Blogs / Cosmic Variance

I just heard that one of my favourite Jazz pianists and vocalists, Shirley Horn, has died at age 71. I can think of few people who have mastered the mingling of voice and piano -in any musical genre- to quite the level she had. She’s one of the first vocalists (or pianists) I think of reaching for when I want to immerse myself in some musical work that is clear and uncluttered, slow and unhurried. Her phrasing is just incredibly thoughtful. Her clever use of space is up there with Miles Davis’, and indeed he loved her work (he was not a big fan of singers in general - early Sinatra is one of the few other vocalists I can think of that he liked, again for great phrasing) and he encouraged her early in her career.

Here’s a website with a discography. Two of my later favourites are Softly, and You Won’t Forget Me. Have a look at today’s Washington Post article on her life. You can also find video, audio and a transcript of a PBS Newshour Jim Lehrer 2004 interview with her here.

May she live on through her wonderful music. She can end this post better than I can, from words of the song Here’s To Life that often ring in my head:

No complaints and no regrets; I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets…

Here’s to life — here’s to love — here’s to you.

-cvj

…And all four of my co-bloggers have spilled their beverage. Sorry dudes!

I mean Kate Bush. Just to illustrate how out of touch I am with everything these days, I learned from my mother (who is visiting me) that she has released a new album.

Anyway, this is a big deal, at least in the UK (the release, not my being out of touch). Apparently the buzz about this is just huge over there. She has not released an album in 12 years, and this one is supposed to be really rather good. We shall see (hear).

I was simply in love with Kate Bush and her music as a teenager. It was not a sex thing (inasmuch as anything can be far removed from sex as a teenage boy); instead I was in love with just how different her music was while still remaining both interesting, tuneful, bizarre, and beautiful. (And often very funny.) You see, I loved listening to things other than the standard 80’s UK pop everyone else was into at school, and I went to great lengths in pursuit of this, and the results were not always interesting and enjoyable at the same time (you may recall me writing about being into obscure German electronic music as a teenager). But Kate Bush managed to be different and all of those other things I said above at the same time. She was clearly a genius, at least to my mind back then, producing all sorts of tremendous musical ideas and sounds.

Always being a supporter of the underdog, I probably secretly enjoyed it a bit that few others seemed to appreciate her tremendous talent, so that I could fiercely defend her. Women musical artists in the genre in those days were mostly supposed to just be pretty and sing stuff they were told to, not sing (with a truly haunting voice), dance, play an instrument, write, produce, mix, edit….etc…(I know there were a few other exceptions). And as a bonus, she showed up (with a Fairlight CMI!!**) on the cover of some new magazine I was into entitled something like “Electronics and Music Hobbyist” which had pages and pages of stuff on the internal circuitry of various sound synthesizers and sound modifying devices, my big hobby at the time, so she was right up my alley.

Anyway, a lot of you won’t even know who Kate Bush is, being either too young or from the wrong country. Well, so many artists copy her to some extent, so you’ve heard her through others. Think Tori Amos is terribly original? She’s channelling Kate Bush. Think you’re terribly cool listening to Bjork? Direct decendent of Kate Bush. Into Fiona Apple or any of the 1700 or so “talented girl singing with piano” artists? All Kate’s children. To get straight to the source, go out and get “The Kick Inside”, and then “The Dreaming” and “Hounds of Love”.

Here’s an excellent article from the Scotsman on her career trajectory and the recent buzz about the new release. And here is a short Guardian article, and a Wikipedia entry. And all around the web you can easily find more material, including an authorized download of the first single from the album.

I have to rush off now. My new (minor?) celebrity neighbour seems to be having his first party and his guests seem to be being valet-parked (the horror!). I have to go and look a bit disapproving from the balcony.

There goes the neighbourhood…

-cvj

(**Update: The exclamation marks are to indicate that this was a big deal back then. That piece of kit was every in electronic music hobbyist’s wildest dreams.)

So today you are hiding, since the first three days of the week were taken up with teaching and committee work, and because tomorrow will have at least two committee meetings in the middle of the day. You need a full day to get back into full immersion for working on this paper you’re writing. You’ve no plans for exciting and varied writing venues today, as described in a previous post. This is because now you’re more into the part of the writing that can benefit from just sitting in one comfortable and familiar place for a long time, staring, scribbling, typing, mumbling, and drinking lots of tea and coffee…

…and listening to music. Today, you woke up in the mood for Cassandra Wilson’s music, and so while you write you’ll be listening for the entire day to every album she’s ever recorded. Blue Skies is one of your favourites, as is Blue Light ‘Til Dawn. And the recent Glamoured, has many wonderful reworkings of several modern standards from several genres such as pop, jazz, blues, country…(for example, Sting’s “Fragile”, while the original is a favourite of yours, never sounded better, or made more sense, before her version, and you’ve been listening a lot to her wonderful version of Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” recently). But you’ll not just be listening to her later stuff, you’ll be digging way back into work closer to her earlier, more experimental M-base collective work too.

Happy Hiding Away, Writing, And Listening To Cassandra Wilson Day*

-cvj

(*After the excellent blog Girls Are Pretty .)

When I was growing up in the early to middle eighties, I spent a lot of time ignoring the popular music of the time, and pointedly listening to semi-obscure German electronic music. It took a lot to get me to admit to liking anything most of my school friends (or come to think of it, mostly anyone else in the country) was listening to. Yep, I must have been pretty annoying at times. (Amusingly, the other day I had an ironic mood swing and went to Amoeba Music and bought a Madness album and drove around the city with songs like “Our House” playing on the CD player….)

Back in those days, I also spent a lot of time in my room with a hot soldering iron, building circuits of various sorts. (If I had not breathed in so much soldering lead fumes and soldering flux, goodness knows what dizzying heights of intellectual achievement I could have reached. Raspy voice: “I could ‘a been a contender…”)

There is a connection between those two paragraphs. Electronic generation and modification of sound. I spent of lot of time making weird noises in my room with the aid of transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, and all those wonderful things you hardly see any more when you open up a modern electonic device.

Why am I telling you this? Well, Robert Moog, one of the masters, a pioneer of the field of electronic synthesizers -who without a doubt indirectly inspired what I was doing in my room, since everybody I listened to was playing his instruments or decendents of them- died on Sunday. Those hobbies of mine certainly helped me focus my interests and skills along the way to becoming a scientist, so I’d like to thank him for whatever role his work played in shaping my trajectory.

I heard the news on NPR and there is a collection of links and sounds from several NPR segments at a nice page they’ve built, which is here. I also saw some links at Swoon.

Thanks for the sounds, sir!

-cvj

I’ve just heard that Ibrahim Ferrer has died. You can read a BBC news story about this here. You can learn more about this wonderful musician, who had a most beautiful voice (which engages you whether or not you speak Spanish), here, and you can learn more about the Buena Vista Social Club project here. (I’d credit the photo if I could, but I don’t know the original source. It was on the album cover of “Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer” which is great.) Several of the original masters from that project have died now, Ferrer and Ruben Gonzalez being two of my favourites.

Music - and life in general - are very much richer for their contributions.

May they live forever!

-cvj