Mary Greenfield
The best friend anyone could hope for. Happy Birthday Mary!
Robert Wilkins – The Original Rolling Stone (Yazoo)
I’m working on a piece for CultureCatch.com to celebrate the 110th anniversary of Wilkins’s birth on January 16, 1896 in Hernando, Mississippi (hill country south of Memphis), so I’m listening to this a lot.
Wilkins is pretty obscure except to hardcore blues fans, but you might know his “That’s No Way to Get Along” as “Prodigal Son” by the Rolling Stones in a rip-off that ranks among the lesser-known but no less despicable in the many perpetrated by British rockers who always seemed surprised that anybody whose music they were stealing was still alive. (Wilkins also had a song called “Rolling Stone,” which seems to increase Mick & Keith’s debt to him even more.) Wilkins grew up hearing the many different folk styles of pre-blues music, and both that and his personal originality are reflected in his songs, which display stylistic variety and lack of repetition of licks, and don’t always stick to usual blues forms. Aside from two atypical 1935 recordings, the selections here come from 1928-30 and show why hardcore blues aficionados hold Wilkins in such high regard.
Teenage Fanclub – Man Made (Merge)
Another favorite from the past year, and another fine showing by a Glasgow band. Not putting out lots of albums has had the effect of letting them concentrate on only the highest-quality songs in their best album in eight years. Plenty of chiming, Byrdsian guitar propels a bunch of perfect riffs and aching melodies in yet another power-pop classic.
R.L. Burnside – Too Bad Jim (Fat Possum)
Born in 1926, Burnside was a neighbor of Mississippi Fred McDowell, but Burnside’s style may reflect a regional sound as much as any specific influence of McDowell. There are tracks on this album (his second on Fat Possum, and his best) with the structure and progression of 12-bar blues or something close to it, such as “Fireman Ring the Bell,” a variation on the Delta standard “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and a solo track, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Short-Haired Woman.” But the tunes that most reflect the indigenous hill country style are area standards such as “Old Black Mattie” with no chord changes or steady meter, just unending one-chord drones built around individual vocal phrases answered by guitar fillips and ornamented by the drummer’s rhythm changes and the guitarist’s filigree. The emphasis on the timbre of the lead guitar is great, and Burnside gets a unique snapping tone. On solo tracks such as “Miss Glory B.” and “Short-Haired Woman,” Burnside plays more ornately, using the idiosyncratic timbres of different strings or fret positions for variety. With Burnside’s death last September 1, we lost the last of the great juke-joint bluesmen.
Pearls and Brass – The Indian Tower (Drag City)
Grunge lives! Well, actually there’s more variety than that on this debut album (coming out on Jan. 24), but there’s a lot of Kyuss and a little Soundgarden here: slow, grinding, metallic, grim. Twin guitars and sometimes twin vocals plus some intricate time signatures indicate the band’s virtuosity, while some acoustic tracks offer variety and rootsiness. Fire up a bowl and party like it’s 1991….
Tortoise/Bonnie “Prince” Billy – The Brave and the Bold (Overcoat)
Also coming out Jan. 24 – I’ve been listening in advance to write blurbs for Sound Fix’s new release page for the first big new-release Tuesday of 2006. The little Overcoat label is making a splash with surprising collaborations. Its Calexico/Iron and Wine disc was one of the best of 2005; greeting the new year is this wild and wacky album of covers by the unlikely team of Chicago’s electronically savvy Tortoise and Kentucky/New York’s roots moaner Will Oldham AKA Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Ranging from desecrated ‘70s icons—Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” Elton John’s “Daniel”—to unexpected punk nods—Minutemen’s “It’s Expected I’m Gone,” Lungfish’s “Love Is Love”—it will probably inspire equal amounts of outrage, huzzahs, and hilarity. Is it a great album? Nope, too uneven. But is it often fun? You betcha.
Arvo Pärt – Tabula Rasa (ECM)
This 1984 release was ECM’s first Pärt album, and thus the mainstream’s primary introduction to his music. It has three highly representative 1977 instrumental works in his “tintinnabuli” style. Tabula Rasa, for two violins, prepared piano, and chamber orchestra (Gidon Kremer & Tatjana Grindenko; Alfred Schnittke; Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra/Saulus Sondeckis), is the greatest of them, a gently undulating, slowly turning spiral of sound. “Fratres” exists in at least seven different arrangements; here it’s heard in versions for violin and piano (Kremer and Keith Jarrett) and for cellos (the 12 cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic). “Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten” (Staatsorchester Stuttgart/Dennis Russell Davies) is an aptly somber work. This disc is the top-selling back catalog item in Sound Fix’s classical section.
John Cage – The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage
On three CDs, this 1958 concert at Town Hall in New York City offers a fine cross-section of Cage’s work up to that point. “Williams Mix” drew boos for its drastic redefinition of music; the then-shocking extended techniques and microtonality of Concert for Piano and Orchestra provoked catcalls. Illustrating Cage’s percussion phase is First Construction in Metal (1939) for orchestral bells, “thundersheets,” prepared piano, 12-gong gamelan, cowbells, Japanese temple gongs, brake drums, anvils, cymbals, muted gongs, water gong, suspended gong, and tam-tam. Also included: Six Short Inventions for Seven Instruments (1934), Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1942, for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano and cymbal), “The Wonderful Widow of 18 Springs,” She Is Asleep (1943), the first half of “prepared piano” magnum opus Sonatas and Interludes (played by Maro Ajemian), and Music for Carillon No. 1 (1952). The booklet has a score page and discussion of each piece, the texts of Cage’s essay “The Future of Music: Credo” from 1937 and his speech “Experimental Music” from 1957 along with his own notes on each piece, and producer George Avakian’s reminiscences.
Mitsuko Uchida/Cleveland Orchestra/Pierre Boulez – Arnold Schoenberg: Concerto for Piano, Op. 42; 3 Piano Pieces, Op. 11; 7 Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19; Anton Webern: Variations, Op. 27; Alban Berg: Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (Philips)
This remarkable 2000 release refutes the idea that these three “Second Viennese School” composers (associated with, if not always utilizing, Serialism) wrote drily abstract music. Uchida emphasizes this music’s Romantic roots rather than downplaying in the manner of most modernists. In Schoenberg’s Concerto, the only non-solo work here, she and conductor Boulez give the work a more limberly rhythmic and lyrical reading than the stiffer, analytical competition, spotlighting emotional facets and beauties of timbre previously stifled. In the solo works—somewhat in the Webern, expectedly but vividly in the Berg, and to a heart-wrenching degree in the Schoenberg sets—there’s a new poetic intensity.
Yahtzee
Sorta like poker with dice instead of cards; one of the most fun games for a rainy day. Just don’t let Jack convince you on your next-to-last roll that you should take a zero in the Yahtzee (five of a kind) score because you have a better chance of getting four of a kind – after which I rolled a Yahtzee of five ones, the lowest four of a kind score possible and 45 points lower than a Yahtzee, costing me the game. That’s okay Jack, I’ll get even on the softball field.
