jazz bar, on Fifth Avenue and F Street. Ingrid Croce helped him pay for the Selmer he plays now, and the legendary tenor player James Moody gave him the mouthpiece he performs with to this day. “I saw him once a few years back, and he asked me how that mouthpiece is working out, and I said, ‘Man, I still haven’t found out all the things it can do.’”
Before the end of the ’90s, Jackson found himself paid to play piano nearly as much as saxophone and took a gig as the house pianist at the upscale Prince of Wales Room at the Hotel Del Coronado, which he wryly refers to as “Ice Cube Island” for the chilly atmosphere he endured for six years. With a recent remodel, the bar was demolished and Jackson’s stint ended.
It was, he says, “the only regular paying gig I ever had in San Diego.” Is he bitter that they let him go? “No, man, that’s just the free market system at work. I’m happy to have time to focus on the horn. There’s some things I want to do, to figure out. I’d like to record an album with strings,” as his heroes Parker and Land did before him. “And I’m organizing a foundation to get artists, musicians and other creative people in need the training or equipment they need to help shine some light in the world.”
Not long after our afternoon on Imperial, I travel with Jackson by car up the coast—avoiding the freeway almost the entire way, since he prefers surface streets, “where you can see something”—to attend a jam session in South Central Los Angeles, where Jackson is admired as a visiting sage. Young musicians seek him out after the session for advice and encouragement, which Jackson gives generously, as he has off and on for decades in university seminars on jazz improvisation and occasionally as a private saxophone teacher.
Appearances at such jam sessions have been high points of the 2000s, during which Jackson has recorded several independently produced CDs, written dozens of compositions, performed at a concert in his honor at Sushi Gallery, a sold-out 69th birthday tribute at Dizzy’s and an all-star show he organized at San Diego City College.
But infrequent concerts don’t pay the bills.
The town to which Jackson has remained loyal hasn’t entirely reciprocated. Resurgent interest in the recordings of jazz icons like John Coltrane (who once advised Jackson not to imitate others but to “do what you do”), along with a burgeoning young local jazz scene led by trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, who cites Jackson as a mentor, has yet to lead to regular work for the elder statesman. There are only a few clubs in town that feature jazz as more than background music, and Jackson’s only current steady gig is playing piano for Sunday brunch at Croce’s.
Last week, Jackson called me, discouraged, and said, “I’m thinking about maybe selling my horn.”
If he did, the dominant living voice of the post-war Imperial Avenue scene, of San Diego jazz history, would be silenced. And what a shame that would be when Jackson at 70 plays with remarkable dexterity, passion and tone, perhaps better than ever.
As James Moody says, “San Diego doesn’t know how lucky it is to have Daniel Jackson.”
Daniel Jackson is on the web at Danieljacksonmusic.com.
Carlos "Patato" Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81
New York Times
December 6, 2007
Carlos Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81
By BEN SISARIO
Carlos Valdés, better known as Patato, whose melodic conga playing made him a giant of Latin jazz in Cuba and then for more than half a century in America, died on Tuesday in Cleveland. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was respiratory failure, said his manager, Charles Carlini.
Born in Havana, Patato (a reference from Cuban slang to his diminutive size) played in the 1940s and early ’50s with important groups like Sonora Matancera and Conjunto Casino. He became a star in the early days of Cuban television for his virtuosic playing and for his showmanship; his signature song was “El Baile del Pingüino” (“The Penguin Dance”), which he illustrated with side-to-side, penguinlike movement in perfect time.
He came to the United States in the early 1950s and settled in New York, where he quickly established himself as an indispensable player, performing and recording with some of the top names in jazz and Latin music. In the ’50s and ’60s he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Machito, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones; he played with Herbie Mann from 1959 to 1972.
Known for his fluid, improvisatory melodies, Mr. Valdés tuned his drums tightly to produce clear, precise tones, and he popularized the playing of multiple conga drums; when he began his career, conga players, or congueros, typically used only one or two drums, but Mr. Valdés played three, four or more to allow a wider range of tones.
He is also associated with using a key to tune the congas instead of heating the skins with a flame. Latin Percussion, the leading Latin drum company, makes a Patato line of conga drums.
Mr. Valdés had an influential role in expanding the rumba form. His 1968 album “Patato & Totico,” recorded with Eugenio (Totico) Arango, a singer who was a boyhood friend from Havana, was particularly inventive. Instead of sticking to the usual format of drums and vocals, the album added several other instruments played by star musicians like Israel (Cachao) López on bass and Arsenio Rodríguez on tres, a six-string Cuban guitar. It is said to be Mr. Rodríguez’s last recording session, and its innovations had a lasting effect on Latin jazz.
“I had these ideas and wanted to advance them through jazz,” Mr. Valdés said in an interview with Latin Beat magazine in 1997. “I wanted something progressive.”
He was also a flamboyant performer who knew how to work a crowd. One of his performance hallmarks was jumping atop his drums and dancing while keeping the beat. In the 1956 film “And God Created Woman,” he is briefly seen teaching Brigitte Bardot to dance the mambo.
He is survived by his wife, Julia; two daughters, Yvonne and Regla; and two grandchildren, Jose Valdes and Mayra Garcia.
Mr. Valdés never stopped touring, recently working with his group the Conga Kings, which also includes Giovanni Hidalgo and Candido Camero, a fellow octogenarian. While flying back a few weeks ago from concerts in California — including one at the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Nov. 9 — he had trouble breathing, and the plane made an emergency landing for him in Cleveland. He had been hospitalized since then.
December 6, 2007
Carlos Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81
By BEN SISARIO
Carlos Valdés, better known as Patato, whose melodic conga playing made him a giant of Latin jazz in Cuba and then for more than half a century in America, died on Tuesday in Cleveland. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was respiratory failure, said his manager, Charles Carlini.
Born in Havana, Patato (a reference from Cuban slang to his diminutive size) played in the 1940s and early ’50s with important groups like Sonora Matancera and Conjunto Casino. He became a star in the early days of Cuban television for his virtuosic playing and for his showmanship; his signature song was “El Baile del Pingüino” (“The Penguin Dance”), which he illustrated with side-to-side, penguinlike movement in perfect time.
He came to the United States in the early 1950s and settled in New York, where he quickly established himself as an indispensable player, performing and recording with some of the top names in jazz and Latin music. In the ’50s and ’60s he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Machito, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones; he played with Herbie Mann from 1959 to 1972.
Known for his fluid, improvisatory melodies, Mr. Valdés tuned his drums tightly to produce clear, precise tones, and he popularized the playing of multiple conga drums; when he began his career, conga players, or congueros, typically used only one or two drums, but Mr. Valdés played three, four or more to allow a wider range of tones.
He is also associated with using a key to tune the congas instead of heating the skins with a flame. Latin Percussion, the leading Latin drum company, makes a Patato line of conga drums.
Mr. Valdés had an influential role in expanding the rumba form. His 1968 album “Patato & Totico,” recorded with Eugenio (Totico) Arango, a singer who was a boyhood friend from Havana, was particularly inventive. Instead of sticking to the usual format of drums and vocals, the album added several other instruments played by star musicians like Israel (Cachao) López on bass and Arsenio Rodríguez on tres, a six-string Cuban guitar. It is said to be Mr. Rodríguez’s last recording session, and its innovations had a lasting effect on Latin jazz.
“I had these ideas and wanted to advance them through jazz,” Mr. Valdés said in an interview with Latin Beat magazine in 1997. “I wanted something progressive.”
He was also a flamboyant performer who knew how to work a crowd. One of his performance hallmarks was jumping atop his drums and dancing while keeping the beat. In the 1956 film “And God Created Woman,” he is briefly seen teaching Brigitte Bardot to dance the mambo.
He is survived by his wife, Julia; two daughters, Yvonne and Regla; and two grandchildren, Jose Valdes and Mayra Garcia.
