Old and new

Dan Bern: The Torn Flag
From My Country II, 2004

No top ten list from me. I have a complete inability to rank my favorite movies, music, books, or anything else. I could maybe do a top fifty, in no particular order. Maybe.

So I thought I'd pick one song to usher in 2005. Anything celebratory would be inappropriate given this week's incomprehensible tragedy and the past 20 months of war.

So I went with "The Torn Flag." Pete Seeger wrote the poem in 1969, and Dan Bern put it to music a few months ago. In just two minutes it captures my fear and cautious hope as we head into the second half of the decade.

Happy New Year, everyone. Have fun and be safe.

Click here to donate to Oxfam's Asia Earthquake Fund.

Click here to visit Dan Bern's website

All Blue

Velha Guarda da Portela: Sabiá Cantador, Lenço, and Volta Meu Amor (w/Marisa Monte)
From Tudo Azul, 2000

The first sound we hear is a knife scraping a plate. Then a cavaquinho strums a samba rhythm, the clear but slightly tooth-deprived voice of an old sambista joins in, and suddenly we’re in Rio, 1950, at a backyard samba de roda, clapping hands and dancing while the churrasco cooks slowly on the grill.

This is the Velha Guarda da Portela, veteran members of the Portela samba school, performing the group’s classic sambas of forty, fifty, and sixty years ago. I guess you could call them Brazil’s Buena Vista Social Club, but the simple production makes this disc more raw and guitar than anything Ry Cooder ever marred with his evil slide gutiar and reverb. Instead, this project was bankrolled and produced by Marisa Monte, Brazilian songstress of Tribalistas fame and daughter of a former Portela director. She lends her earthy, resonant voice to one track, and other than that, it’s hands-off.

Click here to order the CD from Amazon

Nickel Creek's impressive, chubby past

You may know the bluegrass/pop band Nickel Creek, who picked up a Grammy this year for their latest album, This Side.

You may not know that their frontman, Chris Thile, was a child mandolin prodigy with shellacked hair (see above) who recorded his first record at age thirteen. By the time he was sixteen, he was on par with the hottest session players in Nashville, as Stealing Second shows.

The really creepy part is not the technical ability – you expect the prodigy types to have freakishly fast and precise playing. It’s the maturity. Chris composed every track, and his tunes are interesting, complex, and, well, mature. Same with his improvising. The only place he shows his age is his song titles, which mainly have to do with baseball and Star Wars.

Here are a couple of sample cuts. The first is a blazing fast bluegrass tune where the backing Nashville studio cats shine without overshadowing the kid. The second is a beautiful duet with dobro wizard Jerry Douglas.

And while you listen to 16-year-old Chris Thile, consider that he’s now 23 and much, much better. Although he still hasn't quite tamed the hair.

Chris Thile: Stealing Second and Golden Pond
From Stealing Second, 1996

Click here to buy the album from Sugar Hill Records

I found her when the snow was on the ground

Wesleyan University, February 2001

Here's some seasonal music for those of you who actually have seasons. I celebrated the solstice like a good Northern Californian -- by going hiking. But I hear it's pretty cold for the rest of the country, so enjoy these songs: "While Roving On a Winter's Night" is beautifully arranged and produced by violinist Darol Anger, with vocals taken care of by Dar Williams and John Gorka. Tim O'Brien puts some nice spin on the Winter Solstice; the days only get longer from here. Bill Monroe tells us how he found his true love thanks to the freshly fallen snow (of course, she's dead now). And then there's Ella and Louis.

Enjoy the weekend and stay warm.

Dar Williams and John Gorka: While Roving On a Winter's Night
Tim O'Brien and NewGrange: NewGrange
Bill Monroe: Footprints in the Snow
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm

Click here to see how the liberals, gays, and atheists stole Christmas

Some files down

Update: everything is back up.

Songs from last week are down for the moment. They should be back up by this evening.

New music tomorrow.

Okay, I give in

I'm a Jew who dislikes Christmas music, and Chanukah songs don't really spin my dreidel either. That said, there's one holiday album I love, so here we go.

I think I like this recording because I can separate the songs from the cheesy lyrics and gaudy holiday imagery; it stands alone as great music, good for all seasons. Midnight Clear is a beautiful and imaginative collection of holiday songs arranged for solo acoustic guitar by Mike Marshall, a Bay Area musician better known as one of the world's top mandolin players.

