Quiet Bubble

They Might Be Giants might be coming to your town

Saturday afternoon, and I’d just finished my friend’s marvelous book, Long after Midnight at the Niño Bien when I get a phone call. Brünhilde and C. are driving home from Canton, and wonder what I’m up to that night. John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt is being staged by New Stage Theatre, I say, and I’m considering that, despite the $22 price tag. Brünhilde casually asks, “Are you going to the They Might Be Giants show, or are you past that stage of your life?”

“What They Might Be Giants show?” Relatively big-name acts that don’t come from Mississippi, Louisiana, or Tennessee, even those with cult followings rather than blockbuster statuses, usually end up playing in Memphis or New Orleans. They pass Mississippi by, and that’s what I’m assuming here. I’m not up to a three-hour drive to see a band I loved in my youth.

“No, no, they’re playing at Hal and Mal’s”—a restaurant/bar/concert venue about ten minutes from my apartment—“and I think it starts at nine.”

For all the irony and post-pop cleverness TMBG conveys on records, they rock out onstage. I’d last the Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell) in New Orleans, two weeks after 9/11, and found them to be affecting, uplifting, and danceable. The irony and (admittedly good) jokes get tempered by stage theatrics, crunchy guitars, and a super-tight rhythm section. Live, TMBG becomes a full-on band and not just two nerds goofing off in their basement. I reviewed that show for a short-lived zine, and this closing excerpt sums it up:

John Flansburgh surprised me. That’s putting it mildly. He’s one of the best frontmen I’ve ever seen live. He’s a terrific rhythm guitarist—punchy, assured, simultaneously raw and precise. He bounded around stage as if he was on a constant caffeine high, smirking and cracking jokes with just his eyes and grins.

In a sublime moment, the band burst into the faux-lounge crooner, “She’s Actual Size.” Midway through the song, Flansburgh paused to lead Hickey in a drum solo. But not a normal one. Flansburgh screamed, “Press 1 for Latin Dance!” and Hickey drummed a pattern fit for conga lines. After a few seconds, “Press 2 for Ringo Starr!” Hickey performed a drum fill that could have come straight out of Abbey Road. Flansburgh ran through three through five. “Press 6 for Mid-1970s Power Ballad!” At this point, the audience began to laugh uproariously. “Press 7 for Keith Moon!” Hickey emulated the high-voltage tom-tom flares of the Who. The fan favorite? “Press 9 for Animal from the Muppets!” Deafening cheers and laughter and pumping fists in the air.

So, yeah, I suppose TMBG is the same it’s always been, inspiring giggles, awe, and the movement of butts. But, finally, it’s figured out a way to do all three at once. In the 1980s, Flansburgh and Linnell started shows with a prerecorded tape pronouncing them to be the “Twin Quasars of Rock.” It was a joke at the time, but I think they’re serious now.

So, I spent my $22 on a rock show instead of a play. After 25 years together, this would be the band’s first-ever concert in Mississippi. I’d be foolish to miss it.

Hal and Mal’s caters more to the “bar” end of the venue than the “concert hall” end—there’s three bars, and either the stage needs to be raised higher or the audience floor leading up to it needs to slope slowly; or maybe I’m just too short. In any case, the sightlines aren’t great, and are hindered further by blocky, thick support posts. The cigarette smoke casts such a haze that I periodically thought my eyes were out of focus, and there’s precious little ventilation. (I’ve always rock clubs and dry cleaners were in collusion, but I can’t prove it.) Even John Flansburgh made jokes about it—“The only thing we ask is that you please don’t start smoking menthols, for Christ’s sake.”

Once the band got started, none of this mattered. With two encores, the five-piece band throttled through about 25 songs in 90 minutes. The band rocketed from song to song, often with only a second’s pause in-between. The opener, “Doctor Worm,” was still finishing when Flansburgh announced “This one’s called ‘Cyclops Rock!’” and off we went. Flansburgh barely had time to close the minute-long “Boss of Me”—better known as the theme for Malcolm in the Middle—with the line “Life is unfair” before the equally caustic “I Palindrome I” kicked in. Though Flansburgh’s movement was limited due to the small size of the stage, the band was energetic. Flansburgh and Linnell’s banter and winks to the audience were well-practiced and elicited laughs, though occasionally they went on too long. Their voices—nearly identically nasal Brooklyn whines—sounded in good form, and I was able to make out words and phrases above the din, despite the mediocre mix that bled the guitars too strongly into the rest of the sound. The rhythm section was notably solid and popping.

It should be noted that TMBG has fallen off my radar since 1998’s Severe Tire Damage. I was vaguely aware that the band had released three or four studio albums since then, and that its recent series of children’s albums have perhaps sold better than its “regular” work. While this was partly an exercise in nostalgia for me, it’s pleasing that TMBG didn’t wallow in past glories. I recognized only half of the songs played. They gleefully played two rousing songs—“Alphabet of Nations” and “Apartment Four”—from the kids’ albums. The golden oldies played from their early, mid-1980s albums were not the expected “Don’t Let Start” or “Ana Ng,” but instead “Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head” (fueled by Linnell’s accordion) and the b-side favorite “Hey DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal.” The band mixed new and old songs with abandon, and even the ones I didn’t recognize were enjoyable and sharp.

The standards were there, of course, but took on new dimensions in a live setting. “Particle Man” became a toe-tapping zydeco number; “Older” was a mock dirge, with confetti spraying the air during the first chorus; “New York City” remained a cheesy parody of a girl-pop song but felt genuinely (as opposed to ironically) jovial; “Birdhouse in Your Soul” soared and uplifted despite the lyrics’ best intentions of letting our expectations down gently.

After the unexpected “It’s Not My Birthday” (from 1988’s Lincoln) ended the first encore, the braying drunks behind me (two nice guys, but still…) shouted “ISTANBUL! ISTANBUL! ISTANBUL!” which became a rallying cry for the 300+ crowd. Soon enough, it became “CONSTANTINOPLE! CONSTANTINOPLE!” which is harder to chant out rhythmically. I remarked to Brünhilde that it would be perfect if the band decided not to play it. After all, it’s their version of Los Lobos’ “La Bamba”—an early cover song that’s inexplicably more popular than most of their original material.

Alas, it was not to be, but TMBG made it worthwhile. Lead guitarist Dan Miller came out onstage, with an acoustic guitar. Spotlighted, he essentially played “Istanbul (Not Constantinople” as a guitar solo without singing. It was intricate and gorgeous, growing more intense in strumming and faster in tempo. Gradually, the rest of the band joined him—drums first, then bass, and then the Johns. Finally, Flansburgh and Linnell sang it, complete with Flansburgh’s fake muezzin call during the bridge. Brünhilde said that the shrieking drunks were worth it all just for that version of the song.

Flansburgh and Linnell, however, weren’t satisfied with that. They closed with the slow and hilarious “How Can I Sing Like A Girl?” which belts out a line that could serve as a call to arms for the band and audience alike: “I want to raise my freak flag/ Higher and higher.”