Mr. Valdés never stopped touring, recently working with his group the Conga Kings, which also includes Giovanni Hidalgo and Candido Camero, a fellow octogenarian. While flying back a few weeks ago from concerts in California — including one at the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Nov. 9 — he had trouble breathing, and the plane made an emergency landing for him in Cleveland. He had been hospitalized since then.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Anna Netrebko: A New Kind of Diva
From the New York Times Magazine
December 2, 2007
A New Kind of Diva
By CHARLES McGRATH
Correction Appended
Anna Netrebko is a gifted opera singer who at 36 has already mastered many of the roles — Mimi, Violetta, Lucia, Manon — that used to go to the queenly, temperamental sopranos of the old school, with their furs, their atomizers, their entourages. She is also a media-savvy entertainer from the new school, with the knockout looks, the fans, the celebrity of a pop star. Her “Traviata” at Salzburg two years ago was such a hot ticket that scalpers were reportedly charging $7,000 a seat, and her records regularly top the charts in Europe. In the summer of 2006 she was part of a concert in Berlin that filled a stadium.
Netrebko, whose appearance at the Metropolitan Opera on Dec. 15 in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” will be broadcast live in movie theaters around the world, has a captivating voice that is both high and deep, lustrous and velvety, and she is one of that growing breed of opera singers who can actually act. She is sometimes compared with Natalie Dessay, the French singer whose face has been on posters all over New York this fall, advertising her mad scene in the Met’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” and who may in fact be technically superior. But Netrebko is the larger presence. She has an earthiness and impishness — a daredeviltry — that may prevent her from ever attaining the kind of rarefied, disembodied sainthood that has been awarded, for example, to the American sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw but that also makes her more fun to watch.
Some critics have called Netrebko the next Callas, which is both a high compliment and a bit of a stretch. Callas was more intense, more forceful and also more tortured. On the other hand, Callas never appeared on a music video. Netrebko has a whole DVD of them, “Anna Netrebko — The Woman, the Voice,” which when it first came out in Europe in 2004 outsold Beyoncé and Britney Spears. In one, Netrebko, wearing a white bathing suit, her hair marcelled, sings Dvorák’s “Song to the Moon” while floating in a swimming pool on an inflatable raft.
When she was younger, Netrebko was often compared with Audrey Hepburn. She has since filled out a little and now more nearly resembles one of those sultry Italian movie stars of the ’50s and ’60s—Anna Magnani, say, or Sophia Loren. The paparazzi love her, so much so that she doesn’t dare make a restaurant reservation in her own name. (One that she likes, for some reason, is Beaverhausen.) In this country she has been featured in Vogue and Elle and on “60 Minutes.” In Europe, where cultural news frequently makes the front page, she is the subject of two unauthorized, not entirely reliable biographies and is written about all the time — seldom factually — in the tabloids and gossip columns. It is not true, for example, that she had an affair with Robbie Williams and bore his love child. On the other hand, the reports that she loves to party and to shop and can swear like a trooper in five or six languages are probably not inaccurate.
Netrebko is more of a homebody than she is sometimes given credit for. She spent her 36th birthday, in September, in her apartment in New York cooking dinner for her publicist and his girlfriend. But she is also a serious clotheshorse. In August, when I had lunch with her in Vienna, where she also has an apartment, she turned up wearing purple pumps (which matched her eye shadow), a bright orange duster and the shortest miniskirt I’ve seen anywhere except on Carnaby Street in 1969. The face of her wristwatch was encrusted with what must have been diamonds, because you’d be embarrassed to have rhinestones that big.
“I’m so fat,” she said as she sat down. She explained that she had just come back from a few days’ rest in Italy. “My crazy friends,” she said, “They don’t think about nothing but food, food, food.” (Netrebko, who is a very quick study when it comes to languages, used to speak English with a noticeable Russian accent, but it’s almost gone now, her Russianness apparent only in certain vowels and infrequent lapses into Russian syntax.) She didn’t look the least bit fat to me, however, or apparently to anyone else. When we went out window-shopping afterward, she turned heads. While we were walking around she explained that she had recently started to work out, not to strengthen her abdominal muscles, which in a singer need to be supple, but to build up her back, which she uses to pump out her sound. She paused, threw back her shoulders and made an Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing motion, pumping her arms in front of her.
Netrebko’s videos and outdoor concert appearances, her contract with Chopard, the luxury jewelry company, and her commercials for Vöslauer, the Austrian mineral water, have made her a member of what the critic Alex Ross calls the Yo-Yo Club — classical musicians who, like the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, have attained such celebrity that their artistic credentials are deemed suspect by the purists. If you’re that popular, the logic seems to go, you can’t possibly be any good. Netrebko used to be a frequent target of some of the cattier opera blogs, where she is known as Trebs or Trebbie. “That pretty, ruthless girl from some Russian province,” one blogger called her last winter. Others complain about her trills, her coloratura, her poor Italian diction, which is “like some thick, gooey kvass,” according to another blogger.
But there are just as many knowledgeable fans who can’t get enough of her voice, which some critics think is still getting better, and to see her perform is to forgive almost anything. She has the stage presence, the charisma, that the old-fashioned divas used to command, and she adds to it both charm and sensuality. She seems pulsingly alive in a way that the grand, marmoreal singers sometimes did not. In that much-anticipated Salzburg “Traviata” (which is available on DVD), for example, she’s consumptive in the way that Verdi surely intended: not just sick but burning herself up. When she appears onstage in a form-fitting red cocktail dress, twirling around and flashing a lot of leg, she instantly explains away one of the creaky plot problems in this famous old opera: how Alfredo, who has never seen Violetta before, can fall for her in a second. She sings the opera’s signature piece, the Act I-ending aria “Sempre libera,” an anthem to pleasure and self-indulgence, with abandon and defiance, soaring effortlessly up to the high notes. In Act III, which can sometimes be a drag (Violetta takes forever to die, and at one point seems miraculously to bounce back), she is heartbreaking, with the natural richness of her voice adding a deeply felt layer of sadness and regret. She doesn’t die in Alfredo’s arms, as in most productions, but by herself in the middle of the stage, and that, too, seems exactly right.
Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, says that Netrebko is “the complete artistic package,” and she is one of the cornerstones of his plan to rejuvenate the Met — to make opera more popular and accessible — by insisting that the productions be more dramatic. “The Met is famous for being the house of great voices,” he explained recently. “My intention is to gain a new audience by raising our theatrical standards while at the same time holding on to our musical and artistic ones. Anna is the perfect embodiment of the new Met. She has a beautiful voice and a kind of stage presence that is very rare. Audiences just embrace her.” He added: “Her being great-looking doesn’t hurt. Great-looking is good. But I want to resist this notion that looks are all I’m looking for in a singer. Looks alone won’t cut it on the stage of the Met, which is so big that there’s no place for you to hide out there. Your talent is bare and exposed. Luckily, there’s a whole generation of singers, of whom Anna is one, who understand that opera is theater and can integrate singing and acting.”
Even before taking over at the Met, Gelb said, he knew who Netrebko was and had heard her several times. But she made a particularly strong impression on him in the spring of 2005, after he was appointed the next general manager but before he actually assumed the job, when he happened to see her and the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón in a Viennese production of “L’Elisir d’Amore.” This particular production (also available on DVD) happens to be a 25-year-old wheezer, but as Gelb recalled, Netrebko and Villazón “just elevated their roles” and got a huge ovation at the end. After seeing her, Gelb immediately took steps, as he said, to “make sure Anna was going to be squarely in the center of the Met’s plans.” Netrebko, who made her Met debut in 2002, as Natasha in Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” was already scheduled for further appearances there, but Gelb wanted to enlarge her role. One difficulty of running an opera house, he explained, is that plans often have to be made years in advance, and over the years the Met became slower and more inflexible than some other opera houses, like London’s Royal Opera House, for example. In the case of Netrebko, he has tried to command a chunk of her schedule, and the Met’s plans for her now extend into the 2012-13 season and even beyond, with a goal of showcasing her in at least two productions a year, one old and one new.
In the years to come, Gelb is particularly looking forward to seeing Netrebko in a new production of “La Bohème.” Netrebko, for her part, is looking forward to the 2012 production of “Manon Lescaut.” This is an opera she loves (with reason, her detractors say: it’s about a materialistic airhead), and she delighted in a production that Vincent Paterson created for her in Los Angeles. It was set in Paris in the 1950s and showed Manon evolving from a Leslie Caron character to one modeled on Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. In one scene she even did a pole dance. “This production was so good,” she said, “because it understands that ‘Manon’ is not a deep story. She’s not a deep character. So it has to be funny, silly, charming, erotical — not dark. She’s not evil. She’s like, I screw up my life, but, well, too bad!”
