v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Tonglen

Vallejo Nocturno 2019- A recent concert by Tonglen-Derrick Michaels, Sarah Hughes, Zack Branch, Derek Wiegmann at An Die Musik Live

Lira's Great Bossa Nova Testament

 

A telling story of Bossa Novaist Carlos Lira, a great Brazilian composer of that style:

In the early 1960s a rift was opening in the bossa nova movement as some – mostly younger – singers developed a taste for including political messages in their songs.  This approach often also involved a rejection of foreign influences in Brazilian music and a return to samba’s roots.   Carlos Lira (often spelled Lyra), born in Rio de Janeiro on May 11, 1936*, was perhaps the greatest leader of the bossa novistas “engajados” — Portuguese for politically and socially “engaged,” whose ranks included  renowned musicians like Edu Lobo and Nara Leão by the mid 1960s. The other side — “purists” who thought bossa nova should remain faithful to the contemplative serenity of songs like “O Barquinho” — included Lira’s former partner (and Nara Leão’s ex-boyfriend) Ronaldo Bôscoli, and the brothers Marcos Valle and Paulo Sérgio Valle. The Valle brothers composed the song “A Resposta” (“The Answer“) to criticize socially “engaged” bossa nova – and Nara Leão in particular.

In 1961, Lira — together with Oduvaldo Viana Filho, Ferreira Gullar, and others —  founded the Popular Culture Center (Centro Popular de Cultura) of the National Students’ Union, which aimed to support and disseminate “revolutionary art” among university students. By this point, according to Jairo Severiano and Zuza Homem de Mello, Lira was beginning to express frustrations with bossa nova, feeling it was “just a trite modern style, repeating the same romantic musings as always.” He began to compose more explicitly political and nationalistic songs, including “Mister Golden,” “Os Subdesenvolvidos” (“the Underdeveloped”), and “Influência do Jazz,” which laments the tainting of traditional samba with obvious foreign influences.

While the lyrics protest the influence of jazz, the samba is written in an Americanized, bossa nova style– using the pentatonic scale so pervasive in American jazz and blues compositions — with a melody that purposefully recalls American songs like “You Were Meant for Me,” from Singing in the Rain, and “Indian Love Call,” from Rose-Marie. 

“Influência do Jazz” was first released by the Tamba Trio on Zé Trinidade’s sunday program on TV Rio. It was an immediate hit, and was performed twice at the famous bossa nova show at Carnegie Hall — by Lira and the Oscar Castro Neves Quartet.

Lyrics translated to the classic song:

My poor samba
It started getting mixed up and modernized, and got lost
And the sway, where is it? It’s gone
Where’s that shimmy that stirs us up
Poor thing, my samba changed all of a sudden
Influence of jazz

It almost died
And ends up dying, is almost dying, it didn’t realize
That samba sways from side to side
Jazz is different, forward and back
And samba, half dead, got half warped
Influence of jazz

In the afro-cubano, it’s getting complicated
It’s going down the tubes, it’s going
It’s getting warped, going without rest
Going, leaving, falling off the scale

My poor samba
Go back there to the hillside and seek help where you were born
To not be a samba with too many notes
Not be a warped samba, forward and back
You’re going to have to stand on your own to be able to free yourself
From the influence of jazz

Faure's Piano Music Done Right

Strangely, a day after having been mesmerized by Faure's Nocturnes I read this  article by the New Yorker's cinema critic Richard Brody and I'm in very much agreement as I listen to Heidsieck's 1972 recording:

Yesterday morning at home over coffee, when I heard on our local classical-music station, WQXR, that today is Gabriel Fauré’s birthday, I foresaw the occasion to chat about some music that means a lot to me. The composer, who is doubtless best known for his Requiem, is, for me, above all, a composer of piano music. Born in 1845, he died in 1924, and his music ranges, in style and tone, from the romantic through the modern. His two great cycles of piano music—thirteen Nocturnes, composed from 1875 through 1921, and thirteen Barcarolles, composed between 1880 and 1921, move from the limpidly melodic to the ethereally abstract; following them on their course reveals the severe thought and exquisite touch that they combine.

Speaking of his own music, Fauré delivered one of the great self-definitions in artistic history: “J’ai reculé les limites du raffinement”—“I have moved back the limits of refinement.” It’s precisely the refinement of Fauré’s piano music that accounts for its relative unfamiliarity. Where his near-contemporaries Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel were master colorists of a wide palette, Fauré worked in shades of mauve and gray; where Chopin’s intimate miniatures have an assertiveness that transfers (albeit sometimes uneasily) to the concert hall, the crystalline forms of Fauré’s piano music seem too fragile, the perfumes too subtle and delicate, to be cast to the thousands without being damaged or dispersed.