—————————————

It’s good to see TMBG passing on the meta-pop torch to the kids. The night’s opener was Oppenheimer, a young duo from Belfast. Shaun Robinson drummed and sang most lead vocals—it’s hard to do that well, and he pulled it off, with an earnest high tenor and crackling, inventive drum fills. Rocky O’Reilly bounced around the stage, pounding out guitar riffs, stepping on distortion pedals, singing through a vocoder, and manipulating keyboard effects. There was shtick—O’Reilly’s robot voice, a brief shoehorn solo, stage banter about the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day, handclaps, and goofy jokes—but the band seemed genuinely excited to be on stage, and thrilled to be playing for a reasonably enthusiastic crowd. I imagine that, twenty years ago, They Might Be Giants projected the same onstage aura.

Oppenheimer’s music mixes loud and slurring guitars, vocal harmonies, fast tempos, and the prominent use of Farfisa organ and Moog keyboards. The vocal delivery is sunny and lulling, even with the robot voices; the lyrics reflect complicated young love and causing ruckuses in clubs. Like TMBG, they keep the songs fast, funny, and short—nothing clocked in over 2½ minutes. The duo was impressive enough that I bought its full-length CD, which is even more fun without the drunk guy yelling in my ear for “They Might Be Giants!”

Two representative songs from the debut album, both of which were played at the show:

“This is a Test” and “Saturday Looks Bad to Me.”

These will stay up until 1 April 2008.

Movies I’ve Seen: U2 3D (2008)

Directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. Starring Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullens, Jr.

Is U2 3D a triumph of aesthetics or merely technology? Either way, it’s a load of fun. As my friend Herman said after the movie, “sometimes, you actually can be too close to the band.” That level of immersion—mike stands veering into your face, Larry Mullins’s drumsticks surging up from the crashing cymbals into your direct line of sight—meshes well with the crisp and clean digital photography. The staging and lighting scheme is simple but surprisingly fluid—a tall gridlike backdrop of lights that looms over the band, sometimes flooding band and audience alike with solid patterns and timed, multicolored flashes, while at other times broadcasting animation, words, and unobtrusive graphics. When the stage’s floodlights are dimmed or turned off, but the backdrop stays lit, the compositions of silhouette bandmembers are arresting. There’s a minimum use of the smoke machine, so the staging gets points for sidestepping cliché. The mix of patterned-light backdrop and silhouettes owes a lot to Mark Romanek’s music videos—see Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound,” Linkin Park’s “Faint” and Audioslave’s “Cochise”—but the visual rhythms aren’t quite as playful and occasionally jarring as Romanek’s best work. (The editing does deserve special mention in one respect: continuity. Despite being stitched together from shows in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and São Paolo on the 2006 Vertigo tour, the bandmembers wear the same clothes throughout and their haircuts remain the same, and U2 3D looks and feels like a single, seamless show. I didn’t notice the cutting-and-pasting until reading the credits.) The photography keeps it straightforward, too—lots of crowd shots, extreme closeups of Bono, clapping and raised hands flooded by overhead lights, and the use of crane shots to get over the heads of everyone—so there are few surprises. That goes for the songs as well. I recognized every song but, then, that’s one hell of an achievement. Over nearly three decades, U2 has amassed enough instantly recognizable songs to fill a 90-minute show, and to have every one of those songs be known—by the end of the first chord progression—by 80,000 raucous fans. I’m writing this, by the way, as a person who doesn’t own nor has ever owned a U2 album, or been more than a casual fan, or been a regular pop radio listener since 1995. Yet I grinned like a maniac with the start of each new song. The foursome has tapped into something universal about pop. A cynic would claim that it’s the banal, purposefully vague lyrics—Really, is “Pride” actually about anything other than Bono’s ability to recite the date of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination? Is the song saying anything profound?—but there’s no denying the distinctive sound. Watching the Edge negotiate keyboards and distortion pedals in closeup, his choppy, shimmering guitar sound becomes impossible to disrespect. With Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen, Jr. on drums, U2 builds musical structures that swirl gently around a center but which remain rock-solid rhythmically. Bono can’t reach the high ending notes of “One” anymore but even that becomes a sort of plus onstage. His voice growls and purrs wonderfully but, without the toe-curling histrionics of his youth, Bono’s more a part of the mix in U2 3D—an element of the sound rather than its defining point. Not that he doesn’t try for the latter. He wears a blindfold with the classically trite “Co-exist” image (made up of symbols from the world’s major religions, don’t you know) on it. U2’s earnestness gets the better of it during “Miss Sarajevo,” which ends in silence while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights scrolls across the backdrop and a background voice recites it—my bet is that’s Bono’s idea through and through. Still, the band’s trying for unity and something greater than getting laid and another paycheck, which is more than you can say about the Rolling Stones after its first three decades. Speaking of which, U2 3D, for all its pomp and self-importance, definitively proves that the band remains relevant. “Vertigo” is a dream concert-opener, with the audience screaming out “Hello! Hello!” along with Bono (the word’s blaring in red on the backdrop, too), and that’s from their 2004 album. The second song, “Beautiful Day,” comes from 2000’s All that You Can’t Leave Behind, and it roused the crowd as much as golden-oldie “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I missed favorite hits—there’s no “Mysterious Ways,” “Zoo Station,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “Even Better than the Real Thing,” or “In God’s Country”—but I got my money’s worth, song-wise. (“The Fly” was the encore opener—the one terrific surprise on the songlist.) To clarify my opening question, though, does the 3-D photography add enough to justify this extravaganza as art? Honestly, the experience only holds up because U2 3D is an effectively shot concert/ After twenty minutes of eye-popping closeness to the participants, the novelty wears thin. Because we weave in and out of the audience and onto the stage, a visual focal point is somewhat lacking. This doesn’t mean that I wanted a stationary camera throughout the movie but rather that the filmmakers haven’t decided on a perspective or a definite lens through which the viewer enters the movie. Compare U2 3D to the Beastie Boys’ Awesome! I Fucking Shot That!, in which we so clearly identify with the audience’s vantage point that the audience effectively shot the movie; or with Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, in which the band is photographed as art objects, like a gallery installation, and the audience is decidedly incidental. These two movies aren’t just recording concerts but also giving us a point-of-view, a sense of the filmmaker behind the camera and the listener seeing the show. U2 3D feels impersonal in comparison, and the 3-D meant—for me, anyway—that I was constantly aware of it as a gimmick. I kept flitting my 3-D glasses on and off, to note the onscreen difference in visuals. Because of this, I was never completely immersed in the movie, even though the songs grabbed my heart. Without resorting to 3-D, the fabulous live video of “City of Blinding Lights”—another great song missing from the set—is tonally rich, cinematically graceful, and genuinely moving. When Bono sings “Oh, you look so beautiful” to the crowd, we believe he means it, and that it’s possible to believe that about ourselves, too. While U2 3D dazzles us with technique, the 4-minute “City of Blinding Lights” makes me want to enter the screen. There’s a difference.