For the 2007-8 season, Netrebko was scheduled to appear at the Met in 11 performances of the same opera, Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” five of them last month and in September, six more starting this month, including the live broadcast. Her Roméo for all was supposed to be Villazón, one of her favorite partners, with whom she has recorded an album of duets that came out here this fall. The two singers have a singular rapport, and some of their past performances of “Roméo,” as well as of “Traviata” and “Manon,” have been so steamy as to convince the paparazzi that they must be lovers in real life. (In fact, Villazón is married, with children, and Netrebko was until recently involved with the Italian bass-baritone Simone Alberghini.) In September, however, Villazón, who like Netrebko (and sometimes with her, to promote the new record) was carrying on a breakneck schedule of concert appearances, announced that on medical advice he was canceling everything, leaving the Met to hastily cobble together a revolving-door list of replacements. Roberto Alagna, who filled in for the opening performance in September, had to learn the staging of the production in a matter of days, and standing in her dressing room during a run-through at the Met one afternoon, Netrebko said that the rehearsals were “very stressful.” She had a bottle of fruit juice in one hand and a double latte in the other. “For my sex scene,” she explained. “I need energy.”
The sex scene in this particular production requires Roméo and Juliette to cavort in a bed suspended 12 feet above the stage. When the curtain came up, Netrebko, wearing a thin, low-cut nightgown, and Alagna, barelegged, in a nightshirt, slid around, trying to sing and caress each other simultaneously. The conductor, Plácido Domingo, interrupted them several times to work on tempo and phrasing and, at one point, to break the mood, Netrebko picked up the front of Roméo’s shirt and began flapping it, exposing his underpants. (For the opener, a few days later, he wisely kept his trousers on.)
Domingo, who began casting Netrebko in productions of his Washington National Opera soon after seeing her in 2002, said recently that “she is one of the great singers of her generation — or of any generation.” And he added: “I love to conduct her. She brings sometimes the right amount of humor into situations where maybe there is tension. But she is the right kind of diva — very professional, very hard-working, and brings the right attitude to rehearsals. And a great artist, able to create great feeling. For the poison aria in ‘Roméo,’ she kept refining, emphasizing just a quarter note to enlarge the pathos of the moment. This is what the great singers do all the time.”
“Look, I am normal,” Netrebko told me last summer. “Normal, normal, normal!” And she is, though at the animated, high-energy end of normality. She laughs easily and gestures broadly, waving her arms, rolling her eyes, sticking out her tongue. When a man suddenly materialized at our restaurant table bearing not one but five copies of her “Figaro” CD, which needed to be autographed on the spot, she sweetly complied and went out of her way to chat with him a bit. When I was trying to discuss her Carnegie Hall concert this past May with the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and compliment the fine points of her performance of the Letter Scene from “Eugene Onegin,” she found it necessary to explain that I didn’t know what I was talking about. She did so gently, however, and added, “You are very nice.”
Netrebko’s friend and mentor, Renata Scotto, herself a diva in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, says that an important clue to Netrebko’s nature is her Russianness. “She’s very humble, very truthful,” she remarked of Netrebko. “And I think a lot of Russians are like this. She’s full of the joy of life and also a very hard worker.”
Netrebko concedes that there may be something to this, but also says that another Russian trait, which she clearly does not share, is melancholy, passivity and being unable to decide what you want from life. A phrase she uses a lot is “I try” or “I will try,” and you get the sense that she is very much the stage manager of her own story.
The younger of two sisters, Netrebko grew up in the southwestern Russian city of Krasnodar, along the Kuban River, north of the Black Sea. “It’s kind of a boring city, with not much culture,” she says now, and is notable chiefly for the richness of the surrounding agricultural land: “If you plant something there, in five minutes it will grow.” Her mother, who died five years ago, was a telecommunications engineer. Her father is a geologist. “He is still famous in Krasnodar,” Netrebko told me. “I am very proud.”
The family, she went on, was “let’s say not rich, but well-to-do: we always ate well and had nice clothes to wear.” The Netrebkos lived in a big house by Russian standards, with a grape arbor in back. Yuri Netrebko liked to make wine, and on weekends he would often give outdoor parties for 30 or 40 guests at a time. “It was a very happy family, and it was a wonderful childhood,” his daughter says. “Always there were friends and relatives around.”
Netrebko’s parents both loved music, but their taste didn’t extend much beyond operetta. They seldom listened to classical music, and for that matter, neither does Netrebko except when she’s rehearsing or performing. (She likes Green Day and the Black Eyed Peas, and this summer, she said, she listened to a lot of Amy Winehouse.) Netrebko started piano lessons when she was 6 but eventually grew bored and dropped them. At 7, she joined a children’s chorus, where she became a soloist, and in high school she was part of a traveling ensemble of singers, dancers and musicians.
Netrebko was not much of a student, and at 16 she moved to St. Petersburg with the idea of becoming an actress, until she discovered that lots of other young women had the same dream. “The competition was so great,” she said, “and I heard very bad rumors about how you had to sleep with the directors. So I decided to try to be an opera singer. People said I had a voice.”
She studied for two years at a musical college and then applied to the conservatory in St. Petersburg: “I said to myself: ‘O.K. I will try. Maybe they will take me, and if not the worst that can happen is I will go home and be in the operetta. That will be more than enough.’ ” The conservatory took her, but initially at least, some of her colleagues were not encouraging, telling her that her voice was so small that the best she could hope for was a place in the chorus. “But I thought maybe I’m better than they think,” Netrebko recalled. “I found something in my voice. It’s very clean and very recognizable. It wasn’t big, but it was always very pointed — it came to a whole. That’s why I continued to think I might be a singer.”
At the time, to make some pocket money and for the chance to watch rehearsals, Netrebko was also washing floors at the Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg’s famous opera and ballet house, and this has given rise to a myth that is the Russian version of “La Cenerentola,” the Cinderella opera, with Valéry Gergiev, general and artistic director of the Mariinsky, swooping in and rescuing her from the mop and bucket. In fact, by the time she auditioned for Gergiev she had already retired from scrubbing and had even won the Glinka, perhaps Russia’s most famous vocal competition. But Gergiev was an early and steadfast supporter. In 1994 he cast her as Barbarina in a Kirov Opera production of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and then the director bumped her up to Susanna, the starring role. A year later Gergiev took an even bigger chance — an “insane risk,” he later called it — by casting Netrebko, only 23, as Lyudmila in a San Francisco Opera production of Glinka’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila.” It was her U.S. debut.
“Gergiev, he’s crazy, crazy!” Netrebko told me. “There are so many young singers he’s given opportunities to — big roles at a young age, which never happens in America. They have what they call the young artists’ programs, but what they’re really doing is putting singers in their graves. They’re sitting there in the big theaters wasting their best years, studying, covering, looking at the big stars. It’s so wrong. You can never learn to sing if you are just watching.”
The role that put Netrebko on the map and made her an international star was a 2002 Salzburg production of “Don Giovanni,” conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who took the unusual step of casting her as Donna Anna, the Commendatore’s daughter, who is forcibly seduced by the Don, setting the whole plot in motion. This is a part that, as Netrebko says, usually goes to “a big fat lady—angry, loud!” The role used to be a standby of Joan Sutherland and also of Birgit Nilsson (sometimes known, impolitely, as Beergut). Netrebko played Donna Anna as a sexy young woman in a slip, who kisses the Don in such a way as to make you wonder if she was forced into anything at all. By all accounts her version of “Crudele? Ah no, mio bene!” Anna’s signature aria, in which she apologizes to her betrothed for not marrying him just yet, was ravishing because she invested it with such longing and sensuousness.