The CD opens with rain, the sound of the holidays here in northern California, recorded outside the Oakland studio. And the music is perfect for a rainy day, or for cold weather, reading, red-eye flights, or listening on headphones as you fall asleep. Mike takes the best-known holiday songs, strips them down to bare bones, and takes some liberties with harmony and rhythm. He excavates these songs, usually buried under a mountain of strings, horns, bells, choirs, barking dogs, and it turns out there are some great melodies hidden under all that junk.

You'll hear more of Mike Marshall here in the future, playing all sorts of crazy notes on all sorts of instruments. For now, enjoy the perfect simplicity of his guitar.

Mike Marshall: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear and Angels We Have Heard On High
From Midnight Clear, 1998

Click here to order Midnight Clear from Acorn Music.

Help

After less than two weeks, you guys have nearly maxed out the monthly bandwidth limits on my free Earthlink server space. Can anyone suggest a good, inexpensive alternative for mp3 hosting?

The rhythm of the sea

Okay, enough with the Welsh accordion crap. Here’'s something catchy.

Adriana Calcanhotto is an A-list star in Brazil but relatively unknown outside the country. She was hailed as the next Elis Regina when she first came on the scene, but that hardly covers it. As strong an influence as Elis may be, Calcanhotto’'s music is informed more by the tropicália she listened to growing up – Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa. She follows their creative principle of anthropophagy: the cannibalistic consumption of sounds and ideas, foreign and domestic, into a new, Brazilian final product.

Calcanhotto's the real deal: singer, composer, poet, guitarist, arranger. Her songs are catchy and smart, full of clever wordplay and great hooks, accessible but meaty and layered enough to satisfy any music snob (hi!). The engineering is sleek but organic; textured grooves and beats anchor her acoustic guitar and hypnotic voice.

These tracks are from Maritmo (mar + ritmo, get it?), a marine-inspired concept album from 1998. The title track is a trip along the beach, a cinematic series of images and sensations. “Vambora” was used in on the soundtrack to a popular soap opera in 1998 – the novelas actually tend to have pretty good taste like that. Amazon has some of her albums, but this one is tough to find -- if anyone finds it for sale, let me know and I'll put up a link.

Adriana Calcanhotto: Maritmo and Vambora
From Maritmo, 1998


In addition to the two usual tracks, here's a bonus that was just too beautiful to leave out: a duet with 85-year-old Dorival Caymmi, a living legend of Brazilian music. He’s sort of a Woody Guthrie of Brazilian song: no socialist anthems, but he wrote a huge catalog of classic songs that capture the mythology and folklore of Bahia, tell stories of common folks'’ lives, and are firmly planted in the collective memory of the entire nation. In fitting with the theme of the album, Caymmi's song “"Quem vem pra beira do mar”" tells of the mythic power of the sea:
"“Whoever comes to the seashore / never wishes to return... I walked just to walk / and every road led to the sea...”"

Adriana Calcanhotto and Dorival Caymmi: Quem vem pra beira do mar

Click here to visit her website (if you read Portuguese or Spanish)

Give the accordion some love

This CD is perfect. Every plucked guitar string, each breath of sound from the accordion is exactly right.

Yeah, accordion. Seriously. This accordion/guitar duet CD from Karen Tweed and Ian Carr, unpronouncably titled Fyace, might be the most sublime 50 minutes of music I own.

These are traditional Western European tunes:– Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Swedish, and so on. Meant for dancing, you repeat the tune over and over with a few variations until the dancers want a new song, so when you take the tunes out of the dancehall, you gotta make them interesting.

Karen Tweed plays the melodies beautifully and flawlessly, but the real star is Ian Carr. His insanely inventive guitar playing turns the whole idea of "accompanist" on its head. He treats the guitar like a piano, plunking deep sustained pedal tones while dancing around the melody on the higher strings. Each time through the melody, he takes an entirely new approach to backup, finds every possible rhythmic emphasis, harmonic twist, dynamic effect.

When you listen to these tunes, treat the accordion itself as sort of a musical anchor; let it fall into the background and focus on the backup. Listen to Carr tell stories with his guitar; listen to his endless supply of surprising and wonderful ideas.