Jazz ballet: Maria Schneider Orchestra’s “Pas de Deux”

Maria Schneider loves birds. They come through in her airy, fluttering jazz compositions. These songs are rich with insinuating horn layers, tinkling piano keys, and drumwork that’s as shimmering as it is fleet-footed. Percussion plays a major role in her Cuban jazz-influenced pieces but the drums used are usually higher-register—cymbals, snares, rimshots, woodblocks, often hit with brushes rather than sticks—rather than the muscular, low-toned booms of bass drums and tom-toms. The lower, more muscular, registers are there, sure, but they rarely dominate a Schneider piece. The tunes often invoke the wind rustling leaves, and twitters and echoes in the background sound like squawking sparrows, flapping wings, and beaks pecking at the ground. (“Cerulean Skies,” off 2007’s magnificent Sky Blue, begins with the music emerging from two minutes of bird calls, and settles back into them at the end.) The horns are always clean and smooth—the saxophones rarely honk or shriek; the trombones rarely slur, even at full force. As befits someone who watches the skies for colors and birds, Schneider’s light and soft flutes and clarinets as mixed as loudly as the trumpets. She conducts her music to be as uncluttered as possible, given that there are 17 musicians in her ensemble.

In Schneider’s early career, a relatively common (and fair) complaint was that her compositions were superficially beautiful and multi-layered but lacked depth. Certainly, the high-toned percussion meant that Schneider’s orchestra rarely stomped or got its hands dirty. Her two latest studio albums, 2004’s Concert in the Garden and Sky Blue, are gorgeous but I wouldn’t call them raucous. Considering that Schneider leads a full-scale jazz orchestra, a type of band that more or less went out of style by 1950, it’s surprising how little danceable swing there is in her music. Days of Wine and Roses, recorded live at the Jazz Standard in 2000, is a significant exception, which may mean that she’s more comfortable letting her hair down at a club than in the studio. Still, Days lacks a lot of wild abandon; I enjoy it immensely, but I always have a sense of where the music’s going.

The most recent compositions have a melancholy to match Schneider’s ever-present lyricism. The featherweight gets dusted with sobriety, and her pieces have gotten longer and more expansive. They ebb and flow, gently, into separate movements, and leitmotifs are introduced and reinforced. The aforementioned “Cerulean Skies” is 22 minutes, with multiple, nearly discrete segments. Concert in the Garden’s title track and the closing “Bulería, Soleá y Rumba” feature improvised solos—as does everything I’ve heard by the Jazz Orchestra—but the structures are dense. If most big-band jazz wants to tell a quick story, tightly focused and punchy, Schneider’s orchestral works tell meandering novels that wander into odd digressions.

Though Schneider draws heavily from Afro-Cuban jazz, especially in her percussion arrangements, she’s less interested in settling into a groove than making it evolve into epic movements. She’s mostly rid herself of the blues influence in her jazz, and certainly the toe-tapping element is long-gone. The Maria Schneider Orchestra is a minor symphony orchestra, at this point, rather than a dance band drawing from the traditions of 1920 New Orleans stomp or the orchestras of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Or perhaps we’re looking at her accomplishments all wrong. Schneider’s compositions always leave room for her musicians to solo. While the traditional, brassy swing is muted in Schneider’s music, it’s certainly rhythmic and individual segments of songs are often quite danceable. Her arrangements don’t include strings at all. Maria Schneider’s music is jazz through and through.

Rather than conceiving the jazz orchestra as a dance band for the audience, I think Schneider considers her compositions as better-suited for the dancers onstage. It’s not meant to inspire mass Lindy-hopping. Instead, Schneider’s dance tunes work best for couples or single bodies in motion.

The best example I can give is Concert’s “Pas de Deux,” the second of a three-part sequence entitled “Three Romances.” (See what I mean about the classical element to her compositions?) It’s the best piece Schneider’s written, romantic, erotic, and melancholy.

The ballet term means that simply a dance involving a couple. In “Pas de Deux,” we begin with Ingrid Jensen’s flugelhorn introducing the simple overriding theme, accompanied only by Frank Kimbrough’s piano at first and then by a minor horn surge. It’s a sexy, sinuous theme. Then Charles Pillow repeats the theme, on soprano saxophone. The background surge rises—a drummer snaps, once, on a triangle; brushes sweep across snare drums. After this, the full band soars into flight but the theme’s only being repeated by Kimbrough’s piano. The soloists Jensen and Pillow, the pas de deux’s couple, are already starting to tease and flirt with each other, moving beyond the melody and becoming more baldly passionate than Schneider’s conducting usually allows.

“Pas de Deux” swings slowly, but note that the bounce is buoyed by the horns rather than the traditional bass and drums. Jensen and Pillow each get another crack at the main theme before they take over the song. Even as Jensen is soloing, Pillow is responding and fluttering around, and vice versa. The orchestra behind them vamps a one-two, one-two rhythm that’s tonally lower and more subdued than the couple. Trumpets and trombones create a white-noise hum in the background. As Pillow and Jensen get faster and more muscular, so do the drums, and so ultimately does the rest of the band.

Around 5:15, the orchestra’s decided to reflect the climax of Jensen and Pillow’s pairing. This is the brassiest and full-throated a Schneider composition’s appeared but, even through the melodic rush and symbolic orgasm, Jensen and Pillow swirl around each other’s riffs, shrill and high-pitched and frenzied. The duo’s in harmony with each other and in key with the rest of the band, despite being so distinct from it at this moment. The piece rushes headlong into a symbolic orgasm and, at 7:24, they’re spent. Things grow quiet. The full orchestra’s one-two secondary theme becomes dominant for a moment.

At 7:54, Jensen starts up the main theme again under the same spare arrangement as at the beginning, but with a crucial difference. Now Pillow’s right there with her, not quite paralleling her reiteration of the theme but winding his supple playing around it. He plays less notes, sustaining them longer than Jensen does, but they wind up at the same place. It ends, oddly, without either of them, on Kimbrough’s solitary and lonely notes that rise higher and higher. It’s as if they’re still more to climb—the closure is thrillingly incomplete. (Indeed it does. The piece immediately segues into the solo piano opening of “Three Romances”’ third song, “Dança Illusória.”)

“Pas de Deux” shows a couple working things out onstage, and coming together for one sizzling, hot moment. Even though it doesn’t last—it can’t last—it creates enough electricity to keep us enthralled even after the rush is gone.

Woman’s gotta have it

I don’t expect the pastoral in hip-hop, but I’ve learned to throw aside my expectations in the presence of Yuka Honda.

Honestly, I didn’t like her music when I first heard it, in 1996. That summer, I worked at Whole Foods Market as a cashier/customer service rep, and discovered to my happiness that my co-workers were some hard-partying fiends. I ended up at great, impromptu parties—some of which involved video cameras, most of which involved marijuana (to which I’m unfortunately allergic), all of which involved beer “gifted” from our site of employment—nearly every weekend. Sometimes, the weekend extended to Wednesday. The Whole Foods crowd, at least the Dallas variety, wasn’t as hippie-ish as you’d imagine (several employees scoffed at my Phish t-shirts), but most were either musicians or hardcore music lovers with obscure, oddball tastes.