Last year she appeared in an even more controversial Harnoncourt production, “Le Nozze” this time, directed (by Claus Guth) in such a way that it more nearly resembled a play by Ibsen or Strindberg than a comic opera. Just about everyone here is neurotic and oversexed, including Susanna (Netrebko), who has clearly been receptive to the Count’s advances even before the curtain comes up and is also turned on by Cherubino. To play the part Netrebko has to give up a lot of Susanna’s traditional charm, and yet she makes the character appealing, and even sympathetic, through the richness of her singing. Netrebko found this role hard, she told me, because Susanna has so few high notes and also because the character was so complicated. “This Susanna is a lost person,” she said. “Very lost. She doesn’t know what to do, and it’s sad.”
At the Met, where Netrebko has also starred in “Rigoletto” and “La Bohème,” Gelb says he feels she really came into her own two seasons ago, as Norina in “Don Pasquale.” But it was her role as Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” that was a sort of watershed. Some people loved it; others began to question whether she was really suited to this kind of bel canto role.
“I Puritani” is seldom put on, and for good reason. Except for a scene in which the heroine goes mad for about half an hour, not a whole lot happens. Mad scenes are practically obligatory in bel canto opera, and they’re hard to pull off, because, typically, the more distraught the heroine becomes, the more high, tricky passages she has to sing. It used to be that sopranos would just stand there and sing the notes, without much attention to the madwoman aspect, but that hasn’t washed for years now, and it certainly won’t at Peter Gelb’s Met. Netrebko, who says that at first she was dismayed by the part, because she found the character a bore, eventually threw herself into it, but during some of the coloratura passage work she wound up snatching breaths in places that some listeners found sloppy and inappropriate.
“I thought her ‘Puritani’ was a real drag,” Peter G. Davis, a longtime critic on the New York classical music scene, said. “I don’t think she has the vocal technique for that kind of singing. It depends on what your expectations are, I guess, and in her case I have a lot. She has a lovely sound, a beautiful voice — so much talent, so much to offer, that I sometimes feel shortchanged. In ‘Puritani,’ the technique was really spotty, as if she didn’t have a sense of how the phrases should be shaped.”
But Netrebko says she felt very comfortable in the part, and she defends her technique. “The cantilena is also bel canto,” she said, referring to the smoother passages, “and this I think I do well. We’re losing the school of bel canto, because so many singers are doing it light, without the full body. Real legato is very important.” She paused and smiled. “If you ask me about vocal technique, I don’t know anything. I could never be a teacher. I just know what my teacher told me: Always sing with a full voice. When they tell you, less sound, more piano — no.” She added: “I know what I’m missing. I know what I have to work on. Coloratura. And I sing sharp sometimes,” meaning she sometimes hits a note on the high, screechy side. “It happens when I’m nervous. I get like this” — she tensed her stomach muscles and clenched her fists — “and the breath comes out forced and gives me the high intonation. I’m fighting it. I’m also looking for more color in the voice, but it only comes with experience. Singing experience and also life experience. I definitely know that I gained a lot in the last two years, during which I had a lot of storms in my personal life. After that I found something in my singing which was never there before. Interesting. This is the part that is coming from your soul.”
Netrebko’s performances in “Roméo” this fall appear to have won over even the cattiest of the bloggers. The worst they could say was that her French pronunciation was inexact. She was ravishing and heartbreaking, playing Juliette not as a besotted teenager but as a sensual young woman with a depth of feeling beyond her years.
In August, Netrebko caused a minor ruckus when at the last minute she canceled an appearance at the Salzburg Festival, where she was supposed to sing Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” The Austrians took offense, pointing out that she seemed in fine voice when a few days earlier she gave a concert in Baden-Baden. “I was sick,” she said. “I can sing when I’m sick if I have to, but the question is how long can you continue to do that? At Covent Garden last June I had such a fever that I couldn’t continue after the first act, and since then I’ve decided I have to be more careful.”
Peter Gelb told me: “The Salzburg thing was a little unfair. Anna has been unusually reliable and dependable. She’s so healthy, in fact, that it has probably been taken for granted.” But he went on to say that for singers of Netrebko’s caliber, burnout is always a concern, because so many demands are put upon them. “Managers of opera houses all worry about this,” he said. “Smart singers worry about it as well. If you’re going to have a long career, you have to take care of yourself.”
Even the multitasking Valéry Gergiev, of all people (besides running the Kirov Opera and Ballet, he is a guest conductor all over the world), has worried that Netrebko may be spreading herself too thin, especially by singing so many open-air concerts.
The concerts make money, however, and they also give a singer a different kind of exposure. “I hate them,” Netrebko said of her concert engagements, “because they’re so difficult.” But then she recalled with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm a concert she had just sung in Cologne. “I sang before 16,000 people, and most of these were people who never go to the opera. Many of them can’t afford it. So I am giving them something.” She sang with a microphone, she explained, but occasionally would step away from it so the audience could hear her true, unamplified voice. “They loved it!” she said.
Just as dangerous as singing too much is singing the wrong roles, and some critics have complained that Netrebko has learned too many parts too quickly and should be sticking to lighter roles. She insists, however, that it is important for her to strike a balance between light and heavy roles, and she also says she believes in taking on parts that are a little more demanding than she’s comfortable with. “Donna Anna, Traviata — people say, No, no, don’t do it, it’s too early,” she said. “But I think, No, I’d like to try, and now look, if I let them, they’d have me sing ‘Traviata’ all the time, and it would destroy my voice in three years!”
She added: “I have an intuition, and usually my intuition is right. I have a feeling for whether a role will be good or bad for me, and I almost never make a mistake. There were just a few that weren’t good. ‘Rigoletto’ — the first act is hell and the whole time I was shaking. Zerlina — horrible! But Mimi I knew would be good. I have to work extra to make the right sound in the low register. The high register is no problem, except you can’t make this sound all the time or your high notes begin to suffer.” She talked about someday wanting to sing Elettra in Mozart’s “Idomeneo” and Desdemona in Verdi’s “Othello,” and then suddenly said: “The role I really want to sing is Elisabetta from ‘Don Carlo.’ I really love this music, and I think that in five years I will be able to do it. I will try. If not, not. But I have a feeling it will be a good role.”
Every now and then, Netrebko worries about her biological timetable as well as her artistic one. “I do have a private life,” she told me, “and right now it’s very difficult.” As for marriage and a family, she said: “I don’t know. I’m not ready. Life is so crazy. There are just a few years left, and I have to think whether I want it or not. Probably I want it.” She paused, then said: “But it will change my life a lot. I really don’t want to sink with a family and close myself to life. Right now I’m not missing a family. I’m not missing it at all. I’m just a different person. If you don’t have all that when you’re 25, then at 35 it’s very difficult. But we’ll see. Maybe in one year I’ll be married and I’ll get bored of singing.” She laughed. “I can’t believe it!”
Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The New York Times.
Correction: December 2, 2007
An article on Page 32 of The Times Magazine today, about the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, misstates the date of a concert she performed at Carnegie Hall. It was in May 2007, not June.
December 2, 2007
A New Kind of Diva
By CHARLES McGRATH
Correction Appended
Anna Netrebko is a gifted opera singer who at 36 has already mastered many of the roles — Mimi, Violetta, Lucia, Manon — that used to go to the queenly, temperamental sopranos of the old school, with their furs, their atomizers, their entourages. She is also a media-savvy entertainer from the new school, with the knockout looks, the fans, the celebrity of a pop star. Her “Traviata” at Salzburg two years ago was such a hot ticket that scalpers were reportedly charging $7,000 a seat, and her records regularly top the charts in Europe. In the summer of 2006 she was part of a concert in Berlin that filled a stadium.
Netrebko, whose appearance at the Metropolitan Opera on Dec. 15 in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” will be broadcast live in movie theaters around the world, has a captivating voice that is both high and deep, lustrous and velvety, and she is one of that growing breed of opera singers who can actually act. She is sometimes compared with Natalie Dessay, the French singer whose face has been on posters all over New York this fall, advertising her mad scene in the Met’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” and who may in fact be technically superior. But Netrebko is the larger presence. She has an earthiness and impishness — a daredeviltry — that may prevent her from ever attaining the kind of rarefied, disembodied sainthood that has been awarded, for example, to the American sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw but that also makes her more fun to watch.