Yet, despite their exquisite surfaces, the works in these two great cycles are no mere decorative strands, but intensely, intellectually concentrated compositions. I’ve always thought, with my amateur’s ear, that Fauré is second only to Beethoven in the power of his decomposition—in his ability to extract, from a melody, a tiny and dense thematic node or phrase that becomes, in turn, the basis for new flights of imagination that kaleidoscopically reveal the musical and emotional essence of the original melody. These are tightly packed, severely constructed works; with their intense intellectualism and their ethereal exquisiteness, these two cycles of colossal miniatures are worthy to stand alongside Chopin’s Nocturnes and Brahms’s intermezzi; yet their lofty virtues of severity and intimacy are among the reasons why they have been largely overlooked in the shuffle of musical history.

I’ve got some favorite recordings; the obvious choices are the ones from the nineteen-fifties by Germaine Thyssens-Valentin, for whom Fauré’s voice was the vernacular and who plays these pieces with wisdom and grace. A recent, daring, impulsive recording of the Barcarolles by a young pianist, Pierre-Alain Volondat, brings some surprisingly intense glints of noonday sun to the aquatic genre (a barcarolle is, after all, a gondolier’s song). My favorite recording of the Nocturnes, by Eric Heidsieck, a pianist of tensile energy and mercurial emotion, is, at the moment, unavailable.

P.S. On a cinematic note, the Requiem is sampled in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1982 “Passion,” a movie that joins music and painting to politics and personal revelation in a modern reclamation of grand-scale melodrama.

Faure's Infernal Nocturnes

I had not focused on these complex set of pieces until recently when the just kind of appeared on my mix one day as i sat reading a novel. Eventually they cornered me and I had to pay attention. Here is a solid assessment in Gramophone on which are the best versions:

For Debussy, Fauré was a ‘master of charms’, his Ballade as erotic as a woman’s loose shoulder strap, while even Liszt – most far-sighted of critics – demurred before music which offered too few instant returns. At a later date Cortot may have written rapturously about Fauré (the First Impromptu’s ‘stylised coquetry and regret’ or the Third Impromptu’s central calm, ‘like an avenue of fans folding and unfolding’) but much to the composer’s chagrin he played little of his music. In a burst more of sadness than of rage, Fauré wrote to him saying, ‘you allow my music to pile up without actually playing it’. This desertion even included music dedicated to Cortot, including the bleak and unaccommodating Ninth Nocturne. Horowitz once told me that he played the entire piano works of Fauré in private but his public offering consisted of only three works, proof for some that he was primarily interested in the externals of music. For French pianist Michel Béroff, Fauré’s music expresses little beyond a ‘vague perfume’, an opinion that should have earned him chastisement from his long-term two-piano partner Jean-Philippe Collard, who has recorded the complete piano works. Joan Chissell, for long a critic for Gramophone, felt that with Fauré, ‘a little goes a long way’, while a German lady ‘professor’ who I had the misfortune to meet as a jury colleague in France told me that if she suggested such music to her students they would walk out. For such people Fauré’s outward convention and inner audacity, together with the move from what they see as salonish origins to obscurity, is hardly worth the effort or challenge.

And that challenge, too, is considerable, The difficulty in performance is a major factor in Fauré’s neglect. Any pianist who has ever studied or attempted to memorise Fauré will tell you of their often desperate fight for fluency in patterns which rarely lie easily under the hand, and for shot-silk modulations and rhythmic ambiguities that can fox even the most skilled player. And all this in music which, as Liszt hinted, is hardly designed to win easy applause. The public has understandably little notion of the intensive work required to bring such an elusive task to vivid and meaningful life. Regrettably, if again understandably, many pianists dip their toes in Fauré (the early, more accessible Fauré with the Second and Third Impromptus for preference) before retreating into less unsettling, commercially more viable territory for a greater sense of musical terra firma.

Again, and at a more basic level, such a plethora of problems is compounded by record companies whose sleeves and illustrations perpetuate a misleading emphasis and impression. Sylvan woods, garlands of flowers and over-familiar portraits of Fauré as an elderly white-haired prelate hardly hint at the whole story. And it is greatly to Paul Crossley’s credit, for example, that he insisted on having reproductions of the often darkly disturbing paintings of Caspar David Friedrich for his covers. These at any rate suggest paradise lost and hardly regained.