At one of these parties, I heard Cibo Matto. The group—Miho Hatori on vocals, Honda on everything else—sang about food. A lot. Seriously. “Cibo Matto” means “crazy food” in Italian. The group’s big hit was entitled “Know Your Chicken,” and the chorus was: “Know your chicken! You’ve got to know your chicken!” in vocals that were sung in halting English. I hated it. I hated it even more when I noticed the partygoers all singing along, and laughing in broken English and mimicking Japanese. I wondered if anyone would give a shit—Cibo Matto was all the rage in 1996; Sonic Youth loved it, and you can’t get more hip than that—if it consisted of two white girls from north Chicago. (Robert Christgau noted that Cibo Matto “signify their commitment to innovation by hanging out in the right neighborhood,” and that sounded right to me.) There was a “you’re pretty good for being Japanese” condescension at the party that irritated me about love of the band. The beats were marginally catchy but, I thought, self-consciously opaque, as if putting a distance between the music and hip-hop so as to be all the hipper. If you were down with Cibo Matto, you were cool that year, and I guess I wasn’t cool in 1996.

My opinion began to shift in 1998, when I heard Honda’s remix of Medeski, Martin & Wood’s “Sugar Craft.” The original track comes from the beat-heavy jazz band’s lone misstep, Combustication—the hot beats and keyboard noodling doesn’t quite meld with the samples and DJ Logic’s limp-wristed turntable scratches, with the exception of the sexy and slow-burning “Just Like I Pictured It”—and is flaccid for all its instrumental layers and sonic effects. Medeski’s Hammond B-3 organ sounds hesitant, as if he wants to start playing but doesn’t know when he should come in; the sampled screams, laughs, and other vocals seem slapped on, and not integral. Everything’s effect but there’s no center. The track wants to sound sinister and slinky but instead is perfunctory.

Honda’s remix—okay, let’s call it Cibo Matto’s, since Hatori and Honda’s then-boyfriend Sean Lennon appear as well—is delightful. (In fact, the Combustication Remix EP is half as long and twice as good as the original album.) She takes the basic ingredients, but raises everything to a couple octaves higher. Honda tosses aside the vocal effects, and instead adds Hatori’s soul-drenched singing—no, I’ve got no idea what she’s saying—which brings the swagger that the original track was missing. What was once a swamp-bottom piece, tonally, becomes bright and poppy. Honda filters the drums through something that makes them frayed and propulsive, so the tempo moves us along even if it’s not technically any faster than the original. Around 2:15, Honda abandons the original song altogether, and instead dives into a shimmering, acoustic-guitar-driven beat that’s so happy that you grin alongside the notes. (The beat keeps Billy Martin’s original rhythms.) The samba strum of the guitar and the piano plonk are new dimensions—we’ve left “Sugar Craft” far behind.

I started paying attention, and looking back. Honda did production work and keyboard playing on Los Lobos’ terrific 1996 album Colossal Head; I’m pretty sure, but can’t definitively prove, that “Life Is Good” (the record’s best song) belongs to her. Michel Gondry’s visual palindrome video for Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water” must be seen to be believed, and the song’s good to boot.

In 2002, she released her first solo album, Memories Are My Only Witness, a suite of multi-movement songs—some crossing the seven-minute mark—that show as much sweep and melodic range as anything by DJ Shadow. There are beats galore, but her pieces are truly aural landscapes, tracks that are intended to have the depth and explorability of physical places. There’s rainfall, bird calls, wind rustling through trees, and children laughing. Harmonies reign here. The samples and keyboard flourishes sound like part of a natural environment. She evokes long walks through the countryside rather than through closed-in city streets. Her work is expansive. All this (and more) runs through pop-song structure with head-bobbing rhythms and snapping drums.

Those drums. I’ve intentionally referred to Honda’s work as hip-hop, as opposed to techno or electronica, and I meant it. The beats lope and swagger, and she believes in the bass drum and tom-tom fills rather than the high-register and thin-sounding snares and cymbals. (Sure, she uses the latter—she uses all percussion, and even makes bird chirps into beats—but low tones dominate her sound.) She builds layer upon layer of melody and rhythm, but each always feels thick and funky. The tracks are epic in thematic scope, but always grounded in specificity. Hence the long, detailed titles: “Driving Down by the Hudson River, We Saw the Blood Red Burning Sky,” “You Think You Are So Generous, But It’s the Most Conditional ‘Anything’ I’ve Ever Heard,” “Some Days I Stay in Bed for Hours.”

Two years later, she emerged again with Eucademix, a collection of shorter pop songs—nothing goes over five minutes—that varies more in style. Still, there’s the string section of the gorgeous “Humming Song (Alone Together)” and the pretty folk of the nevertheless danceable “Parallel.” “Seed of Seed of Peach” is a solo piano piece, searching and earnest and played by Honda. The album is chamber pop seeped in a hip-hop producer’s mindset. “Limoncello” feels like the soundtrack for a Super Mario Bros. Game—it’s that MIDI-primitive and synthetic—but “When the Monkey Kills” (with Timo Ellis’s mangy, raw guitar) sounds like raw meat being torn into.

Somehow, none of it sounds urban. (Well, okay, “Limoncello” couldn’t be countrified if it tried.) It’s too Big Sky, too ocean-like, too cloud-embracing to be confined by asphalt and soot. Yuka Honda, time and time again, has taken hip-hop into the sunshine. We’re all better for the brightness and warmth.
—————————————
I’m writing this as a sort of response to Girish Shambu’s post, “Films: Evaluation & Value,” in which he asks: “Does your evaluation of a film change over time? Are there examples of ‘revisionist evaluation’ of films or filmmakers in your viewing history? And what might’ve caused or catalyzed these revisions? I think our stories might make for interesting sharing and reading.” These are great questions, but I got to thinking: Why can’t we broaden the horizon of this line of questioning to all art forms? What makes cinema inherently different from, say, our experiences with literature or music or architecture? And so here we are.

Sleater-Kinney rocks the PS3

Did you know that Carrie Brownstein has a blog? If you did, why on Earth didn’t you tell me? I found out only because she–a genuine guitar goddess–tried out that newfangled Rock Band video game for Slate, and quickly discovered what Stan’s dad figured out in an episode of South Park: being a good musician doesn’t do you a lick of good while playing the game. In fact, technical chops may in fact be a detriment to your conquering the game. Her prose is sly, cranky, and funny, just like her guitar-playing and singing. A taste:

I had some friends over to play Rock Band a few nights later. We didn’t cluster into formal bands but instead took turns on the various instruments. The allure of Rock Band seems to break down not by people’s interest in music or their skills at playing it, but by people’s love of either karaoke or video games. One friend stayed on the vocals for a number of songs, scoring 100 percent on a Queens of the Stone Age tune, and, at one point, calling out for someone to grab him a beer. Feeling like obsequious roadies, we obliged. The roles do go to one’s head after a while. But after a few hours, most people’s enthusiasm for the game diminished. When I looked carefully, I realized I was having a party where people were sitting around playing video games. And, really, if you are going to play the game with a group of friends for more than a night, shouldn’t you just form a real band? There is something sad about the thought of four teenagers getting Rock Band for Christmas and spending all of their after-school time pretending to know how to play.

Go read it.
-------------------------------------------
RELATED: I raved about Brownstein’s former band Sleater-Kinney and its final album here.