Some critics have called Netrebko the next Callas, which is both a high compliment and a bit of a stretch. Callas was more intense, more forceful and also more tortured. On the other hand, Callas never appeared on a music video. Netrebko has a whole DVD of them, “Anna Netrebko — The Woman, the Voice,” which when it first came out in Europe in 2004 outsold Beyoncé and Britney Spears. In one, Netrebko, wearing a white bathing suit, her hair marcelled, sings Dvorák’s “Song to the Moon” while floating in a swimming pool on an inflatable raft.
When she was younger, Netrebko was often compared with Audrey Hepburn. She has since filled out a little and now more nearly resembles one of those sultry Italian movie stars of the ’50s and ’60s—Anna Magnani, say, or Sophia Loren. The paparazzi love her, so much so that she doesn’t dare make a restaurant reservation in her own name. (One that she likes, for some reason, is Beaverhausen.) In this country she has been featured in Vogue and Elle and on “60 Minutes.” In Europe, where cultural news frequently makes the front page, she is the subject of two unauthorized, not entirely reliable biographies and is written about all the time — seldom factually — in the tabloids and gossip columns. It is not true, for example, that she had an affair with Robbie Williams and bore his love child. On the other hand, the reports that she loves to party and to shop and can swear like a trooper in five or six languages are probably not inaccurate.
Netrebko is more of a homebody than she is sometimes given credit for. She spent her 36th birthday, in September, in her apartment in New York cooking dinner for her publicist and his girlfriend. But she is also a serious clotheshorse. In August, when I had lunch with her in Vienna, where she also has an apartment, she turned up wearing purple pumps (which matched her eye shadow), a bright orange duster and the shortest miniskirt I’ve seen anywhere except on Carnaby Street in 1969. The face of her wristwatch was encrusted with what must have been diamonds, because you’d be embarrassed to have rhinestones that big.
“I’m so fat,” she said as she sat down. She explained that she had just come back from a few days’ rest in Italy. “My crazy friends,” she said, “They don’t think about nothing but food, food, food.” (Netrebko, who is a very quick study when it comes to languages, used to speak English with a noticeable Russian accent, but it’s almost gone now, her Russianness apparent only in certain vowels and infrequent lapses into Russian syntax.) She didn’t look the least bit fat to me, however, or apparently to anyone else. When we went out window-shopping afterward, she turned heads. While we were walking around she explained that she had recently started to work out, not to strengthen her abdominal muscles, which in a singer need to be supple, but to build up her back, which she uses to pump out her sound. She paused, threw back her shoulders and made an Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing motion, pumping her arms in front of her.
Netrebko’s videos and outdoor concert appearances, her contract with Chopard, the luxury jewelry company, and her commercials for Vöslauer, the Austrian mineral water, have made her a member of what the critic Alex Ross calls the Yo-Yo Club — classical musicians who, like the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, have attained such celebrity that their artistic credentials are deemed suspect by the purists. If you’re that popular, the logic seems to go, you can’t possibly be any good. Netrebko used to be a frequent target of some of the cattier opera blogs, where she is known as Trebs or Trebbie. “That pretty, ruthless girl from some Russian province,” one blogger called her last winter. Others complain about her trills, her coloratura, her poor Italian diction, which is “like some thick, gooey kvass,” according to another blogger.
But there are just as many knowledgeable fans who can’t get enough of her voice, which some critics think is still getting better, and to see her perform is to forgive almost anything. She has the stage presence, the charisma, that the old-fashioned divas used to command, and she adds to it both charm and sensuality. She seems pulsingly alive in a way that the grand, marmoreal singers sometimes did not. In that much-anticipated Salzburg “Traviata” (which is available on DVD), for example, she’s consumptive in the way that Verdi surely intended: not just sick but burning herself up. When she appears onstage in a form-fitting red cocktail dress, twirling around and flashing a lot of leg, she instantly explains away one of the creaky plot problems in this famous old opera: how Alfredo, who has never seen Violetta before, can fall for her in a second. She sings the opera’s signature piece, the Act I-ending aria “Sempre libera,” an anthem to pleasure and self-indulgence, with abandon and defiance, soaring effortlessly up to the high notes. In Act III, which can sometimes be a drag (Violetta takes forever to die, and at one point seems miraculously to bounce back), she is heartbreaking, with the natural richness of her voice adding a deeply felt layer of sadness and regret. She doesn’t die in Alfredo’s arms, as in most productions, but by herself in the middle of the stage, and that, too, seems exactly right.
Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, says that Netrebko is “the complete artistic package,” and she is one of the cornerstones of his plan to rejuvenate the Met — to make opera more popular and accessible — by insisting that the productions be more dramatic. “The Met is famous for being the house of great voices,” he explained recently. “My intention is to gain a new audience by raising our theatrical standards while at the same time holding on to our musical and artistic ones. Anna is the perfect embodiment of the new Met. She has a beautiful voice and a kind of stage presence that is very rare. Audiences just embrace her.” He added: “Her being great-looking doesn’t hurt. Great-looking is good. But I want to resist this notion that looks are all I’m looking for in a singer. Looks alone won’t cut it on the stage of the Met, which is so big that there’s no place for you to hide out there. Your talent is bare and exposed. Luckily, there’s a whole generation of singers, of whom Anna is one, who understand that opera is theater and can integrate singing and acting.”
Even before taking over at the Met, Gelb said, he knew who Netrebko was and had heard her several times. But she made a particularly strong impression on him in the spring of 2005, after he was appointed the next general manager but before he actually assumed the job, when he happened to see her and the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón in a Viennese production of “L’Elisir d’Amore.” This particular production (also available on DVD) happens to be a 25-year-old wheezer, but as Gelb recalled, Netrebko and Villazón “just elevated their roles” and got a huge ovation at the end. After seeing her, Gelb immediately took steps, as he said, to “make sure Anna was going to be squarely in the center of the Met’s plans.” Netrebko, who made her Met debut in 2002, as Natasha in Prokofiev’s “War and Peace,” was already scheduled for further appearances there, but Gelb wanted to enlarge her role. One difficulty of running an opera house, he explained, is that plans often have to be made years in advance, and over the years the Met became slower and more inflexible than some other opera houses, like London’s Royal Opera House, for example. In the case of Netrebko, he has tried to command a chunk of her schedule, and the Met’s plans for her now extend into the 2012-13 season and even beyond, with a goal of showcasing her in at least two productions a year, one old and one new.
In the years to come, Gelb is particularly looking forward to seeing Netrebko in a new production of “La Bohème.” Netrebko, for her part, is looking forward to the 2012 production of “Manon Lescaut.” This is an opera she loves (with reason, her detractors say: it’s about a materialistic airhead), and she delighted in a production that Vincent Paterson created for her in Los Angeles. It was set in Paris in the 1950s and showed Manon evolving from a Leslie Caron character to one modeled on Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. In one scene she even did a pole dance. “This production was so good,” she said, “because it understands that ‘Manon’ is not a deep story. She’s not a deep character. So it has to be funny, silly, charming, erotical — not dark. She’s not evil. She’s like, I screw up my life, but, well, too bad!”
For the 2007-8 season, Netrebko was scheduled to appear at the Met in 11 performances of the same opera, Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” five of them last month and in September, six more starting this month, including the live broadcast. Her Roméo for all was supposed to be Villazón, one of her favorite partners, with whom she has recorded an album of duets that came out here this fall. The two singers have a singular rapport, and some of their past performances of “Roméo,” as well as of “Traviata” and “Manon,” have been so steamy as to convince the paparazzi that they must be lovers in real life. (In fact, Villazón is married, with children, and Netrebko was until recently involved with the Italian bass-baritone Simone Alberghini.) In September, however, Villazón, who like Netrebko (and sometimes with her, to promote the new record) was carrying on a breakneck schedule of concert appearances, announced that on medical advice he was canceling everything, leaving the Met to hastily cobble together a revolving-door list of replacements. Roberto Alagna, who filled in for the opening performance in September, had to learn the staging of the production in a matter of days, and standing in her dressing room during a run-through at the Met one afternoon, Netrebko said that the rehearsals were “very stressful.” She had a bottle of fruit juice in one hand and a double latte in the other. “For my sex scene,” she explained. “I need energy.”