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In Unison With Yourself

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Monasterio de Santa Catalina Arequipa, Peru

The crux was Aretha repeating her legendary scream over and over. Everyone was prancing by in different directions like in a sophisticated but misdirected musical. You realized then that the future was now in short supply as the native slaves came to serve you local delicacies. You emote a last desperate smile. And then when the sun descends and the parade begins. . .the film we all agree was bad. Realism is not what it used to be. Unfortunately, she said, these reality shows is what TV is all about. They permeate the horizon and your history will be to seduce those watching the puppet show how convincing you can dance and boogaloo (a modern dance to rock-and-roll music performed with swiveling and shuffling movements of the body, originally popular in the 1960s).

From Machaut's Le Lay de Plour

Here begins The Lay de Plour

                    I

Whoever loves well forgets slowly,
And the heart that slowly forgets
Is like the fire that burns
But cannot easily be put out.
And whoever suffers an illness
That pleases unwillingly recovers.
In such a state, so God give me help,
Love restrains and commands me,
For Pleasure has me so snared
That the arrow of loving
Will never be drawn out, not even a little,
From my heart, whatever anyone might say,
For it’s been in me so long
That there’s no question of its leaving,
Nor ever, by any art,
Will that wound be healed.


                    II

A huge tree can hardly be
Uprooted without leaving behind
               Some of its roots,
And so in a short time it is seen
Bearing flowers and fruit, its branches
               Growing and spreading.
Surely, it’s the same with love,
For when a heart’s bent on
               A noble love affair,
It can hardly forget its loved one,
Rather, always, through memory
               Inclines toward him.


                    III

For the water flowing down
To the root that remains
Makes it green again and flourish,
               Bearing fruit:
Just the same, my heart, weeping
Bitterly all the time,
Makes my memory grow
               Both day and night.
And this drives me mad;
This covers my face in tears;
This is the reason I cry out;
               True Love
Drives me to it, assaulting me,
And Goodness finds it sweet:
But they cannot enter me,
               And I am destroyed.

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Van Gelder Speaks

From an informative interview in Audio magazing conducted in 1995 with Rudy Van Gelder, the legendary sound engineer for Blue Note and Prestige records, on the sound from vinyl:

What are your feelings on digital versus analog?

The linear storage of digital information is idealized. It can be perfect. It can never be perfect in analog because you cannot repro­duce the varying voltages through the dif­ferent translations from one medium to an­other. You go from sound to a microphone to a stylus cutting a groove. Then you have to play that back from another stylus wig­gling in a groove, and then translate it back to voltage.

The biggest distorter is the LP it­self. I've made thousands of LP masters. I used to make 17 a day, with two lathes go­ing simultaneously, and I'm glad to see the LP go. As far as I'm concerned, good rid­dance. It was a constant battle to try to make that music sound the way it should. It was never any good. And if people don't like what they hear in digital, they should blame the engineer who did it. Blame the mastering house. Blame the mixing engi­neer. That's why some digital recordings sound terrible, and I'm not denying that they do, but don't blame the medium.

A lot of people argue that digital is a cold­er, sterile sound. Where do you think that comes from?

Where does it come from? The engineers. You've noticed they've attributed the sound to the medium. They say digital is cold, so they've given it an attribute, but linear digi­tal has no attributes. It's just a medium for storage. It's what you do with it. A lot of this has to do with the writing in consumer magazines. They've got to talk about some­thing.

What should be discussed is the way CDs are being marketed as 20-bit CDs, but there is no such thing as a 20-bit CD. Every CD sold to the public is a 16-bit CD. You can record 20-bit and it is better than 16-bit, but it has to be reduced to 16-bit before you can get it onto the CD. History is re­peating itself.

It reminds me of when they marketed mono recordings as "re-mastered in stereo." All they did was put the highs on one side, put the lows on the other, and add a lot of reverb to make it believable. Then they'd sell it as a stereo record.

The Forgotten Jack Wilson

It's a bit strange how life is. You live it and if you are an artist, that life is your work in many ways. I've been listening to the great Jack Wilson, a jazz pianist of delicate and penetrating style in the 50's and 60's. He was in many ways ahead of his time melding a lush piano style with strings but with logical sensibilities and cinematic understanding. He seems to be forgotten today and its why I want to link to this piece that brings back his works from Spotlight:

In Richard Cook's dense and scholarly book, Blue Note Records: The Biography, the late British jazz critic commends the work of Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion, co-founders of Blue Note, for recording Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons and James P. Johnson, innovators of the boogie-woogie and stride piano styles. "[T]hese beautiful sessions," Cook writes, "suggest that Blue Note might have gone on to compile a piano history of jazz."

