Tag Archives: USA

Java to jazz

Posted on by

Gauthier, gamelan, and Gershwin

Java Paris 1889Source.

I can’t remember how I came across the name of Éva Gauthier (1885–1958) and the story of how she presented arrangements of Javanese music in her concert recitals.

By the late 19th century the sounds of gamelan were regularly heard at grand exhibitions in the West; Paris 1889 (Exposition Universelle), Chicago 1893 (Columbia Exhibition), and San Francisco 1915 (Panama–Pacific International Exposition) all had a “Javanese village”.

By contrast with Berlioz’s aversion to the music of the Mystic East, Debussy was entranced by the gamelan he heard at the 1889 Exposition. He wrote to a friend in 1895 of “the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades… which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts, for use by naughty little children.” And in 1913, in a much-cited passage:

There used to be—indeed, despite the troubles that civilization has brought, there still are—some wonderful peoples who learn music as easily as one learns to breathe. […] Their traditions are preserved only in ancient songs, sometimes involving dance, to which each individual adds his own contribution century by century. Thus Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint which make Palestrina seem like child’s play. And if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a travelling circus.

(Ravel is also sometimes said to have been impressed by the gamelan at the 1889 Exposition, but he was only 14, and I haven’t yet found a source.)

As to gamelan studies in later years, Michael Church devotes chapter 12 of Musics lost and found to the immersion of Jaap Kunst (1891–1960) and Colin McPhee (1900–1964) in the musics of Java and Bali. On his return from Indonesia to Amsterdam in 1934, Kunst established gamelan as a major theme in ethnomusicology. The Canadian-American composer McPhee lived in Bali through the 1930s; he found the engaging A house in Bali easier to write than his monumental study of the island’s music: “I did not live in Bali to collect material. I lived there because I wanted to, for the pleasure of it”. As Church comments,

he disdained the paraphernalia of scholarship, wanting to purge the book of “all stupid jargon-like aeophones [sic], idiophones beloved by Sachs and Hornbostel”. Yet as Oja points out, his approach to research was fastidious and scholarly.

Such pioneers lay the groundwork for the later gamelan craze; since the time of Mantle Hood few self-respecting ethnomusicology departments are without their own gamelan…

* * *

Even before Kunst, the French-Canadian mezzo-soprano Éva Gauthier was already promoting the music of Java (besides wiki, I have consulted Matthew Isaac Cohen, “Eva Gauthier, Java to jazz”).

Gauthier 1905Éva Gauthier, 1905. All images from wiki.

In 1910, disillusioned by being replaced in the opera Lakmé at Covent Garden, she travelled to Java, where she inconsequentially married a Dutch importer and plantation manager. Until 1914 she was based in Surakarta; besides performing there, in 1911 she toured Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Peking, followed over the next two years by Japan, Siam, and India.

But while in Surakarta Gauthier was granted permission to live in the Kraton palace to study its court music. She gained an introduction to this world through the composer and pianist Paul Seelig (1876-1945), former conductor of the royal band, chronicler of gamelan and kroncong. As she learned the basics of gamelan theory, Gauthier’s relations with the all-male gamelan musicians of the court were mediated through the royal wives.

She was taught, for example, that the drum was the “chef d’orchestra”, and that the vocal part “is merely a tone colour in the ensemble, and the singer’s voice counts as another instrument in the orchestra”.

Here’s film footage of a performance at the Kraton from 1912 (part of an interesting playlist):

And here’s the album Court music of Kraton Surakarta (King Records), recorded in 1992:

Gauthier’s sojourn at court also involved, um, International Cultural Exchange:

I sang to them a bit of colorateur and they thought the screaming on the high notes was hideous; they thought I was going to burst. Then I sang to them a melody. But they looked bewildered. They could not grasp it in the least. Then I sang Debussy to them, and they went into raptures.

Anyway,

She became such an enthusiast of Javanese performance that she hatched a plan to produce a tour of Javanese dancers and gamelan to Europe. She was convinced that the srimpi dance would captivate European audiences as much as it had her.

When this plan was thwarted by World War One, Gauthier moved to New York, and began to give recitals of arrangements by Paul Seelig and Constant Van de Wall, inserting short talks on Javanese courtly culture into her programmes. Her 1914–15 recordings of two songs were reissued in 1938:

For a gruelling vaudeville tour of the States she teamed up with the exotic dancer Regina Jones Woody (“Nila Devi”) with an item called Songmotion. As the latter recalled,

We were booed, laughed at, and made targets for pennies and programs. Almost hysterical, Eva and I changed into street clothes and sat down with Mr. Smith [the stage manager] and the conductor to discuss what to do. We had a fifty-two-week tour ahead, but if this was a preview of audience reaction, the Gauthier-Devi act wouldn’t last two minutes in a big city.

The stage manager, Mr Smith, was outspoken. He took Madame Gauthier apart first. “Take off that horse’s head thing you’re wearing and get rid of that sarong with its tail between your legs. Scrap that whiny music. You’re a good-looking woman. Put on your best evening gown, sing the Bell song from Lakmé, and you’ll get a good hand”. Madame promptly fainted.

On being revived, she stalked out of the room, announcing, “We’ll close before I prostitute my art”.

I came next. According to Mr. Smith I look bowlegged as I moved my feet and legs in Javanese fashion. Even he had to laugh. My native costumes were ugly. Why did I have four eyebrows? And if I could really dance, why did I just wiggle and jiggle about? Why didn’t I kick and do back bends and pirouettes?

Substituting Orient-inspired songs by composers such as Ravel and Granville Bantock, they only retained two songs by Seelig and Van de Wall. Gauthier withdrew from the year-long tour after five months, but for Songmotion in 1917, with Nila Devi no longer available, she found another dance partner in Roshanara (Olive Craddock!). This led them to perform in Ballet intime, an altogether more classy affair directed by Adolf Bolm, formerly of the Ballets Russes.

Having premiered Stravinsky’s Three Japanese lyrics in 1913, Gauthier loaned her Java notebooks to Ravel and Henry Eichheim. In November 1917 she premiered Five poems of ancient China and Japan by the talented young Charles Griffes (1884–1920). 

and that same year she supplied him with material for his Three Javanese songs:

Much drawn to both French modernism and American popular music, in 1923 Gauthier gave a seminal recital of “Ancient and modern music for voice” at the Aeolian Hall in New York—an early challenge to the boundaries between high and low cultures. In the first half she sang pieces by Bellini and Purcell, as well as modernist works by Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Milhaud, and others. The second half was still more daring, including pieces by Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin (who accompanied these items on piano). This was the first time Gershwin’s music was performed by a classical singer in concert, and led directly to the commissioning of Rhapsody in blue (1924) and his later jazz-classical syntheses.

Gauthier poster

Through the 1920s Gauthier often performed her “Java to jazz” programme, which typically began with her Seelig and Van de Wall songs, continuing with Beethoven, Bliss, Debussy, and Ravel, and ending with Gershwin, Berlin, and Kern. **

Eva 2
Birthday party honouring Maurice Ravel in New York, 8th March 1928.
From left: Oscar Fried, Eva Gauthier, Ravel at piano, Manoah Leide-Tedesco, George Gershwin.

* * *

Griffes is cited as saying “In the dissonance of modern music the Oriental is more at home than in the consonance of the classics”. Cohen again: 

Gauthier’s encounters with traditional Asian music, and particularly Javanese and Malay song, at a pivotal point in her career opened her mind to the diversity of world music and made her rethink her cultural values. As she remarked, “It was actually a serious study of all Oriental music that enabled me to understand and master the contemporary or so-called “modern music”.

For more on Indonesia, cf. Margaret Mead (under The reinvention of humanity), Clifford Geertz, and Frozen brass. For more Debussy, click here and here.

* For the riches of regional traditions, note the 20-CD series Music of Indonesia (Smithsonian Folkways, masterminded by Philip Yampolsky)—this playlist has a sample.

** From the days before newspaper typesetting rejoiced in the terse and gnomic, the wiki article on Gauthier cites a 1923 headline in the Fargo Forum:

Eva Gauthier’s Program Sets Whole Town Buzzing: Many People Are of Two Minds Regarding Jazz Numbers—Some Reluctantly Admit That They Like Them—Others Keep Silent or Condemn Them

Cf. the over-generous title of an 1877 book cited by Nicolas Slonimsky (in note here). And this roundup of wacky headlines.

Green book

Posted on by

Green book 1

Green book 1940Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018) may be flawed, but it’s a good watch, as long as you’re white.

It’s inspired by the true story of African-American pianist Dr Don Shirley’s fraught 1962 concert tour of the Deep South, for which he employed Italian-American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. On the road, Tony makes use of The Green Book, a guide for African-American travellers through the segregationist era.

Don is alienated from both his own culture (whatever that means) and from white society. Tony is himself no proponent of civil rights, despite being the object of a lesser racism—but as he experiences the shocking degradations to which his boss is subjected on tour, gradually they bond.

Green book 3

In the words of Rotten tomatoes, it’s “an excessively smooth ride through bumpy subject matter”. Some reviews (e.g. rogerebert.com, and the Guardian) note the film’s problems but are inclined to downplay them, and sterner critics too concede that the portrayals from Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are compelling.

But several reviewers, like Melanie McFarland, have more detailed critiques of the “lazy, feel-good take on race”. She notes how the movie combines “the white saviour trope with the story of a bigot’s redemption”, and that the movie “presents violent manifestations of racial animus as an unfortunate element of a distant past” (cf. this even more scathing appraisal).

Green book 2

The climactic scene in a black blues bar (where Don begins by winning the crowd over with Chopin—really?) is both cheesy and exhilarating (still McFarland: “the part we’re meant to note is Shirley’s only natural expression of joy comes near the end of the movie when let loose on a cheap and worn piano in a deep-South blues joint among his own people. You know, where he belongs.”) Such

escapist Social Progress tales drawn from a mythologized version of history […] reassure mainstream white audiences of how far we’ve come as a nation despite the headlines about a spike in hate crimes, the rising white nationalist presence within law enforcement and in politics, racially motivated mass shootings and widening wealth gaps between whites and non-white minority groups.

In similar vein are reviews in Vox and Vanity fair.

It’s a not infrequent experience to enjoy a work of art before (and even after) someone quite rightly points out that you shouldn’t… However well-meaning (or canny) its attempts to atone for racism and sexism (cf. Barbie), Hollywood remains an unlikely source of enlightenment.

See also The Tulsa race massacre, America over the water, A Hollywood roundtable, and An Indigenous people’s history of the United States.

* * *

Still, it’s good for Don Shirley’s ouevre to reach a wider audience. Some samples:

Orpheus in the underworld (as playlist):

Among several Greatest hits albums:

A live version of My funny Valentine:

How high the moon live on TV:

Yesterday:

and this short interview.

See also under A jazz medley, including Black and white.

Barbie

Posted on by

Barbie

I’m always late to the party, but thanks to the splendid Turkish Airlines, after the spellbinding safety video I accompanied the delicious in-flight meal by watching

  • Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023).

With a cast led by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, it’s both hilarious and sobering. Foremost among the excellent articulations of the current human predicament is America Ferrara’s monologue:

The patriarchy, and mansplaining, are gleefully exposed. But how subversive is it? How feminist? Besides a thorough article on wiki (including sections on “Critical response”, “Feminism”, Masculinity”), and this further survey of reviews, Vogue observes:

While some are praising the film for its tongue-in-cheek approach to girlhood, womanhood and, erm, dollhood, many others have described it as white feminism wrapped up in a pink, Mattel-labelled bow. I’m here to argue that those two things can be true at the same time.

Guarded approval also here; some social-historical background, and reservations in global context. Among a wealth of discussions, feminists such as Natasha Walter are less than convinced (see also here, here, here), and the taint of “shameless product placement” lingers. I’d love to hear the insights of Janet Radcliffe Richards on the film.

Here’s the final song What was I made for? by Billie Eilish:

While the recent portrayal of women in movies is still not such a success story, it must be good that Barbie‘s huge success has spurred such a wealth of discussion. Cf. Green book, “an excessively smooth ride through bumpy subject matter” in the field of racism.

See also this roundup of posts on gender—rural and urban China, modern European history, language, music, humour, film, sport….

Central Asia: shashmaqom at SOAS

Posted on by

Bukhara old
Old Bukhara (screenshot from Invisible Face of the Beloved).

Last week on the eve of Nowruz, just back from Istanbul, I was happy to attend a concert of shashmaqom  in the Brunei Gallery at SOAS, featuring two fine musicians from the Academy of Maqam in Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Sirojiddin Juraev on long-necked lutes and Khurshed Ibrohimzoda on vocals and tanbur plucked lute.

As I seek a rudimentary education on this suite repertoire of refined Sufi poetry accompanied by instrumental ensemble, in my explorations below (typically) I merely “gaze at flowers from horseback” 走马观花.

Shashmaqom originated from the numinous cultural metropolis of Bukhara, with related traditions evolving in centres such as Tashkent and Ferghana. For the greater region, Theodore Levin has adopted the term Transoxania, favoured by his fieldwork colleague Otanazar Matyabukov (“OM”)—stressing its “underlying geographic and social coherence rather than its more recent ethnic and political divisiveness”.

mapFrom The hundred thousand fools of God.

Basic sources on shashmaqom include an essay by Alexander Djumaev, the Musics of Central Asia site; Will Sumits’ chapter 15 in Michael Church, The other classical musics (cf. Musics lost and found, chapter 17); “Central Asian Republics” in The Rough Guide to world music: Europe, Asia, and Pacific; and sections in the New Grove Dictionary of music and musicians and The Garland Encyclopedia of world music.

Rather than attempting to define “classical” (cf. What is serious music?!, Joining the elite musical club, and in the introduction to my series on the Beatles) or to regard shashmaqom as a “living fossil” of courtly art music from a bygone society, it surely makes sense to understand such a tradition as part of the widespread, shifting maqam family of repertoires crossing national and class boundaries, albeit subject to canonisation (“maqām-isation”) even before the interventions of modern state regimes (see Rachel Harris, The making of a musical canon in Chinese Central Asia, pp.9–10, 97–9, 107–8).

Under the Soviet era, while shashmaqom was the object of official posturings about its “national”, “elite”, or “popular” status, it “found itself at the centre of a nationalistic tug-of-war” (in Sumits’ phrase), with competing Tajik and Uzbek versions. 

Levin cover

So it’s high time for me to revisit Theodore Levin‘s “pioneering cultural odyssey” The hundred thousand fools of God: musical travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) (1996, with CD). Despite its brilliant title, I suppose I was somewhat resistant to the book at first: reading it just at a time when I was deep in Chinese traditions of village ritual that were (then) remarkably unmediated by conservatoire-style remoulding, I found it unfortunate that so many of Levin’s interlocutors were representatives of state ensembles. Whereas Veronica Doubleday and John Baily, living in Herat on the eve of the Soviet invasion, had been able to immerse themselves in the grassroots world of social musicking, Tashkent was different; when Levin arrived there in 1977 his institutional base was doubtless inevitable. On that initial stay he can have had little access to the social milieu that OM later described to him (pp.33–4):

The entire unofficial cultural network and economic system that supported the central events in Uzbek social life—the toy (wedding), âsh (literally, “food”—an early morning quasi-religious gathering of men given separately by the fathers of both bride and groom before every Uzbek marriage), and ziyâfat, gap, gurung, or majlis, as intimate evening gatherings of friends for conversation, food, and music are variously called—had existed all along in the shadow of the official cultural life played out in concert halls and theatres, at public ceremonies and on radio and television.

muqam

Source: The other classical musics.

The tradition of gap is related to the Uyghur mäshräp, now the object of a new wave of repression in Xinjiang.

But if Levin too was perhaps frustrated that his initial clues to this elusive world were largely based on second-hand accounts rather than direct observation, he writes most insightfully about his encounters, with revealing stories of senior musicians’ lives. On his later visits to Tashkent with OM from 1990, he was able to attend gap and âsh ceremonies, meeting latter-day abdâl Sufi dervish “fools of God” (cf. Uyghur ashiq).

Back in 1977 Levin regarded the shashmaqom as stagnating—”a musical system propped up from above by the policies of Uzbekistan’s culture apparat” (“Frozen music”, pp.47–51):

Though I couldn’t put my finger on it, something had seemed not right about the performances of Shash maqâm I heard when I first came to Tashkent. Put simply, they lacked life. As taught at the Tashkent Conservatory, the Shash maqâm could have been compared to a dying person being kept clinically alive on a respirator. The respirator was controlled by the Ministry of Culture. It was the Ministry that had approved of the resuscitation of the moribund Shash maqâm in the late 1950s and had stage-managed its ideological repositioning as a leading exemplar of Uzbekistan’s “national” music (this after a near-death experience in the early 1950s in which the Ministry had decreed that the Shash maqâm had been too close to the feudal culture of the emirs, too distant from “the people”, too infused with undercurrents of Sufism, and thus had to be suppressed).

Still, as I learned of the troubled maintenance of folk ritual activity in China through the Maoist decades (see e.g. Gaoluo), I doubted if the turgid state ensembles could really have monopolised the musical market before 1990. Indeed, Levin continues with a vivid section on Turgun Alimatov (1922–2008), whom he met between 1990 and 1994. As Alimatov recalled, after his radio ensemble was disbanded in 1952,

I played at weddings with two brothers named Bâbâ Khan and Akmal Khan Sofixânov. Their father, Sofi Khan, was a famous hafiz [classical singer]. In those years, there were several musical dynasties which had a high calling […]. In contrast to other singers, the Sofixânovs performed exclusively songs with a religious content. They were religious people themselves, even during the time when religion was strictly forbidden. People who rejected religion simply didn’t associate with them, and for their part, the Sofixânovs stayed away from atheists. They were invited to the houses of believers.

Alimatov told Levin how he used to take part in many Sufi zikr-samâ rituals at which the Sofixânovs would perform (cf. Turkey). And he contrasted such devout behaviour with that of a lowly class of musician known as attarchi—with whom he also used to associate (cf. the underworld of old Lhasa). On this CD (Ocora, 1995), recorded by Levin, Alimatov moves from long-necked bowed lute sato to the plucked tanbur:

The ghijak spike fiddle is common to Transoxania and Xinjiang. But whereas in Xinjiang the soulful satar had long been at the heart of the Uyghur muqam, in Transoxania the sato had long been dormant when Alimatov revived it in the 1950s, followed by his pupil Abduvali Abdurashidov in Dushanbe (see below). And here is Alimatov on tanbur in 2001, recorded by Jean During, leading scholar of Central Asian maqam:

Levin continues with a revealing account of Arif Xatamov, another “unrepentant traditionalist who bemoaned the spiritual superficiality of contemporary music”—here’s a 2013 CD from Alchemy (as playlist):

And in the following chapter on Bukhara (note Levin’s CD Bukhara: musical crossroads of Asia [Smithsonian Folkways, 1991] and Shashmaqam: the tradition of Bukhara [New Samarkand Records, 1999]), while learning of the depth of Sufi and Jewish traditions he pursues shashmaqom in greater depth, finding more “frozen music”:

The worker’s state whose goal had been to eliminate class barriers in art had vilified the Shash maqâm as an elite art and tried to expunge it from cultural life. When that had failed, it had then tried to transform the Shash maqâm into a popular art. But Soviet cultural stategists had gotten everything reversed. In Bukhara, the Shash maqâm and other “heavy” music had been a popular art. And when they had tried to turn this music into a “national” folk art, they had inadvertently created an elite art: elite, that is, because it had all but lost its audience. No-one wanted to listen to a music whose soul had been usurped by the state.

The ponderous ideology of the state troupes still persisted in the early years after independence from Soviet rule. But since then, as the concert market has liberalised, shashmaqom has found a niche in the “Heritage” and “world music” industries, affording a home for some fine, creative musicians.

The hundred thousand fools of God continues with chapters on musical life in the south of Uzbekistan, Khorezm, the Upper Zarafshan and Yagnâb, and Shahristan, where Levin encounters a range of musical activity in social contexts—Sufi rituals, weddings, epic singers, healers. The book is another accessible classic of ethnomusicology, valuable both as an account of the nuanced views of musicians striving to emerge from the Soviet-style cultural yoke, and in paving the way for detailed ethnographies of traditional musicking in Transoxania.

* * *

Anyway, if I find a radical gulf (or might I say gap) between folk and conservatoire in Han-Chinese musicking, it seems I should be rather more broad-minded on the journey further west. In 1950s’ China, when “old artists” were recruited to the new state song-and-dance ensembles and arts-work troupes, they often found themselves busy accompanying a bland, politicized repertoire quite divorced from their former folk practice, which they now abandoned. [1] Conversely, prestigious musicians in the Uyghur homeland and in Central Asia, rather separately from their duties in the state ensembles, often seem to have quietly maintained more traditional styles and contexts.

While I’m keen to learn more about shashmaqom-related grassroots social life (however attenuated by modernization), this kind of music is always easier to find online in commodified versions on stage—including this short UNESCO presentation. Here’s a film from the Aga Khan Music Programme, which has played a major role in enhancing the global profile of Central Asian musics, and in sponsoring centres such as the Academy of Maqam:

  • Invisible face of the beloved: classical music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. Music of Central Asia, vol. 2 (2006):

Vol. 7, In the shrine of the heart: popular classics from Bukhara and beyond (2010), introduces other regional traditions worth pursuing.

Abduvali Abdurashidov, the main guide in Invisible face of the beloved, leads this fine Tajik chamber ensemble on sato at a 2010 Paris concert, with singer Ozoda Ashurova, [2] Pasha Hanjani on ney—and a young Sirojiddin Juraev, whose visit to SOAS inspired this little survey:

Abdurashidov appears on the CD Tadjikistan: chants et musiques classiques (Ocora, 2013):

I’m enthralled by the CD Shashmaqom: Dugoh maqomi (Inédit, 2002), again recorded by Jean During:

For more, see again here, under Audio and video recordings, §8.

Again (cf. Taiwan), I note that one consequence of a superficial survey like mine is an undue attention to the “star” performers, rather than the unsung participants who are at the heart of grassroots musicking (cf. China).

The hundred thousand fools of God concludes in Queens, New York, where a notable Bukharan Jewish tradition of shashmuqom has taken root. The Ensemble Shashmaqam there is comprised of emigrés from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (heard on Levin’s 1991 Smithsonian Folkways CD Central Asia in Forest Hills); in this concert they celebrate the artistry of three leading women performers who have performed with the ensemble over the years. In 2014 Evan Rapport supplemented Levin’s account in Greeted with smiles: Bukharian Jewish music and musicians in New York.

* * *

SOAS Tajik
The SOAS concert. Via Twitter.

So much for homework. Since China opened my eyes and ears to musicking as a vital part of social gatherings (life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies, and so on; cf. Society and soundscape), I’ve had conflicting feelings about “concerts”—events that we so easily take for granted. Of course I grew up with Western Art Music in concert (see e.g. here), and I’ve been complicit in presenting Chinese ritual traditions on stage (e.g. here, and on tour with the Li family Daoists—contrast my film); just that I’m sometimes struck by how such reification can skew our impression of the vitality of expressive culture in local society.

As Djumaev observes, while the new academies seek to adapt the traditional master-apprentice (ustod-shogird) system, a range of strategies for transmission has emerged in response to changing times. Still, however sensitively accomplished musicians may devise classroom teaching, I still find it an alien, stultifying environment for such a culture (cf. Training Daoists in Shanghai).

At SOAS last week, the concert and the preceding workshop were engagingly introduced by Saeid Kordmafi, new lecturer in the Music Department. In duet Sirojiddin Juraev (YouTube playlist) and Khurshed Ibrohimzoda have a wonderful understanding, their musicking at once natural and intense, never showy. Ibrohimzoda’s vocal items (some incorporating a vertiginously high tessitura—apparently his personal taste rather than a feature of the tradition) alternated with instrumental solos on plucked lutes and an intimate meditation on bowed sato. For all my concerns about the academy, their spiritual focus would surely have impressed venerable senior masters like Turgun Alimatov and Arif Xatamov. The dancer Madina Sabirova adorned two items, the singing in the lively finale revealing a more popular folk style.

Across the muqam world, as Levin (pp.55–6) notes, “rigidly structured, closed repertoires like the Shash maqâm had given way to autonomous pieces performed in a relatively personalised style”. The innovations of Turgun Alimatov remind him of Jean During’s remarks on modern change in Persian art music, characterising the shift as a “transformation from classical formalism to Romanticism”,

in which music is cleansed of its status as a sacred object in order to become recentred in the interiority of the individual. […] The values of inspiration, creativity, originality, and personality of style and improvisation have become exalted to the detriment of conformity to standards, fidelity to repertoire, and fixed composition.

While I might suspect that this downplays the creative individuality of the master musicians of Yore, it looks like an inexhaustible topic for debate.

In its latest reinvention of tradition for the concert platform, shashmaqom is most beguiling—I just wonder whether it might be creating a new kind of “frozen music”. As always, I’d like to learn about its prospects for a viable social life beyond the concert hall.

* * *

See also under West/Central Asia: a roundup, Posts on Uyghur culture, and The 2002 Silk Road Festival. For other expressive cultures under state socialism and since its demise, see Resisting fakelore, Musical cultures of East Europe, Folk traditions of Poland, and Sound and sovereignty in Ukraine.
There’s always much to learn from Bruno Nettl, such as his taxonomy of responses to the growing hegemony of Western musics (Abandonment, Impoverishment/reduction, and Isolated preservation—the latter perhaps especially salient here); his wide-ranging unpacking of “improvisation“; and his insights on the conservatoire ethos in Western Art Music.