Rough Magic

I suppose there are more furious album-opening salvos that “Radio Nowhere”— Sleater-Kinney’s “Call the Doctor”, the Clash’s “London Calling,” Public Enemy’s “You’re Gonna Get Yours,” or Fugazi’s “Facet Squared”—but the song’s in good company. Sure, its guitar line recalls Tommy Tutone’s great “867-5309,” but Bruce Springsteen’s intent is far less whimsical, his lyrical tone more isolated and melancholy. “I was trying to find my way home/ But all I heard was a drone/ Bouncing off a satellite/ Crushing the last lone American night.” Indeed, the three guitars bleed into a singular, swallowing sound.

The song—well, almost all the songs here—are about trying to find connections with other people, about the desire and need for human touch, for the sound of another person’s voice. Mostly, the search ends in failure; occasionally, Springsteen gives us equivocal success. Here, and throughout the rest of Magic, Springsteen’s voice is fighting to be heard over the music, over the production that sounds murkier and more frayed than he’s ever let the E Street Band sound before. The guitars slur and muddy the water; even Clarence Clemons’s normally clear-ringing saxophone is brash, roughly recorded, as though its sound is unable to match the clarity of its message.

In his 1970s and 1980s concerts, Springsteen’s battle cry to the crowd between songs was “Is there anybody really alive out there?!” Two decades ago, it was a yell of solidarity; the audience responded with a roar. In “Radio Nowhere,” however, Springsteen’s voice is weary, trying hard not to be desolate as he decries that he’s “spinning around a dead dial/ Just another lost number in a file.” As his narrator succinctly describes his isolation and desperate search for anything approaching communion, Springsteen’s voice is buried by sound. “I just want to hear some rhythm,” chanted over and over again, becomes increasingly ferocious, but also pathetic. He knows he’s being drowned out.

“Radio Nowhere” encapsulates Magic’s strengths and weaknesses in under three-and-a-half minutes. On the album’s twelve songs, Springsteen’s lyrical genius is evident everywhere—that blend of redemption and damnation; the concrete and precise images; the tremendous emotional range and perspectives; the vitality of a single soul ever in conflict with societal forces that s/he can’t comprehend, much less control; the seemingly simple choruses that shift meaning with each new verse. As a singer, he’s more confident than ever. He sells “Livin’ in the Future” with just the swing of his voice—you could dirty-dance to it even without the sleazy/brilliant riffs and roughhouse heavy beats—and that tripping vocal delivery belies its political potency. (Oh, come on: “My faith’s been torn asunder/ tell me is that rolling thunder/ Or just the sinking sound/ of something righteous going under?” That ain’t just about a man singing about a romantic relationship falling apart.) “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” gets into a lonely heart’s mind, his halting attempts to get some loving, but Springsteen’s words and delivery give an autopsy—of which the narrator’s only partly aware—of the idealization and mythologizing that’ll make his connections impossible to achieve.

In Magic’s first half, each time we turn that dial to a new song, we’re turning to a new narrator, a new voice (in “Livin’ in the Future,” Springsteen’s tone is noticeably higher, almost falsetto, than on the rest of the album), a new situation. Most importantly, we’re hitting a new sound. My friend Brünhilde, bless her, hasn’t given up on the power of radio. What I think she loves is radio’s ability to surprise us, to introduce us to something new without our permission, and then its ability to mix that with something similar but unheard in awhile.

Most significantly, there’s a new sound. In the pre-formatted days of AM radio, you could expect to hear the soul strut of the Supremes next to Stevie Wonder in proto-funk form, next to the Byrds’ country-rock, next to the Beatles, next to Springsteen’s own throaty fusion of R&B, gospel, and prog-rock. Springsteen’s perhaps not a great musical innovator, but his compositional genius (there’s that word again but, after nearly four decades of music this good, there’s no other appropriate word. Deal with it) is as a synthesizer. He brings together disparate pop sounds, from traditions black and white, and fuses them together into a form all his own.

So, for six songs, Springsteen rewards Brünhilde’s righteous hope. “Radio Nowhere’s” grunge differs substantially from the crisp pop rock of the next, “You’ll Be Comin’ Down,” though they’re unified by guitars that both bleed into the mix and are distinct. (This is true of the E Street Band’s production as a whole.) “Livin’ in the Future’s” scuzz-funk feels like nothing that came before it, and the chamber pop of “Your Own Worst Enemy,” complete with string-quartet surge and ringing piano, doesn’t sound like what comes before it. Hell, nothing on Magic sounds like, or is as fantastic as, “Gypsy Biker.” “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” has a nostalgic jump-back to Springsteen’s own songwriting history—with the specificity of locale and a bit of the goodbye-to-all-that of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” a song from 1973!—and ambitious musical structures.

The second half, though, feels as unfocused as the narrator of “Radio Nowhere.” The lyrics of “I’ll Work for Your Love,” “Last to Die,” and “Long Walk Home” are terrific, but the sound is generic. It’s not quite soul, not quite rock, not quite chamber-pop, not quite gospel. All of which is fine, but none of it is quite specific to Springsteen, either. The musicianship is competent, in the same way that Matchbox 20 is competent. “Magic” yearns for the folk significance and odd echoes of “Streets of Philadelphia” or The Rising’s “Nowhere Man” and “You’re Missing,” but isn’t distinct enough to make an impression. It’s the worst aspects of Devils & Dust in one song, without the compensation of meaningful lyrics.

The album doesn’t find its footing again until the closing “Devil’s Arcade.” A song’s ability to make you cry is not a perfect measure of a song’s strength, but it’s not a bad one to go by. (The first time I heard “Devil’s Arcade,” I couldn’t stop weeping.) This song serves as a perfect coda for an album of lost souls and missed connections. Its sinuous cello cuts into, and makes real, the lyrics that crack into the skin like a whip. Throughout Magic, we’ve heard lines about people who’ve gone off to serve their country and returned home in body bags. We’ve listened to shell-shocked survivors of war and battles of love as they try to endure the terrors of life. We’ve heard them trying not to be consumed by dread, by static and noise and slurring sound that overwhelms them. The ambient drones reflect our free-floating anxieties in the face of mourning, which Springsteen and company capture in sound. Better yet, Springsteen’s lyrics convey, in detail, a specific man and the effect his death has on those around him. The words that his lover remembers—“You said heroes are needed, so heroes get made/ Somebody made a bet, somebody paid”—as she tries to memorialize him feel specific to this man, but he’s universal enough that we’ve all known someone like him.

“Devil’s Arcade” is the flipside to “Gypsy Biker.” Both deal with the loss of veterans, from the points-of-view of those left behind. The latter is even more expansive—in “Gypsy Biker,” Springsteen switches from narrator to narrator, giving brief portraits of how various people (a lover, a mother, a brother, a friend) deal with the loss. It’s a group snapshot of loss. It ends with the marvelously despondent image of someone “counting white lines/ Counting white lines and getting stoned” because the gypsy biker’s coming home… to his grave. “Devil’s Arcade” offers a memorial that remembers “the beat of your heart,” and that dares to move on from loss to acceptance and a sort of freedom. The sound, ironically, is more mournful (that cello brings us low) than the soaring, angry, drum-filled “Gypsy Biker.” Again, that’s Springsteen tweaking with our expected emotions. As a coda to the coda, the all-acoustic “Terry’s Song” gets to the nitty-gritty and devotes itself to Springsteen’s recently deceased friend Terry Magovern. It captures the Nebraska-era folk that “Magic” aspires to achieve.