Listen to “Eilidh.” At 2:10, Tweed starts a new tune and Carr plays a simple four-note figure behind her. You wait for him to break into chords, or something more complex. He doesn'’t. You wait. At 3:00, he'’s still playing the same four-note drone. You wonder what the hell he's thinking. At 3:10, he plucks a bass note four times, and all the built-up tension falls away. When he finally breaks into “normal” backup, the song soars. Perfect.

And hey, leave a comment, because it’'s nice to know if folks are enjoying this stuff.

Ian Carr and Karen Tweed: Eilidh and Bigger
From Fyace, 2000

Click here to order the CD from Amazon (only one left in stock right now!)

Brazilian hinterland jazz

Quarteto Novo existed for just three years and changed the face of Brazilian jazz. Tom Jobim had already brought jazz harmony and sensibility to Brazilian music in the '50s, when he and João Gilberto put the brakes on samba, turned down the volume and replaced the traditional percussion with a drum kit, piano and bass, creating bossa nova. Samba had swept across Europe and North America years earlier thanks to Carmen Miranda, and bossa nova did the same.

The members of Quarteto Novo had their musical roots in the less famous but equally vibrant sounds of Brazil's northeastern backlands: baião, xaxado, frevo. They recorded just one 30-minute album during their brief lifespan; it shows how they married bebop and modal jazz with the those rhythms of the Brazilian northeast. The blend was so effortless, the grooves so natural, rare and beautiful that it made waves through the jazz world and garnered percussionist Airto Moreira an invitation from Miles Davis to travel to the U.S. to join the Bitches Brew sessions, which catapulted him to worldwide fame. The group's flautist/pianist, Hermeto Pascoal, is a short, nearly-blind albino, and perhaps the purest musical genius ever to come from Brazil (more on him some other time).

The album has since gone out of print, and Quarteto Novo mostly forgotten, though their influence is still felt in Brazil and abroad. Enjoy these two cuts, and keep your eye out for a reissue.

Quarteto Novo: Fica Mal com Deus and Vim de Santana
From Quarteto Novo, 1967

Holy crap...

Scissorkick has a great post up about the "insanely talented" Mike B. Read the post and download the video clip which, as Steve writes, "will truly blow your mind." The guy plays a samba on the guitar while beatboxing and humming a counter-melody. Holy crap.

New music tomorrow.

The best folksinger you've never heard of

When you discover Greg Brown, you wonder where he's been hiding all your life. But he hasn't been hiding; he's been writing, recording and performing for a dedicated legion of fans across the country since the 1980s. And Greg is a folksinger's folksinger: his songs have been covered by Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco, Lucinda Williams, Shawn Colvin, Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana and Gillian Welch, to name a few.

He grew up in Iowa farm country where his father was a Holy Roller preacher and his mother played electric guitar, and today he lives on his grandparents' old farm. The rough heartland hill country seeps from his songs and gives a gravelly edge to his resonant baritone.

Greg isn't a midwestern relic, though. His songs are alternately joyful, melancholy, and dark observations of the 21st-century human condition. Maybe it's the voice, or maybe it's the intense sincerity of his songs, which can make you laugh or give you chills, but Greg has that something that makes him much more than just another folksinger.

Greg Brown: Two Little Feet and Hey Baby Hey
From Further In, 1996

Click here to visit Greg's label, Red House Records

Tom Zé - Discovering the floor sander

David Byrne discovered Tom Zé working at a gas station in northeastern Brazil 1989.

Tom Zé helped Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil launch the Tropicália song movement in the 1960s, but while they rose to international stardom, he gradually slipped into obscurity. The main reason: he was ahead of his time. His music, full of remixed, sampled, cut-n-paste quirkiness, invented instruments and weird phonetic wordplay, was just too jarring for Brazilian ears in the '60s and '70s. He never stopped tinkering with music, though:

By 1975, Tom had discovered the floor sander. “The sound was so beautiful,” he remembers, “it brought tears to the eye.” Eventually he constructed an instrument of triggered sanders, typewriters, blenders and radios, mounted in a wooden cabinet. “The instrument took up two Volkswagen buses,” he reminisces, and the greater part of the beach house Tom stored it in. When Tom sold the house in order to finance a concert, his neighbors dismantled the cabinet for firewood. It was an unusually cold winter.

Luckily for the world, David Byrne came across Zé's 1975 LP, Estudando o Samba, and promptly hunted down Zé (see aforementioned gas station) and signed him to his Luaka Bop label. Zé is back on top - some of his older music has been reissued, at least in Brazil, and he's become a favorite of music critics and in-the-know world music fans.