The sex scene in this particular production requires Roméo and Juliette to cavort in a bed suspended 12 feet above the stage. When the curtain came up, Netrebko, wearing a thin, low-cut nightgown, and Alagna, barelegged, in a nightshirt, slid around, trying to sing and caress each other simultaneously. The conductor, Plácido Domingo, interrupted them several times to work on tempo and phrasing and, at one point, to break the mood, Netrebko picked up the front of Roméo’s shirt and began flapping it, exposing his underpants. (For the opener, a few days later, he wisely kept his trousers on.)
Domingo, who began casting Netrebko in productions of his Washington National Opera soon after seeing her in 2002, said recently that “she is one of the great singers of her generation — or of any generation.” And he added: “I love to conduct her. She brings sometimes the right amount of humor into situations where maybe there is tension. But she is the right kind of diva — very professional, very hard-working, and brings the right attitude to rehearsals. And a great artist, able to create great feeling. For the poison aria in ‘Roméo,’ she kept refining, emphasizing just a quarter note to enlarge the pathos of the moment. This is what the great singers do all the time.”
“Look, I am normal,” Netrebko told me last summer. “Normal, normal, normal!” And she is, though at the animated, high-energy end of normality. She laughs easily and gestures broadly, waving her arms, rolling her eyes, sticking out her tongue. When a man suddenly materialized at our restaurant table bearing not one but five copies of her “Figaro” CD, which needed to be autographed on the spot, she sweetly complied and went out of her way to chat with him a bit. When I was trying to discuss her Carnegie Hall concert this past May with the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and compliment the fine points of her performance of the Letter Scene from “Eugene Onegin,” she found it necessary to explain that I didn’t know what I was talking about. She did so gently, however, and added, “You are very nice.”
Netrebko’s friend and mentor, Renata Scotto, herself a diva in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, says that an important clue to Netrebko’s nature is her Russianness. “She’s very humble, very truthful,” she remarked of Netrebko. “And I think a lot of Russians are like this. She’s full of the joy of life and also a very hard worker.”
Netrebko concedes that there may be something to this, but also says that another Russian trait, which she clearly does not share, is melancholy, passivity and being unable to decide what you want from life. A phrase she uses a lot is “I try” or “I will try,” and you get the sense that she is very much the stage manager of her own story.
The younger of two sisters, Netrebko grew up in the southwestern Russian city of Krasnodar, along the Kuban River, north of the Black Sea. “It’s kind of a boring city, with not much culture,” she says now, and is notable chiefly for the richness of the surrounding agricultural land: “If you plant something there, in five minutes it will grow.” Her mother, who died five years ago, was a telecommunications engineer. Her father is a geologist. “He is still famous in Krasnodar,” Netrebko told me. “I am very proud.”
The family, she went on, was “let’s say not rich, but well-to-do: we always ate well and had nice clothes to wear.” The Netrebkos lived in a big house by Russian standards, with a grape arbor in back. Yuri Netrebko liked to make wine, and on weekends he would often give outdoor parties for 30 or 40 guests at a time. “It was a very happy family, and it was a wonderful childhood,” his daughter says. “Always there were friends and relatives around.”
Netrebko’s parents both loved music, but their taste didn’t extend much beyond operetta. They seldom listened to classical music, and for that matter, neither does Netrebko except when she’s rehearsing or performing. (She likes Green Day and the Black Eyed Peas, and this summer, she said, she listened to a lot of Amy Winehouse.) Netrebko started piano lessons when she was 6 but eventually grew bored and dropped them. At 7, she joined a children’s chorus, where she became a soloist, and in high school she was part of a traveling ensemble of singers, dancers and musicians.
Netrebko was not much of a student, and at 16 she moved to St. Petersburg with the idea of becoming an actress, until she discovered that lots of other young women had the same dream. “The competition was so great,” she said, “and I heard very bad rumors about how you had to sleep with the directors. So I decided to try to be an opera singer. People said I had a voice.”
She studied for two years at a musical college and then applied to the conservatory in St. Petersburg: “I said to myself: ‘O.K. I will try. Maybe they will take me, and if not the worst that can happen is I will go home and be in the operetta. That will be more than enough.’ ” The conservatory took her, but initially at least, some of her colleagues were not encouraging, telling her that her voice was so small that the best she could hope for was a place in the chorus. “But I thought maybe I’m better than they think,” Netrebko recalled. “I found something in my voice. It’s very clean and very recognizable. It wasn’t big, but it was always very pointed — it came to a whole. That’s why I continued to think I might be a singer.”
At the time, to make some pocket money and for the chance to watch rehearsals, Netrebko was also washing floors at the Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg’s famous opera and ballet house, and this has given rise to a myth that is the Russian version of “La Cenerentola,” the Cinderella opera, with Valéry Gergiev, general and artistic director of the Mariinsky, swooping in and rescuing her from the mop and bucket. In fact, by the time she auditioned for Gergiev she had already retired from scrubbing and had even won the Glinka, perhaps Russia’s most famous vocal competition. But Gergiev was an early and steadfast supporter. In 1994 he cast her as Barbarina in a Kirov Opera production of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and then the director bumped her up to Susanna, the starring role. A year later Gergiev took an even bigger chance — an “insane risk,” he later called it — by casting Netrebko, only 23, as Lyudmila in a San Francisco Opera production of Glinka’s “Ruslan and Lyudmila.” It was her U.S. debut.
“Gergiev, he’s crazy, crazy!” Netrebko told me. “There are so many young singers he’s given opportunities to — big roles at a young age, which never happens in America. They have what they call the young artists’ programs, but what they’re really doing is putting singers in their graves. They’re sitting there in the big theaters wasting their best years, studying, covering, looking at the big stars. It’s so wrong. You can never learn to sing if you are just watching.”
The role that put Netrebko on the map and made her an international star was a 2002 Salzburg production of “Don Giovanni,” conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who took the unusual step of casting her as Donna Anna, the Commendatore’s daughter, who is forcibly seduced by the Don, setting the whole plot in motion. This is a part that, as Netrebko says, usually goes to “a big fat lady—angry, loud!” The role used to be a standby of Joan Sutherland and also of Birgit Nilsson (sometimes known, impolitely, as Beergut). Netrebko played Donna Anna as a sexy young woman in a slip, who kisses the Don in such a way as to make you wonder if she was forced into anything at all. By all accounts her version of “Crudele? Ah no, mio bene!” Anna’s signature aria, in which she apologizes to her betrothed for not marrying him just yet, was ravishing because she invested it with such longing and sensuousness.
Last year she appeared in an even more controversial Harnoncourt production, “Le Nozze” this time, directed (by Claus Guth) in such a way that it more nearly resembled a play by Ibsen or Strindberg than a comic opera. Just about everyone here is neurotic and oversexed, including Susanna (Netrebko), who has clearly been receptive to the Count’s advances even before the curtain comes up and is also turned on by Cherubino. To play the part Netrebko has to give up a lot of Susanna’s traditional charm, and yet she makes the character appealing, and even sympathetic, through the richness of her singing. Netrebko found this role hard, she told me, because Susanna has so few high notes and also because the character was so complicated. “This Susanna is a lost person,” she said. “Very lost. She doesn’t know what to do, and it’s sad.”
At the Met, where Netrebko has also starred in “Rigoletto” and “La Bohème,” Gelb says he feels she really came into her own two seasons ago, as Norina in “Don Pasquale.” But it was her role as Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” that was a sort of watershed. Some people loved it; others began to question whether she was really suited to this kind of bel canto role.
“I Puritani” is seldom put on, and for good reason. Except for a scene in which the heroine goes mad for about half an hour, not a whole lot happens. Mad scenes are practically obligatory in bel canto opera, and they’re hard to pull off, because, typically, the more distraught the heroine becomes, the more high, tricky passages she has to sing. It used to be that sopranos would just stand there and sing the notes, without much attention to the madwoman aspect, but that hasn’t washed for years now, and it certainly won’t at Peter Gelb’s Met. Netrebko, who says that at first she was dismayed by the part, because she found the character a bore, eventually threw herself into it, but during some of the coloratura passage work she wound up snatching breaths in places that some listeners found sloppy and inappropriate.