It's a good point he makes. At the same time, though, it's probably why there are so many under-appreciated pianists hiding in the Blue Note discography. Elmo Hope, Herbie Nichols and Sonny Clark come to mind.

Jack Wilson, too, strikes me as one of those pianists. He seems, however, even more obscure—which is odd, because he had a sensitive touch and a musical sensibility that seemed ideally geared toward commercial success, or at least popularity in the jazz world. By my count, Cook only mentions Wilson once in his Blue Note book, in passing, and the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (which Cook wrote with the jazz critic Brian Morton) doesn't include him at all. What accounts for that?

Wilson died in 2007, at the age of 71—unlike Hope, Nichols and Clark, who all passed in the 1960s. (Clark, the youngest among them, was the first to go, in 1963, ravaged by heroin at the age of 31.) At an early age, Wilson was an accomplished pianist and sideman, performing with James Moody in 1953 and working with Dinah Washington later in the decade.

If you want to get a sense of his style, there are many places to look—in 1963, he put out his first record as a leader, featuring the vibraphonist Roy Ayers. But the best examples of his work might be the three records he made for Blue Note, in the second half of the 1960s, all of them good, and one of them—the last one, cut in 1968—now out of print.

The first was Something Personal, from 1966, which strikes me as the most interesting of the three. With Ayers joining Wilson once again, it's got a chamber-like quality to it; some tracks might lead you to recall the work of the Modern Jazz Quartet, a band that featured the same instrumentation you'll find here: piano, vibes, drums and bass. Except, on two tracks, Ray Brown plays cello and Charles Williams Jr. walks the bass. (About that cello: It's not an instrument you'll see too often in a traditional jazz setting. But here, played pizzicato on the Wilson composition "Most Unsoulful Woman" and "The Sphinx," written by Ornette Coleman, it's lovely and weird and altogether refreshing. It's a sound you'd like to hear more often in jazz.)

Easterly Winds, the second record Wilson made for Blue Note, a year later, features a front-line horn section of Jackie McLean on alto saxophone, Lee Morgan on trumpet and Garnett Brown on trombone. That's a hard bop line-up, and this is a hard bop album. (Billy Higgins is on drums and Bob Cranshaw is on bass.) Even with such exciting players, though, Wilson comes off as the most refined. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the prettiest song—the ballad "A Time For Love," by Johnny Mandel—puts Wilson into a trio context, so he can show us his gifts as a soloist and an interpreter of melody.

On Song for My Daughter (the album that is now out of print), Wilson places himself square in the middle of a lush-sounding string orchestra. It's a fine record, with a good dose of Brazilian rhythm thrown in. The best moments happen when the rhythm section swings at a medium tempo, allowing Wilson take some very good and lyrical solos.

Listening to all three of these records, what really stands out—besides the obvious differences in instrumentation that make each one a unique artistic statement—is Wilson's wonderful piano style, a constant throughout. You get the impression that at this point in his career, he knew what kind of pianist he wanted to be, and he had already gotten there. His approach sounds like a mix between Bud Powell and Horace Silver, with Gene Harris's blues virtuosity thrown in for good measure. Not that he was imitating them; there's a bounce in his touch that sets him apart from those musicians.

Still, it's hard to listen to his playing without thinking of other pianists who developed distinct voices on the Blue Note label before he did. Which is why, perhaps, Jack Wilson is not better known.

It's a fate that befalls many good jazz musicians, whose styles can seem more derivative than authentic, even though they are completely comfortable doing what they do and they have worked for years and years to get the sound they want. The alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt, too often compared to Charlie Parker, comes to mind. So do lots of organists working in the shadow of Jimmy Smith, who codified the soul jazz formula in the 1960s.

Often, though, finding out what actually sets those kinds of musicians apart—what makes them special—can be one of the most rewarding and pleasurable aspects of listening to jazz. And there's a lot of pleasure to be had from listening to the music of Jack Wilson, perhaps the most under-appreciated pianist in Blue Note's wide-ranging discography.