Here are a couple of cuts from Estudando o Samba, the album that first caught David Byrne's ear. "A Felicidade" is a stripped-down deconstruction of Jobim's bossa nova classic. Listen with headphones or you'll miss the endless layers of sound.

Tom Zé: A Felicidade and Vai (Menina Amanhã de Manhã)
From Estudando o Samba, 1975

Buy his CDs from Luaka Bop

Just picture Miles Davis at a barn dance...

Bill Monroe invented bluegrass music around the same time Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were creating bebop. Sixty years later, those twin paths of American music have converged in the Wayfaring Strangers.

The vision of jazz violinist Matt Glaser, the Wayfaring Strangers are a 9-piece big band straight out of the primordial ooze of American music, fusing bluegrass, folk, gospel and jazz. Other musicians who went for this blend in the past ended up with entirely new styles with little resemblance to the original building blocks.

Not so with the Wayfaring Strangers. Instead of a streamlined hybrid sound, they keep styles intact, coexisting but remaining distinct. Bluegrass fiddle lines give way to modal jazz piano solos without warning, and for some bizarre reason, it works. A trio of female vocalists holds everything together, while different strains of Americana, from Kentucky to Brooklyn, fade in and out of a hazy background.

"This Train" is a gospel standard, and "Columbus Stockade Blues" is a traditional bluegrass song. These mp3s and more are hosted on the group's website.

The Wayfaring Strangers: This Train and Columbus Stockade Blues
From This Train, 2003

As promised, some twang

Bruce Molsky is a force of nature. Originally a mechanical engineer from New York, he left civilization and headed for the hills of Appalachia to study traditional fiddle styles in the late '70s. Today, he's one of the most incredible traditional instrumentalists in the country. He also rips it on the clawhammer banjo and fingerstyle guitar. And the guy can sing.

This is an unaccompanied fiddle/vocal tune, recorded live in 2001. It's like a very fast, very short ride on a bumpy mountain road with a driver who seems to have a death wish but actually knows exactly what he's doing.

Also, Bruce is one of the only people who can successfully fiddle and sing at the same time.

Bruce Molsky: Cottoneyed Joe

Buy his latest album, Contented Must Be

Remorse

Feeling a bit guilty for bitching about one of my favorite musicians in my first post, I'm offering up one of Caetano's lesser known gems. This is from his hard-to-find 1969 eponymous LP, and showcases everything I love about his early songs: interesting composition, textured arrangement, exploding with energy and life.

Caetano Veloso: Irene
From Caetano Veloso, 1969

Some culturally insensitive whining

Maybe I shouldn't start this blog with a complaint. Ah, screw it. My beef: Caetano Veloso singing in English.

Imagine Bob Dylan and the Beatles rolled into one musician. Add a good helping of samba, bossa nova and other distinctly Brazilian styles. Then imagine that this musician's latest efforts are just as vital and worth hearing as anything he did in the '60s. That gives you a hint of Caetano's stature in Brazilian music. If I could rank musicians and make top-five lists, which I can't (more on this later) he would be in my top five.

But when he decides to cover the Beatles, or, god forbid, Michael Jackson, as he has all too frequently, the results turn out, well, silly. Just something about his accent. Listen to this clip of Caetano singing "Lady Madonna." Great arrangement, nice production... and silly singing.

So when I heard his latest album, A Foreign Sound, was a collection of covers of American standards, I was a bit worried.

As it turns out, Caetano's English accent has improved since the late '60s. Go figure. What drags the album down, of all things, is the arranging. Jaques Morelenbaum, the great Brazilian cellist who has been Caetano's bandleader and, I think, producer for a while now has an unfortunate penchant for sappy string arrangements. Few things can ruin a good song faster than an orchestra. Ech.

The album's saving grace is perhaps the least likely cover of all: Nirvana's "Come As You Are." Give it a listen. I love this track. Everything about it. The bare-bones instrumentation. The simple arrangement -- the single guitar line and the hand percussion. I even like the singing. It's a little four-minute jewel of a song. Give it a listen. Get the whole track. Buy it on iTunes. Download it from Kazaa (actually don't).

So, Caetano, just promise me no more crooning and no more string arrangements unless you do them like David Byrne. Please. Thanks.

Is this thing on?

Still getting this all figured out... I should be up and running soon.