With thanks to Rachel Harris.

[1] See e.g. A Daoist serves a state troupe. Though the opera and narrative-singing troupes were also the objects of intense remoulding (see e.g. my post on Gansu, and sequel), their musicians were often better able to preserve a more traditional style.
Re my aversion to the conservatoire, I’m reminded of the Chinese text on the SOAS T-shirt, magnificently misread by one of my Daoist mentors as “anti-academy”…

[2] For the modern admission of female singers into maqam ensembles, see again Djumaev. For the Ferghana tradition, a female star of maqom is Munojot Yoʻlchiyeva (b.1960), also introduced by Levin (pp.77–80). In Europe, CDs have been issued by Ocora (1994, 1998) and World Network (1997). Here she is in concert:

Maestro: Bernstein and Mahler

Posted on by

Maestro

Infatuated as I am with Mahler (series here), my posts on his symphonies inevitably include performances by Leonard Bernstein (see under The art of conducting). So I just had to watch Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023: in cinemas and on Netflix).

Movies about musicians are notoriously prone to faux pas (for some TV clichés, see e.g. Philharmonia, and Endeavour). Bernstein’s passion as a communicator brought an unprecedented popularity to WAM that it could never again achieve; Maestro is admirable for bringing him (if not his musical genius) to a wide modern audience.

Norman Lebrecht shrewdly observes Bernstein’s place in the roster of Great Conductors (The maestro myth pp.180–87, 192–5, and, confounding the myth that he rescued Mahler’s music from obscurity in Vienna, 198–205). Heart on sleeve, OTT, Lenny was an archetype for his era—by contrast with the austere Maestros of Yore, or indeed the benign, banal middle-managers and Early Music semi-conductors of later years.

As to Maestro, Alex Ross comments in the New Yorker:

Because Bernstein’s career unfolds in the background of his marriage, the film is relieved of the dreary trudge of the conventional bio-pic, which checks off famous moments, positions them against historical landmarks (the Cold War, the Beatles, the Kennedy assassinations). […]
By and large, Maestro benefits from what it leaves out. Some viewers have complained that such major achievements as On the Town, West Side Story, and the Young People’s Concerts are mentioned only in passing. But Bernstein’s life was so stuffed with incident that nodding to each one would have drained the movie of momentum. One omission, though, left me perplexed: the studious avoidance of Bernstein’s radical-tending politics.

The roles of Lenny (Bradley Cooper himself) and his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan) are brilliantly played, with all the tortuous public/private psychologies of their relationship. But indeed, the film omits their considerable social activism through a period of change; Cooper had intended to include the notorious “radical chic” 1970 party, but (as he explains in this podcast) he found it would have detracted from his main theme. So the screenplay invariably chooses the personal over the political. And I agree with other reviews that lament the wider avoidance of social history (e.g. another New Yorker article; myscena.org; The critic)—a tasteful script wouldn’t have to make such scenes into a “dreary trudge” at all.

* * *

Moreover, as a Guardian review comments,

What there is very little of is music. We barely see him conduct, we hear only snatches of his own compositions, and there are frustratingly few glimpses of his passion for communicating—through performance and education—the wonders and riches of classical music.

Mahler 1907

Bernstein’s own music does play a considerable role, without quite engaging us. But the most regrettable casualty is Mahler. Despite a scene that I’ll discuss below, the movie never broaches Lenny’s deep passion for his fellow conductor-composer—he must have seen himself as a reincarnation. In Lebrecht’s words (The maestro myth, p.185; cf. Why Mahler?, pp.239–41 and passim), Mahler was

a visionary who fought against humanity’s rush to self-destruction. “Ours is a century of death and Mahler is its musical prophet” [see e.g. my fanciful programme for the 10th symphony], he proclaimed, seeking to find himself a similar role.

Apart from the moving evidence of his performances, Lenny missed no opportunity to promote Mahler’s vision, and irrespective of the movie, it’s well worth returning to his extraordinary lectures on the topic. * Without hijacking the film’s main theme, one longs for a mention of Mahler’s name, or an image—although I quite see the risks of composing a line like “Oh Felicia, what would I do without you and Mahler?”!

Lenny and Mahler

Lenny ElyWe get to hear some of the Adagietto, though it’s such a staple of movie soundtracks that for many viewers it may sound merely like generic film music rather than the work of Lenny’s alter ego. Then the long scene of the monumental ending of the 2nd symphony at Ely Cathedral in 1973 is the perfect choice, and it should be overwhelming. But if the uninitiated don’t know what it represents (for Lenny and, well, for Western civilisation!), then again one might just think it’s some random piece of dramatic romantic music; or if you love Mahler as deeply as Lenny did, then you’ll be shocked at how the lack of context largely deprives it of impact—the scene’s main point seems to be his reunion with Felicia in a make-up kiss as he comes off stage.

Cooper, having learned assiduously to impersonate Lenny’s conducting for the Ely Cathedral scene under the guidance of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, looks admirably impressive on the podium—but it’s also a salient lesson in how impossible it is to mimic the art of an experienced conductor. The Guardian review cited above has details of how the scene was filmed, with comments from members of the LSO:

Every detail of the 1973 performance was painstakingly reproduced, from where each player sat (“more squashed than we generally are today!”), to the mocked-up programmes, even though these were never in shot.

Players who wore glasses were asked to provide prescriptions so they could be given new ones in old-style frames—and they were all asked to let their hair grow. “Most of the guys had been asked to grow beards,” says Duckworth, “and those with very short hair had been asked not to cut it.”

And (WTAF) despite going to such lengths to achieve historical authenticity, the film used the players of today’s LSO, 45% of whom are women—whereas the 1973 LSO had only two women (the harpists) among 102 players. Is this, finally, PC gone mad?!

Despite these cavils, I admire the way Bradley Cooper has brought Bernstein’s personality to a wider audience. Perhaps it’s too much to hope that Maestro might also turn on a new generation to Mahler.

* After his 1960 talk at the televised Young People’s Concerts (wiki; complete list on YouTube here—weekly audiences for his broadcasts estimated at ten million!), more illuminating is “The unanswered question” in his 1973 lectures at Harvard:

Late in “The 20th century crisis”, from 1.37.58:

And a 1985 essay:

DO go back to Humphrey Burton’s wonderful films of Bernstein’s performances of the symphonies… Burton also filmed him rehearsing—and commenting on—the 5th, the 9th (“Four ways to say Farewell”), and Das Lied von Der Erde with the Vienna Phil (1971–72):

Restless

Posted on by

My penchant for the spy novels of John le Carré, the crime fiction of Philip Kerr, and so on has been enhanced since I learned of the real and tragic story of Noor Inayat Khan, as well as the SOE and Ravensbrück.

Restless cover

A gripping fictional portrayal of espionage in World War Two Is

Here’s the opening:

When I was a child and was being fractious and contrary and generally behaving badly, my mother used to rebuke me by saying “One day someone will come and kill me and then you’ll be sorry”, or, “They’ll appear out of the blue and whisk me away—how would you like that?”, or, “You’ll wake up one morning and I’ll be gone. Disappeared. You wait and see.”

It’s curious, but you don’t think seriously about these remarks when you’re young. But now—as I look back on the events of that interminable hot summer of 1976, that summer when England reeled, gasped for breath, pole-axed by the unending heat—now I know what my mother was talking about. I understand that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life—how it had never left her even after years of peaceful, unexceptional living. I now realise that she was always frightened that someone was going to come and kill her. And she had good reason.

It was only in 1976, in the genteel setting of Oxford, that Sally Gilmartin finally felt compelled to make a series of revelations to her daughter Ruth, confiding her true identity as Eva Delectorskaya, who had worked as a spy for the British during the war.

Eva’s family had fled Russia upon the 1917 revolution, from St Petersburg and Vladivostok on to Tientsin, Shanghai, Tokyo, Berlin, and Paris. In 1939, while living in Paris, Eva was recruited for the British Secret Service, and trained at a secret mansion in Scotland, “an eccentric boarding school” for spies where she learned about codes, how to drive, shoot a gun, forge documents, tail suspects and evade those on her trail, and to speak like a young, middle-class, privately-educated English woman.

Warned by her suave mentor and boss Lucas Romer never to trust anybody, nonetheless, in wiki’s mot juste, Eva does indeed fall for him. After a mission in Belgium goes badly wrong, the plot thickens further in London. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, amidst the shifting, labyrinthine agendas of the German and Soviet secret services, Eva is part of a British mission concocting propaganda to persuade the USA to join the war—under cover of innocuous institutional fronts in New York and Washington, leading her to a gory betrayal in New Mexico.

Returning bereft to New York, finally trusting no-one, Eva makes an assignation in a cartoon theatre:

She waited two hours for Morris at the theatre, sitting in the back row of the near-empty cinema, watching a succession of Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry cartoons interspersed with newsreels that occasionally contained news of the war in Europe. “Germany’s war machine falters at the gates of Moscow”, the announcer intoned with massive, hectoring insistence, “General Winter takes command of. The battlefield”. She saw horses floundering up to their withers in mud as fluid and gluey as melted chocolate; she saw exhausted, gaunt German soldiers with sheets tied around them as camouflage, numbly running from house to house; frozen bodies in the snow taking on the properties of shattered trees or outcrops of rock: iron-hard, wind-lashed, unmovable; burning villages lighting the thousands of Russian soldiers scurrying forward across the icy fields in counter-attack. She tried to imagine what was happening there in the countryside around Moscow—Moscow, where she had been born, and which she couldn’t remember at all—and found that her brain refused to supply her with any answers. Donald Duck took over, to her relief. People began to laugh.

Moving on to Canada, after Pearl Harbor she makes her way back to England. Shocked by further sinister betrayals, she carefully constructs a new identity:

It took her a day or two to calculate how it might just be done. In bombed-out London, she logically supposed, people must be constantly losing everything they owned. What did you do if your block of flats collapsed and burned while you were cowering in your basement shelter in your underclothes? You stumble out, dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown, into the dawn after the “all-clear”, to find that everything you possessed had been incinerated. People had to start again, almost as if they had been reborn: all your documentation, clothing, housing, proofs of identification had to be re-acquired. The Blitz and now these night raids had been going on since September 1940, over a year, now, with thousands and thousands of dead and missing. She knew black marketeers exploited the dead, kept them alive for a while to claim their rations and petrol coupons. Perhaps there was an opening for her, here. So she began to scan the newspapers looking for accounts of the worst attacks with the biggest number of casualties—forty, fifty, sixty people killed or missing. A day or two later names would be printed in the papers and sometimes photographs. She began looking for missing women about her age.

Sally/Eva’s new domestic mask seems to have ensured her safety, but in a tense dénouement she enlists her daughter to confront the threat.

As the novel alternates the voices of the two women, the period detail is evocative, both for the war years and for 1976 Oxford (hire-purchase, malls, buskers, Hare Krishna, glue-sniffing punks). Ruth, a single mum, teaches English to foreigners—including Hamid, whom she later spots at a demo against the Shah. A sub-plot involves Ruth’s own relationship with Germany, with a vignette on the Red Army Faction.

Here’s a trailer for the all-star BBC TV adaptation of Restless (2012):

For those of us who grew up churlishly dismissive of our parents’ drab lives, neither knowing nor caring much about their personal stories, with our mutual “don’t talk about the war” pact, it makes an intriguing fantasy. I still have to assume my mother’s backstory wasn’t as colourful as that of Eva.

For crime fiction, see e.g. novels set in China, North Korea, Germany, Tibet, Russia, Hungary, LA (The big sleep, Bosch), and among the Navajo.

America over the water

Posted on by

Shirley Collins collects songs with Alan Lomax
in the American South, 1959

Collins cover

“So where do you come from, young lady?”
“I’m from England.”
“What—England over the water?”

—Elderly mountaineer in Kentucky.

Having learned a little about the singing of Shirley Collins, I’ve been reading her splendid memoir

  • America over the water (2004) (reviewed e.g. here),

evoking her three-month fieldtrip (later known as “Southern journey”) with Alan Lomax around the southern states of the USA in 1959—just as Chinese people were starving, and Miles Davis was making Kind of blue.

In her memoir she evokes her journey with Lomax around Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, recording mountain ballad singers, pentecostal choirs, blind fiddlers, and inmates of a state penitentiary. Lomax had already visited some of the venues and musicians with his father John in the 1930s and 40s. It’s most rewarding to read Collins’s book for the texture it provides on the excitement and challenges of fieldwork—all the more to do so while dipping into some of the audio material available online, as I do below. Some of her accounts are taken from letters she sent home to her mother and sister Dolly.

All these vignettes alternate with her account of her early life in drab post-war England. Her disappointing experiences working at Cecil Sharp House, the gradual blossoming of the folk music scene (rippling out from the Troubadour in Earls Court), singing trips to Warsaw and Moscow. And after she got to know Ewan MacColl, in 1954 he invited her to a party where she met Alan Lomax—just back from three years collecting songs in Spain and Italy—and they soon moved in together, Shirley working as his editorial assistant. At their home in Highgate they often hosted visiting American bluesmen. Shirley recorded her first two solo LPs.

After Lomax returned to the States in 1958, he invited her to join her on a fieldtrip around the south. So in April 1959 Shirley embarked on the five-day voyage by liner to New York. After the cloistered austerity of the British diet, food looms large in her account—starting on board:

French exotic fruit for breakfast, fruit that I’d never seen outside a tin, eggs cooked in ways I’d never heard of. […] thick beef steaks, turkey […] seafood… delicious dressings and sauces….

And once In New York, pizza, avocado, ice-cream…

I was unworldly and twenty years his junior. What I had in my favour was youth, energy, intelligence, a capacity for hard work, and an innately sound instinct and understanding of the music we both loved.

Driving to Chicago they stayed with Studs Terkel and his wife, before taking the train to California—Shirley still constantly amazed by the opulence of the food.

Collins Lomax Berkeley
Shirley Collins with Alan Lomax at the Berkeley Folk Festival, June 1959.
Source.

Appearing at the Berkeley Folk Festival, she met some fine singers. But she had reservations about the Cali lifestyle:

Nothing seemed quite real, nothing had bite or zest. There seemed little that was robust about urban Californians, they were just too bland—extremely and instantly friendly, but insubstantial, and I couldn’t help but wonder what the pioneers would have made of it all.

Returning to Chicago (Shirley’s first flight), they set off by car for more folk festivals. She delighted in local radio stations (jaunty ads for family bibles, and country music, with songs like Let’s have a lot more Jesus and a lot less rock and roll—recorded by Wayne Raney that very year.

* * *

Sounds of the South

They now set off on their epic journey south, funded enterprisingly by Atlantic Records. Among their tribulations, they were often confronted by both severe poverty and racism. In the Blue Ridge mountain villages of Virginia

we drive up and down rough old tracks to tumble-down wooden shacks, decaying wood and furniture, and there’s always a couple of mangy hound dogs who race and bark at the car.

Arriving at the port of Norfolk, Alan drove off to the black quarter, telling Shirley to stay in the car (cf. David McAllester among the Navajo). In Suffolk and Belleville they visited churches:

Nobody was welcoming us; I could understand why people would be wary of white strangers, even though we were accompanied by a black man, but it was dispiriting.

In Salem they visited the ballad singer Texas Gladden, whom Lomax and his father John had already recorded in 1946, and they drove over to see her brothers Hobart Smith and Preston, also fine musicians. With the apologetic disclaimer “We ain’t got much to offer ye”, Hobe’s family presented a table

laden with yellow corn-bread, country ham, scrambled chicken, fried potatoes, apple sauce, cinnamon apple jelly, home-preserved beans, macaroni cheese, sweet country butter, salad, peaches, grape jelly…

Shirley was much taken by banjo-player Uncle Wade Ward of Galax (first recorded by the Lomaxes in 1939), 81-year-old Charlie Higgins, claiming to play on a 200-year-old fiddle, and Dale Poe on guitar. Here’s a taste of their sessions:

I loved watching Alan at work, building affection and trust. Recording in the field is a difficult task, but Alan brought to it his years of experience, wide-ranging knowledge, unfailing patience, humour, enthusiasm, judgement, and integrity. He could calm a nervous performer with his informal approach or give confidence to an anxious one.He had an infectious chuckle and a down-to-earth friendliness and warmth that charmed people. It was obvious that he loved them and their music, and they responded to him by giving their best. Strangers became friends.

Shirley’s own voice can be heard only in a few of the recordings on the archive.

They came across a gang of black railroad workers:

By now Alan had shaved off his beard so as not to draw more attention to his “foreignness”. Moving on to Kentucky, as they glimpsed hardship, deprivation, and feuds, Shirley started to feel afraid. At Mount Olivet the Old Regular Baptists were not exactly hostile—she just felt unnerved by their watchfulness and silence. Their voices were “harsh, strangled, and fervent” (audio e.g. here)—”people in torment”. They also track down old-timers of the Memphis Jug Band.

In Alabama Shirley found it thrilling and enthralling to hear the Sacred Harp Singers—a tradition that uses ”shape-note” notation. Here’s a diachronic compilation:

Reminding me of my experience in Hebei,

One of the older ladies expressed surprise that I spoke their language so well, evidence, not of ignorance, but of the isolation of their lives.

There, for once, they received a warm welcome—but they were soon jolted back to the racist reality, with KKK signs in evidence.

It pointed up the paradoxes of the South: cruel and kind, mean and hospitable, illiterate and witty.

They recorded a gospel competition and a baptism at a black church. And so on to Mississippi, and three days at the Parchman Farm state penitentiary, where the Lomaxes had recorded work-songs, blues, and field hollers since the 1930s—though Shirley wasn’t allowed out into the fields, having to stay inside. This programme discusses recordings at Parchman from 1933 to 1969—here’s a song later made famous by the Coen brothers’ film O Brother where art thou? (2000):

Note also Bruce Jackson’s excellent book Fieldwork, where he describes the importance of rapport, and his own visits to tough southern penitentiaries.

They drove to Senatobia to find the blind fiddle player Sid Hemphill (1876–1963), whom again Lomax had recorded in 1942 (click here for both sessions). He was also an exponent of a most remarkable genre, the ecstatic fife and drum music of the region, for which he directed them to Lonnie and Ed Young in Como (cf. later film clips in The land where the blues began [below], from 8.00; and e.g. this footage from 1966).

And then… Lonnie invited his neighbour Fred McDowell over, perhaps the most legendary of Lomax’s “discoveries” (wiki; YouTube channel, e.g. this playlist). Shirley recalls:

I am ashamed to say that at first I resented the intrusion by a younger man into the atmosphere made by the old musicians with their ancient and fascinating sounds. I didn’t want that spell broken. Fred started to play bottleneck guitar, a shimmering and metallic sound. HIs singing was quiet but strong and with a heart-stopping intensity. By the time he’d finished his first blues we knew we were in the presence of a great and extraordinary musician. [….] I shall never forget the first sight I had of Fred in his dungarees, carrying his guitar and walking out of the trees towards us in a Mississippi night.

In Arkansas they arrived in Hughes, Alan again leaving Shirley in the car while he got a lead to a gambling den with good blues singers—another place it seemed better for him to visit without her. Meeting up again in Memphis a couple of days later, they visited more black churches, whose music Shirley found “wild and terrifying”. They drove up into the Ozarks to meet Jimmy Driftwood, whose home “was full of fiddles, banjos, and mouthbows, most of them home-made, the finest of which he’d made from a bed-head, and the roughest from a fence-post!”. They also recorded 84-year-old Charlie Everidge accompanying his songs with a mouthbow:

Collins Almeda
Shirley Collins with Almeda Riddle. Source.

They sought out the ballad singer Almeda Riddle—here’s Lonesome dove:

(and by way of comparison with Aretha, her rendition of Amazing Grace).

They ended their field trip with a visit to St Simons in the Georgia Sea Islands, finding singers like Bessie Jones (audio here), with songs and folklore from the days of slavery—while witnessing further racism. The long trip back up north was eventful too.

Atlantic Records issued  the LP “Sounds of the South” in 1960 (playlist):

* * *

After Shirley returned to England in January that year, she and Alan went their separate ways. As outlined in my first post, in the 2022 edition she updates the progression of her life thereafter—teaming up with Davy Graham and her sister Dolly, with the folkies entering an alliance with the Early Music movement and David Munrow, her time with the Albion band; divorces, disphonia, and being rediscovered in her later years. The 2017 film The ballad of Shirley Collins is punctuated by reflections on the 1959 trip with Lomax, which remains a remarkable instalment in the history of song collection.

* * *

Chapter 10 of Michael Church’s book Musics lost and found makes a good introduction to the work of Alan Lomax and his father John.

John brought celebrated singers including Lead Belly into the limelight; the classic songs he collected and anthologised helped redefine American culture. Alan Lomax’s effect on that culture was seismic, as he made his own discoveries, and as a singer-collector-impresario led folk-blues revivals in both America and Britain. His books, plays, and radio programmes championed the music of the dispossessed; he played a leading part in the musical revolution which threw up Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. Meanwhile with his researches in Haiti, Spain, and Italy he opened up new fields in musicology. And drawing on his archive of films, videotapes, and sound recordings he promoted “Cantometrics”, a system of song-classification which he himself had created, and which he messianically believed could unify—musically at least—the world.

The Lomax Archive (1959–60 recordings here) has enough material to last us a lifetime (further material on YouTube, also here). While they could only make audio recordings for the 1959 trip, later projects were much enhanced by video. Among five films made from footage shot by Alan Lomax between 1979 and 1985, he makes an engaging host in Appalachian journey (1991):

And here’s the 1979 documentary The land where the blues began (which he adapted into a book of the same title in 1993):

The definitive biography of Alan Lomax is John Szwed, The man who recorded the world (2011). Beyond the States, having already recorded in the Bahamas and Haiti (1935–6, the latter trip with Zara Neale Hurston), Lomax went on to make celebrated trips collecting song in Spain (1952, coming into conflict with the fascist authorities) and Italy (1954–5).

I’ll end on a lighter note. As Michael Church relates in Musics lost and found,

a 1957 issue of the London magazine Punch carried a cartoon of a ragged farmer sitting outside his shack and disconsolately singing “I’ve got those Alan-Lomax-ain’t-been-round-to-record-me blues”.

Daoist temples in California, 1849–1920

Posted on by

“A lost Daoist America”—Hannibal Taubes

Ho Bronson cover

Pursuing the theme opened up by Hannibal Taubes’ guest post on the Chinese temple in Chico, I’ve been admiring the hefty tome

  • Chuimei Ho and Bennet Bronson, Chinese traditional religion and temples in North America, 1849–1920: California (2022; 523 pages, large paperback format).

An impressive work of scholarship, published under the auspices of the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee (CINARC), the book is an elegy to the remains of popular Daoism that nearly died a century ago but was central to Chinese people’s lives in North America from the mid-19th century. Hannibal is far more able than I to identify salient themes, so below I consult his thoughtful review.

Bronson 1

Among the wealth of illustrations on almost every page, many are reproductions of original black-and-white images, assembled from substantial local archives—perhaps a future edition might include a section of colour plates showing more recent photos. The CINARC website is a rich resource for many such images.

Marysville HT

Marysville. Image courtesy Hannibal Taubes (here).

The topic is geographically distinctive, addressing migrants from the Pearl River Delta in the far south of China to the far west of America. As Hannibal notes,

Some counties in the Gold Rush hills had Chinese temples years before any Christian church was built, while yearly Chinese camp-meeting festivals in the mountains attracted thousands of worshippers, with Zhengyi-sect Daoist priests, great sacral processions, and deity-figures ten feet tall. By 1930 almost all of this had vanished.

Pondering reasons for the neglect of the subject, Ho and Bronson suggest:

Perhaps the main reason for a lack of scholarly interest has been an almost exclusive focus on immigration, anti-Chinese violence, economics, and racism. This has meant adopting a victims’ perspective, reciting long lists of grievances and instances of White hostility. However, we feel that a different perspective is needed, one that focuses on the sources of the courage and mental balance shown by Chinese immigrants.

They posit various provisional elements that may partially account for the rapid, severe decline in religious observances, including conversion to Christianity, white prejudice, progressivist politics, (interestingly) a lack of Chinese women—and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Anyway, the USA proved a less viable site for Chinese religion than southeast Asia.

By the late 19th century the early mining communities * servicing the gold rush gave way to agricultural centres. Both in San Francisco and the hinterland, the secret societies were major patrons.

Apart from newspaper reports (often negative in their portrayal), the study is based largely on the material evidence of the temples themselves—inscriptions, ritual objects, ledgers, and so on, “that we feel brings us closest to what interests us most: to hear, if only faintly, the voices of the pioneers who withstood astonishing hardships to build Chinese America”.

Section 1, “Spiritual and social aspects of temples”, clearly addresses the salient issues, discussing

  • Why temples mattered
  • Where they existed and who built them
  • Functions
  • Worship
  • Temples and communities.

Temples served as refuges, hostels, clinics, and meeting places. They were sources of ethnic pride, and centers of community life. And most importantly, the deities they housed stood at the very center of a Chinese-American identity and psychological survival. The early immigrants withstood enormous pressures from physical hardship, cultural prejudice, threatened violence, and concern for loved ones back in China. They needed those temples. For many, the temples were the central institutions of an exile’s life.