“I thought her ‘Puritani’ was a real drag,” Peter G. Davis, a longtime critic on the New York classical music scene, said. “I don’t think she has the vocal technique for that kind of singing. It depends on what your expectations are, I guess, and in her case I have a lot. She has a lovely sound, a beautiful voice — so much talent, so much to offer, that I sometimes feel shortchanged. In ‘Puritani,’ the technique was really spotty, as if she didn’t have a sense of how the phrases should be shaped.”
But Netrebko says she felt very comfortable in the part, and she defends her technique. “The cantilena is also bel canto,” she said, referring to the smoother passages, “and this I think I do well. We’re losing the school of bel canto, because so many singers are doing it light, without the full body. Real legato is very important.” She paused and smiled. “If you ask me about vocal technique, I don’t know anything. I could never be a teacher. I just know what my teacher told me: Always sing with a full voice. When they tell you, less sound, more piano — no.” She added: “I know what I’m missing. I know what I have to work on. Coloratura. And I sing sharp sometimes,” meaning she sometimes hits a note on the high, screechy side. “It happens when I’m nervous. I get like this” — she tensed her stomach muscles and clenched her fists — “and the breath comes out forced and gives me the high intonation. I’m fighting it. I’m also looking for more color in the voice, but it only comes with experience. Singing experience and also life experience. I definitely know that I gained a lot in the last two years, during which I had a lot of storms in my personal life. After that I found something in my singing which was never there before. Interesting. This is the part that is coming from your soul.”
Netrebko’s performances in “Roméo” this fall appear to have won over even the cattiest of the bloggers. The worst they could say was that her French pronunciation was inexact. She was ravishing and heartbreaking, playing Juliette not as a besotted teenager but as a sensual young woman with a depth of feeling beyond her years.
In August, Netrebko caused a minor ruckus when at the last minute she canceled an appearance at the Salzburg Festival, where she was supposed to sing Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” The Austrians took offense, pointing out that she seemed in fine voice when a few days earlier she gave a concert in Baden-Baden. “I was sick,” she said. “I can sing when I’m sick if I have to, but the question is how long can you continue to do that? At Covent Garden last June I had such a fever that I couldn’t continue after the first act, and since then I’ve decided I have to be more careful.”
Peter Gelb told me: “The Salzburg thing was a little unfair. Anna has been unusually reliable and dependable. She’s so healthy, in fact, that it has probably been taken for granted.” But he went on to say that for singers of Netrebko’s caliber, burnout is always a concern, because so many demands are put upon them. “Managers of opera houses all worry about this,” he said. “Smart singers worry about it as well. If you’re going to have a long career, you have to take care of yourself.”
Even the multitasking Valéry Gergiev, of all people (besides running the Kirov Opera and Ballet, he is a guest conductor all over the world), has worried that Netrebko may be spreading herself too thin, especially by singing so many open-air concerts.
The concerts make money, however, and they also give a singer a different kind of exposure. “I hate them,” Netrebko said of her concert engagements, “because they’re so difficult.” But then she recalled with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm a concert she had just sung in Cologne. “I sang before 16,000 people, and most of these were people who never go to the opera. Many of them can’t afford it. So I am giving them something.” She sang with a microphone, she explained, but occasionally would step away from it so the audience could hear her true, unamplified voice. “They loved it!” she said.
Just as dangerous as singing too much is singing the wrong roles, and some critics have complained that Netrebko has learned too many parts too quickly and should be sticking to lighter roles. She insists, however, that it is important for her to strike a balance between light and heavy roles, and she also says she believes in taking on parts that are a little more demanding than she’s comfortable with. “Donna Anna, Traviata — people say, No, no, don’t do it, it’s too early,” she said. “But I think, No, I’d like to try, and now look, if I let them, they’d have me sing ‘Traviata’ all the time, and it would destroy my voice in three years!”
She added: “I have an intuition, and usually my intuition is right. I have a feeling for whether a role will be good or bad for me, and I almost never make a mistake. There were just a few that weren’t good. ‘Rigoletto’ — the first act is hell and the whole time I was shaking. Zerlina — horrible! But Mimi I knew would be good. I have to work extra to make the right sound in the low register. The high register is no problem, except you can’t make this sound all the time or your high notes begin to suffer.” She talked about someday wanting to sing Elettra in Mozart’s “Idomeneo” and Desdemona in Verdi’s “Othello,” and then suddenly said: “The role I really want to sing is Elisabetta from ‘Don Carlo.’ I really love this music, and I think that in five years I will be able to do it. I will try. If not, not. But I have a feeling it will be a good role.”
Every now and then, Netrebko worries about her biological timetable as well as her artistic one. “I do have a private life,” she told me, “and right now it’s very difficult.” As for marriage and a family, she said: “I don’t know. I’m not ready. Life is so crazy. There are just a few years left, and I have to think whether I want it or not. Probably I want it.” She paused, then said: “But it will change my life a lot. I really don’t want to sink with a family and close myself to life. Right now I’m not missing a family. I’m not missing it at all. I’m just a different person. If you don’t have all that when you’re 25, then at 35 it’s very difficult. But we’ll see. Maybe in one year I’ll be married and I’ll get bored of singing.” She laughed. “I can’t believe it!”
Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The New York Times.
Correction: December 2, 2007
An article on Page 32 of The Times Magazine today, about the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, misstates the date of a concert she performed at Carnegie Hall. It was in May 2007, not June.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes
New York Times
December 2, 2007
Music
Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
NASHVILLE
TWO years ago, the book “Lost Delta Found” criticized the American folklorist Alan Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. With the release of “Recording Black Culture,” an album consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to buttress this claim.
Mr. Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Mr. Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on “Recording Black Culture,” instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.
Robert Gordon, who edited “Lost Delta Found” with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Mr. Work’s recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called “I Am His, He Is Mine” as an example.
“There’s nascent boogie-woogie in that music,” said Mr. Gordon, who has also written a biography of the blues singer Muddy Waters, whom Mr. Work and Mr. Lomax recorded on their trip to Coahoma County, Miss., in 1941. “That piano would have made many loyal churchgoers angry: a harbinger of the response to R&B and rock ’n’ roll.”
The pressing harmonic and rhythmic interplay of the Heavenly Gate Quartet singing “If I Had My Way” offers further evidence of this evolution. The heavy syncopation heard there and in Mr. Work’s recording of the Fairfield Four’s “Walk Around in Dry Bones” presage doo-wop a good decade before vocal groups like the Clovers and the Coasters would establish it as the soundtrack for young black America in the 1950s.
This isn’t to claim Dead Sea Scrolls-like significance for the music on the new CD. Black Americans, though, were making the transition from rural to urban life. Spirituals were being supplanted by music that was more agreeable to black communities in which congregations were buying pianos so they could play the songs of contemporary gospel composers like the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey during worship. Mr. Work was committed to capturing these changes as they were happening rather than after the fact.
Issued by Spring Fed Records, a label based in Woodbury, Tenn., “Recording Black Culture” demonstrates not only Mr. Work’s understanding of the dynamic way vernacular music functioned in black culture but also his omnivorous musical appetite. In addition to dramatic examples of gospel singers anticipating rock ’n’ roll, the selections include rare recordings ranging from black Sacred Harp singing to the virtuoso banjo playing of Nathan Frazier, performing as half of the banjo-and-fiddle duo Frazier & Patterson.
Classically trained at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (now a part of Juilliard), Mr. Work became a professor of music at Fisk University in Nashville; from 1947 to 1966 he was the director of the school’s spirituals chorus, the Jubilee Singers. His son John Work IV recalled that his father, who died in 1967, was also conversant with jazz.
“I remember Duke Ellington coming to the house on at least three occasions,” John Work IV wrote in an e-mail message from New York City. “On one of these, I am sure that I was a slight embarrassment to my father when Maestro Ellington went to the piano and played ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and one other major composition and I could recognize neither.”
Mr. Work’s expansive grasp of black music was reflected in his approach to collecting source material. “Instead of pigeonholing musicians in terms of what he wanted them to play, Work acted as a fly on the wall and recorded what was there at the moment,” said Evan Hatch, the producer with Mr. Nemerov of “Recording Black Culture.” “He accepted what was indicative of the culture, as opposed to only going after what he expected or thought should be there.”