But “Devil’s Arcade” ends the album proper, and finishes it on a note of sonic hope/futility—a martial, cracking drumbeat, above and isolated from the din. (The din dies away gradually.) It proclaims the individual but, god, it sounds lonely. It’s a thunderclap of fury and hope. As with all thunderclaps, though, it’s at once loud, a little unfocused, and over much too soon.

————————————
Related reading: I wrote about Devils & Dust here, and We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions here.

Walking jones: Hank Jones and Joe Lovano’s “Lady Luck”

The neighborhood isn’t quite painted with fall colors—central Mississippi rarely gets the splendid autumn effect of reds, oranges, and golds—but the breeze is brisk and the aromas evoke spices, subtle perfumes, and barely damp grass. Kids play league football at Chastain Middle School, an off-duty postal employee practices his golf swing on the school’s soccer field, and the branch library is across the street from both. All of which is six to eight blocks from my apartment, and makes for a pleasant route as the sun sets. I tell myself that it’s because I need to return library books, but I make the 1.5-mile loop twice a week mostly because I love walking. The motions helps me unwind and make sense of the day.

As I’ve mentioned before, I also love music that evokes walking outdoors in the city. When I originally wrote about the Earl Harvin Trio’s “A Little Walk to Relax,” in May 2005, I wasn’t technically sophisticated enough to post a mp3 of the six-minute ditty here, so that listeners could hear it for themselves. As you’ll see below, I’ve corrected this egregious error. Ten years after I first heard the piece, I still appreciate its ability to be both gentle and insistent. It sashays, rather than just ambles, down the avenue. Harvin’s drumwork isn’t as flashy or as impossibly intricate as it in the trio’s other stuff, but his brushes and top-top-tops on the snare push Fred Hamilton’s bass and Dave Palmer’s half-stride/half-bebop piano forward, even as we don’t immediately know the destination.

Good autumn walk tunes must possess a rhythmic persistence that’s not so driving that I end up wanting to run, but must also meander, like a flaneur moseying through the cramped alleys and quiet byways of Montmartre. In the two-year interim between the original post and today, I’ve found other “walking” tunes that I love nearly as much as “A Little Walk to Relax.” There’s “Skating” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio—to whom Dave Palmer, the Earl Harvin Trio’s primary composer, owes a large debt—from A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is a classic of the genre. Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo is full of walking songs, filtered through trip-hop production; the bells, drum loops, and dub echoes evoke images of birds flying by, of warm rain, of wind whipping through leaves. The album’s songs often make me want to make love as much as walk, though I suppose that’s not exactly something I fault Gilberto for.

The best walking song of late, and the one that might dethrone “A Little Walk to Relax,” is Hank Jones and Joe Lovano’s live rendition of “Lady Luck.” Recorded in New York at Dizzy’s Club in April 2006, Jones (piano) and Lovano (tenor saxophone) mesmerize with a duet that’s smoldering and jaunty and purposeful. (It appears on the all-around fantastic live album Kids.) At the time of this club date, Jones was 87 years old and Lovano was 53; here, though, they sound like 20-something geniuses with something to prove. Without a bass or drums to anchor them, the duo relies on its innate ability to swing and to communicate telepathically. Jones gets things rolling with a confident riff that’s nevertheless staggered rhythmically and feels a little hesitant—those high-pitched plonks in the midst of a low-tuned stride throw us off. When Lovano comes in, his husky, warm-toned sound belies how smoothly the saxophonist establishes the song’s structure.

Both legends veer off into amazing, intricate solos—both epic and miniature—but it’s the conversation between the two instruments that’s most riveting. Lovano and Jones talk intimately—their sounds could be sharing a post-coital coffee and crossword puzzle in bed. Like the former, “Lady Luck’s” sound is bracing and sharp; like the latter, the piece is surprisingly complex and tricky, leading into areas that the listener can barely predict.

But we can predict them after all—the swing, the sauntering and hip-wavering motion of the song is ever-present. We know ultimately where “Lady Luck” is headed, though each swerve and curlicue makes us smile in nonplussed pleasure. It’s a mature, contemplative piece—perhaps Jones and Lovano sound like thirtysomethings rather than twentysomethings—but one with a youthful snap of the fingers, one that’s not too old to delight in pleasures of the flesh and of walking. I could stride all through north Jackson to its beat.

—————————————
The tracks under discussion are:

1. “A Little Walk to Relax” by the Earl Harvin Trio.

2. “Lady Luck” by Joe Lovano and Hank Jones.

I’ll leave up the first piece indefinitely, since the album on which it appears—Strange Happy—is long out-of-print, and its label is defunct. It’s not coming back any time soon, and I would rather that people get exposed to it than worry about rights infringement. With “Lady Luck,” however, I’ll leave it up until 21 November 2007. After that, you’re on your own. Enjoy.

Slip on your dancing shoes: Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4”

“1, 2, 3, 4” by Feist, directed by Patrick Daughters, choreographed by Noemie Lafrance.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Thai tradition of cinematic blessings before feature films, and why we need more of them. I think I’ve found one that I’d be thrilled to see right as the lights go down.

If you’ve watched TV at all over the past month, you’ve seen snippets of the video for Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4,” since it accompanies the commercials for Apple’s new line of colorful, shiny iPod Nanos. Feist appears, fetchingly, on the Nano video screens, which are spread out like playing cards. The commercial seems unavoidable, and Apple’s pushing these damn things like new candy bars.

Feist is, of course, part of the product package—now, you can watch her video on your tiny-ass video screen, if you squint really hard! It works both ways—Apple uses her to promote itself as hip; Feist uses Apple to get more airplay, and music videos are essentially extended commercials for musicians, anyway.

But nothing about Feist and director Patrick Daughters’s vision can be reduced to mere product. The three-minute video is an ode to melancholy wrapped in joy, and it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

The scene is an open warehouse, lit coldly. The camera stares at a multicolored wall, which contrasts with the stark gray floor, in the distance. The environment’s scruffy and scuffed—it’s seen better days, or maybe it’s just in use. Slowly, our hero (Leslie Feist) emerges from behind an exit door, dressed in a sparkly blue catsuit and with shimmering brown hair, and walks confidently towards us. The camera follows her slowly—the entire video’s shot in a single take—as an acoustic guitar gently strums out a one-two-three-four riff like a heartbeat. “One two three four, tell me that you love me more,” Feist sings in a fragile but somehow tough croon. (Sasha Frere-Jones describes her voice, rightly, as “gentle but grainy, and full of emotion—capable of swooping up to end a phrase on a full, strong tone.”) She completes the verse—“Sleepless, long nights/ That’s what my youth was for”—as she completes her motion. She’s facing it, in medium-closeup, as the camera’s gradually zoomed in as she was walking in a turn.