Unpacking the ambiguity of the common term joss-house (“joss” deriving from Portuguese deus), the authors identify types of affiliated temples and their parent associations: shrines associated with districts of origin associations (huiguan), charitable halls (shantang), clan associations (zongci), tradesmen’s guilds (hanghui), and secret societies (“tongs”), as well as some independent temples.

Bronson 3

Ho and Bronson go on to discuss individual and communal worship, ritual roles (mortuary services, divination, spirit mediums), cultural reinforcement (including education, and opera), secular functions, and investment. They detail the gods invoked (temples with single and multiple deities), life-cycle and calendrical rituals, “bomb festivals” (paohui), and (of special interest to scholars of Taoist ritual) communal festivals for the jiao Offering ritual, known as tachiu (dajiao 打醮, pp.66–73). They discuss the founding, ownership, control/management, and financing of temples.

Bronson 2

Section 2 looks at “The physical side of temples”:

  • Exteriors and siting
  • Entrances and interiors
  • Furnishings with fixed and variable locations
  • Suspended furnishings
  • Inscription boards
  • Equipment for processions
  • Other furnishings.

Overall, “very few Chinese religious buildings were close copies of homeland prototypes”.

Sections 3 and 4 are a detailed inventory of individual temples. Section 3 discusses San Francisco, “by far the most important Chinese religious centre outside Asia” in the late 19th century. Section 4 documents centres outside the Bay Area—mining, agricultural (farm labour), coastal, and urban (despite the great importance of railroad workers in building the West, they were too transient to sponsor temples). This section really opens our minds to the wealth of history in the hinterland, in communities such as Auburn, Marysville, Oroville, and Weaverville.

Left, Oroville; right, Weaverville. Images courtesy Hannibal Taubes.

Ho and Bronson’s concluding remarks survey the spatial and temporal distribution of temples; White views (often disparaging) on the phenomenon; and Chinese American religion in Chinese eyes, making astute distinctions between the perspectives of Chinese businessmen, officials, secret societies, religious professionals, and sojourners.

As Hannibal observes,

Ho and Bronson’s tome will now be the standard reference work on this subject and should be on the shelf of everyone interested in Chinese art and religion, Asian-American studies, immigrant visual cultures in the Americas, and California generally. The authors note that they are considering a follow-up volume that will treat Chinese temples in North America outside of California. Let us hope that this work is completed and that the two volumes can be published together under the imprint of a major press, with color photographs and a few editorial tweaks, as befits this important scholarship.

* * *

My only little contribution to the study of the Chinese diaspora is this tribute to Ray Man, Cantonese music pioneer in London. For the decline of Catholic worship among south Italian migrants in New York, see The Madonna of 115th street.

One point that Hannibal makes in his fine review seems to go rather against the grain of recent scholarship on religious life in post-Mao China. This isn’t the place to assess the vast religious revival that took place there after the demise of the Maoist commune system, but, making a somewhat ambitious comparison between the decline of temples in China and America, Hannibal opens with the statement “Sometime between 1850 and the present, almost all the temples in China vanished.” On the revival since the 1980s, he comments (n.9): “Even areas that appear to have rebuilt their temples en masse still experienced massive losses compared to pre-Communist numbers.” And

Those temples that still physically stood were bulldozed to build apartment complexes, or left to moulder and collapse in half-abandoned villages. Other areas have rebuilt their temples, sometimes in massive numbers, but from the preservationist standpoint this only compounds the destruction, since little care is taken to retain or record the original structures.

These are points worth making, but they downplay the significance of the vast revival. Though much fieldwork on recent Daoist activity (in volumes such as Daojiao yishi congshu) has a retrospective agenda, religious life has resurfaced widely, on a large scale (see e.g. Ken Dean, Adam Yuet Chau, Ian Johnson, and regions such as Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Shaanbei). Moreover, temples are not the only yardstick to assess Chinese ritual life; material artefacts can only tell us so much (cf. China’s hidden century).

While the particular religious ethos that Ho and Bronson’s study reveals will be more familiar to specialists in the ritual history of the Pearl River Delta than to those focusing on other regions of south (and certainly north) China, the whole history of religious life in local communities in the PRC, with their diverse social and economic factors, is utterly different from that in the American West—and from that of the Chinese diaspora in southeast Asia, where ties with the mainland were much stronger and enduring.

* Cf. religious processions of mining communities near Beijing, n. here.

Roundup for 2023!

Posted on by

As I reflected in last year’s roundup,

like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw, having gone to great lengths to mix up the daily sequence of my diverse topics in a stimulating fashion, it’s that time of year when I try and reassemble them into some kind of thematic order.

In order for this exercise to be worthwhile, you’ll have to click on the links! Ideally, spread the word by reposting on one of those “Social Media” Thingies They Have Nowadays… Even if you only read a dozen of these posts, then my labours will not have been in vain!

I’m going to adopt Stella Gibbons’ drôle device in Cold Comfort Farm, drawing attention with *** to passages (mostly posts, in this case—indeed, the book’s protagonist is Flora Poste) Not To Be Missed. And this list isn’t even exhaustive—the committed masochist can consult the monthly archive in the sidebar, scrolling waaay down.

I’ll begin with Nicolas Robertson, who alas joined the Heavenly Choir in November (see my tribute). His extraordinary anagram tales (introduced and listed here***), a kind of fantasy Esperanto fiction, are among the highlights of this blog, and in further tribute to his brilliant mind I have recently added two more:

So here are listings under some main themes (many, of course, belong under several themes, which is the point of giving them categories and tags, listed in the sidebar):

China (culture and ritual, Maoism and politics):

East Asia, other:

This year’s additions to my education in Tibetan and Uyghur cultures:

Turkey and West/Central Asia (see roundup):

Modern Europe:

Ethnomusicology and world music:

Jazz (see roundup***):

Pop:

Western Art Music:

Sport (see roundup):

Film/TV:

Loft best new

Arising from the transformation of my home:

Other:

For roundups of previous years’ musings, see 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. And here’s a roundup of roundups! The homepage is always useful for navigation.

And it’s always worth reminding you to watch my portrait film***
on the Li family Daoists, raison-d-être of this whole blog!

Bosch

Posted on by

Bosch TV

Fast-forwarding from Raymond Chandler and The big sleep, I’ve already praised the crime novels of Michael Connelly, starring the dogged LA detective Harry Bosch. They’ve always seemed to invite representations on the Silver Screen, and now, thanks to Amazon Prime (don’t ask…), I’ve been bing-watching all seven seasons of the film adaptation Bosch (wiki, with episode guide), the first season airing in 2014.

Whether TV and film versions of novels satisfy is a matter of taste. But I found Bosch entirely gripping, with the characters most convincing—Bosch (Titus Welliver in an iconic role) and his nuanced relationships with his daughter Maddie, partner J. Edgar, sympathetic boss Lieutenant Grace Billets, and Chief of Police Irvin Irving, as well as the whole labyrinthine rigmarole of station procedurals.

With Connelly’s active involvement, the TV adaptations are creative variations on the books, combining various plots from different novels. Amply reflected in the soundtrack is Bosch’s passion for jazz, which led me to several great finds (e.g. Tomasz Stańko, Frank Morgan, Art Pepper). * Against the backdrop of a dystopian LA landscape, the jargon, and the dark humour of their exchanges, is fascinating.

My immersion in the novels was never affected by not having a firm visual image in mind; when I return to them it’ll be interesting to see how much this new input colours my reading.

Note also Michael Connelly’s website.

Other posts introduce crime fiction set in China, North Korea, and Germany, Weimar Berlin—Stasi—Russia—Hungary, Tibet, Ottoman Istanbul, and among the Navajo. You might even try Robert van Gulik‘s Judge Dee mysteries, set in Tang China… And for crime drama on screen, see under Saga and Sofia, and French slang.

* Just one more track, somewhat off-piste: the bleak finale of Season 6 plays out with Chris Botti’s 2012 cover of What a wonderful world, with Mark Knopfler. I always felt bad about not quite warming to Louis Armstrong’s 1967 original—maybe it’s just over-exposure. But this is great, both (in Bosch) as a sad commentary on the cemetery scene, and here, enhanced by the Georgian artwork:

The big sleep

Posted on by

Big sleep

In my youth I watched The big sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) More Times than I Had Hot Dinners—not so much in the cinema as on TV, where it was among a wealth of old movies shown in the dim and distant days before DVDs and streaming.

Chandler coverThe film does justice to Raymond Chandler’s brilliant prose style. Roger Ebert, always a perceptive reviewer, made some good points. He described it as

a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler’s ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares.

 However often we watched the film (or read the book), the plot remained elusive. Ebert cites Sperber and Lax’s Bogart:

Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide. “Dammit I didn’t know either”, Chandler recalled.

But details yield to the atmosphere.

Bogart’s career was on the up with The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941; trailer here)—the novels of Dashiell Hammett rivalling those of Chandler—and the iconic Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). On the Bogart–Bacall relationship, a recent book by William Mann is reviewed by David Thompson in the LRB:

The span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the “greatest love affair” promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s. That’s the combined duration of To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946).

Their affair (she was 19, he 44), with its “thrilling ping-pong innuendo”, began while they were filming To have and have not, Bacall’s screen debut:

This led to Bogart divorcing his third wife and drinking still more heavily. Off screen he was regarded as surly and dull.

Moving on to The big sleep, here’s the opening (Chandler’s original here):

The horse-racing dialogue is “one of the most daring examples of double entendre in any movie up until that time”:

In the film, Marlowe is irresistible to a succession of women—something unfathomable to British men well into the 1970s. During wartime, women were admitted to professions from which they were otherwise barred:

Most astounding is the bookstore scene, with Dorothy Malone (and note Max Steiner’s portentous soundtrack):

And here’s the very ending:

OK, I can’t stave off old age for ever. Such films (whether 40s’ noir * from the States or modernist creations from France, Italy, or Japan) came as a kind of blessing to us on a cloistered, repressed island, and are indelibly etched into our collective memory; yet (more an observation than a lament) I doubt if they are quite so iconic to Young People Today. For other seminal influences on “my generation”, see under The conformist.

For a modern take on LA noir, see Bosch.

Irrespective of the Academy, popular culture is clearly, well, popular. Since the 60s, the Fusty Pundits of Yore have been disconcerted to find film, film music, and pop, becoming serious subjects for study; but they wield a profound influence on us all, even on those with more classical concerns… Cf. What is serious music?!, and Feminine endings: Madonna and McClary.

* I read that the term film noir was “coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1945 when a flood of dark Hollywood thrillers made during the war eventually arrived on Parisian screens after the four years of German occupation. Nearly 40 years passed before the term became current in the English-speaking world.”

Jazz at Ronnie’s!

Posted on by

Yet another post in my jazz series!

Ritenour

Since attending a couple of great gigs at the London Jazz Festival (here, here), we visited Ronnie Scott’s, still the most delightful London jazz venue of all (for its heyday, see under Ray Man: Cantonese music and jazz in Soho), to hear Lee Ritenour (b.1952—guitar) and Dave Grusin (b.1934!—keyboards), on tour with Melvin Davis on bass and Lee’s son Wesley on drums, accompanying his father sensitively since he was 13.

Delighting in constant invention, their rapport is wondrous—Ritenour and Grusin * have been making sweet music together for fifty years. Their set encompassed funk, Brazilian, and a rendition of Grusin’s song from Tootsie. Here they all are live in 2018:

And a big jazz hand for Melvin Davis’s solos—here’s one from 2013:

Jazz clubs—particularly somewhere like Ronnie’s—make such a conducive ambience for focused listening. À propos my Buildings and music, Western Art Music pays a heavy price for its move to large impersonal concert halls. Note also What is serious music?!.

* On Grusin’s wiki page, a passage like this always broadens the mind:

Grusin’s family originates from Gruzinsky princely line of the Bagrationi dynasty, the royal family that ruled the Kingdom of Georgia in the 9th-19th centuries. In Slavic languages, “Grusin” is an ethnonym for Georgians. Grusin’s father, who was a violinist, was born and raised in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, from where he emigrated to the United States in 1913.

Crazy

Posted on by

Billie 1949
Billie Holiday arriving at a preliminary court hearing in 1949. Source.

If I had to choose just one song by Billie Holiday (click here for my main tribute)… I couldn’t. You’re my thrill is a contender, as is Don’t explain, and Fine and mellow, filmed for TV in 1957, is just adorable—but I’m increasingly infatuated by Crazy he calls me:

Sentenced for possession of narcotics in 1947 (as she wrote, “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday’. And that’s just the way it felt”), Billie was released from prison in 1948; losing her New York City Cabaret Card prevented her from working anywhere that sold alcohol—but she soon came back with a show at Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile she had split with both her husband and her drug-dealing lover, but she was busted again in January 1949. She made the very first recording of Crazy he calls me (Carl Sigman, to lyrics by Bob Russell) in October that year—in the same Decca sessions as You’re my thrill.

Billie Decca 1949
Decca Studios, New York 1949.

Any jazz ballad invites rubato, but this song is a classic instance of Billie’s utter freedom from rhythmic parameters, going with the poetic flow; and just as astounding is her freedom in pitch, always bending the notes of the scale. No-one else can match this! With the modulation into the middle section (“Like the wind that shakes the bough…”), she’s just as irresistible. Like much of her repertoire, it could be quite saccharine, but her timbre in every phrase encapsulates joy and pain, at once intimate and detached—I can only resort to the cliché “bitter-sweet”. *

Many other singers went on to record the song (listen here), but not even Aretha’s version can compare. Still, I do have a lot of time for Patsy Cline’s Crazy (1961) (in my post on Country). My Playlist of songs includes not only Billie, Chet Baker, Michel Legrand, and the Beatles, but fado, taranta, Bach, Mahler, Ravel, and Barbara Hannigan…

* I could listen to Billie singing the opening lines all day long: “I say I’ll move the mountains, and I’ll move the mountains, if he wants them out of the way”. Many jazzers found it useful to study notation, but like many of the great musicians in the world, Billie never learned to read music. In most cases she would have been familiar with other versions of a song before she began reworking it, so for this new tune I imagine Carl Sigman or someone would have played it to her. Notation can be ridiculous (see here, scrolling down)—of course it’s only an approximation, but most scores of the opening read more or less like this:

Crazy score

Take me for a pint sometime and I’ll do my impression of Pavarotti singing it from the score… A few versions attempt to convey basic syncopation, but they just look pedantic. Most jazzers found notation useful at some stage, and some latter-day sax or guitar players learn a lot from meticulous transcriptions of solos by Bird or Hendrix; but in simpler cases like this, far better just to listen…

BTW, those opening lines recall a dictum that has been attributed to Flann O’Brien, perhaps apocryphally: “I don’t like mountains, because they get in the way of the view”. 

Another sax legend

Posted on by

David Murray

Part of my “strangely extensive” jazz series!

Murray 2

The London Jazz Festival crams so many fabulous events into just over a week that one inevitably misses a lot. I didn’t even manage to hear Ron Carter, Aynur, or Hiromi, but I delighted in young musicians’ tribute to Tomasz Stańko.

After Ronnie Scott’s (NB my post on Ray Man, covering a lot of ground!), another site for Soho jazz history is the conducive ambience of Pizza Express in Dean street. Besides the endless subtleties of the rhythm section, I’ve always delighted in trumpet playing (see e.g. Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, and several posts on Miles, to be found under A jazz medley), but it’s good to refocus on the sax, in the hands of the great David Murray (b.1955). Raised in Cali, in 1975 he moved to New York, taking part in the loft scene; soon he founded the World Saxophone Quartet. Like Rahsaan Roland Kirk, he benefits from circular breathing. Since 1998 he’s spent periods living in Paris (working on projects such as Banlieu Blues), and collaborating with Afro-Cuban musicians. No longer an enfant terrible, and not yet quite a veteran, he’s constantly exploring.

I relish this, live at the Village Vanguard in 1986, with Ed Blackwell (drum), Fred Hopkins (bass), and John Hicks (piano):

In 2018 Murray formed Class Struggle (see e.g. here) with his son Mingus (guitar), Rashaan Carter (bass), Russell Carter (drums), Craig Harris (trombone), and Lafayette Gilchrist (piano).

Murray 1
Source.

In this interview he reflects:

As tenor players get older, we tend to play fewer notes, but with more authority. We play the truer tones. Even in the kind of music I play, I feel my notes are getting more selective. I don’t have to fool around with unnecessary notes. Some of my predecessors—Archie Shepp, Paul Gonsalves, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins—got a chance to mature in their sound. Part of the maturation process on the tenor is to become more frugal with your note selection. Some notes ring on the tenor saxophone more so than on other instruments. There are certain notes inside of a chord—if you hit the right tones in the measure, you don’t need to spell out every note inside of a chord. It takes experience to do that. You have to tell a story on the tenor saxophone. A young musician won’t tell the same stories as an older musician—a musician who has been through divorces, who has been through the travails and tribulations of life. Some of the truest stories in jazz have been told on the tenor saxophone. When you hear a story being told, you take note.

Fred Jung called him “the Madonna of jazz, reinventing himself in a contemporary union with the times”. Murray laments the lack of individuality in the factory approach and the Lincoln Center treadmill. He speaks highly of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

Blues for Memo (2018; playlist), with rapper Saul Williams, was recorded in Istanbul (see here). It’s a tribute to Turkish jazz promoter, Mehmet “Memo” Uluğ. “We try to remember him with this album. He was a bass player and he and his brother, Ahmet, owned the Babylon jazz club and Positive Productions. They’ve done great things in Istanbul” (cf. Nardis, and Jazz in Turkey). Here’s an introduction, opening with the sounds of kanun zither:

Here’s a “teaser” for the documentary I’m a jazzman (Jacques Goldstein, 2008):

* * *

For how jazz musicians learn and develop their voice and style, it’s always going back to Paul Berliner, Thinking in jazz. Jazz genealogies are notoriously hard to trace (dig the trumpet family tree here)—for the sax, see e.g. this basic outline. Murray may sound “avant-garde”, but he recognises his influence from players of previous generations such as Paul Gonsalves, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Dexter Gordon. From the next generation, he’s inspired more by Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman than by Coltrane. The sax lineage moves on through the likes of Pharaoh Sanders, Wayne Shorter, Art Pepper, Sonny Rollins, and Archie Shepp, then extending to Britain with musicians like Courtney Pine and Nubya Garcia.

At the LJF gig Murray appeared with Luke Stewart (bass), Russell Carter (drums), and Marta Sanchez (piano). His gutsy honking in the bass contrasted with some amazing squealing way up the top of the register, just like a high trumpet. He ended with vocals reminding us of his advocacy for the African-American cause. Here’s his 2004 album Gwotet with the Gwo-Ka Masters and Pharaoh Sanders:

The creativity of jazz never ceases to astound me. David Murray exudes an air of authority, at once dynamic and benign—it was a delight to hear him.

Aretha

Posted on by

Aretha

I’ve accompanied some amazing singers In My Time, like Mark Padmore, and I’ve heard some great folk artists from around the world (such as flamenco, or dhrupad), but I just have to remind you of the divine inspiration of the great Aretha Franklin (wiki; YouTube), whose songs I’ve featured in several posts (Detroit 67; Amazing Grace; most recently, under Ray Charles). So if you’re not up for selections by more knowledgeable pundits (like 30 songs ranked here, or 50 here), here’s a succinct roundup of some of her most enchanting tracks.

  • Respect:

  • I say a little prayer:

  • Amazing Grace:

  • Spirit in the dark:

Barack Obama in 2015:

Aretha 2Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope. American history wells up when Aretha sings. That’s why, when she sits down at a piano and sings “A Natural Woman”, she can move me to tears […] because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.

Among all the inspired genius of the soundtrack of the 60s and 70s (Beatles, Coltrane, Hendrix…), Aretha will always stand out. Note also my fabulous, eclectic Playlist of songs, and for a great Long Read, What is “serious music”?!.

Ray Charles

Posted on by

Ray Charles 1

I’ve got a lot of time for blind musicians around the world, but somehow I’ve never quite warmed to the great Ray Charles (1930–2004; website; wiki; YouTube channel)—probably because I’m allergic to singers accompanying themselves at the piano, smacking of mere showbiz entertainment, the feel-good crossover into pop seeming too flagrantly commercial. But (not for the only time) I’ve been missing out.

Ray Charles 2The balance of joy and pain—Passion in its various senses—is a common issue throughout pop, folk traditions, and Western Art Music. Clearly some of the great performers communicate great joy through music and dance, from Bach to Madonna; Billie Holiday had a unique ability to transmit both at the same time. But when the theme of so many songs is suffering (e.g. flamenco), I generally find the smiley stage demeanour of musicians false, superficial. That jovial image was common enough in the days before dour hardcore jazzers like Miles Davis, but to me Ray Charles somehow didn’t seem troubled enough, despite his difficult childhood and his later struggles with heroin. As he played to the gallery, finding an image where he’s not grinning is no easy task. Now, at last, I’ve got over the shiny showbiz surface.

Henry Pleasants observed:

Sinatra, and Bing Crosby before him, had been masters of words. Ray Charles is a master of sounds. His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm… It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation. He can’t tell it to you. He can’t even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you, or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair—or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message.

For the gamut of vocal techniques in world music, note the wonderful CD set Les voix du monde.

Ray was with Atlantic Records from 1952 until signing with ABC in 1959. Here’s I got a woman (1954): *

In 1957, with Milt Jackson on vibes, he recorded Soul brothers and Soul meeting, also playing alto sax (here as playlist):

What’d I say (1959), with its “grunt’n’groan” exchanges, was a huge hit, and a major influence on the Beatles and the Stones:

Nelson George wrote:

By breaking down the division between pulpit and bandstand, recharging blues concerns with transcendental fervor, unashamedly linking the spiritual and the sexual, Charles made pleasure (physical satisfaction) and joy (divine enlightenment) seem the same thing. By doing so he brought the realities of the Saturday-night sinner and Sunday-morning worshipper—so often one and the same—into raucous harmony.

What’d I say became the finale to all his shows, and has been widely covered. Ray observed:

I saw that many of the stations which had banned the tune started playing it when it was covered by white artists. That seemed strange to me, as though white sex was cleaner than black sex. But once they began playing the white version, they lifted the ban and also played the original.

His first hit with ABC was the iconic Georgia on my mind (1960):

The great ethnomusicologist Bernard Lortat-Jacob devotes an essay to the song in his book Petits pays, grandes musiques.

From 1962 Ray added Country to his range—in this Nashville Special from 1985 he sang I can’t stop loving you with his friend Willie Nelson:

And here’s Spirit in the dark, his cameo with Aretha Franklin (see e.g. Amazing Grace, and under Detroit 67) in her joyous 1971 show at the Fillmore West (from 6.15):

Over the following years, with the scene ever changing, while Ray Charles’s output became less original, his commercial success was modified as he assumed the comfortable role of familiar legend performing a well-established playlist—a common pattern.

The documentary The genius of soul (1991) provides good context, including tributes to (and from) his fellow musicians:

And here’s a playlist of clips from the movie Ray (2004):

Learning to appreciate Ray Charles is another stage in my musical education. Note What is “serious music”?!.

With yet more thanks to Augusta

* For the linguistic pedant, another helpful comment on wiki: “Originally titled “I’ve got a woman”—I like to imagine the editorial debate…

A Hollywood roundtable

Posted on by

March 1963
Leaders at the front of the march. Source.

Following the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28th August 1963, the United States Information Agency (USIA) broadcast a “Hollywood roundtable” (useful summary here), with Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston [hmm], * Sidney Poitier, Joseph Mankiewicz, James Baldwin, and moderator David Schoenbrun:

As a commentary observes:

The Hollywood Roundtable did not portray the United States as a perfect nation. Instead, the USIA used honesty and humility in an attempt to relate to foreign audiences. Throughout the film, the celebrities emphasised the nation’s faults while still promoting American values. Writer and director Joseph Mankiewicz perhaps put this best: “This is the only country in the Western world where this [the march] is possible, but also the only country where this is necessary.” (11.45)

The emphasis on hope and potential is another theme meant to lure foreign viewers to the American way of life. James Baldwin states, “No matter how bitter I become I always believed in the potential of this country. For the first time in our history, the nation has shown signs of dealing with this central problem.” (18.58)

When word spread that the government was broadcasting images of domestic inequality to foreign nations, many Americans were not pleased with USIA officials. Shortly after, Edward R. Murrow stepped down as USIA president and was replaced by Carl Rowan. At the time, this made Rowan the highest ranked African American in public office.

That such an articulate, enlightened debate was aired at the time seems all the more impressive today, with the media perilously dumbed down and Republicans renewing their energies in assaulting the rights of minorities and women. The March was a predecessor of later demonstrations leading up to those for George Floyd and for womens’ rights. Here’s a film of the March itself:

As Michael Thelwell of SNCC commented:

So it happened that Negro students from the South, some of whom still had unhealed bruises from the electric cattle prods which Southern police used to break up demonstrations, were recorded for the screens of the world portraying “American Democracy at Work”.

As in the Roundtable, women were conspicuously absent as speakers at the March. Gloria Richardson, Rosa Parks, and Lena Horne were escorted away from the podium before Martin Luther King’s speech. Women who were allowed to sing included Marian Anderson and Joan Baez; and here’s Mahalia Jackson singing How I got over and I’ve been buked and I’ve been scorned:

MLK dream
Martin Luther King delivering his I Have a Dream speech at the March.