Translations-How Language Works

From an interview with Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis:

I think many American-born Latinx people can relate to that. Spanish is your first language, right?
Yeah. My dad actually teaches English, so I grew up speaking both. I felt super embarrassed the last time I went to Colombia though – I did an interview and just failed miserably, because I wasn’t sure about which words to use. When you go for so long without speaking the language, you get rusty. I was like, “Fuck, I need to be constantly staying on top of my shit when it comes to my language – otherwise I’m just totally gonna lose my shit!”

Ever since then, every time I talk to my parents, I speak to them in Spanish. If your parents know English, you get reliant on that because you’re so used to speaking English in America. I know a lot of Latinos [whose] parents didn’t raise them speaking it at all. It’s way harder for them to connect, and they feel a little bit of their Latinidad is erased and taken away from them, which is unfortunate. I started feeling like maybe that’s why my friends don’t like to speak it – when I try to speak Spanish they respond to me in English.

Definitely. So you also spent some of your childhood in Virginia?
I would say most of my childhood. I was supposed to stay in Colombia my whole life, but my parents decided to move to Virginia. I mean, I was blessed to go to school in Virginia and visit Colombia – my family is still there, and my parents are there now. I got to experience both worlds in a way. I feel like that was really nice to have as a kid, and I would definitely want to give that to my own kid, the ability to have multiple places to call home. But Virginia is tricky because basically it’s between the North and the South.

It’s just under the Mason-Dixon line.
I’m from the DMV area, which is D.C., Maryland and Virginia combined, so it’s a subculture of its own. But for some reason when I tell people that I lived in Virginia, they ask, “Oh, is it a bunch of, like, hillbillies out there?” They don’t know a lot of legends come from Virginia – Pharrell is from there, Timbaland, Clipse and Missy [Elliott], obviously such an important icon in music and culture. But that’s OK, stay sleep.

How would you describe the area where you grew up?
We have Latin culture in Alexandria, but the Colombian crowd is not so big – it’s El Salvadorians, Ecuadorians, Hondurans. There’s also lots of of Ethiopians; I grew up with all the Habesha. I went to a high school called T.C. Williams High School – you know where the Remember the Titans movie was set? It’s one of the most diverse schools in all of the United States. Nowadays I get really uncomfortable to be in a room of people that are all the same, who all look the same, are the same ethnicity and dress the same. I feel like it’s because I just always grew up around people who were all different. There weren’t really any cliques – everyone was just cool with each other. I felt very blessed to be able to go to a school that had a lot of funding for the arts. Unfortunately, they’re shutting down some of those programs now, but they were key in developing me as an artist. I couldn’t afford cameras, or equipment, or a dark room. I wouldn’t have been able to access those things on my own, but we could play with them at school for free.

Best Music of 2018-Mati Mormandi

 

We know great music gets made all over the world. Mormandi takes Brazilian beats, mixes them with funk from the urban centers in the U.S. and then adds his particular local southern Latin sense and creates sensible modern music whose vocal mix makes sense and adds the new with the . . . An artist who deserves wider recognition. Unfortunately he dreams in a very partucular space and so is not a superstar in Argentina or Uruguay but I have to confess his two latest discs are of a subtle beauty that is rare in contemporary music and very few are even aware it exist. Enjoy undiscovered beauty.

 

From Viento Nomade:

Mati Mormandi toca piano y canta tango, candombe, y otras músicas; ofreciendo composiciones y antología de joyas cancionísticas del Cono Sur.
Nacido en Buenos Aires, conformó dúos junto al percusionista Oscar Linero H, al armoniquista Rodrigo Mercado, a la pianista y compositora Nora Sarmoria; fue pianista de Dancing Mood, de U-niko Dubs & Friends, de Papas ni pidamos y produjo 8 álbumes: Un Rato - cuandónde (1998), Un Rato 2001 (2001), Quaderno Abrido (2003), QA2 (2004), Quaderno Cerrado (2005), Kmbalache (2005), Invocando la Muzzarella Inspiradora (2007) y Amor Mortal.
Formó parte del proyecto Colectivo Argentino-Uruguayo, dirigido por el guitarrista Alan Plachta, donde además de Matías, participaron grandes músicos como Daniel Maza, Hugo Fattorusso, Pipi Piazzolla, entre otros.
Mati Mormandi es un auténtico y talentosísimo compositor de música popular: su estilo es enérgico y desfachatado; sus canciones, directas y efectivas. No busca en modo alguno el perfeccionismo, aunque para mi lo es: la fuerza de su poética reside en una lírica de la intensidad, lo ácido y lo cotidiano.