And then all hell breaks loose. As the string section and the banjo and the handclaps enter, along with the throaty gospel choir belting out “whoa-oh-oh!,” people start collapsing behind her. The shot moved so fluidly, and as a long shot, that we know there was no one behind her up to this point. But there they are, about ten of them, tumbling out from behind her, as if emerging from Feist. Thank goodness there are people running in, from both sides of the frame, to catch them. Of course, these people immediately also fall down, with others to catch them. The catch-fall continues in a semi-circular pattern, like a slow wave, until Feist is singing and dancing with the accompaniment of about 40 dancers. This all takes five seconds. Then everyone rises, and starts singing and clapping in a somewhat synchronized dance.

“1, 2, 3, 4” as a song could be called ramshackle chanteuse, in that the lyrics—about teenage love, as seen both nostalgically and realistically—and vocal styling is sophisticated and world-weary, but the music is charmingly eccentric and unpolished. At some point, you’ll hear everything from a quick piano cascade to sliding trombone to triumphant crowd whoops to a joyous but almost out-of-step trumpet section, all structured by that simplistic guitar strum and soft-shoe drumwork. Handclaps and finger snaps are more prominent percussion than actual drums. Feist’s earlier stuff feels polished, rubbed to an ironic but immaculate sheen of 1980s new wave and electro. This song sounds as if it were recorded with one microphone, on Feist’s front porch. It clatters, charmingly so, and it’s catchy.

The video emulates the song brilliantly, with abstraction instead of trying to visually show the lyrics’ narrative. The dancers move in rough synchronicity but it’s not exact. The teams of dancers are clad in either red, purple, green, or yellow, but the clothes aren’t uniforms. From person to person, they don’t match shades—one woman’s yellow shirt is solid, while another’s is striped. The clothes themselves don’t even match, as some wear khakis while others wear leotards or skirts or cargo pants. The casting call must have said “Come as you are; we’ll make it fit.” The dance routine is practiced, but not so much so that you can’t see the frayed edges.

In a prominent sequence, we can see one man moving obviously against the current, accidentally bumping into and twirling into others. A lesser director would have used a less sloppy take. But messiness is part of the point. The song and the dancing are both so exuberant that we don’t care about missed notes. Feist reveals her multiple selves and moods symbolically by having all these pieces seemingly s/tumble out of her, just as we all contain multitudes. And some of them clash, go against the grain, and don’t make sense.

In any case, these minor slip-ups have a way of correcting themselves so well that I wonder if choreographer Noemie Lafrance actually planned for that man to be visually off-key. When the zealous choral dances threaten to dissolve into chaos, Feist’s singing snaps onto a precise idea—“One, two, three, four, five, six, nine and ten/ Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then”—and so do the dancers. Suddenly, as we see from above (and, again, the whole video is a single take; no cuts), they’ve formed into a spiral through which Feist is carried by a strong dancer. Just as we have a habit of spiraling back into nostalgia for “teenage hopes” that nevertheless “have tears in their eyes” and “left us with nothing” (all Feist’s lyrics), she literally spirals into herself. She pantomimes shooting out the spiral—again, collapsing dancers all around—and returns to adulthood.

The precision of the visual motifs and motion matches the clarity of such lyrics as “Sweetheart, bitter heart/ Now I can’t tell you apart/ Cozy and cold/ Put the horse before the cart.” At the same time, both song and dance reveal how ecstatically love (especially young love) makes us feel. Again and again, the seemingly slipshod group dances coalesce into tight patterns and formations. Feist bodysurfs on a sea of hands that we don’t quite believe has come together so fluidly; she’s soon after boxed in by the crowd; and then she gets to bodysurf again, this time with the hands moving in a wave.

Throughout it all, Feist proves to a casual, expressive dancer. Her movement, awkward but self-assured and with no trace of self-consciousness, goes well with her conversational singing voice. The song and dance are talking to each other—I’m not sure the crowd cheering is part of the album version of the song or just appropriate to the video. Feist’s videos for “Mushaboom” and “My Moon, My Man” (also collaborations with Daughters) also show a love for non-professional but deeply felt body motion. (Her video for “One Evening” hilariously rips off Michael Jackson and the ultra-low-budget reels of 1980s girl-pop videos such as Toni Basil’s “Mickey.”) Daughters, bless him, understands the need to see the full choreography in long and medium shots, without chopping it into incomprehensibility. His camera moves lusciously from zooms to pans, elevating up to get bird’s-eye views and back down again to ground level.

Because of this, we sense the dance as an organic, singular entity, despite the large number of dancers and not-always-in-sync swirling arms and legs. Shooting this as a single take was risky but necessary. This chaos and clarity, says Feist in her singing and Daughters in his direction, are both part of us simultaneously. We’re the clutter and order and spasticness and fluidity, and nothing brings all this out at once quite like love. At the end of this orgy of motion, all the dancers seem to collapse perfectly behind Feist again. She’s alone again, but sated. She walks forward slowly, the camera backs up, she stops, and takes a bow. We can’t see anything but her on a seemingly empty stage, but we know that the flood of energy must still be there. The façade is a sparkling, smooth, single entity. But facades are tricky things. Each of us contains multitudes of emotion and longing—all it takes is a little love and music to bring it all out.

---------------------------------

UPDATE: To the hundreds of you who've apparently found this site through this place, welcome! To the left, you'll quickly find 2½ years worth of posts on everything from more music and film commentary to personal posts, stuff about food, and everything in-between. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by.

Sauna night at Preservation Hall

It’s 9:30pm on a August Sunday in New Orleans, and I’m drenched in sweat. I’m indoors but that doesn’t matter here. At least, not now.

My little brother and I have come down to the Crescent City for a long weekend. I take an annual trip here, but it’s James’s first time here outside of a church trip which, given the nature of the city, doesn’t really count. Still, we’re no Bourbon Street poonhounds looking for a whiskey fix. We avoided Hustler’s Barely Legal Club—James said, “Aren’t they basically asking for a police raid?”—and its like. This afternoon, we’ve taken the Canal Street streetcar to the New Orleans Museum of Art, and shivered through the new exhibits (magnificent Albrecht Dürer engraving, and a lush, gold-strewn set of Russian Orthodox paintings and iconography) and the more-or-less permanent Fabergé collection. Last night, we ended up at Mona’s for some Middle Eastern cuisine, and some fruity, exquisite gelato off of Oak Street.

Still, we’ve stayed for the most part in the Quarter, which means we’ve been walking for most of the weekend. This morning, before the museum trip, we took a $12/person mule tour through the Vieux Carré, and the rambunctious guide pointed out good shops, old history, and interesting places to eat. (During the ride, we ventured into the gayborhood part of Bourbon Street, and one woman said to the guide, “I see all these rainbow-colored balloons around. See, right by that bar. Are the Saints about to start playing?” James and the guide had to suppress laughter.)

Now, the Quarter is not just pedestrian-friendly but probably pedestrian-essential. Parking’s a nightmare; we left our car at our lovely hotel, except for the trip out to Mona’s. Streets are blocked from vehicular traffic for large chunks of the day, and I couldn’t figure out a schedule for when those times might be. The streets are narrow, so even the rare two-way street is clogged enough to make me long for my own two feet.

All that’s terrific; I’m a big fan of older, pedestrian cities. (This is why New Orleans, New York, and especially my love of loves Chicago will always be treasured by me.) But walking in the Quarter, in early August, means two things: 1. You’re always smelling new, and not quite fresh or savory, aromas, in the early morning on your way to Café Du Monde on Decatur, or Café Beignet on Royal Street; and 2. you’re always sweating and looking for an interesting shop in which you can cool off for five minutes.