For the tragic end of Martin Luther King, see Memphis 1968.

* The wiki article on Heston (under “Political views”) has a summary of his later conversion to racism and the NRA, ranting against Political Correctness.

It’s what it is

Posted on by

what it is

In Istanbul over the summer, punctuated by the call to prayer, I watched not only my usual woke fare of black-and-white subtitled foreign-language films with amateur actors, but also a succession of classic mafia movies—three instalments of The Godfather, plus Goodfellas, perhaps the greatest of all. I still have to watch Casino.

I wasn’t previously aware of The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019; reviewed by Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode), but it’s just as compelling, with a star-studded cast. For me, among all the immortal dialogue, two scenes stand out with Robert De Niro, as he tries to relay the unwelcome news from Jo Pesci to Al Pacino, and as it becomes clear that his best friend is gonna have to get whacked:

and

We may be used to “It is what it is”, but here “It’s what it is” makes an even stronger line.

The female gaze is only fleeting in The Irishman, but the revulsion in the face of Frank’s daughter Peggy offers a rare glimpse of a moral core to the story. These movies are particularly topical amidst the current mafia state prosecutions in the USA.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers if I note that “It is what it is” makes a suitable bumper-sticker for the descriptive anthropologist of Daoist ritual, by contrast with the prescriptive agenda of scholars seeking clues in modern ritual to the religious doctrine of ancient times (see Debunking “living fossils”) [Oh FFS—Ed.].

On a more topical note, the astounding Coco Gauff used the expression in her wise reflections after her semi-final in the US Open was (briefly) disrupted. She is Good People.

Splåtergørd

Posted on by

I’m most resistant to new-fangled kitchen gadgets, but, um, splashing out on a splatter guard for my little Moka makes a delightful early birthday present.

splatter guard

In a felicitous coincidence, the Norwegian centre-forward Einar Splåtergørd was the first footballer to break the £10 transfer-fee barrier, going on to score the winning goal for Burnley in their legendary 1959 Cup Final victory over Tranmere Rovers [You nearly had me there—The Plain People of Ireland].

For more diacritics, note Ogonek and Til!

Talking of kitchen gadgets, the African American businessman and inventor Alfred L. Cralle patented the “Ice Cream Mold and Disher” in 1897, forerunner of the ice-cream scoop.

scoop

Cf. the inventions of the fridge, tobacco, and the helpline.

Bill Evans: Blue in green

Posted on by

“The Bill Evans of jazz”—Robert Offergeld

Kind of blue session
Source.

The Miles Davis album Kind of blue (1959) is so iconic that every note has come to seem sacrosanct. But we need to remind ourselves that jazz is improvised; now that covers a lot of ground (as the ever-perceptive Bruno Nettl explains), but no two performances will sound the same—as when Bach and Mozart played, and as with almost any folk music you care to mention. More still than Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte, or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in blue, fossilised by the exigencies of Western Art Music, jazz recordings are merely a snapshot capturing one moment in the life of an ever-changing organism.

The sessions for Kind of blue were almost entirely unrehearsed—Evans opens his liner notes with a tribute to the spontaneity of Japanese painting. * I featured Blue in green, the album’s most meditative track, in my page on Ravel, whose harmonies it very much evokes—how I wish Ravel could have heard it! Its material seems to belong more to Bill Evans than to Miles (who claimed the royalties). Still, Miles appreciated him immensely:

Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall. I had to change the way the band sounded again for Bill’s style by playing different tunes, softer ones at first.

Anyway, to return to improvisation, we can gently rattle the cage we’ve entered of our own accord by tuning in to other versions of Blue in green, like the three 1960 takes featuring Evans’s “first” trio with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums—starting with this:

(Take 2 here, 3 here).

Indeed, even before Kind of blue, a resemblance can be heard in Evans’ recording of Alone together with Chet Baker:

On this collaboration, Michael Quinn wrote:

While both were peerless masters of their instruments and shared a rich, evocatively lyrical playing style that bordered beguilingly on the introspective, Baker and Evans were polar opposites when it came to the discipline of performance.

Though both were heroin addicts, the musically-trained Evans never let it interfere with his meticulously precise flights of invention while the self-taught Baker became increasingly erratic and inconsistent.

* * *

Evans trio

You can’t have enough Bill Evans… As we bask in the archive on YouTube, it’s worth consulting Ted Gioia’s informed  selection. Here’s Peace piece, 1958:

After his brief but formative time with Miles, he went on to form his “first” trio—here they are live at Birdland NYC in 1960:

And Gloria’s step, live at the Village Vanguard in 1961:

Grieving at the early death of Scott LaFaro, Evans formed a trio with Chuck Israels on bass and Larry Bunker on drums. Here’s their 1965 London appearance on Jazz 625 (ending with Waltz for Debby, cf. the a cappella version here):

Nardis also features in my post on the eponymous Istanbul jazz club—in this 1970 gig Evans plays it with Eddie Gómez on bass and Marty Morell on drums:

In 1966 he played a moving extended solo in memory of his father:

His solo album Alone again (1975):

His 1977 album Together again with Tony Bennett includes You must believe in spring! And listen to his version of My favorite things here.

As one might surmise, not least from the physical similarity of their styles at the keyboard, Bill Evans seems to have been Glenn Gould’s favourite jazz pianist. Glenn O’Brien reports,

Glenn Gould said of Evans, “He’s the Scriabin of jazz”, to which the classical music critic Robert Offergeld said, “More to the point, Bill Evans was the Bill Evans of jazz. He could produce a broader tonal color in 32 measures than Glenn in his whole career.”

Discuss…

The intense meditation of his style is still evident in Reflections in D, live in Montreux, 1978:

See also Middle-period Miles, The spiritual path of John Coltrane (whom Evans, as well as Yusuf Lateef, turned on to the wisdom of Krishnamurti), Lives in jazz, and many posts in my jazz roundup.

* In interview Evans commented:

I was interested in Zen long before the big boom. I found out about it just after I got out of the army in 1954. A friend of mine had met Aldous Huxley while crossing from England, and Huxley told him that Zen was worth investigating. I’d been looking into philosophy generally so I decided to see what Zen had to say. But literature on it was almost impossible to find. Finally, I was able to locate some material at the Philosophical library in Manhattan. Now you can get the stuff in any drugstore.

But, like a Zen monk, he didn’t make a meal of it:

Actually, I’m not interested in Zen that much, as a philosophy, nor in joining any movements. I don’t pretend to understand it. I just find it comforting. And very similar to jazz. Like jazz, you can’t explain it to anyone without losing the experience.

For more on the Zen boom, see e.g. The magic of the Zen bookshop, Zen and haiku: R.H. Blyth, The great Gary Snyder, More East-West gurus, J.D. Salinger, and even The Celibidache mystique; cf. Daoism and standup. 

You couldn’t make it up

Posted on by

Hyde cover

Political satire may be impotent (as in Peter Cook’s “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”), but apart from making us Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati feel smug, it affords us a modicum of sanity. On both sides of the pond, this has been a golden age for satirists, whose only problem is that no matter how exaggerated their fantasies, they couldn’t possibly dream up anything so absurd as the behaviour of the politicians themselves.

The Guardian is blessed with a kind of Brian-and-Stewie double act in the form of John Crace and Marina Hyde. The latter’s columns since 2016 have been collected in the handsome tome

  • Marina Hyde, What just happened? Dispatches from turbulent times (2022; 512 pages).

In her Introduction she addresses the reader:

You have chosen to be reminded that the path to the sunlit uplands goes right through shit creek.

And she reflects:

I know some people like to think of column-writing as an art, but for me, it’s definitely not. It’s a trade. You get up, you write something to fill a space, and you hope it’s not one of your worst shots and that readers enjoy it. Maybe some people are out there imagining they’re writing the first draft of history, but I feel like I’m just sticking a pin in a moment.

While it’s topical to read her dispatches weekly, it’s also salient to digest them en masse under loosely-grouped themes, or rather characters: not just politicians, but

a queen, various princes and duchesses, celebrities, wicked advisers, reality TV monsters, billionaires, philanthropists, fauxlanthropists, Hollywood sex offenders, judges, media barons, populists, police officers, and all kinds of other heroes and villains.

Ms Hyde is happy to be “the journalistic equivalent of a chocolate digestive or a packet of salt and vinegar crisps”, interspersing showbiz and sport with politics and always thinking associatively (“for me the reflexive way of making sense of a lot of things is by using references to other things”). But beyond the dazzling stylistic brilliance of her satire, many columns evince her genuine passion about events where levity is unthinkable, such as the murder of Jo Cox and the Manchester Arena bombing.

It’s all there—Brexit, Covid and Partygate, with the Orange Baby taking a relatively cameo role. Will our grandchildren ever believe any of this, or will it be eclipsed by duplicities and iniquities as yet unimaginable? Copious columns of Ms Hyde excoriate the Tories floundering over Brexit and its “opportunities”, from Theresa May (“the Florence Foster Jenkins of politics”) to the arch-villain BoJo, “matinee idol of the Tory shires”, “the blond black hole”,

journalist, novelist, Churchill biographer, politician, urban planner, diplomat. At this stage in Boris Johnson’s storied career we have to ask: is there anything he CAN do?

I’ve already featured the classic scene in Outnumbered where a visiting German student refuses to believe that “Boris” could possibly be a real politician (see note here). Ms Hyde’s epithets for him are magnificent:

not so much a statesman as an Oxfam donation bag torn open by a fox

this radioactive haystack, this Frankenstein assemblage of all the rejected personality disorders of the minor Greek gods

puts the “I am” into iambic pentameter

lying, hypocritical degenerate

looks like Chucky if he’d borrowed a suit for a court appearance, or a Yewtree version of Worzel Gummidge, or what would happen if you started making Margaret Rutherford out of papier maché but got bored halfway through

and

The level of self-congratulation with which he produces a phrase like “tricephalous monster” marks him out as the classic stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person, but among the faithful it is undeniable that some of his most recycled lines still bring the house down. And the lovely thing is, he’s never buried in the rubble.

Ms Hyde is incisive on the way “Boris” stokes up Islamophobia. And from October 2021:

For pretty much the entire pandemic, right up until about 10 minutes ago, Johnson has been the teacher who wants to be cool. You know the type—messes his hair up and calls you “mate”. High-fives you when you get a right answer but claims that, in many ways, there are no wrong answers. Tells you to call him by his first name. Deals with early speculative breaches in discipline by announcing he’s not going to send you to the headmaster, mate, because he comes at this stuff from different angles. Tells you to rip out the introduction to your pandemic textbooks.

Insists he’s the same as you guys and totally gets what you’re going through, in fact he actually feels it more deeply. Claims to have been expelled from three schools as a teen. Says he hates teaching because he’s “about freedom”. Rides a dirt bike. Raps Cardi B. Chaperones a school trip where 47 pupils die.

And his Rasputin, the éminence grise Dominic Cummings,

shiftily meeting the camera’s gaze with the same defensive sneer you’d see on the proprietor of a holiday caravan park who had just been released on police bail after a fatal gas explosion thought to have been caused by poor maintenance,

whose intrepid research trip to Barnard Castle, at a time when the feckless riff-raff were just lounging around on their own at home, is yet another priceless gift to satirists.

And then there’s the Haunted Pencil, “someone [Boris] would unquestionably have pitied mercilessly at school”, giving him a patrician endorsement:

“Two years ago, in the Conservative Party leadership campaign, I supported Boris Johnson, because I thought he would deliver Brexit extraordinarily well”, Rees-Mogg intoned, suggesting he has inherited all his father’s gifts of prophecy. “I haven’t seen anything that would cause me to change my mind on that.” Not anything?! He should have gone to MonocleSavers.

Among many classic reproaches to his absurd, sinister shtick is this.

Further sections are devoted to “Big Guys: from street harassers to Supreme Court judges”, Billionaires, and the Royal Family. Ms Hyde’s sports columns are acerbic too, such as “Pity the poor man who’s had the Women’s World Cup shoved down his throat”,

at the expense of one of the four great civil rights questions of our era: 1) When are we getting a White History Month? 2) When is International Men’s Day? 3) Isn’t it time we had Straight Pride? and 4) Can you imagine how sexist people would say it was if we had a men’s World Cup? […]

Ways that it can be shoved down his throat include “being on TV” and “being on a website he normally looks at”.

And Oh No, he’s Being Branded Sexist!

No one more than me wants to help the guy whose chief point about the 2019 World Cup is: “I would so much rather watch parks football on a Sunday morning”. I would also rather he did this.

She pays homage to Marcus Rashford, “worth a hundred ministers”, with his initiative for free school meals; and to the emotional maturity of the England men’s football team after the 2020 Euros, “in stark contrast to that of the prime minister and government”:

It is, on every level, absurd that it should feel socially necessary for footballers barely out of their teens to pen missives to the nation apologising for missing a penalty, but not for a government to even acknowledge vast and lethal mistakes, much less say sorry for them.

In the section on still more recent débacles (“12 parties, three prime ministers, and a war”), she deplores the shameful failure of the “government” to help refugees from Ukraine—or indeed (one might add), refugees from anywhere, or to help anyone ever, except themselves. And I’ve already cited her riposte to the rabid critics of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Indexes can give a succinct, drôle flavour of a book’s tone; the index here is entertaining in itself, while somewhat more restrained than those of Paula Clarke Bain, or my own draft index for Nicolas Robertson’s mind-blowing anagram tales. The substantial entry for “Johnson, Boris” includes sub-headings such as

banal psychopathy
dishonesty
self-love
and death of shame
farming sunlit uplands
fridge-hiding
…

See also my roundup of posts on Tory iniquity.

Neither wolf nor dog

Posted on by

Wolf cover

  • Kent Nerburn, Neither wolf nor dog: on forgotten roads with an Indian elder (1st edition 1994).

I can only scrape the surface of the wealth of coverage (both academic and popular) of Native American cultures (see this roundup). Within the literature, “as told to” memoirs (mediated by a more or less diligent white amanuensis) make an important way of amplifying the voices of Native Americans. For some early life stories (the field led by the classic Black Elk speaks, 1932), as Arnold Krupat concludes in For those who come after (1985),

Any future examples of the genre will appear in a context increasingly dominated—at least so far as the white world’s awareness is concerned—by autobiographies by Indians who, while deeply interested in the old ways, have become extremely sophisticated in their manipulation of new—Euramerican, written—ways. In their different fashions all of these life histories, and those of their predecessors, deserve study and inclusion in the canon of American literature.

So Neither wolf nor dog belongs to a long tradition. While many of the thorny issues that it poses are basic to fieldwork in many parts of world, this is a famously sensitive area. Nerburn explicitly problematises the relationship between Native American subject and white interlocutor (anger and sadness on one side, guilt on the other). And this, with the road-trip format, gives the book a dramatic impetus, making it more personal and engaging than a dry series of homilies or a litany of white rhapsodies about NA spirituality.

The book’s title comes from Sitting Bull:

I do not wish to be shut up in a corral. All agency Indians I have seen were worthless. They are neither red warriors nor white farmers. They are neither wolf nor dog.

Learning of Nerburn’s previous collection To walk the red road, as NA elder Dan nears the end of his life he contacts Nerburn to ask him to help him commit his insights to paper. While revealing his own conflicts and soul-searching, Nerburn stands up to Dan and his sidekick Grover when they test his endurance and chip away at his values.

I had not come out here to be given an endless series of tests in cultural sensitivity, or to become the butt of some deep and private jokes. Even if the old man didn’t realise it, I was doing him a favor, and at great cost to myself and my family. I was willing to play his Boswell, but I was not willing to play his patsy. And I surely was not willing to have my every action judged, critiqued, and used as the basis to decide if he was going to let me pursue this any further.

As Dan tells him:

White people that come around to work with Indians, most of them want to be Indians. They’re always wearing Indian jewelry and talking about the Great Spirit and are all full of bullshit. […]

Or else they think we need some kind of white social worker telling us what to do. Some of them come here because they can’t find a job anywhere else and end up out on the reservation…

Grover too comments, “White people don’t want real Indians, they want storybook Indians.” Nerburn shares their antipathy to well-meaning hippies and do-gooders. In his Preface he elaborates:

They take on the trappings, they romanticize, they try to right the historical wrong through a great outpouring of cultural compassion, or try to express spiritual solidarity by appropriating Indian values or belief. In the process, they distort the reality of the people about whom they care so deeply, and turn them into a reflection of their own needs.

This is exactly what Dan and Grover and all the others would never let me do in Neither wolf nor dog.

The tragic history has been documented in detail, but Dan’s account is eloquent.

The white people surprised us when they came. […] We had seen other strangers before. But they were just other people like us—other Indians—from different tribes. They would come and ask us to pass through our land. If we wanted to, we would let them. Otherwise they couldn’t.

But you see, it wasn’t our land like we owned it. It was the land where we hunted or where our ancestors were buried. It was land that the Creator had given us.

It was the land where our sacred stories took place. It had sacred places on it. Our ceremonies were here. We knew the animals. They knew us. We had watched the seasons pass on this land. It was alive, like our grandparents. It gave us life for our bodies and the life for our spirits. We were part of it.

So we would let people pass through it if they needed to, because it was our land and they knew it. We did not wish them to hunt or to disturb our sacred places. But they could come to our land if they needed to.

But the new influx soon became a great ocean washing them off their land.

Then something strange happened. These new people started asking us for the land. We did not know what to say. How could they ask for the land? They wanted to give us money for the land. They would give us money for the land if their people could live on it.

Our people didn’t want this. There was something wrong to the Creator in taking money for the land. There was something wrong to our grandparents and our ancestors to take money for the land.

Then something happened that we didn’t understand. The people who came said that we didn’t belong here anymore. […] We thought they were crazy.

As land became property (“We just belonged to the land. They wanted to own it”), Dan goes on,

Your religion didn’t come from the land. It could be carried around with you. Your religion was in a cup and a piece of bread, and that could be carried in a box. Your priests could make it sacred anywhere. You couldn’t understand that what was sacred for us was where we were, because it was where the sacred things had happened and where the spirits talked to us. […]

The worst thing was that you never even listened to us. You came into our land and took it away and didn’t even listen to us when we tried to explain. You made promises and you broke every one.

On naming;

“Do you mind being called an Indian, Dan?” It seemed appropriate, since his granddaughter had just referred to him as an Indian, and it was a question that always lurked beneath the surface when I was involved in conversations with Indian people.

“What the hell else would you call me?”

“Oh, Native American. I don’t know. Something. Anything other than Indian.”

The old man took a deep breath, as if he had explained this many times before.

“It doesn’t bother me. It bothers a lot of our people, though. They don’t like that the name we have was a mistake. Just because Columbus didn’t know where he was, we have to be called Indians because he thought he had found the East Indies. They think it takes away our pride and our identity.”

“That seems like a fair sentiment to me,” I said. The old man waved his hand in front of his face to silence me.

“I guess I don’t mind because we have taken the name and made it our own. We still have our own names in our own languages. Usually that name means ‘first people’, but no-one would ever call us that. So we let people call us ‘Indians’. Does that tell you something about us?”

I wasn’t sure what he was driving at. “It tells me you are willing to accept a certain level of injustice.”

He nodded vigorously. “Sure. What if you called black people Russians or Chinamen? Do you think they’d stand for it?” He laughed at the thought. “Hell, they change what they want to be called every few years.”

“I don’t blame them, though. They’ve been called some pretty bad names. And being called by a color is almost as strange as being called by a place you never lived. But the point is that our people mostly don’t care so much about something like a name. We’re pretty easygoing about things.” […]

“You remember a few years ago? Some Indians decided they would rather be called Native Americans. It’s an okay name; it’s more dignified than ‘Indians’. But it’s no more real than Indians, because to us this isn’t even America. The word America came from some Italian who came over here after Columbus. Why should we care if we’re called Native Americans when the name is from some Italian?” […]

“If some of us want to be called Native Americans, you should call us Native Americans. If some of us want to be called Indians, you should call us Indians. I know it make you kind of uncomfortable, not ever knowing which one is right. But I think that’s good. It reminds you of how uncomfortable it is for us—we had our identity taken from us the minute Columbus arrived on our land.”

In “Junk cars and buffalo carcasses”, another lesson arises from a concern of Nerburn:

I had always been mystified by the willingness of people to live in squalor, when only the simplest effort would have been required to make things clean. I had come to shrug it off to the old sociological canard that it reflected a lack of self-esteem and a sense of hopelessness about life.

But, in my heart, I knew that this was too facile, too middle-class in its presumptions. But it certainly was preferable to earlier explanations—that people who lived like this were simply lazy and shiftless.

Dan gives him another perspective:

“All of these—all these cars and stuff—makes me proud.”

“Proud?”

“Yeah. It means we haven’t lost our traditional ways.”

The anger had faded from his face and been replaced with a placid smile. “We have to live in this world. The Europeans killed all the animals and too all our land. We can’t live our way anymore. In our way, everything had its use then it went back into the earth. We had wooden bowls and cups, or things made of clay.

We rode horses or walked. We made things out of the things of the earth. Then when we no longer needed it, we let it go back into the earth.

“Now things don’t go back into the earth. Our kids leave pop cans around. We leave old cars around. In the old days these would be bone spoons and horn cups, and the old cars would be skeletons of horses or buffalo. We would burn them or leaave them and they would go back to the earth. Now we can’t. We are living the same way, but we are living with different things. We will learn your way, but, you see, you really don’t understand any better. All you care about is keeping things clean. You don’t care how they really are, just so long as they are clean. You see a dirt path with a pop can next to it and you think that is worse than a big paved highway that is kept clean. You get madder at a forest with a trash can in it than at a big shopping center that is all clean and swept.”

Dan and Grover enjoy an old Cowboys ‘n’ Injuns movie on TV:

“My God,” I said. “How can you watch this? Doesn’t it make you crazy?”

“Hell,” Grover said. “I used to go to the movies as a kid and root for the cowboys. I probably even saw this one.”

“Yep,” said Dan. “In the old show houses everyone used to cheer and boo at movies. We all booed the Indians; cheered when the cavalry came. I really liked John Wayne.”

This leads to another worthwhile discussion. At a truck-stop they find some old hippies, wannabe Indians. Dan bemoans his fellow Indians who sell what is sacred, and the whites who want to buy it:

The white people want to own us spiritually. […] Before you wanted to make us you. But now you are unhappy with who you are, so you want to make you into us.

Dan offers an intriguing perspective on the nature of freedom (an overriding American obsession that most outsiders find mystifying). On the early settlers:

When you got here you got scared and tried to build the same cages you had run away from. If you had listened to us instead of trying to convert us and kill us, what a country this would be.”

And more on images:

For white people there are only two types of Indians. Drunken bums and noble Indians. In the old days, we used to be savages, but that’s gone. Now it’s drunks and noble Indians. I like the white men better who think we are all drunks. At least they’re looking at us as people. They’re saying what they see, not what they want to see. Then when they meet one of us who’s not a drunk, they have to deal with us.

The ones who see us all as wise men don’t care about Indians at all. They just care about the idea of Indians. It’s just another way of stealing our humanity and making us into a fantasy that fits the needs of white people.

In a powerful dénouement, they visit the Wounded Knee memorial.

I must also read the sequel, on the iniquitous boarding school system (introduced here and here).

* * *

Wolf film

While I was swiftly converted by the book, I couldn’t quite imagine how it might adapt as a movie. But Steven Lewis Simpson’s 2016 film turns out to be just as thought-provoking. This is largely thanks to the inspired casting of Dave Bald Eagle (1919­–2016) as Dan; 95 years old at the time of filming, before he died he commented “it’s the only film I’ve been in about my people that told the truth”. Grover and Nerburn are well cast too; scenes from the book are carefully handled, like Jumbo who Fixes Stuff, and the alcoholic Indian approaching them in a diner. Dave Bald Eagle’s final oration at Wounded Knee is extraordinary.

Here’s a trailer:

* * *

The dialogue that Dan and Nerburn open up has clearly been well received, at least among wasichu white audiences. Neither wolf nor dog gives food for thought not only to the wannabe Indians and do-gooders but to other wasichu, whether or not they welcome the message (Nerburn’s website has some thoughtful reflections here, and here). How Native Americans feel about it is another matter (though their appraisals too will be diverse); but maybe it can go towards helping everyone come to terms with the appalling tragedy at the heart of the American psyche.

Summertime

Posted on by

Postcard from Istanbul

Since the carefree Italian musical jaunts of my youth, I’ve become resigned to enduring the English “summer”—resenting long periods of showers and Arctic temperatures, alternating with the occasional stifling heatwave, before the long drab grey August decline.

So—pace global warming, which despite the demurrals of many fuckwit politicians is actually A Thing—how delightful it is, around an island interlude, to spend an extended period in a region (thanks to my enforced homelessness) where heat is just a given, and one’s body just gets into the rhythm, finding shade, working at sensible times of day (if you have a choice, that is), and actually Enjoying Life, freed from the vain, desperate annual scramble to change colour—one of the afflictions of Being English.

desert
Gary Larson.

Of course, such a sentiment would never have buttered any parsnips for the tanners of Zeytinburnu, nor will they for a waste collector in Tarlabaşı pulling a heavy load up a steep hill at midday (see e.g. here, here). And meanwhile in London, heroic NHS nurses are still slaving away, saving the lives of others, catching crowded buses and juggling childcare; in China and India, peasants are still tilling the fields, seeking water, dreaming of escaping hardship by migrating to urban apartment blocks.