Mr. Work’s method of documenting the music proved a corrective to the sometimes romantic approach of Mr. Lomax, who viewed the spiritual, for example, as the apex of black culture and largely ignored the new sounds emerging from Southern black churches. “Blues had become established,” Mr. Gordon said, “and churchgoers began to ask, ‘Why should the devil get all the good tunes?’”
Mr. Lomax also seemed preoccupied with old work songs at a time when the cotton fields were becoming mechanized. “Workers weren’t just dragging the big sacks behind them in the fields anymore,” Mr. Nemerov explained. “Muddy Waters was a tractor driver.
“But to be fair to the Lomaxes,” he added, referring both to Mr. Lomax and to his father, the pioneering folklorist John Lomax, “they were interested in preserving music that wasn’t going to be around in 10 years’ time. You can’t fault them for that, but not knowing all the details, modern listeners get a skewed view of what black people liked to sing. Thus you have people listening to this music 20 or 30 years later going, ‘Oh, look, black people love to sing ‘Go Down, Moses,’ when that wasn’t really the case.”
Racial dynamics at the time might have contributed to the Lomaxes’ view of the music. Because of the prevalence of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, many Southern blacks might have been wary of white folklorists from the Northeast. As a black man and a Southerner, Mr. Work would have had a much easier time gaining entree to churches, dances and other social events than would his white counterparts.
“Work clearly would have had a rapport with the church singers, especially with the church hierarchy, being from a religiously based college like Fisk,” said David Evans, the director of the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis. “There was also the reputation of the Jubilee Singers. All of that would have given him a kind of in.”
Unable in some cases to gain such access, the Lomaxes turned to the prisons, where inmates like Lead Belly had no choice but to sing at the warden’s bidding. “Lead Belly of course is an icon of American music, so it’s not to be dismissed,” said Mr. Nemerov. “Nevertheless, the Lomaxes gave America a very peculiar view of black music. Professor Work’s recordings give us a much more balanced view, both in terms of music and social class, of the black culture of the time.”
Why Mr. Work did not publicize the acetates that have been meticulously remastered on “Recording Black Culture” remains unclear. When Mr. Nemerov found the discs in the attic of the Work home near the Fisk campus a few years ago, they appeared to have been played frequently, suggesting that they were dear to Mr. Work.
Some of the recordings that he had made with Mr. Lomax, largely the work songs and spirituals favored by Mr. Lomax, had been deposited in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. The rest of the performances, which have gone unheard by the public for the better part of seven decades, give a more expansive view of the black vernacular music of the time.
“Professor Work had big ears,” Mr. Nemerov said. “The overarching theme here is just how much music there was in the black community before World War II. It just seemed to be everywhere, and in every layer of black culture, not just in the cotton fields and prisons.”
December 2, 2007
Music
Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
NASHVILLE
TWO years ago, the book “Lost Delta Found” criticized the American folklorist Alan Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. With the release of “Recording Black Culture,” an album consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to buttress this claim.
Mr. Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Mr. Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on “Recording Black Culture,” instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.
Robert Gordon, who edited “Lost Delta Found” with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Mr. Work’s recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called “I Am His, He Is Mine” as an example.
“There’s nascent boogie-woogie in that music,” said Mr. Gordon, who has also written a biography of the blues singer Muddy Waters, whom Mr. Work and Mr. Lomax recorded on their trip to Coahoma County, Miss., in 1941. “That piano would have made many loyal churchgoers angry: a harbinger of the response to R&B and rock ’n’ roll.”
The pressing harmonic and rhythmic interplay of the Heavenly Gate Quartet singing “If I Had My Way” offers further evidence of this evolution. The heavy syncopation heard there and in Mr. Work’s recording of the Fairfield Four’s “Walk Around in Dry Bones” presage doo-wop a good decade before vocal groups like the Clovers and the Coasters would establish it as the soundtrack for young black America in the 1950s.
This isn’t to claim Dead Sea Scrolls-like significance for the music on the new CD. Black Americans, though, were making the transition from rural to urban life. Spirituals were being supplanted by music that was more agreeable to black communities in which congregations were buying pianos so they could play the songs of contemporary gospel composers like the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey during worship. Mr. Work was committed to capturing these changes as they were happening rather than after the fact.
Issued by Spring Fed Records, a label based in Woodbury, Tenn., “Recording Black Culture” demonstrates not only Mr. Work’s understanding of the dynamic way vernacular music functioned in black culture but also his omnivorous musical appetite. In addition to dramatic examples of gospel singers anticipating rock ’n’ roll, the selections include rare recordings ranging from black Sacred Harp singing to the virtuoso banjo playing of Nathan Frazier, performing as half of the banjo-and-fiddle duo Frazier & Patterson.
Classically trained at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (now a part of Juilliard), Mr. Work became a professor of music at Fisk University in Nashville; from 1947 to 1966 he was the director of the school’s spirituals chorus, the Jubilee Singers. His son John Work IV recalled that his father, who died in 1967, was also conversant with jazz.
“I remember Duke Ellington coming to the house on at least three occasions,” John Work IV wrote in an e-mail message from New York City. “On one of these, I am sure that I was a slight embarrassment to my father when Maestro Ellington went to the piano and played ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and one other major composition and I could recognize neither.”
Mr. Work’s expansive grasp of black music was reflected in his approach to collecting source material. “Instead of pigeonholing musicians in terms of what he wanted them to play, Work acted as a fly on the wall and recorded what was there at the moment,” said Evan Hatch, the producer with Mr. Nemerov of “Recording Black Culture.” “He accepted what was indicative of the culture, as opposed to only going after what he expected or thought should be there.”
Mr. Work’s method of documenting the music proved a corrective to the sometimes romantic approach of Mr. Lomax, who viewed the spiritual, for example, as the apex of black culture and largely ignored the new sounds emerging from Southern black churches. “Blues had become established,” Mr. Gordon said, “and churchgoers began to ask, ‘Why should the devil get all the good tunes?’”
Mr. Lomax also seemed preoccupied with old work songs at a time when the cotton fields were becoming mechanized. “Workers weren’t just dragging the big sacks behind them in the fields anymore,” Mr. Nemerov explained. “Muddy Waters was a tractor driver.
“But to be fair to the Lomaxes,” he added, referring both to Mr. Lomax and to his father, the pioneering folklorist John Lomax, “they were interested in preserving music that wasn’t going to be around in 10 years’ time. You can’t fault them for that, but not knowing all the details, modern listeners get a skewed view of what black people liked to sing. Thus you have people listening to this music 20 or 30 years later going, ‘Oh, look, black people love to sing ‘Go Down, Moses,’ when that wasn’t really the case.”
Racial dynamics at the time might have contributed to the Lomaxes’ view of the music. Because of the prevalence of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, many Southern blacks might have been wary of white folklorists from the Northeast. As a black man and a Southerner, Mr. Work would have had a much easier time gaining entree to churches, dances and other social events than would his white counterparts.
“Work clearly would have had a rapport with the church singers, especially with the church hierarchy, being from a religiously based college like Fisk,” said David Evans, the director of the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis. “There was also the reputation of the Jubilee Singers. All of that would have given him a kind of in.”
Unable in some cases to gain such access, the Lomaxes turned to the prisons, where inmates like Lead Belly had no choice but to sing at the warden’s bidding. “Lead Belly of course is an icon of American music, so it’s not to be dismissed,” said Mr. Nemerov. “Nevertheless, the Lomaxes gave America a very peculiar view of black music. Professor Work’s recordings give us a much more balanced view, both in terms of music and social class, of the black culture of the time.”
Why Mr. Work did not publicize the acetates that have been meticulously remastered on “Recording Black Culture” remains unclear. When Mr. Nemerov found the discs in the attic of the Work home near the Fisk campus a few years ago, they appeared to have been played frequently, suggesting that they were dear to Mr. Work.
Some of the recordings that he had made with Mr. Lomax, largely the work songs and spirituals favored by Mr. Lomax, had been deposited in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. The rest of the performances, which have gone unheard by the public for the better part of seven decades, give a more expansive view of the black vernacular music of the time.
“Professor Work had big ears,” Mr. Nemerov said. “The overarching theme here is just how much music there was in the black community before World War II. It just seemed to be everywhere, and in every layer of black culture, not just in the cotton fields and prisons.”
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