So, James and I have strolled into toy shops—in one, James found a Curious George tea set; in another, we found a collection of handmade, wooden toys and puzzles—and hat stores with Panama fedoras and bowler hats. We wandered into the St. Louis Cathedral, Faulkner House Books, and Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, which is lit only by candles and serves a great amaretto sour; the latter was the tour guide’s recommendation.

Another Quarter-specific thing: French Quarter architecture surprises outsiders. The exteriors of the buildings—dilapidated, with peeling paint, facades from the mid-1800s, and ancient wrought-iron gates—do not often reflect the tenor of the interiors, which can be luminous and sumptuous. Because the buildings are packed together so tightly on the narrow streets, it’s hard to tell how deep most of them are. A doorway no wider than a phone booth might show a glimpse of green and chairs through a long, dark hallway. You pass through the hall, and discover you’re in an open-air ivy-and-palm-tree-strewn courtyard, with building walls all around you. We wandered into Pat O’Brien’s, and were surprised by how vast the courtyard is, by how much space there is amidst the red brick to stretch out and unwind. James ordered the world-famous Hurricane; I had a mint julep, complete with a huge sprig of mint and a maraschino cherry. True to our nerdy selves, we nursed our drinks over the course of an hour, reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (James) and Daniel Pinkwater’s The Neddiad (me), and occasionally people-watching.

After reading a few chapters apiece, we left Pat O’Brien’s pleasantly buzzed and entered the humidity and stumbling walkers on St. Peter Street. Just down the street, we saw Preservation Hall. James immediately suggested it as a place to visit.

Now, I’m a big jazz fan but the moldy fig stuff leaves me cold. Yes, I own and enjoy a collection of Jelly Roll Morton’s recordings from 1926-27, and I’ve given R. Crumb’s old-timey tastes a try. Mostly, though, my jazz love runs post-1945, and against crackly vinyl and the rattling, slurred trombone and banjo. And what Preservation Hall wishes to preserve, of course, is the ragtime/stomp/moldy fig ramshackle jazz of the pre-1930 era.

But this trip was about searching out new avenues in one of my favorite cities, and about doing what James wanted to do. So I said, “Let’s go.”

And that’s why I’m standing up, on a Sunday night, in a rundown building that doesn’t have air conditioning, and that’s crammed with 50-60 enthusiastic fans, yelling my head off. This incarnation of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (there have been several incarnations over the years) is blowing hot fire. We’ve reached that crescendo signaling the end of the first set, with the lead singer/trumpeter leading call-and-responses to the audiences and coming sly come-ons to the comely female singer who’s a student at Tulane University. The band engages the audience; the music comes from us as much as it comes from the folks onstage.

In fact, the “stage” is level with the audience floor, and the musicians sit unless they are moved to stand and wow us. Improvisational pyrotechnics threaten to ignite the walls. One thing about early jazz that’s been hard to get used to is that it seems like everyone is soloing all at once. For a good description of what’s going on, it’s useful to turn to Tom Piazza’s Understanding Jazz:

…Contemporary ears may be so used to hearing a sharp distinction between foreground and background, between a solo voice and its accompaniment, that a performance such as [King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band’s] “Weather Bird Rag” may come as something of a shock. In it, almost every instrumental voice, certainly every wind instrument, seems to be in the foreground at the same time.

[…]

Once our ears get used to the limited acoustic range, we can hear something like a musical miracle in progress. All the musicians are playing at once, each is playing something different, and yet the music doesn’t sound chaotic. There is a unified effect consisting of very different elements.

Those things—the limited acoustic range, and the blurred border between foreground and background—is what’s always bugged me about the oldest school of jazz. Tonight, though, this raucous energy and sexy musical slurs is getting me worked up. The crowd, too. We’re singing along, clapping energetically (even if we’re sometimes a little off the beat), and dripping with sweat. Old-time jazz blurs lines, exposes and takes advantage of the porous borders between instruments, between band and audience, between genres (jazz, blues, folk, country), and between solos and group swing. Band members traipse onto and off of the stage. The trap-kit drummer doesn’t show up to join the tuba-and-bass-drum rhythm section until the second song. The Asian clarinetist hops on stage around song four, plays two dynamite and insinuating solos for two respective songs (Is there a more immediately erotic sound than a clarinet blowing smoothly? I think not), and then quietly leaves the stage. He was in the fifth row before he joined the band; I thought he was just part of the audience.

Still, it’s a sauna in here, and not just because of the female singer glistening in the low-cut black dress. The set break comes as relief. James and I buy bottled water—no alcohol here, nor a restroom; the staff welcomes you to cross the street to a bar with both available—and check out the CDs. We rest. We know we’re sticking around for at least one more set.

During the second set, I realize that preservation doesn’t mean cryogenically freezing the sound. In rousing versions of “St. James Infirmary” and “This Little Light of Mine,” the singers adapt the lyrics to make hilarious, in-meter references to Playstation 2 and cellphones. For these kids—because none of the black musicians on stage is over 30—this music is far from “old-timey” or “moldy fig” or “old hat.” It’s contemporary, it’s right now. They feel it freshly, and make it fresh for the audience. We’re all rolling along, singing and clapping to songs twice as old as we are, to melodies that we’ve known in our bones since our first Sundays in church.

Indeed, the concert reminds me of church, but without the sermons or the bombastic moralizing. Just the communion, and a lot more sexual heat. Around 10:15pm, after the second set, James and I leave. This isn’t because the show wasn’t good—it was, in fact, overwhelming. So overwhelming that we needed a slow night walk back to the hotel—well, after a piña colada—to wind down and process it. And I’ve been thinking about the concert ever since.

Calypso call

After over a decade of dial-up, I recently made the switch to digital cable here at la casa de QuietBubble. There are so many advantages: 1. I no longer get to read a chapter of whatever book I’m reading as I wait for a picture to upload. 2. Streaming radio doesn’t cause my computer to develop a hernia. 3. Google Maps and MapQuest are actually useful operations for me now. 4. I can subscribe to podcasts without laughing at myself. 5. My friends and relatives can call me again. 6. Apparently, there’s this thing called YouTube—perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Now, if I’d get myself a cellphone, I’d be living in the late-1990s.

The biggest joy has come from the oodles of music blogs out there. (Go to the “music” bloglist on the left to see what I’ve added recently.) My jones for Brazilian music has gotten a major upgrade. The Funky 16 Corners’s weekly radio show sends chills and spills down my spine. My hard drive is rapidly filling up; the iTunes library swells.

I’ve had trouble, though, finding music blogs and/or podcasts for one genre I love—calypso. There’s lot of reggae sites out there, but I’m not, and never have been, that fond of the music. (I’m more tolerant, though, of its sister genre, dub.) What I’ve looking for is Afro-Caribbean pop music from the early part of the 20th century through the 1950s and 1960s, either created in the Caribbean or in the wide-ranging Caribbean diaspora… and that’s not reggae.

Any suggestions, whether in the comments section or the email inbox, would be greatly appreciated.