* * *

Plucked from Porgy and Bess, Gershwin’s song has become such a cliché (“the most covered song in the world“) that it rarely moves me. As always, Billie Holiday transforms the song—here’s her 1936 recording, when it was still new:

And it keeps inspiring musicians—here’s Miles in 1959:

Mahalia Jackson in 1960:

And the brilliant Andrea Motis with mentors of the Sant Andreu Jazz Band in 2013:

On a linguistic note, I like Stephen Sondheim’s observation about the opening line:

That “and” is worth a great deal of attention. I would write “Summertime when”, but that “and” sets up a tone, a whole poetic tone, not to mention a whole kind of diction that is going to be used in the play; an informal, uneducated diction and a stream of consciousness, as in many of the songs like My man’s gone now. It’s the exact right word, and that word is worth its weight in gold. “Summertime when the livin’ is easy” is a boring line compared to “Summertime and”. The choices of “ands” [and] “buts” become almost traumatic as you are writing a lyric—or should, anyway—because each one weighs so much.

For a fine Native American weather story, click here.

Black and white

Posted on by

The elephant in the room
or
The ivory tower

Ivory
Source.

Today we take for granted the colour scheme of the piano keys, with white “natural” notes and black “chromatics” . But the layout was only standardised after around 1810; on most early harpsichords, fortepianos, and organs, the colours are reversed. [1]

Left: harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers (Antwerp, 1646),
remodelled and expanded by Pascal Taskin (Paris, 1780).
Right: fortepiano by Johann Andreas Stein (Augsburg, 1775).
Source: wiki.

Historians are showing ever more clearly how the prosperity of Western imperial nations was built upon slavery (e.g. here; see also the note in Hidden heritage). And as ivory became a prized symbol of affluence,

with the establishment of the early-modern slave trades from East and West Africa, freshly captured slaves were used to carry the heavy tusks to the ports where both the tusks and their carriers were sold.

Meanwhile, worthy efforts are being made to write black composers and performers into the story of Western Art Music (WAM). However, such discussion as I’ve found of the reversal of the keyboard’s colours comes from within the rarefied echelons of musicology—still largely a bastion of “autonomous music” divorced from society (with some honourable exceptions, under Society and soundscape; note also recent initiatives such as this). So even those who take note of the colour reversal (e.g. here, and this) suggest innocent explanations, ignoring the elephant in the room. It’s not exactly a conspiracy of silence, just a scene dominated by white people in their ivory tower. While I can’t see the wider picture here, I’d be intrigued to see what historians of colonialism and the global slave trade might make of this.

Within WAM, some ingenuous commentators seek to explain the change by the practical reason of visual clarity: supposedly, when the adjacent (“natural”) keys were black, they were hard to distinguish since the space between them was also dark, so the new scheme made them easier to identify. Implausibly, this seems to suggest that master performers like Bach and Mozart just couldn’t help playing fistfuls of wrong notes, and that modern players of historical instruments rashly run the same risk.[2]

Mozart piano
Mozart’s piano, by Anton Walter—played in our times by the brilliant Robert Levin
e.g. here. [3]

Surely such an explanation falls between the cracks. While keyboards with white naturals and black chromatics were quite common (such as those depicted by Vermeer), [4] the reverse system was well-established and long-lived—anything but a fleeting experiment before makers “got it right”. This more common early layout seems to make economic sense: the “natural” keys were larger, longer, and more numerous; black keys were made of ebony (promising article here) or rosewood, while white keys were covered with ivory, which was more scarce and more costly.

But after a couple of centuries of colour diversity, the scheme of white naturals and black chromatics became standardised from the early 19th century, and this coincided with several factors that I have yet to see spelled out. As importing ivory became more efficient (I surmise) it must have become rather less expensive (cf. fluctuating costs of ebony manufacture?); and as industrial production developed, the piano market surged—notably among the social classes making lucrative profits from slavery and the ivory trade. So we might want to find out how piano prices and incomes changed over the period, for German, French, Dutch, and English producers and consumers.

An article on one corner of American piano manufacture since the mid-19th century suggests the kind of approach I’m seeking.

Ivory 2

It may be hard to find out how white supremacy came to be inlaid onto the piano keyboard within a couple of decades early in the 19th century. Doubtless both aesthetic and socio-economic factors played a role; but it’s an interesting coincidence that the change occurred just as profits from the trade in ivory and slaves were soaring. So I hope this post will read not so much as a Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati rant but as a plea for broader-based and informed research.

* * *

Returning to more purely aesthetic concerns, a friend also wonders if a predominantly white keyboard was considered more pleasing in salons and concert halls where musicians wore dark suits and audiences sat at a distance. Another, later story (that, mercifully, I won’t attempt to cover) is the overall contours of the instrument’s body: how the varied shades of elegantly decorated wood yielded to the modern concert grand—massive, impersonal, shiny, and black (white instruments appealing mainly to the tastes of such as R. Clayderman and D. Trump).

It’s hard to gauge if playing on one or the other keyboard had, or has, any effect on performers or audiences—for instance, if modern players who use both early and later models are influenced in some obscure way by playing on instruments of one or the other type.

As a relief from such meretricious speculation, let’s rejoice in one of the funkiest keyboard solos ever:

You will note that this colourised version of The chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (featured in my post on Susan McClary’s stimulating political analysis of the cadenza) shows Gustav Leonhardt apparently playing a harpsichord with white natural keys and black chromatics—as is a 1640 instrument by Johannes Ruckers in Antwerp played by Richard Egarr, seen and heard in the same post. Tickling the ivories was never an entirely black and white issue…

Let’s play out with Hazel Scott (in The heat is on, 1943)—the piano on the left presumably a novelty one-off, specially manufactured:

[1] Wiki articles on Harpsichord, Piano, Fortepiano, and Musical keyboard make useful introductions. BTW, in the Sachs-Hornbostel taxonomy of instruments the piano is classified as a subdivision of §31, alongside musical bows and zithers.

Frances Cole[2] What about blind players, one might ask? An even more dodgy claim is that “the custom of having the naturals a darker colour was said to have originated in France to show off the player’s hands to better advantage”.

Left: Frances Cole (1937–83).

Another aside: although the old theory that Beethoven was black sometimes gets exhumed on social media (and is soon reburied), it can still lead to interesting conversations, like this. 

[3] More Mozart pianos concertos here. For the different timbres of early pianos—even up to the 1950s—see my note here on Beethoven’s wondrous Op. 109 sonata. For a modern performance of Brahms on a piano of his time, click here. In my tribute to Fou Ts’ong I refer to Richard Kraus’s fine study of pianos and politics in China.

[4] So was this layout, which only achieved a monopoly considerably later, more common in the Netherlands—and if so, might that be because since the Dutch empire prospered earlier than its rivals, its keyboard makers had earlier access to ivory? Maybe someone can direct me to a large image database for early keyboards.

Tomorrow

Posted on by

After Yesterday, here’s Tomorrow…

Shirelles

Will you [still] love me tomorrow (Carole King, with lyrics by Gerry Goffin) was a big hit for the Shirelles in 1960, the first song by a black all-girl group to reach no.1 in the USA. While I’m all for evocative string backing arrangements (She’s leaving home, The windmills of your mind—I rest my case), this one is rather naff—still, it’s a wonderful track:

For her own version in 1971 the song’s composer Carole King sang it slower, “less like the pleas for gentleness on the part of a trembling virgin and more like a mature woman requiring parity in a relationship”:

Amy

Among numerous covers, no singer can ever compare to Amy Winehouse, who recorded the song for the soundtrack of Bridget Jones: the edge of reason in 2004 (between her albums Frank and Back to black), only released in 2011 on her posthumous album Lioness: hidden treasures:

For my tribute to Amy, click here. See also Detroit 67, Memphis 68, and Northern soul, as well as Walk on by. Do also bask in my eclectic Playlist of songs!

Waterson–Carthy, and Shirley Collins

Posted on by

This blog is full of “world music“, from far and near. I’ve always been a great fan of Irish music, but somehow I’ve never quite paid attention to the English folk scene. While I’ve made a modest attempt to get to grips with Morris dancing, I struggle to get over the quaint “Hey Nonny No” shtick—which is an irrelevance for English folkies like the women featured below; they keep ploughing their own furrow (sic), nestling in a niche alongside (and branching out towards) pop and rock.

So I welcomed Eliza Carthy’s delightful recent chat with John Wilson on BBC Radio 4.

CarthysEliza Carthy with her mother Norma Waterson.

Eliza Carthy (website; wiki) comes from a tradition of domestic musicking in a family of musicians that goes back at least seven generations (cf. Bach, household Daoists in China, flamenco, India, and so on). She was brought up with the singing of her parents Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson—here’s their album Frost and fire: a calendar of ritual and magical songs (1965):

Eliza tells a nice story about singing on stage with her folks for the first time when she was 6, and she fondly remembers joining the family for the Vancouver folk festival in 1989, aged 13. Touring the States, she got the opportunity to hear regional traditions she could recognise as derived from the British Isles.

Having focused on a cappella singing, as a fiddler she began exploring instrumental music in more depth. She didn’t rate classic folk-rock, but was inspired by the Scottish band Shooglenifty. She also pays tribute to Billy Bragg. Of her many collaborations, such as The Imagined Village, I’m keen on Ratcatchers, with Jon Boden and John Spiers of Bellowhead:

More recently Eliza relished touring with the Wayward band—some great tracks on their YouTube channel. And she still appeared with the family; here they are live in 2007:

She sees nothing particularly bold about her rather edgy updating of the heritage, a bit punk: tradition was always evolving, and “I was never going to float around in a tree!”. She believes in the importance of every generation developing their own sound.

How do you make a song your own?
[laughs] Well, I sing it… […]

As to “traditional” songs,

You take out what’s not you, and you put in what is you…

As her mother commented in 2010,

We thought—my generation of musicians—that we’d all get old and grey and there’d be nobody left. And then all this new generation of young musicians came up, and we all said, “Thank God”. So if people say traditional music has got to be like that, or like that, then you’re going to freeze it. You may as well put something in a museum or bury it in the ground in a time capsule and dig it up so many years later to see what it was like then. You can’t do that with tradition. You have to hope each generation brings their own thing to it, so it keeps going forever.

Here mother and daughter sing Psalm of life:

Now that Eliza is President of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, she reflects, “It’s strange being the president of something that nobody really knows exists—and I’m not talking about the society…” She gives a suitable tirade against the government’s philistine disregard of culture.

Alas, another programme, in which Kathryn Tickell visited the family home, with more generous sound excerpts, isn’t currently available.

* * *

Moving from north to south England, another senior doyenne of the English folk scene is Shirley Collins (b.1935) (website; wiki; articles e.g. here, with a fine playlist, here, and here). She and her sister Dolly were steeped in the songs of Sussex from young.

Left, Shirley Collins in her youth (photo: Brian Shuel/Redferns)
right, after her comeback (photo: Andrew Hasson/REX).

After meeting Alan Lomax in 1954, they made a song collecting trip to the USA in 1959 (as described in her book America over the water), making some major discoveries—notably Mississippi Fred McDowell:

Also in 1959 Shirley recorded her debut album Sweet England—here’s Barbara Allen:

Through the 1970s she sang with the Albion band. She was then silent for over three decades, but in recent years she has begun singing again, to much acclaim. Like the Carthys, she doesn’t hold with the whole purist folk shtick:

There was some controversy surrounding Anthems in Eden, but most of it came from the Ewan MacColl lot who wouldn’t brook any other way of singing than, you know, putting your hand behind your ear so that everyone knew you were serious about it.

And she was underwhelmed by the political link:

For me, Pete Seeger bashing his bloody banjo and exhorting an audience to join the chorus of We Shall Overcome never seemed to advance any causes.

Her songs were championed by John Peel; more recently another great fan is Stewart Lee—in this chat they discuss “music, creativity under lockdown, civil rights, the government’s support of the arts, and the importance of having the right spoons”.

There’s a wealth of material on English folk to explore on Topic records alone. And Songlines is always a good source for updates—including #189 (July 2023).

Chloé Zhao

Posted on by

The films of Chloé Zhao are subtly engaging.

Born in Beijing in 1982, she moved on—via boarding school in London—to LA and New York. Having felt drawn to the vast empty spaces of Inner Mongolia in childhood, once based in the USA she discovered an affinity with the landscapes of the mid-West, and an empathy with subaltern lives (cf. Xu Tong).

Zhao 2

Songs my brothers taught me (2015; reviewed e.g. here) evokes the conflicted lives of Native Americans on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. For the outsider the desolate beauty of the landscape may suggest freedom, but with their choices constrained by a cycle of alcohol, violence, and prison, all attendant on chronic poverty, young people’s only hope seems to rest in leaving. Trailer:

Less eventful, but just as moving, is Nomadland (2020).

Zhao 1
Chloé Zhao with the film’s protagonist Frances McDormand.
Photo: AP.

The freedom of the alternative American Dream, and the back-to-nature romance of the nomadic lifestyle, are tempered by tenuous living conditions, dependent on the van and on soulless temporary factory work. Several real-life nomads appear as themselves, as well as simple-living guru Bob Wells. Trailer:

As Adrian Horton writes in the Guardian,

Nomadland observes an America not so much forgotten as ignored, or never seen in the first place. The film redirects attention to where the cinematic gaze is usually fleeting, and often made by those inured to glazing over service work, alternative living situations, older people, women in general, and particularly older single women uninterested in stagnation, cordiality or disappearance. For Fern, there’s no trite redemptive arc or revelation, just as there’s no restoring her town and old memories. Instead she dances on a cliff, gallivants around postcard sunsets, keeps moving, saves herself. She’s dwarfed by the Arizona desert and the larger forces at play in her uprooting, but her single story, one among the many real ones glanced by Nomadland, looms large, if only we choose to listen.

See also Grassy narrows (under my roundup of posts on Native American cultures); and for a moving study of alienation, Five easy pieces.

On growing (or shrinking) old

Posted on by

As I approach 70 (WTF), at last I think I can begin using this line with impunity:

live this long

Quote investigator researches the genesis of the saying with typical aplomb. The germ of the idea can be traced back to around 1770, but the precise formulation was first recorded in 1951, with candidates such as Billie Noonan, Adolph Zukor, Eubie Blake, and Mickey Mantle.

Cf. “If I had all the money I’ve spent on drink, I’d spend it on drink“.

On a related note,

What do we want?
More research on Alzheimer’s!
When do we want it?
Want what?

For the other end of Life’s Journey, see here.

In memory of Wayne Shorter

Posted on by

*Part of my surprisingly extensive jazz series!*

Wayne Shorter 1975Source.

The great sax player and composer Wayne Shorter (1933–2023) (wiki; YouTube topic) died recently at the age of 89, having been at the heart of a succession of outstanding bands (tributes e.g. NYT; Guardian here and here).

From 1959 he was a core member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, recording albums such as A night in Tunisia—here’s live footage from Paris that year:

Indestructible (recorded in 1964, issued in 1966) (as playlist):

and Free for all (1965) (as playlist):

* * *

Wayne and Miles
Source.

Eventually in 1964, Wayne was lured away by Miles Davis (cf. here and here) to join his second great quintet, recommended by John Coltrane himself as his replacement. As Miles reflected in his Autobiography, evocative and candid:

I knew that Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams were great musicians, and that they would work as a group, as a musical unit. To have a great band requires sacrifice and compromise from everyone; without it, nothing happens. I thought they could do it and they did. You get the right guys to play the right things at the right time and you got a motherfucker; you got everything you need.

If I was the inspiration and wisdom and the link for this band, Tony was the fire, the creative spark; Wayne was the idea person, the conceptualiser of a whole lot of musical ideas we did; and Ron and Herbie were the anchors. I was just the leader who put us all together. Those were all young guys and although they were learning from me, I was learning from them, too, about the new thing, the free thing. Because to be and stay a great musician you’ve got to always be open to what’s new, what’s happening at the moment. You have to be able to absorb it if you’re going to continue to grow and communicate your music. […] I knew that I was playing with some great young musicians that had their fingers on a different pulse.

Both Miles and Herbie deeply admired Wayne’s writing—Miles again:

Wayne was the only person that I knew then who wrote something like the way Bird wrote, the only one. It was the way he notated on the beat. Lucky Thompson used to hear us and say, “Goddamn, that boy can write music!” When he came into the band it started to grow a lot more and a whole lot faster, because Wayne is a real composer.

The passage that follows refines our image of “free” jazz:

He writes scores, writes the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. It worked exactly like that except when I changed some things. He doesn’t trust many people’s interpretations of his music; so he would bring out the whole score and people would just copy their parts from that, rather than go through the melody and changes and pick our way through the music like that.

Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn’t work, then he broke them, but with a musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your satisfaction and taste. Wayne was always out there on his own plane, orbiting around his own planet. Everybody else in the band was walking down here on earth. He couldn’t do in Art Blakey’s band what he did in mine; he just seemed to bloom as a composer when he was in my band. That’s why I say he was the intellectual musical catalyst for the band in his arrangement of his musical compositions that we recorded.

Classic albums from this heady period include E.S.P. (1965):

Sorcerer (1967):

Miles smiles (1967):

Nefertiti (1968) (Miles: “it was with this album that people really began to notice what a great composer Wayne Shorter was”):

and Miles in the sky (1968):

For all the variety of these albums, I find it remarkable how often Miles favoured the idiom of the busy earlier bebop style that he had sidelined with Kind of blue (1959).

Meanwhile Wayne was also making albums independently of Miles—such as Night dreamer (1964), with Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, and Elvin Jones (as playlist):

Speak no evil:

and Juju (as playlist):

* * *

Much as I admire the 1960s’ pop scene, it’s taken me a while (Hello?) to appreciate the extraordinary creativity in jazz that followed on the heels of the classic bebop era.

Moving on, Miles disbanded the quintet in 1969 after Wayne left, but they kept working together, with exploratory albums with Joe Zawinul such as the exquisite, contemplative In a silent way (1969)—with Chick Corea as well as Herbie and Joe on keys, and John McLaughlin on guitar:

They delighted further in new keyboard timbres with the extraordinary double album Bitches’ brew (1970):

Again, Miles’s account of this period (Chapter 14) is fascinating. I’m always impressed that early bebop found such an audience, but these later albums, even less grounded in the reassuring signposts of traditional melody and harmony, were joyfully received too—even amidst the wealth of more digestible popular songs that were thriving at the time, such as soul (here and here) and the British scene (of which the Beatles were just the apex), not to mention the niche WAM avant-garde like Boulez. 

* * *

I may be stuck in the 60s, but Miles, Wayne, and Herbie weren’t. Through the 1970s, they were avidly exploring the new sounds of funk, rock, and fusion. By now Wayne had largely switched from tenor to soprano sax; and like Herbie, he was absorbed in Nichiren Buddhism.

If you ask Wayne the time, he’ll start talking about the cosmos and how time is relative.

From 1971 until 1986 he was a core member of Weather report with Joe Zawinul, making albums such as I sing the body electric (1972) (these are all playlists):

Mysterious traveller (1974):

Heavy weather (1977):

Procession (1983):

Here they are with their final line-up, live in Cologne in 1983:

From the late 1970s Wayne was also part of VSOP, with Herbie, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams (from Miles’s 60s’ quintet), and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet:

Ever adaptable, Wayne also worked with Joni Mitchell (from 1977 to 2002), Carlos Santana, and Steely Dan. But he never neglected jazz; from 2000 he played in a quartet with Danilo Perez (piano), John Patitucci (bass), and Brian Blade (drums)—here they are live in Paris, 2012:

Now you can read my companion post on Herbie Hancock! And it’s always worth going back to What is serious music?!.

The politics of ethno-trad

Posted on by

Ruslana
Ruslana, 2004.

A recent Guardian article on the politics of Eurovision (based on this study) reported that

countries with high levels of support for populist, radical right parties voted more for songs from other countries that featured what the authors call “ethno-traditional” cues.

At first this may confuse the “Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati”, many of whom are doubtless devotees of “world music” in some form. But while traditional cultures, the world music scene, and Eurovision may not always be clearly distinguishable, they are not congruent; moreover, the agendas of ethnomusicologists may differ from those of performers and audiences in the societies concerned—among whom there’s a wide spectrum of tastes, amidst widely differing political contexts.

Bartok 1907Béla Bartók recording Slovak folk singers, 1907.

The music of “the folk” has long been regarded as a counterpart to elite culture. As Bruno Nettl observes (The study of ethnomusicology: thirty-three discussions, p.406, under “Diversity and difference”), academic research tends to champion diversity, speaking out for neglected minorities. But one finds an overlap between nationalism and liberation from empires on one hand, and regional pride or Kumbaya-esque world music fusion on the other, with the lines often blurred. Nettl (p.435, under “Trying to make peace”) also observes the role of music in national and ethnic conflicts for contexts such as sporting events, political rallies, and wars.

Michael Church’s Musics lost and found makes a convenient survey. In the early days of collection, folklore was often conscripted to nationalist goals, as in east Europe (see e.g Fiddles and racism). In Franco’s Spain (Musics lost and found, pp.124–5), the culture of sub-groups (Galician, Catalonian, Basque) was downplayed; while flamenco seems to have been largely exempt, in Portugal fado was linked to fascism.

MacColl
Source.

While the political allegiances of local communities may be hard to discern, in the USA and Britain the folk scene has long been associated with the left. In England, the “Christian socialist” Cecil Sharp was followed by a succession of left-leaning collectors and performers. But quite apart from the socialist heritage of British folk music, the Last Night of the Proms has become a focus of Brexit nostalgia. In the States, the Lomaxes were joined by singers like Woody Guthrie and Peggy Seeger; folk was the soundtrack for post-war protests. (In rock music, also commonly assumed to be anti-establishment, there’s a similar unease when ageing rock stars turn out reactionary—see e.g. here).

Modern nation-states have adopted a prescriptive, and proscriptive, stance towards their indigenous peoples. A classic case is the Chinese regime’s portrayals of its ethnic minorities, notably the Uyghurs (e.g. here) and Tibetans (e.g. Sister drum, and How *not* to describe 1950s’ Tibet). Within the socialist bloc around east Europe, whose heirs are perhaps the main breeding-ground for the ethno-trad movement, there was considerable resistance to state fakelore (tellingly evoked by Milan Kundera in The joke).

So besides the winning Eurovision entries of Ukraine, we can’t celebrate the Buranovo Babushki so innocently:

On one hand, the Eurovision voting blocs may regard each other as allies; on the other, beyond the media bubble, Brexiteers are not renowned for their enthusiasm for Balkan turbo-funk; and Greek-Turkish fusion is unlikely to feature on playlists of the far-right denizens of those countries. The Guardian article comments:

The populist radical right tends to be associated with very national narratives, a kind of inward-looking, nativist defence of domestic cultural traditions against the modernising, homogenising influence of globalisation.

This seems a worthy agenda—but Nettl’s comment that “ethnomusicology values a cultural mosaic, rather than forcing everyone into a melting pot” needs unpacking too. While regional diversity indeed tends to undermine narrow nationalist agendas, whatever one feels about the world-music fusion scene, it can lead to another kind of homogenizing grey-out (cf. the “Rough Guides phenomenon”, and Songlines).

However inconclusive, the Eurovision analysis makes a reminder that different performers and audiences will attribute different meanings to music (see e.g. Terylene).

Taraf

For more on Eurovision, click here and here. See also Critiques of artistic competition.

New Orleans brass bands

Posted on by

Eureke 1955
The Eureka band, 1955. Source. 

Having long rejoiced in the bands heard on the 2 glorious CDs Frozen brass ( Nepal, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Ghana, Surinam, Bolivia, Peru!), it’s high time for me to get a basic education on the brass bands of New Orleans. [1]

The early years
After the Civil War and Emancipation, black civilian bands began to emerge, their style inspired by both European-style military bands and the ring shout of African slaves at the Sunday gatherings in Congo square. Organised by labor unions, social aid and pleasure clubs (the Perseverance Benevolent and Mutual Aid Association was founded as early as 1783), they would perform on parades for feast days like Mardi Gras, and play hymns and dirges on funeral processions.

By the early 20th century, new instruments, sounds, and styles were transforming the musical landscape. Early groups included the Excelsior (1879–1931) and Camelia bands. Perhaps most celebrated is

  • the Eureka brass band (wiki; YouTube topic) (1920–75); here’s a brief clip from 1951:

Excerpts from 1952 to 1963:

Some more footage:

and Westlawn dirge, 1961:

Since the 1960s
By the early 1960s, despite concerns that the tradition was in decline, New Orleans brass bands enjoyed a renaissance, gaining wider celebrity through tourism, heritagification, and touring. As new generations were trained, the stylistic spectrum broadened. Among the more traditional groups:

and

  • the Original Liberty jazz band, founded by Michael White in 1981—here they are in a 2015 recording for Smithsonian Folkways:

  • The Olympia band, led by Harold Dejan and Milton Batiste, was a major training ground.  Here they are in 1982:

Soul Rebels
The Soul rebels. Source.

and by the early 80s, groups were incorporating hip-hop and funk into their repertoire, like the Rebirth band,

Moreover,

For more brass bands, besides Frozen brass, do explore the Balkan scene (under Musical cultures of east Europe), Brassed off, and even the bands accompanying saeta ritual songs in Andalucia; for China, e.g. the Shaanbei big band sound. See also, Trumpets, wind and brass bands, and A jazz medley.

[1] Besides studies like

  • William J. Schafer, Brass bands and New Orleans jazz (1977)
  • Richard Knowles, Fallen heroes: a history of New Orleans brass bands (1996), and
  • Mick Burns, Keeping the beat on the street: the New Orleans brass band renaissance (2006),

note e.g. the Hogan Archive, a CD series from Smithsonian Folkways (e.g. this), as well as articles here and here. This article leads to four videos (starting here) that make a succinct introduction, along with an outline of the style’s rhythmic foundations (NB this virtual exhibition, with great photos and audio reminiscences). 

Wiki articles include
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_funeral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_shout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_band#New_Orleans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_line_(parades)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardi_Gras_in_New_Orleans.
See also
https://beyondthedash.com/blog/cultural-spotlight/jazz-funerals-a-new-orleans-goodbye/7363.

Roundup for 2022!

Posted on by

Like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw, having gone to great lengths to mix up the daily sequence of my diverse topics in a stimulating fashion, it’s that time of year when I try and reassemble them into some kind of thematic order (cf. 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). In September I essayed a handy roundup of roundups, covering some of this ground; and in November I listed Some recent *MUST READ* posts. As ever, in the sidebar you can consult the tags and categories, and even the monthly archive (scrolling waaay down); the homepage still provides useful orientation.

Disturbingly, the items featured below are just a selection, but do click away on all the links…

Perhaps I can begin with a story that combines several of my interests:

While I can’t quite claim to have won the World Cup for Argentina,

and I’m exceptionally fond of

  • Ogonek and Til, for fans of tennis, fado, and Noh drama—wacky diacritics and nasal vowels, with matching anagram and limericks.

Meanwhile I seem to have recovered from being a Ticking Time-bomb:

* * *

China:

And it’s always worth reminding you of my film on the Li family Daoists, and this roundup of posts on them, as well as my work on Gaoluo village.

Tibet (updated roundup), including

I also update my collected posts on Uyghur culture, including

Turkey features prominently in my Roundup of posts on west-central Asia, as I try to educate myself (and even this is only a selection):

leading on to

and William Dalrymple:

Some posts on Ukraine (Applebaum, Snyder, Sands), also linking to

As to other world music,

An Irish music medley, including recent entries:

North Indian music (collected posts):

Jazz (roundup of another extensive series) (Turkish jazz listed above):

And then:

Western Art Music: among this year’s posts on Bach (updated roundup) are

Mahler: my whole series is now listed here, with recent additions

Also

Society, religion, ritual:

A mélange of other topics:

New entries in A Sporting medley include

Drôlerie:

Well, that’ll keep you busy—as a reward, in future perhaps I’ll try posting every three days, rather than every other day, and I might even reblog earlier posts a tad less avidly—not wishing to try your patience (“You must come over and try mine sometime”—Groucho).

Patricia Lockwood excels again

Posted on by

The LRB has enriched my life, but nothing in its pages is so invigorating as Patricia Lockwood’s articles (click here for her own literary ouevre and a selection of her reviews; see also here).

Much as I learn from the LRB, some of its reviewers tend to submerge the book supposedly being considered beneath their own superior expertise, reading like “it should have been ME who wrote about this topic”. Ms Lockwood’s style is highly personal, but she manages to keep the poetry of her own fantastical world in the service of deep insights into the milieu of her subject, while drawing us into the whole craft of fiction writing. In a recent review of two story collections by George Saunders her comments illuminate, rather than obscure, the author’s message.

She reflects on the sense of failure conveyed by Saunders’ characters:

It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point, the source of poignancy stopped being the characters, and started being the desire of the stories to rise above themselves. They wanted a little more than they had, than they could ever have. They could feel their strength, if they were just given a chance, they could be more than Daryls, Dereks, Kyles…

Commenting on his religious background, she stops herself:

Trying to trap me into writing a big Catholic thing, eh? Well, I won’t, except to say that we probably have a few of the same voices in our heads.

Saunders 3

Reading Lincoln in the Bardo, she observes:

Short fiction is a cruel form. It is life in miniature: not enough time. Some of its best practitioners have been cruel, or doctors in an age when we took legs off with hacksaws. It is hard to keep giving readers that edge they can brace against, catch their breath, say OK, all right, you know it and I know it. It is hard, after experiencing their love, to stop yourself from showing up to rescue your readers too soon.

On Saunders’ experience as a teacher:

If you’re a normal person, the first time you set foot in a classroom you will hear a voice that says: “It is wrong to take their money”. Other claims rise up to drown out this voice—what holier thing than the study of literature; talent cannot be taught, but the fundamentals can; they are paying for a circle of protected time—and all of them are true, but the voice is loud, louder than literature, and grows louder when you see a student so full of desire for her own life that she can barely breathe, and you taking money for it. What will she do? Is there a world for her? Are you part of the cheat, have you been promoted to middle management?

As to his insights on Russian fiction:

Why is Saunders so much more interesting about Turgenev’s “The singers” than about Gogol’s “The nose”, when Gogol would seem his more natural forebear? Most memorably, A swim in a pond in the rain has a great section on Tolstoy’s “Master and man”, the story he is always writing in one form or another: one man dies to save the other, in falling snow.

Finally,

There is something insoluble here. He is telling us that you cannot trust the Pulse—this is the fact that must be continually learned. Your feeling (you are, after all, doing this to feel the feeling) has nothing to do with whether it is good, just as your desire to be good cannot be worked out in fiction. But in those moments it does come to you what a guy is for, and you are covered in glory; it comes to you what it is to be a cloud of consciousness, with lives moving through you and that weird holy look on your face. The body lies far below you, in parts, the Worm Interlude—real site of your genius—passes into another phase, one you seem to remember from before you were born. “Where were you, before you came here?”

Heaven, Jeremy offers.

I want her to teach me everything. In exchange I can offer to share my experience of Daoist ritual in north Shanxi—but I’m not waiting for the phone to ring (that heavy black Bakelite contraption on the table in the hall).

Andrea Motis in London!!!

Posted on by

Motis gig

Andrea Motis is one of the most gifted young musicians nurtured under the aegis of Joan Chamorro’s Sant Andreu Jazz Band project in Barcelona (click here, and here). How very wonderful to hear her live last weekend, performing at the London Jazz Festival on vocals and trumpet at Pizza Express Holborn—an intimate venue conducive to attentive listening—in trio with the splendid Josep Traver on guitar (a Sant Andreu veteran) and the Sicilian bass-player Giuseppe Campisi.

Her alternation of vocals and trumpet recalls Chet Baker, but whereas Chet constantly reproduced a mood that he had discovered in his youth, Andrea is always developing—creating her own magic of the voice, ever deeper in her personal dream. With her growing superstar status, she’s not becoming a diva: her manner remains unassuming.

Here’s an upbeat number (the colour palette not doing justice to the Mediterranean warmth of her Almodóvar-esque dress!):

Between imaginative reworkings of standards like My favorite things and Someone to watch over me, a highlight of her Latin-tinged set was her entrancing transformation of Majorcan/Catalan band Antònia Font’s song Alegria, with its “gentle shower of stardust”—here she is performing it in 2020, with Josep Traver and Joan Chamorro:

Going back to her London debut in 2014 (also at Pizza Express), here’s her creative cover of Amy’s You know I’m no good:

More on Andrea’s website, and her YouTube topic! Note her recent quintet album Loopholes, borrowing from electric jazz, funk, and neo-soul—here’s Heat, live: *

Click here for her 2010 version of the gorgeous Dream a little dream of me, and here for her 2013 Summertime. See also under A jazz medley, including New British jazz and Two women vocalists, as well as a Turkish gig in the London Jazz Festival.

* BTL comment (HUH—Discuss):

If Andrea had stayed with her four-piece jazz backup band of Juan and Josep etc., and done original versions of jazz standards, she could have been the European version of Diana Krall and found huge success. With that small jazz band, she was getting hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of comments on YouTube. With her new band led by her husband and the experimental style, she is fading from view. I find this unfortunate.

Cf. the LA traffic cop’s unwitting put-down of Eric Leinsdorf…

Beethoven retorts:

Ich wäre nicht, wo ich heute bin, hätte ich nur gemütliche Lieder geschrieben!

Coltrane too could have stuck to playing cute little ballads…

Dream a little dream

Posted on by

Dream

Composing and performing songs is an art—not just in Western Art Music, but in folk and popular genres around the world (cf. What is serious music?!). The songs of the Beatles deserve to be treated with the same seriousness as those of Schubert (cf. Susan McClary); and apart from pop music generally, it’s worth admiring the craft of miniatures such as cartoons, TV theme-tunes, and jingles (for the merits of “analysis”, see the introduction to my Beatles series, citing Mellers and Pollack). 

The exquisite Dream a little dream of me was composed in 1931 by Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt, with lyrics by Gus Kahn. Unlike Beethoven, those guys really knew how to write a tune. A lullaby for parting lovers, it’s been revisited by many singers to different effects that reflect the changing zeitgeist.

Cass Elliott (1941–74, another sadly brief life) made the most celebrated recording with The Mamas & The Papas * in 1968—a time of revolutionary conflict when we have to remember that there was also a mood for such ballads. As she commented,

I tried to sing it like it was 1943 and somebody had just come in and said, “Here’s a new song”. I tried to sing it as if it were the first time.

And it’s magical:

Stars shining bright above you
Night breezes seem to whisper “I love you”
Birds singing in the sycamore tree
Dream a little dream of me

Say nighty-night and kiss me
Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me
While I’m alone and blue as can be
Dream a little dream of me

Stars fading but I linger on dear
Still craving your kiss
I’m longing to linger till dawn dear
Just saying this

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
But in your dreams whatever they be
Dream a little dream of me…

Mama Cass caresses the lyrics (“Birds singing in the sycamore tree”…) with dreamy syncopations and triplets, never metronomic. The harmonic progressions into and out of the “Stars fading” section are enchanting. Whether or not listeners are consciously aware of it, various types of modulation are effectively used in pop music. Step-wise shifts are most frequent; but here, after the opening two verses in the home key of C major (with our ears perhaps prepared by the surprising chord at “whisper” in line 2), the second section modulates fluently, exhilaratingly, to A major (from 0.54)—distantly reminiscent of Mahler’s sudden revelation of alpine pastures adorned with cowbells, or an incandescent Messaien meditation suffused with ondes martenot [Steady on—Ed.].

The “Stars fading” section is a gem in itself. After the chromaticism of the opening two verses, its rather brighter mood, over layers of honky-tonk piano and wordless chorus, far from sounding brash, only enhances the song’s overall intimacy. With more lazy triplets, I relish the descending minor 7th leap (from high so to low la) at “linger on dear” and “linger till dawn dear”, framing more sensuous lingering on the last word of “Still craving your kiss“… And then, to signal the return to the home key, the harmony shifts back with “Just saying this“—first (1.13) beneath a descending semitone in the vocal line, then the second time (2.18) with dreamy wide leaps.

It’s all complemented by the arrangement, with the first bass entry slipping in for verse 2 (Cass responding with a funky rhythmic emphasis on “kiss me”), the nostalgic-pastiche piano interlude and coda, as Mama Cass becomes subtly more jazzy and energised… Every detail is perfectly calibrated to the dream.

* *  *

Going back to quirky original versions from 1931 transports us to a different era of dance music—when the singer was subsidiary, providing an interlude between the main instrumental sections. Here’s Ozzie Nelson and his Orchestra:

And here’s Wayne King, introduced by some wacky chinoiserie at the very start (in homage to the organum of the sheng mouth-organ?!), with Ernie Burchill singing:

BTW, it’s fun to invert the chronology of these early recordings, imagining them as a post-modernist ironic take on Mama Cass’s song by the Michael Nyman band.

We can only hear early music with our modern ears; and how we respond to music over time depends substantially on the persona that we impute to the protagonists. Still in 1931, by contrast with those versions, Kate Smith (cf. By the Sleepy lagoon) performed the song with an impressive rhythmic freedom, and the band arrangement is also effective, already breaking out from the starched corset of the foxtrot:

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1950:

(Several YouTube uploads mistakenly attribute this to Billie Holiday, but alas she doesn’t seem to have recorded it—now that would have been amazing!)

Doris Day (1957) is even dreamier:

Now here’s a thing. For the “Stars fading” section, versions so far modulate upwards by a minor 6th—pleasantly novel, but not radiant like the major 6th modulation of The Mamas & The Papas (a stroke of genius that I surmise we can attribute to Papa John Phillips). And in earlier versions, for the first appearance of the line “Dream a little dream of me” the vocal line has risen brightly (mi–la–so); but as a later generation perhaps found this too soupy and saccharine, it was discarded, instead falling from a flat mi to re.

Just a few selections from numerous later covers. Anita Harris in 1968, almost contemporary with The Mamas & the Papas’ recording, sounds rather too four-square to my ears. Enzo Enzo recorded a French version, Les yeux ouverts, in 1990; Tony Bennett and k.d. lang sang it in duet in 2002; and the 2013 Robbie Williams cover (with Lily Allen) is in thrall to The Mamas & The Papas.

While there is much to savour in such renditions, the more I listen the more infatuated I am by the dreamy mood of Cass Elliott’s version, with her rhythmic variety, and all the subtle tweaks of the arrangement in timbre and harmony that make it so very enthralling.

And the song keeps inspiring younger musicians—such as Andrea Motis with the Joan Chamorro Quintet (see here, and here):

Other popular songs in similar vein that feature in my wide-ranging Playlist of songs include You’re my thrill, Moon river, I sing a little prayer, You must believe in spring, Comment te dire adieu—and a wealth of Beatles ballads. For dreams perhaps not envisaged by Gus Kahn, click e.g. here and here; see also Aboriginal dream songs. Cf. Bach as bandleader and arranger.

For Augusta!

* Pedants’ corner (cf. my notes to Morris dancing and Messiaen’s transcendent éclairs; see also Punctuation for truck drivers):
I don’t really Hold With the ampersand, which has a whiff of the corporate (the “vast emporium, one of these appalling achievements of our modern craving for the huge, the immense”, as Henry James characterised the Army and [sic] Navy Stores), but here, while curious, it’s correct… I also make a copious exception for G&T.

Cunk on Earth

Posted on by

Cunk 1

I’m delighted to find a new BBC TV series from Philomena Cunk (aka Diane Morgan), the “Landmark Documentary Presenter”, with her distinctive style of forensic investigation:

  • Cunk on Earth (available here for the next year).

Again, among targets that she sends up are the documentary format, her own persona, both elite and popular cultures, and indeed human history itself.

In the beginnings opens by exploring the achievements of early humans:

One thing they did invent was fire, which allowed them to see at night and kept them warm, tragically prolonging their already tedious lives.

Having conquered numbers, humankind moved on to something even more boring, by inventing writing.

The Ancient Greeks invented lots of things we still have today, like medicine and olives, and lots of things that have died out, like democracy and pillars.

And another invention:

Philosophy is basically thinking about thinking—which sounds like a waste of time, because it is.

On Pompeii,

Thanks to the volcano, we know everyday Romans had grey skin, were totally bald, and spent their time lying around inside their shockingly dusty houses. But it also preserved glimpses of how sophisticated Roman life was, with creature comforts like indoor plumbing and cunnilingus.

In Faith/off the intrepid Ms Cunk covers religion.

What’s ironic about Jesus Christ becoming a carpenter was that he was actually named after the two words that you’re most likely to shout after hitting your thumb with a hammer.

She perks up with an entirely gratuitous plug for an all-inclusive five-star resort near the temple of Kukulkan, “the last word in luxury”.

Islam represented a radical break from previous religions, because the buildings it happened inside were a slightly different shape.

And she asks

Why can’t the religions all learn to live together in peace, like they do in Ireland?

In The Renaissance will not be televised Ms Cunk sets the scene:

It’s the year 1440 (not now, but then, in 1440).

The historic present has always Got my Goat too.

Gutenberg’s press was the first of its kind in history—except Chinese history.

This is Florence—the Italians call it Firenze to try and stop tourists from finding it. […] Florence might look like a pointless mess today, but in the 15th century…

On the Mona Lisa:

Just looking at her prompts so many questions. Who is she? What’s she smiling about? Is she holding a balloon between her knees? And if so, what colour is it?

Cunk 2

Turning to the New World,

After arriving in America to forge a life of honest hard work and toil, many of these colonists quickly discovered they couldn’t be arsed, so they stole people from Africa and made them do it instead.

Eventually Washington won, becoming America’s first president, the single most revered role in the world until 2016.

Rise of the machines opens with a succinct recap:

Last time we saw how the Renaissance turned Europe from a load of mud and parsnips into a posh resort full of paintings…

Introducing Manifest Destiny, she helpfully explains:

Americans back then weren’t the humble unassuming people they still aren’t today.
[…]
The North asked the South what kind of America it wanted to live in—one where white people leeched off other races while treating them as inferior, or one where they pretended they didn’t.

Following the Civil War,

Now Lincoln was President, at long last slavery was abolished, and replaced with simple racial prejudice.

Turning to recording,

Thanks to Edison’s pornograph, classical music could now bore an audience of millions.

Cunk 3

She returns to the theme of femininism, on which she has already established her credentials;

Finally, with the vote, women could choose which man would tell them what to do.

Besides her collaboration with Charlie Brooker, in the final episode, War(s) of the World(s)?, “it’s easy to see why” she’s an admirer of the ouevre of Adam Curtis. Turning to Russia, Tsar Nicolas

was allowed to rule the country like a dictator, which I’ve been advised to say isn’t how Russia works today. […]

A world like this, where the masses toil for pennies while a tiny elite grow rich, seems so obviously unfair and unthinkable to us today. We can scarcely imagine what it must have been like.

Cunk 4

As to 1950s’ America,

Adverts were so influential that it made viewers at home want to be the sort of person who bought things too. They’d work hard to get money, to buy a car, so they could drive to the shops and buy more things, which they’d have to pay for by going back to work, which made them miserable, so they’d cheer themselves up by going out and buying more things, which they’d have to work to pay for.

On the birth of popular culture:

Unlike normal culture, which was paintings and Beethoven, this was stuff people actually enjoyed.

For decades, pioneering black artists had steadily built on each other’s work to develop an exciting new musical form for white people to pass off as their own.

Moving on to the technological revolution, the Apple Macintosh was

the world’s first inherently smug computer.

And

smartphones revolutionised the way people interact, by providing a socially acceptable way to ignore everyone around us.

But we’re not lonely—thanks to social media, it’s quicker and easier to bond with millions of others over something as simple as a cat photo or the ritual shaming of a stranger.

* * *

Cunk interview

Dr Shirley Thompson’s musicological expertise somewhat under-used
in fielding fatuous questions like
“Would it be fair to say the Rolling Stones were the Beatles of their day?”.

To help her unlock the mysteries of human civilisation Ms Cunk consults a range of academics, asking penetrating questions like “Why are pyramids that shape—is it to stop homeless people sleeping on them?”, “Has a mummy ever ridden a bicycle?”, and “Is there a Great Roof of China?”. Scholars such as Jim Al-Khalili, Douglas Hedley, and Ashley Jackson manage to keep a straight face, even as she disputes their so-called expert views with stories about “my mate Paul”, recommending them helpful YouTube videos wat ‘e sent ‘er. The Cunk interview is fast becoming the hallmark of the public intellectual; and I now feel that it should be a compulsory ordeal, a rite of passage for any aspiring lecturer. As Rebecca Nicholson’s review observes:

You could spend a lot of time wondering whether the interviewees are in on the joke or not; if they are in on it completely, it ruins the gag, which surely works best if they think Cunk is deadly serious. The same is true for viewers, in a way. If you look closely enough, you can see that there’s a formula: compare old thing to new thing, ask anachronistic question, wait for baffled response. In both cases, though, I don’t think it matters. None of the academics seem to think they are being mocked, nor are they trying to be funny; likewise, it’s so hilarious and well-written that if you can occasionally see the bare bones poking out, it isn’t much of an issue.

The interview in Cunk on Shakespeare, where she quizzes Ben Crystal on a list of words that Shakespeare, er, might or might not have made up, remains a great favourite of mine:

cuckoo?
ukulele?
omnishambles?
mixtape?
sushi?
titwank?

This series has a new, mystifying musical leitmotif, introduced by fine links such as

Descartes inspired an intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, during which metrosexual elitists published essays that expanded humankind’s horizons in a manner that will go unmatched until the 1989 release of Belgian techno anthem Pump up the jam… [cue music].

Philomena Cunk attains a level of vacuity with which no-one outside the current government could compete. Too bad she’s over-qualified to serve as the next Prime Minister.

Memphis 68

Posted on by

Memphis cover

The meshing of social history and musical detail is a cornerstone of ethnomusicology (see Society and Soundscape, and cf. What is serious music?!). To follow my paeans to Stuart Cosgrove’s Detroit 67 and Young soul rebels, every bit as enthralling is his

  • Memphis 68: the tragedy of southern soul (2018),

by turns passionate and dispassionate. Working month by month through 1968, the short chapters, with their snappy titles, unveil a wealth of insightful vignettes, showing a real feel for the streets and for the dazzling cast of troubled musicians in search of stardom, social justice, or just struggling to survive. Cosgrove’s vivid descriptions make one reach for YouTube—so below I complement my introduction with some of the many tracks he evokes so well.

The story hinges on Stax Records, the civil rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4th April 1968, and increasingly violent protests. Vietnam, and the obdurate Memphis city mayor Henry Loeb, also loom large. Stax has already been the subject of several studies, such as Rob Bowman, Soulsville U.S.A. (1997) and Robert Gordon, Respect yourself (2013), as well as several documentaries.

Cosgrove’s opening chapter, “Roosevelt Jamison’s blood bank”, segues seamlessly from the segregationist rules for blood donation to Jamison’s thriving sideline nurturing soul bands.

  • James Carr, The dark end of the street (1967):

In Hank Cherry’s words, Carr “dove into his own embattled soul and pulled from the painful reaches of his psyche”. Another star discovered by Jamison was O.V. Wright, who had a series of hits, including

  • A nickel and a nail (1971):

The brilliant Otis Redding was only 26 when he was killed in a plane crash late in 1967, along with the Bar-Kays. Sittin’ on the dock of the bay was posthumously released on 8th January 1968:

Unlike the more controlled Motown system, or, more famously, the Hollywood studio system, Stax was informal, haphazard, and collegiate.

The company, “an oasis of racial sanity”, smashed through segregationist rules. Its (white) owners were Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton; the school system produced a wealth of black talent. The Bar-Kays were educated at the Booker T. Washington High School in South Memphis, still almost entirely black, “informal academy of southern soul”. Stax prodigies Booker T. Jones (no relation!) and the M.G.’s had a hit with the instrumental Green onions as early as 1962:

Another senior mentor was sax player, bandleader, and studio boss Willie Mitchell. At first Stax had a mutually beneficial relationship with Atlantic Records in New York and its “emperor” Jerry Wexler. Among the performers Atlantic sent to Memphis were Wilson Pickett and Don Covay, as well as Sam and Dave—all of whom were volatile and hard to work with.

  • Mustang Sally (1965):

  • Hold on, I’m coming (1966):

But then came the break with Atlantic, as they came under the wing of Warner Brothers—which soon ensnared Stax in knotty legal disputes with a soulless conglomerate.

As young black musicians returned from Vietnam—such as John Gary Williams, a member of the Mad Lads—a group of activists called the Memphis Invaders led student unrest, closely watched by the FBI.

  • James Brown, Say it loud I’m black and proud:

A lengthy garbage workers’ strike—publicised by WDIA, the voice of black Memphis, and supported by charismatic ministers—came to the attention of Martin Luther King. He arrived in Memphis on 28th March as another violent protest march was under way. In successive chapters Cosgrove tells the story of the murky chain of events surrounding King’s assassination on 4th April.

MLKDr King’s supporters point in the direction of the shooting.

King had checked into the Lorraine Motel, where Stax regularly put up visiting black singers. Sax player Ben Branch was due to give a fundraising concert that night, and just before the shooting King addressed his last words to him from the balcony:

“I want you to play Take my hand Precious Lord, Ben—play it real pretty, sweeter than you’ve ever played it before.”

The inner cities now erupted.

King was among those religious men torn by a “civil war inside”, captivated by sex and love, revealed in the tension between sacred and profane, gospel and blues. Bettye Crutcher was a gifted composer of candid songs about betrayal and infidelity, including

  • Johnnie Taylor, Who’s making love:

Stax, hitherto a model of racial harmony, was polarised by King’s death, with black activists increasingly concerned to claim equal rights.

Like Miles Davis, Booker T. Jones had chosen popular music over the orchestral world. He made his name on the Hammond B-3 organ, taking it beyond gospel towards rock and soul. Ironically, while working on the soundtrack for Jules Dassin’s political movie Uptight (watch here), he escaped the turmoil of Memphis to fly to Paris for a round of post-production, only to witness the May riots there.

Cosgrove gives an aside on “black bohemian” Melvin Peebles and his Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss song, whose soundtrack was also taken up by Stax. Isaac Hayes, who had assumed the persona of Black Moses after his album Hot buttered soul, went on to win an Oscar for Shaft (playlist here), his extravagant stardom playing a major role in Stax’s later travails.

More socially engaged than the “bubblegum soul” of Motown, Stax was rebuilt by Al Bell after the fall-out with Atlantic, aiming at the new market for albums. Another hit single of this period was

  • William Bell and Judy Clay, Private number:

The 1972 Wattstax festival, “the Black Woodstock”, with Isaac Hayes heading the bill, was immortalised in a film—here’s a trailer:

Young mother Juanita Miller led a Poor People’s March by mule train on Washington DC, which turned out less to be far less successful than Martin Luther King’s vision, ending in disarray.

  • The Staple Singers, Long Walk to DC:

As black power became more militant, Cosgrove introduces Dino Woodard, a “devout brute” who served as security guard and enforcer for Stax. With his fellow hardman Johnny Baylor he propelled Luther Ingram to stardom:

  • (If loving you is wrong) I don’t want to be right (1972):

After Vietnam and some time in prison, John Gary Williams went on to reflect the changing times with The whole damn world is going crazy (1973):

Olympics 68

The Black Power movement spread to the 1968 Olympics. Athlete Bill Hurd, from Memphis, narrowly missed selection. He was also a sax player brought up in the jazz and the marching band tradition of Manassas High School, where he was trained by Emerson Able—as was jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr, “the greatest soul musician that never was”. Newborn also passed through the Plantation Inn, another cradle for soul, whose house band were Ben Branch and the Largos. * Meanwhile Bill Hurd retired from athletics and became a successful opthalmologist, travelling internationally; later he reconnected with his fellow students at Manassas High to record soul albums.

Also visiting Memphis in 1968 was Mahalia Jackson, who remained faithful to her gospel roots at a time when many singers were crossing over to pop and soul. Of course, like the church, the gospel scene was far from pure, with “religious parasites, false preachers, and furious commercialism”. The battle between sacred and profane was again in evidence. Jackson’s Glori-fied Chicken franchise, part of the move towards black-owned businesses, had a branch at Stax corner. Here she is singing Take my hand precious Lord at King’s Atlanta memorial service:

This leads Cosgrove to feature the songs of Ann Peebles, such as I can’t stand the rain:

and Margie Joseph, whose reworking of Stop! In the name of love, with its introductory rap, was influential:

By December, Memphis “had been battered by a divisive rage that few cities in the world could survive, yet it not only survived, it thrived and expanded”.

Meanwhile, FWIW, white stars were making the pilgrimage too. Dusty Springfield (white only reluctantly) came to record an album—although she ended up recording the vocals in New York. Elvis showed up, recording a comeback TV show with a strong Memphis element. Janis Joplin, who also idolised the Memphis sound, did a misconceived gig there with the local regulars. She turned up for Jim Stewart’s Christmas party, “one of the most bizarre events in the history of soul music”. The following November, strung out on heroin, she joined the tragic 27 Club. (The lure of Memphis has persisted—among later pilgrims, on a quest for blues rather than soul, was alternative Chinese singer/novelist Liu Sola).

The Bar-Kays re-formed, reinventing themselves as pioneers of street funk. On stage with Isaac Hayes at the Tiki Club they broke new ground in an innovative cover of By the time I get to Phoenix, with a rap intro—“a mesmerising piece of soul alchemy that took classic Nashville and reimagined it as Memphis soul”. Here they are in the version on the visionary Hot buttered soul album, all 19 minutes of it:

With the obvious exception of jazz, most forms of popular black music had been constrained by the needs of commercialism and the demands of radio stations. Motown had perfected telling stories of teenage love in under three minutes, and not until Hayes broke the mould had any soul artist ever dared to extend songs or disrupt the rules of the marketplace.

In an Epilogue Cosgrove ponders reasons for the “banal and ignominious” demise of Stax records in the 70s: expanding too far from the centre (“like many a dying empire”), bruised by rash financial dealings, and over-indulgence.

Amongst all the creativity of the 60s (Coltrane, Hendrix, Beatles …), the story of Stax Records, beset by social trauma, is remarkable.

* Like Charlie Parker, Newborn spent periods in Camarillo State Mental Hospital—cf. Bellevue in New York, among whose inmates were artists such as Leadbelly, Mingus, and Dusty.

The Queen Mother of the West in Taiwan

Posted on by

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this week for an audience with President Tsai Ing-wen was both bold and costly. As she tweeted,

America’s solidarity with the 23 million people of Taiwan is more important today than ever, as the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy.

But at such a highly sensitive moment in world affairs, her trip has inflamed relations with the PRC, prompting much ominous sabre-rattling from them; and according to many China-watchers, and indeed the US government, it was ill-advised. So far not only has the PRC regime escalated the war of words, but it is retaliating seriously by launching live-fire military drills.

Pelosi’s visit was illustrated by this striking image that has been making the rounds on social media:

Pelosi

The transliteration Nanxi Peiluoxi 南西 佩洛西 is felicitous (cf. Shuaike 帥克 for Švejk). Her Italian parents migrated west (xi 西), and her mother came from the south (nan 南); more to the point, in the image above the final xi character has been elided into the popular deity Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu 西王母). * It illustrates the, um, nexus between sacred and secular power that one finds so often in Chinese religion, both before and since the 1949 “Liberation” (such as the ritual associations of Hebei; see e.g. my Plucking the winds). And on opulent processions in both Taiwan and Fujian across the strait, such god images are borne aloft on palanquins to re-assert territorial boundaries.

Mazu
Mazu. Source.

Still, by contrast with Pelosi’s excursion, pilgrimages for the seafarers’ goddess Mazu 媽祖 have been a major factor since the 1980s in the political, economic, and cultural rapprochement of people on both sides of the strait (see e.g. here).

President Tsai also awarded Pelosi the civilian Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon (Qingyun xunzhang 卿雲勳章)—another ritual title (cf. deities such as Houtu, enfeoffed as Chengtian xiaofa Houtu huangdi 承天效法后土皇帝). Perhaps Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi’s Italian-American background further enhances the ritual connection, recalling the Madonna pilgrimage (another niangniang female deity) of Italian Harlem.

And as to Pelosi and Catholicism, click here for a discussion of an extraordinary image from the Chinese embassy in France, depicting the Virgin Mary (Pelosi) as a baby-stealing witch. 

For Pelosi’s “long history of opposing Beijing”, including her 1991 visit to Tiananmen to commemorate the victims of the 1989 demonstrations, click here.

Pelosi Tiananmen

Meanwhile, as rabid nationalist Hu Xijin of the Chinese Global Times denounced Pelosi’s visit, Chinese netizens have fabricated an unlikely fantasy love affair between them:

Pelosi Hu

Just as unlikely, “back in the USA”, for once, Fox News and Mitch McConnell—normally Pelosi’s harshest critics—are full of praise for her initiative.

* * *

Around the time of Obama’s visit to China in 2009, “Obamao” T-shirts (“serve the people”) were sold in Beijing before being banned:

ObamaoSource.

While the T-shirts made a popular kitsch image in Beijing, adroitly combining enthusiasm for a foreign icon with misplaced nostalgia for Mao, in the USA they were soon in demand among Obama’s opponents, who fatuously compared his health-care reform with the Holocaust.

The world is a complicated place (You Heard It Here First).

I suppose most people read it simply as “Nanxi Peiluoxi wangmu niangniang” rather than “Nanxi Peiluo Xiwangmu niangniang”, but it’s a nice ambiguity—cf. the classic story of the hilarious misconstruing of a report on Prince Sihanouk’s visit to China!

The genius of Jimi Hendrix

Posted on by

Hendrix 1

In the late 60s, fatefully indoctrinated in the classics, my awareness of pop was largely limited to The Beatles, and it took my ears a long time to open up to the gutsy, intense physicality of unmediated rock and blues. Still, even I couldn’t help noticing the genius of Jimi Hendrix (YouTube channel; wiki), a shooting star who exploded onto the scene, as if the 60s weren’t already wild enough.

Born in Seattle in 1942, following a stint of army service he moved to Nashville, touring in backing bands. After a brief stay in Greenwich Village, in September 1966 he moved to London, “like a Martian landing”. Lured there by Chas Chandler, himself just starting out as a manager, for Jimi it was a leap in the dark; but when after just a week he got to jam with Cream, Eric Clapton was amazed by his playing of Howling Wolf’s Killing floor.

He soon formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience band, with the dynamic energy of Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass. In London he experienced less racism than in the States, and brought an Afro-American tinge to what was still a largely Caucasian pop scene, a “black hippie”. When he returned to the States in 1967 for the Monterey festival, he was still largely unknown there.

A deeply serious musician, he synthesised blues (already unfashionable among the new generation of African Americans), soul, folk, R&B, jazz, and psychedelic rock. He was at the heart of the whole countercultural zeitgeist; even his exotic sense of fashion was iconic. His vocals (“warm, wistful or lascivious on cue”) make a counterpoint to his astounding guitar playing. Like Coltrane, he was gentle and softly spoken.

Jimi cover

His three studio albums are

The wiki article has a section on Jimi’s innovative use of equipment: guitars (notably the Fender Stratocaster, restrung for a left-hander), amps, wah-wah pedal and Uni-vibe (cf. Bach’s inspiration from new technology).

Jimi 2

Jimi’s appearance at the 1967 Monterey festival must have been one of the great gigs of all time. The band opened with yet another stunning rendition of Killing floor, immortalised here; in Hey Joe Jimi plays guitar with his teeth, and behind his back (like the pipa players of the Tang dynasty…):

Yet Jimi never indulged in empty virtuosity; such iconic scenes are integral, sincere. He ended the set with Wild thing, setting fire to his guitar and smashing it (“I decided to destroy my guitar at the end of a song as a sacrifice. You sacrifice things you love. I love my guitar”):

For the Woodstock festival in 1969 Jimi had a new lineup. I must confess it took me some time to tune into his legendary reworking of The star-spangled banner (for some other versions, click here). I’m used to jazzers transforming standards with complex melodic and harmonic changes, and our ears are tuned to the dense, manic textures of rock; so, misled by Jimi’s sparse monodic rendition (Like, Hello?), it took me a while to hear that the meaning resided in the timbre—“an act of protest”, as Paul Grimstad observed, in which

bombs, airplane engines, explosions, human cries, all seem to swirl around in the feedback and distortion. At one point, Hendrix toggles between two notes a semitone apart while burying the guitar’s tremolo bar, turning his Fender Strat into a doppler warp of passing sirens, or perhaps the revolving blades of a helicopter propeller. […]

All the exalted ideals of the American experiment, and the bitterness of its contradictions and hypocrisies, are placed in volatile admixture through an utterly American contraption, a device you might say is the result of a collaboration between Benjamin Franklin, Leo Fender, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the mongrel machine that Hendrix made into a medium for a new kind of virtuosity. In the Woodstock performance of the national anthem, we find that an electric guitar can be made to convey the feeling that the country’s history could be melted down, remolded, and given a new shape.

Typically, Jimi deflated all the hype:

All I did was play it. I’m American, so I played it… It’s not unorthodox … I thought it was beautiful.

Yeah right.

Amidst legal disputes, Jimi parted with Chas Chandler, continuing to explore; his new band Band of Gypsys was an all-black power trio with his old friend Billie Cox on bass and Buddy Miles on drums. Despite mixed reviews, their live album at the Fillmore East includes stunning solos from Jimi like Machine gun:

and Who knows:

* * *

Following Joe Boyd’s celebrated 1973 film, a BBC documentary has some good interviews, despite the baffling lack of music in this YouTube version! For some good technical discussion, click here.

There’s something cute about Hendrix being a neighbour of Handel in Brook street, albeit not at the same time. Both were migrants catering to a changing modern market, both experimenting in different styles—but while some of Handel‘s arias are admirable, he can hardly compete with Hendrix’s genius… *

By 1970 Hendrix was dead, yet another member of the fateful 27 club: Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin (all between 1969 and 1971), and later Kurt Cobain (1994) and Amy Winehouse (2011)… (cf. my list at the end of The spiritual path of John Coltrane).

* That’s how I originally wrote that last sentence—in the interests of brevity, not wanting to try the patience of Hendrix junkies. In view of Eric’s entertaining comment below, I might now augment it, perhaps like this:

While some of Handel’s music is admirable (see my tribute to some gorgeous arias), over his long career the ratio of drudge to ecstasy is rather high (and “I’ll have you know, I’ve played more Messiahs than you’ve had hot dinners”!). Handel found himself, as you do (or at least, as baroque composers did), dutifully churning out a lot of mundane fugues by the square yard. I’m not knocking the routine, bread-and-butter craft of artisans, but this is far from the evanescent genius of Jimi—and, I’d say, in a more sensible comparison, far from the constant spiritual inspiration of Bach. OK, for a more refined assessment of “the class of ’85”, see John Eliot Gardiner, Music from the castle of heaven, ch. 4 (cf. A Bach retrospective, Rameau, 1707 at the Proms, and many posts under https://stephenjones.blog/category/wam/early-music/).

Li Shiyu on folk religion in Philadelphia

Posted on by

來而不往非禮也

LSY cover

We impertinent laowai are used to descending on a Chinese community to interpret its customs, but it’s less common to find Chinese ethnographies of religious life in Western societies.

Li Shiyu 李世瑜 (1922–2010) was a leading authority on Chinese sectarian religion and its “precious scrolls” (baojuan 寶卷). Alongside his historical research, he was concerned to document religious life in current society—although it was hard to broach the latter in China after the 1949 revolution. In his work on the precious scrolls, I have also been impressed by his attention to performance practice (see under The Houtu scroll). When I met him in the early 1990s he was still going strong, and still doing fieldwork.

Li Shiyu 1993
Li Shiyu with his wife, 1993. My photo.

Grootaers heying

Li Shiyu undertook his early field training in rural north China in 1947–48, on the eve of the Communist revolution, assisting his teacher, the Belgian Catholic missionary Willem Grootaers, in documenting village temples around the regions of Wanquan, Xuanhua, and Datong. [1] Whereas Grootaers was mainly concerned with listing the material evidence of “cultic units”, Li went further in describing sectarian activity. His resulting thesis Xianzai Huabei mimi zongjiao 现在华北秘密宗教 [Secret religions in China today], was published promptly in 1948, focusing on four sects including the Way of Yellow Heaven (also active in north Shanxi in counties such as Yanggao and Tianzhen, and later documented by scholars such as Cao Xinyu and Liang Jingzhi).

After the 1949 “Liberation” Li’s research was highly circumscribed (like that of countless other scholars such as Wang Shixiang), though he managed to continue his study of the precious scrolls, publishing a major catalogue in 1961. It was only after the liberalisations of the late 1970s following the collapse of the commune system that was he able to resume his work in earnest.

And in that early reform era, from 1984 to 1986 he also spent eighteen months as a Luce Scholar at Pennsylvania University. Hannibal Taubes (always ready to supply a stimulating lead: e.g. here, and here) alerts me to a chapter in Li Shiyu’s memoirs (Li Shiyu huiyilu 李世瑜回憶錄 [2011], pp.296–311) in which he attempted to apply the kind of field methods that he had acquired under Grootaers (described in pp.267–70) to the “folk religions” of the USA, with vignettes of the diverse Christian life of urban Philadelphia.

LSY opening

In his last six months there Li Shiyu made an ethnographic survey of church activity in the university district—an area of twenty streets and some 8,000 inhabitants. The 160 churches there might be large or small, with some shared by more than one denomination; seventeen were established Catholic and Protestant churches, while the others belonged to over seventy different groups that had mostly been formed since World War Two, some of them just small “house churches”.

LSY and deputy mayorWith the Mayor of Philadelphia.

My eyebrows were raised to read of Li Shiyu’s first port of call: in search of statistics, he began by consulting the very people he would never dream of going anywhere near in China—the Police Chiefs 公安局局长 (!) of the district and city. In China, local police archives (see Liu Shigu’s chapter for Fieldwork in modern Chinese history) would make most instructive sources on religious activity for the whole era of Maoist campaigns, but attempting access would be rash. Indeed, to Li Shiyu’s lasting anguish, his 1948 thesis had been used by the Public Security Bureau to suppress the very sectarian groups he had respectfully documented.

Anyway, when the Philadelphia police chiefs were unable to help, the City Council introduced him to the Mayor, who asked, “Why do you wanna know? You been sent by your government? Are you gonna give your report to them when you go back?”. [2] Li Shiyu replied that he was just doing academic research, nothing to do with the government—just as we might have to explain in China (cf. Nigel Barley in Cameroon, cited at the end of my post on The brief of ethnography).

In answer to Li Shiyu’s query whether churches needed to register when they opened, the Mayor explained how “freedom of religious belief” worked in the States; all people had to do was to find a property, ideally one bequeathed in someone’s will, tax-free and rent-free. He went on, “Some pastors are pitiable—unable to find a site, they have to rent one temporarily, paid by donations from the congregation or from their subsidiary occupation. Spreading the teachings is a good thing, it’s good for society, there’s no need to register with the police—so I dunno how many churches there are in Philly.”

Next Li Shiyu visited the Westminster Theological Seminary. But as one has to do in China, he soon gave up on officialdom, “going down” to the churches themselves, one by one. As he notes, in an unstable, even dangerous, American society, parents sought to prevent their children getting into trouble by introducing them to the spiritual power of the church (rather like the elders of Hebei ritual associations, as recalled by many villagers such as Cai An). Li absorbed himself in the intensity of sermons and choirs, getting to know congregation members. But rather than observing the mainstream churches, his experience in China doubtless prompted him to seek out some of the more less orthodox, charismatic groups—some of which forbade marriage or the owning of property.

To imbue us with the holy spirit, here’s a musical interlude from 1976 (which will get you in the mood for Aretha’s ecstatic Amazing Grace):

Li Shiyu’s survey makes fascinating reading in Chinese, bearing in mind his particular concerns, suggesting parallels with religious life in China. A case in point is the first, and most remarkable, of his nineteen vignettes, “The Holy Mother descends from the mountain” (Shengmu xiashan 圣母下山).

I doubt if Li Shiyu quite knew what he was getting into [3] when he stayed for ten days in a hostel on 36th Street, whose basement was the meeting place of the International Peace Mission. The mission was founded by the controversial African-American preacher Father Divine—here’s a short documentary:

After his death in 1965 the organisation was led by his white wife Edna Rose Ritchings, known as “Sweet Angel”, “Mother Divine”.

Mother DivineMother Divine signs her book for Li Shiyu.

In March 1986 Li Shiyu witnessed Mother Divine’s annual “descent from the mountain” (the “mountain” of her estate at Woodmont in the suburbs), and even made a speech as guest of honour at the banquet. But he can’t have been privy to Father Divine’s turbulent story or the Peace Mission’s intrigues. From 1971 Mother Divine was engaged in a dispute with cult leader Jim Jones, until he fled to Guyana in 1978 and instigated his followers to commit a horrific mass suicide there (subject of several documentaries, e.g. here)—alas, just the kind of cult that the Chinese state seizes on as a pretext to suppress peaceful gatherings of believers.

Li Shiyu goes on to introduce the Miracle Temple of Christ; he takes part in a “qigong” healing session, and a service involving “wild kissing”; he is struck by the silence of prayer at a Quaker (Kuike! 魁克) meeting (evidently “unprogrammed worship“), discovers Sister Tina’s lucrative psychic fortune-telling business, and observes a rather stressful immersive baptism. In an experiment that only the most intrepid fieldworker will care to contemplate, he confuses a couple of what sounds like Jehovah’s Witnesses by showing a genuine interest in their teachings, asking them etic questions like why there were so many denominations in Philadelphia, and their economic circumstances. And he describes the only occasion in visiting over a hundred churches when he was met by a hostile reception.

While Li Shiyu was in the States, Robert Orsi’s study of the Madonna cult in New York’s Italian Harlem was published, a book that would have impressed him.

* * *

Of course, Chinese scholars have long sought to understand “Western culture”; one might even see it as the mainstream of Chinese intellectual life since at least the May Fourth era (for science, philosophy, fiction, music, and so on)—I think, for example, of Fou Ts’ong’s father Fu Lei. Though Western culture didn’t reside solely in advanced technology or reified masterpieces of high art, it was rare for Chinese scholars to have the curiosity (or means) to contemplate the ethnography of living Western societies.

Even making the transition from rural to urban ethnography is rather rare, let alone shifting one’s sights from rural China to urban America. Just as Western fieldworkers in China build on a considerable body of research by local scholars, within the USA such charismatic traditions attract much study. And like Western scholars making an initial survey in China, during Li Shiyu’s time in Philadelphia he could hardly engage with the complexities involved in documenting religious life, or address issues such as race, gender, poverty, migration, and social change.

Still, he clearly found the encounter most fruitful and suggestive. For Chinese readers, potentially, such studies might suggest that “superstitious” practices were not unique to a “backward” China, that they have their own social logic. Li Shiyu’s non-judgmental, etic viewpoint is refreshing.

Though he gives Christian Science an easy ride, when interviewed by a representative he encapsulates a significant issue: asked, “Why do you want to come to the States to study our folk religion?”, Li Shiyu replies feistily, “That’s a question I’d ask your scholars—why do you come to China to study our folk religion?!”, citing the Chinese proverb Lai er bu wang fei li ye 來而不往非禮也 “Not to reciprocate is against etiquette”. Click here for the more elaborate interview in The Christian Science Monitor. 

Despite his somewhat testy initial encounter with the Mayor, Li Shiyu clearly relished the ease of doing fieldwork in the States, without the fear of consequences that bedevilled research under Maoism in China. His sojourn in Philly must have made a welcome relief before he plunged back into the fray of fieldwork in China, as academic pursuits there became more free—if never free enough.

[1] See the detailed critique on the site of Hannibal Taubes, in four parts starting here; for bibliography, see n.1 in my article on The cult of Elder Hu.

[2] The Mayor was apparently Wilson Goode—who might well have been feeling sensitive since he was under the shadow of an investigation into the police’s botched attempt the previous year to clear the building occupied by the radical anarcho-primitivist cult MOVE, when a police helicopter had dropped a bomb that led to a fire destroying four city blocks, killing eleven (including five children) and leaving 240 people homeless (documentary here). Goode himself later went on to become a minister of religion.

[3] Rather as I had no idea in 1989 when I first witnessed the New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo that the village had been the scene of a major massacre in the 1900 Boxer uprising, and that the Catholics there had later been evangelised by Bishop Martina, who was accused of plotting to blow up the Communist leadership at the 1949 victory celebrations in Tiananmen: click here.

Another unlikely invention

Posted on by

tobacco

Sir Walter Raleigh smoking a pipe and being doused by a servant who thinks he’s on fire.
Wood-engraving, mid-19th century. Source.

Talking of inventions (the sandwich, the telephone), one of Bob Newhart‘s classic sketches features Sir Walter Raleigh on the phone to the head of the West Indies Company in London, trying to plug yet another of his wacky ideas:

This post on the introduction of tobacco to England has some charming vignettes, such as

The Great Plague of 1665 saw tobacco smoke widely advocated as a defence against “bad air”. Indeed at the height of the plague, smoking a pipe at breakfast was actually made compulsory for the schoolboys at Eton College in London.

See also under You say tomato.

The Tulsa race massacre

Posted on by

panoramaPanorama of the damage soon after the massacre.

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement.

—Carol Anderson

The Tulsa race massacre remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the modern history of the USA, one of its deadliest terrorist attacks. [1]

It took place on 31st May and 1st June 1921 in the Greenwood District (“Black Wall Street”) of Tulsa, Oklahoma—then one of the wealthiest Black communities in the USA. Following the arrest of a young Black shoeshiner, Black citizens gathered to prevent him being lynched. As martial law was declared, mobs of white residents—some of whom had been deputised and given weapons by city officials—attacked Black residents and destroyed homes, businesses, churches, and schools, including aerial bombardments by incendiary devices.

Tulsa 1

More than 800 people were admitted to hospital, and as many as 6,000 Black residents of Tulsa were interned, many of them for several days. At least 39 people were killed, with some estimates as high as 300. Around 10,000 Black people were left homeless; over a thousand homes were destroyed.

Tulsa 2

In the years to come, as Black Tulsans worked to rebuild their ruined homes and businesses, segregation in the city only increased, and Oklahoma’s newly established branch of the KKK grew in strength.

Black and white residents kept silent about the massacre for decades; it was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories. There were no public ceremonies or commemorations; instead, the events were deliberately covered up.

The silence began to be broken from the 1970s. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, founded in 1996, delivered its report in 2001 (the name was changed to the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission in 2018). Only since 2002 have schools in Oklahoma been required to teach students about the massacre, and in 2020 it officially became a part of the school curriculum there.

Several documentaries are available, such as from OETA, CBS and Vox.

[1] Some sources:
https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/
https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/31/tulsa-race-massacre-at-100-act-of-terrorism
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/01/tulsa-race-massacre-a-century-later
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/may/28/tulsa-race-massacre-documentary-the-fire-and-the-forgotten
See also Scott Ellsworth’s book The ground breaking (LRB review);
and for the context of racial terrorism in the States from 1917 to 1921, click here.

Ukraine: Gogol Bordello

Posted on by

Hutz

Now is a suitable time to listen to Gogol Bordello, a Manhattan-based “gypsy punk” band (website; wiki). Their lead singer Eugene Hütz was brought up in Kyiv, making his way to the USA in 1990 at the age of 17. Now he is active in raising funds to relieve the plight of Ukrainians suffering from the Russian invasion (cf. Jamala and other artists).

Formed in 1999, inspired by Roma music with elements of punk and dub, Gogol Bordello was originally titled “Hütz and the Béla Bartóks”, but he recalls that they decided to change the name because “nobody knows who the hell Béla Bartók is in the United States” (cf. the missed opportunity for an early punk band Gurdjieff and the Truth Seekers). In the revised title, the name Gogol pays homage to the way the author “smuggled” Ukrainian culture into Russian society, rather as the band was doing with east European music in the USA.

Hütz and the band have appeared in several films, including Everything is illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2005), a drama about the Nazi purges in Ukraine. Here’s a trailer for the documentary Gogol Bordello non-stop (Margarita Himeno, 2008):

Here’s American wedding (2007):

And Pala Tute, opening track of their 2010 album Trans-continental hustle—here live in Paris (with funky fiddling from Sergey Ryabtsev):

The band has long been subsumed under the alternative Manhattan world music scene—and it’s “not that Hütz himself originally set out to educate the world about eastern Europe”:

Believe me, that’s not really my thing. And, truth be told, Ukrainians are pretty humble. Which is probably why things were easily hijacked from them for so long. We’re like, well, we’re rich in culture, so it ain’t gonna hurt us.

But the Russian invasion has given Hütz an urgent new mission as cultural ambassador. His benefit single Zelensky: the man with the iron balls, with Les Claypool, Stewart Copeland, Sean Lennon, Sergey Ryabtsev, and Billy Strings:

Hütz also draws our attention to a recent song by the choral group Bortnichanka in Kyiv:

The unsuspecting world music fan might easily mistake it for a nice bucolic wheat-threshing song—but no:

And armoured personnel carriers were in flames
The Muscovites stood nearby
They were in complete stupor
Burning bastards were in flames…

For more on female polyphony, as well as early recordings of Ukrainian immigrants to the USA, see under Ukraine: traditional soundscapes. For the musicking of other immigrants, see under Accordion crimes. For conflict as a lens on societies under threat, see e.g. Afghan and Uyghur cultures.

What’s the craic?

Posted on by

*Part of my series on Irish music!*

Craic pub

I’m always intoxicated [Now read on—Ed.] [That’s enough of your lip—SJ] by the mood of Irish music, with its elusive, swirling, heterophonic (or even monophonic) melodies offset by jagged syncopations, any rare hints of harmony serving merely to remind us that it’s a mere modern trinket to which its unruly contours can’t be reduced (see e.g. More early music).

* * *

Around the world there must be many terms evoking the special atmosphere of entering deeply into the spirit of musicking; I think of flamenco duende and fado saudade—both with a strong undercurrent of loss. In more celebratory vein, an Irish expression much bandied nowadays is craic, the convivial mood sparked by getting together in company (cf. buzz, vibe, groove). I suppose this kind of atmosphere is the goal of most social gatherings where music is likely to be a catalyst, like Moroccan ahouach, Mediterranean festivals, or weddings anywhere. How good it is to have an all-encompassing term that stresses the wider context of sociability—including drinking, joking, musicking together! Significantly, in WAM, whose pundits have worked tirelessly to claim autonomy from mere human interaction, I can’t think of such a term—ideas welcome.

Irish session 2

Sitting around the table, taking turns—like in Shanghai silk-and-bamboo teahouses.

So impertinent non-nationals like me have become familiar with the nation of craic; but sure enough, it’s yet another of those fabricated traditions—in which the Irish are complicit, to boot. Kevin Myers has described it as “pseudo-Gaelic”, a “bogus neologism”.

The word crack (derived from Middle English crak, “loud conversation, bragging talk”) is recorded in Scotland in the 16th century in the sense of chat, news, or gossip; and it was common in north England and Scotland in the 19th century, sometimes with hints of musicking. These senses of the term entered Hiberno-English from Scots through Ulster, and were then borrowed into Irish, with a reference from 1929 and rural citations from the 1950s. In Dublin, the great Flann O’Brian used the word in articles collected in The best of Myles (1966).

The Gaelicized borrowed spelling craic is only documented from 1968, and it was reborrowed into English later still. The glorification of craic as a “specifically and quintessentially Irish form of fun” is even more recent. Critics have accused the Irish tourism industry and the promoters of Irish theme pubs of marketing “commodified craic” as a kind of stereotypical Irishness. For Kevin Myers it “coincided with the moment that Irishness became self-conscious, winsome, stylised, conceited, boastful”. In his 1999 book Companion to Irish traditional music, Fintan Vallely suggests that the use of craic in English is largely an exercise on the part of Irish pubs to make money through the commercialisation of traditional Irish music; he never heard the word spoken in Dublin until the late 1980s. He notes that Ciaran Carson (based in Belfast) was enraged by the spelling craic. Do read this excellent article by Donald Clarke!

Of course, we can’t specify the spelling when uttering the term (now that would make conversation a fine pickle), but just as I was about to try adopting it, I now think it’d be prudent for me to refrain from doing so. Still… it does sum up a feeling that is much needed.

While, um, craic has to be experienced in company, even audio recordings of live concerts can sometimes hint at the jubilation of the event. Here’s a playlist for the CD Dear old Erin’s isle: Irish traditional music from America (Nimbus, 1992—a companion to the 1991 Fiddle sticks: Irish traditional music from Donegal, also wonderful):

Following Last night’s fun, on a linguistic note: #3, with Liz Carroll on fiddle, consists of an exhilarating sequence of reels with magnificent titles: Drying out, Crush cars, The lost Indian; and Séamus Eagan’s flute solo (#6) is The wee bag of spuds. Such creative titles are conspicuously different from those of non-nationals like Messrs Messiaen and Boulez.

South American getaway

Posted on by

Butch

At Cambridge in the early 1970s, as a counterpart to my studies of Chinese culture (here, and here) and WAM, movies also made an important part of my education. At some remove from the arthouse European films that were all the rage was the outlaw movie

  • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) (wiki; see also e.g. here).

Despite mixed reviews, the film soon became a huge hit. Besides Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the title roles, Katherine Ross appears as Etta Place, following her part in The graduate. She went on to star in the sequel Wanted: the Sundance woman (1976). And Hill used the Newman–Redford partnership again with The sting (1973), with a Scott Joplin soundtrack.

The soundtrack for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (playlist) is by Burt Bacharach, whom I revere eternally for I say a little prayer. Robert Redford was not impressed by Raindrops keep falling on my head, sung by B.J. Thomas (“What the hell is that song doing in this film?”)—despite its wonderful major 7th leap:

A scene that undermines the pomposity of soundtracks in traditional Westerns is South American getaway, with the Ron Hicklin singers in fine form:

The disembodied audio is here, so as to focus on the musical artistry of the alternating zany and nostalgic passages, and that major 7th leap again (0.28, 3.18). They might have come up with more imaginative instrumental bridges, but hey. And this is clearly not the time for ethnographic study of musicking in Bolivia…

Another scene that remains with me is “Can I move?”:

which somehow for me evoked Kyūzō in Seven samurai (rather than anything in the remake The magnificent seven), and now even reminds me of the importance of context in folk musicking…

Mahler swings!

Posted on by

Adagietto 1

Adagietto 2

I yield to no-one in my veneration for Mahler 5, some great renditions of which I’ve provided here—irreverently introduced by a version of the symphony’s opening trumpet solo on rubber chicken…

In distressingly similar vein, I’ve just had a vision of how Mahler might have revised the sublime Adagietto had he lived through to the 1930s (as he should have done) to arrange it as a catchy up-tempo number for a New York swing band, with blaring horn section (led, perhaps, by Buck Clayton) and zany syncopations, largely dispensing with the sentimental appoggiaturas.

So here’s my preliminary draft of the melody on horns, leaving you to fill in the boogie-woogie bass-line, drum-kit, and funky sax harmonies—it works even better with the hushed original opening bar and a half:

Adagietto swing

Actually, Mahler’s choice of key works well for jazz winds, making one suspect that the original was just a preliminary sketch—after all, if you’re writing a slow love song for strings, whoever would plump for F major rather than E major or F♯ major?!

As to tempo, one might regard the two versions of the Adagietto as the opposite of what happened to the music of the Tang court after it was exported to Japan, where it began a long process of retardation.

Resting caseThe big-band arrangement would also suit a turbo-charged Balkan brass band like Fanfare Ciocârlia. I can’t take responsibility for my wayward visions, but I realise WAM purists (bless) may be alarmed. Conversely, composers from Bach to Mahler did often creatively recycle their previous work. Bach has inspired a wealth of jazz and world arrangements; and folk and popular musics were intrinsic elements in Mahler’s sound world (see e.g. under the 4th symphony). I rest my case.

As I observed with reference to the musician’s fantasy of performing Always look on the bright side of life as encore to the Matthew Passion, we come to accept such cognitive dissonance. Or at least I do.

Not merely as an attempt to redeem myself, now we must go back to Mahler’s original version—within the context of the whole glorious symphony. I’m also constantly amazed at the second movement, its turbulent trauma punctuated by the hushed cello recitative.

You can find links to my series on Mahler here—extending to chamber arrangements and Mahler’s own piano rolls. Among many movies that incorporate the Adagietto, do watch Tampopo! And here’s a roundup of my series on jazz. For the “Ming-dynasty bebop” of the Hua family shawm band in China, with A/V and analysis, click here.

Timothy Snyder on tyranny

Posted on by

Amidst the current carnage, I followed up Timothy Snyder’s brilliant, harrowing Bloodlands by reading two of his more recent books, written under the shock of the Trump presidency. While we’ve been sleepwalking, suddenly with the invasion of Ukraine they are even more distressingly relevant (for an overview of his work, see here).

Tyranny

  • On tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century (2017) (reviewed e.g. here; for an interview, click here)

is a succinct handbook, a manifesto largely directed at US readers. It’s also available in graphic form.

Of the topics, each illustrated with salient cases from modern history, some may seem prosaic, like “Make eye contact and small talk”, “Contribute to good causes”; others (so far) are specific to the USA, like “Be wary of paramilitaries”, “Be reflective if you must be armed”, and “Learn from peers in other countries” (“make sure you and your family have passports”). More widely salient are:

  • Do not obey in advance (“anticipatory obedience”):
    Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
  • Defend institutions (countering a tendency to perceive them as impersonal and corrupt):
    It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institutions you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labour union—and take its side.
  • Beware the one-party state:
    The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.
  • Take responsibility for the face of the world:
    The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other symbols of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
  • Remember professional ethics:
    When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labour.
  • Be kind to our language:
    Avoid pronouncing the phrase everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.
  • Believe in truth:
    To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no-one can criticise power, because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
    Here Snyder identifies four modes: open hostility to verifiable reality, “shamanistic incantation” (“Build that wall!” “Lock her up!”), magical thinking (“the open embrace of contradiction”), and misplaced faith.
  • Investigate:
    Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidise investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realise that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns. Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.
  • Listen for dangerous words:
    Be alert to the rise of the words extremism and terrorism. Be alive to the fatal notions of emergency and exception. Be angry about the treacherous use of political vocabulary.

In “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives”, Snyder outlines the rise of Putin. His target in “Be a patriot” is particularly clear:

It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. […] It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do so. […] It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. […]
A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.

(I was going to reproach the use of “he” and “his” there, but with some disturbing exceptions this is indeed largely a male aberration.)

In the Epilogue Snyder observes:

Until recently we had convinced ourselves that there was nothing in the future but more of the same. The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and Communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that politics could move only in one direction: towards liberal democracy. […]

He describes this as a self-induced intellectual coma.

The second antihistorical way of considering the past is the politics of eternity. Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.

Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present, all of them equally accessible for manipulation. Every reference to the past seems to involve an attack by some external enemy upon the purity of the nation. […]

The danger we now face is of a passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity, from a naïve and flawed sort of democratic republic to a confused and cynical sort of fascist oligarchy.

But he counsels:

History allows us to see patterns and make judgements. […] History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

And

We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Our own tradition demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it.

* * *

Unfreedom

The politics of inevitability and eternity are major themes of Snyder’s

  • The road to unfreedom (2018) (reviewed e.g. here),

where he expounds in more detail the background to the ongoing disaster. The chapters consider alternative world-views through meticulous analysis of the modern history of Russia, Europe, America—and Ukraine:

  • Individualism or totalitarianism
  • Succession or failure
  • Integration or empire
  • Novelty or eternity
  • Truth or lies
  • Equality or oligarchy.

Ukraine is highlighted in Chapters 4 and 5.

Another rigorous scholar setting forth from the brutal history of 20th-century regimes to address the current crisis is Anne Applebaum. Note also the work of Timothy Garton Ash; and in film, Adam Curtis. See also under Life behind the Iron Curtain. There’s a surge of recommended readings on Ukraine, on Ukraine and Russia, and guides to help understand the invasion.

A jazz medley

Posted on by

To help navigate through the jazz tag in the sidebar, here’s a roundup of some of my main posts so far. Many of them are based on playlists, as I educate myself on some substantial ouevres…

From the Golden Age:

Chet Baker https://stephenjones.blog/2017/10/28/chet/

See also

Moving on,

Further afield,

More songs:

And on a linguistic note:

Roundup for 2021!

Posted on by

Emma Leylah

As I observed in my roundup for 2020, since part of my mission (whatever that is) is to vary the distribution of the diverse posts on this blog, keeping you guessing, this latest annual mélange is an occasion to group together some major themes from this past year. This is only a selection; for reasons of economy, I’ve tended to skip over some of the lighter items. You can also consult the tags and categories in the sidebar.

Some essential posts:

I’m going to emulate Stella Gibbons and award *** to some other *MUST READ!* posts too…

China: on the Li family Daoists, recent and older posts are collected in

and it’s always worth reminding you to watch our film

Elsewhere,

Tributes to three great sinologists:

The beleaguered cultures of the

  • Uyghurs (posts collected here) and
  • Tibetans (posts collected here), including

I’ve begun a growing series on Turkey (with a new tag for west/Central Asia):

Among this year’s additions to the jazz, pop, punk tags are

In memoriam Fou Ts’ong https://stephenjones.blog/2021/01/02/fou-tsong/

WAM:

Bach (added to the roundup A Bach retrospective):

as well as

On “world music” and anthropology:

Patricia Lockwood https://stephenjones.blog/2021/02/13/lockwood/

On gender (category here, with basic subheads):

Germany:

Italy:

Britain (see also The English, home and abroad), and the USA:

More on stammering:

On a lighter note:

Even just for this last year, I realise there’s a lot to read there, but do click away on all the links! And I can’t resist reminding you of some of my earlier favourites, notably

Ma Yuan

Musics lost and found

Posted on by

MC cover

  • Michael Church, Musics lost and found: song collectors and the life and death of folk tradition (2021)

makes an engaging diachronic introduction to fieldworkers, and the musics they documented, in societies around the world—a sequel to his 2015 book The other classical musics (favourably reviewed here). Of course, our labels of “classical” and folk” are flawed (see e.g. What is serious music?!): the two volumes overlap.

In his astute Introduction, Michael notes the role of “colonial curiosity, sometimes tinged with guilt”, as well as patriotism and the distortion of local traditions under nationalistic movements and then state socialism (cf. the observations of Yang Yinliu and Milan Kundera). He comments:

Some collecting has been a response to horrifying circumstances. The most heroic collector of Nazi death-camp songs was the Polish singer-songwriter Aleksander Kulisiewicz, who survived three years in Sachsenhausen and devoted the rest of his life to performing the songs he had memorised from Jewish fellow-prisoners. There was a clandestine Jewish choir in Sachsenhausen whose members told him that, if he survived, he should preserve their memory by singing their songs to the rest of the world. That became his mission; his 3,000-page typescript of death-camp songs—many collected from survivors of other camps whom he sought out after the war—is now lodged in the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Even in less extreme conditions, under authoritarian regimes such as the USSR the work of collecting was dangerous. Now I think too of Rahilä Dawut, distinguished anthropologist doing fine work on Uyghur culture until she was “disappeared” in 2017.

While Michael recognises that his selection is to some extent arbitrary, beyond the Usual Suspects (Béla Bartók, Cecil Sharp, the Lomaxes), the chapters tell fascinating stories, digesting a vast amount of material—focusing on pioneering fieldworkers before the 1970s but also showing the ongoing work of more recent scholars.

As to the thorny issues of “loss”,

Most of the work songs which Alan Lomax collected in Spain and Italy in the 1950s are sung no more. The same applies to the work songs which Komitas found in rural Armenia, and which Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger collected in England a century ago. These songs are gone, because the reasons for their existence—the trades they accompanied—are gone. And after the death of the village comes the death of the songs marking its calendrical and life-cycle events; there comes, in short, the death of local music. This rule holds for all villages, everywhere.

And

Worn-out and irrelevant forms may not be replaced by new ones, because the conditions required for that process—community and kinship networks and the aforesaid shared religion or ideology—no longer obtain, and may never obtain again.

But Michael does well to observe that

The old idea of an immutable musical corpus is giving way to the idea of an endlessly mutable art; the primacy of collecting is being replaced among scholars by the primacy of interpretation.

And indeed he concedes that the prospect is not one of unrelieved gloom. “Migrants carry their music in their baggage”, and

New work inspires new songs: baggage-handlers for Amazon in Genoa, whose forefathers sang as they humped fish, have devised new songs to speed their parcels.

Michael contrasts fusions that are the spontaneous result of social shifts with those that are arbitrarily willed by producers. He ends his Introduction with thoughtful reflections on the role of Covid.

* * *

The chapters are loosely grouped in four sections. “Why it all began” begins with a prelude on the various motives for collecting song in 18th century Europe—political, colonial, and economic—introducing Johann Gottfried Herder and the concept of Volkslied. Chapters follow on the 17th-century broadside ballads and Francis James Child; Orientalists from France (Jesuit priests in Beijing and Salvador-Daniel in Algiers); and the Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), documenting Ottoman music in Constantinople after being taken hostage. Here’s a sample of Jordi Savall’s project on Cantemir with Hesperion XXI:

“The birth of ethnomusicology” opens with chapters on collecting among Native American peoples—from Alice Fletcher’s work on the Omaha to Franz Boas.

Michael moves on to the work of Komitas (1869–1935) studying Armenian song on the eve of the 1915 genocide; and the British folk-song revival with the “contentious” Cecil Sharp, followed by Percy Grainger.

Bartok 1907

In “Carrying the torch: collectors in Northern and Eastern Europe” (a misleading rubric, since the chapters range far more widely), after an Introduction (featuring collectors such as Pyotr Kireyevsky (1808–56) in Russia, Karel Erben (1811–70) and Leos Janáček for Bohemia and Moravia, Vasil Stoin (1880–1938) for Bulgaria, Bjarni Thorsteinsson (1861–1938) for Iceland), Michael offers a fine chapter on Béla Bartók, with his extraordinary fieldtrips before World War One collecting songs in Transylvania, Slovakia, Romania, Ruthenia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Algeria—and much later, Egypt (1932) and Turkey (1936). Michael ponders Bartók’s prescriptive agenda, seeking the “purity” of “ancient” songs, disdaining “Gypsy” and “sacred” melodies. But he was always in search of connections:

In 1912, I discovered among the Maramures Romanians a certain kind of highly ornamented, Orientally-coloured and improvisation-like melody. In 1913, in a village of Central Algeria bordering the Sahara desert, I heard a similar melodic style. […] Who would have thought that the distance between the two phenomena—more than 2,000 kilometres—could be bridged by a causal relationship?

Lomax

This leads to a chapter on John Lomax and his son Alan, subsuming not only their work among (mainly African-) American folk-singers (see e.g. America over the water, and cf. Bruce Jackson) but Alan’s work in the Bahamas, Haiti, Britain, Spain, and notably Italy, working with Diego Carpitella. Note the Alan Lomax Archive and YouTube channel.

Among the pioneers of Australian Aboriginal music cultures, Michael highlights the work of Theodor Strehlow with the Aranda. The old theme recurs:

I am recording the sunset of an age that will never return—every act that I see is being performed for the last time, and the men who are with me have no successors. When they die, they will take all their knowledge to the grave with them—except that part which I have recorded. Hence I am writing down everything in full detail, so as to give the clearest picture of an age and of a culture that no one else but I have been privileged to witness.

In Chapter 12 Michael introduces the Western fascination with gamelan, from the 1889 Exposition Universelle to Jaap Kunst and Colin McPhee (for more, see Java to jazz). The site Bali1928.net has a wealth of (silent, alas) film clips.

The work of Paul Bowles in Morocco makes another vivid topic. Turning to Greece, Michael introduces the mission of Domna Samiou to document folk traditions there. John Blacking’s work on the Venda is a classic inspiration for ethnomusicologists. He goes on to explore the importance of record companies, introducing Moses Asch, Folkways, Nonesuch, Ocora, PAN, and Topic Records—before the label “world music” became a bland catch-all.

The final section, “Musical snapshots: the importance of sound archives” is introduced with notes on the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, East European archives, the British Library Sound Archive and the Golha Project on Persian music.

Chapter 17 explores the traditions of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Xinjiang—and further afield, Tuva. Despite the spectre of Soviet prescriptive innovations, collectors did some fine work, such as Viktor Uspensky and Viktor Belyayev, followed by foreign researchers like Jean During and Theodore Levin, and the Aga Khan Music Initiative. This leads to Afghanistan, introducing local musician-collectors, and the work of John Baily and Veronica Doubleday.

Chapters follow on Russia and Georgia—as a change from the polished stage presentation of many groups, here’s a Georgian group singing informally:

Musics lost and found continues with Pygmy polyphony in central Africa, with Colin Turnbull, Simha Arom, Suzanne Fürniss; and the radif of Persian art music.

Yang Yinliu 1950

Yang Yinliu, 1950.

Chapter 23 discusses China: the great Yang Yinliu, and my own humble fieldwork with the Gaoluo ritual association, the Li family Daoists, and shawm bands—all themes amply covered on this blog. Korean traditions (see my posts on Dang and Bowed zithers, 1) are introduced through the art of p’ansori; and Japan through taiko drumming—having left the more venerable traditions of gagaku, Noh, and kabuki to The other classical musics.

In the two final chapters Michael discusses the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage programme and its pitfalls, ending with a thoughtful overview of the book’s knotty issues. Besides the bibliography, each chapter ends with a basic reading list.

More digestible than the New Grove and Garland encyclopedias, sections in the two New Grove Ethnomusicology volumes, or even The Rough Guide to world music, this book leads audiences to a wealth of traditions. While scholars were poring over musty tomes in libraries, and composers busy composing, these intrepid collectors were busy in the field, seeking to make sense of the cultural life of grassroots communities.

While Musics lost and found covers an impressive amount of ground, there’s scope for a further volume. The story of Milman Parry and Albert Lord recording the “Homeric” epics of bards in 1930s’ Yugoslavia (archive here) would be grist to Michael’s mill. Bruno Nettl is one of the crucial figures in ethnomusicology, not only for his studies of Native American cultures but for his work in Iran. Also valuable are Bernard Lortat-Jacob’s explorations of the Mediterranean. The chapter on the Lomaxes hints at the vibrant field of Italy, but one might also adduce the work of Roberto Leydi, Tullia Magrini, and so on. Though the work of Richard Widdess in Nepal gets a mention in the Introduction, south Asia deserves a lengthier treatment, to include the likes of Arnold Bake and Nicolas Magriel. And so on…

* * *

Tom Service introduced the book with Michael on BBC Radio 3 Music Matters (here, from 17.01). The programme introduces English folk-song; migration and “climate change in music”; singing in Albania and Genoa; and (from 28.42) Veronica Doubleday discusses her outstanding work in 1970s’ Afghanistan and the current crisis—a clear instance of a culture that is very much under threat, of course.

It’s true that village communities have changed decisively. But we need a new model for the ecosphere of folk tradition. Such genres are not timeless; even Bach’s cantatas soon fell from favour, and whether or not they find new audiences is not something that I worry about, although recordings and documentation are clearly valuable.

In China I often feel as if I’m responsible for the dwindling of the folk traditions that I document; or to put it another way, the very forces that bring us to these sites are those which lead to change. The role of the fieldworker has come under increasing scrutiny, as in such works as Shadows in the field (see e.g. William Noll on blind minstrels of Ukraine). Further to Nigel Barley’s portrayal of the fieldworker as “harmless idiot”, I sometimes feel like a harmful idiot.

Tom Service opens with a soundbite much favoured by pundits: “folk music cultures are in danger of extinction all over the world”.  I’m none too enamoured with the concept of “endangered traditions”: since the beginnings of anthropology, fieldworkers have always supposed they were witnessing the last vestiges of a tradition. It tends to suggest a nostalgia for the halcyon days of child chimney-sweeps (cf. Edible, intangible, dodgy). Cultural loss is a thorny issue. As Michael indeed suggests, the book’s leitmotif—the fear that the music of collectors’ chosen field might evaporate before they managed to fully document it—may not be so well-founded. It’s always too late, and never.

* * *

The book was sonorously launched with an event at the Wigmore Hall, making a fitting tribute to live musicking after a long silence, as well as a reminder of the rich traditions maintained among UK diasporas. In an exquisite programme, it was wonderful to hear Veronica Doubleday again, followed by a cappella songs from the Georgian Maspindzeli choir, Persian classical music performed by Mehdi Namdar (ney) and Fariborz Kiani (goblet drum), and the Anatolian folk songs of Çiğdem Aslan accompanied by Erdal Yapici on baglama.

* * *

See also e.g. my voluminous fieldwork and world music categories in the sidebar; note Society and soundscape.