Cage, free

The three movements of John Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra (1951) seem to form a kind of dialectic of freedom and order.

Filed under: Lines of Flight, Recordings

Both

The answer is: the Slits

and the Raincoats

Filed under: Recordings

Cry sis

For anyone interested, I have finally finished this thing. If you want a copy, leave a comment or send me an email [recordingsurface at gmail.com] and I’ll send it along. Maybe now I will start posting here with more regularity. Maybe. UPDATE: or just read it here.

Filed under: Economy, Recordings

Walking the cow

(For the Love of Hate)

A few days ago I finally heard, a mere twelve years after it was released, Kathy McCarty’s Dead Dog’s Eyeball, her record of Daniel Johnston songs. The versions are nice as far as they go, but like most covers of Johnston’s songs I’ve heard, they are animated by one mistaken motivation: to realize the potential of the songs.

Filed under: Minor, Recordings

Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen died last week.

Filed under: Recordings

Bix

The jazzist take on the relationship between Bix Beiderbecke’s biography and his music goes something like this: While Bix suffered lots of insecurities, doubts, disappointments, and despair in his life — all of which gave rise to the alcoholism that killed him at the age of 28 — he was able to overcome these once he stepped on stage or into the recording studio.

Filed under: Lines of Flight, Minor, Recordings

Wagner and Ursprung

I’ve just finished watching Das Rheingold (this version). Who knew that it was about, among other things, primitive accumulation.

Filed under: Recordings, Work

‘Give us back our unity’

[Somehow this post got deleted from the day I wrote it, September 20, and reappeared as a new post. Weird.]

This morning I listened to David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, from 1971, which has always been my favorite of his. I haven’t heard it in years, and I was pleasantly surprised at the topicality of some of the lyrics, particularly the minor parenting in “Kooks,” the xenophobia-rendered-as-apocalypse tale of “Oh, You Pretty Things,” and the interplay of the real/symbolic, Thanatos, and power/knowledge in “Quicksand.”

Filed under: Opposition, Recordings

Thelonious

Today is the 89th birthday of Thelonious Monk, my favortie jazz musician-composer. Jazz has never known quite what to do with Thelonious, who struggled in obscurity and poverty for two decades while others had hits with his songs and then suddenly–in the 60s, well after his creative powers had ebbed and as his debilitating mental illness took permanent root–became a huge international star: He is simultaneously venerated and institutionalized–his name is attached to professional songwriting contests and music programs at academies–and treated as a sideshow, notable but mostly for his freakishness–in Ken Burns’s Jazz, Branford Marsalis praised him but did so as a joke, like professing love for a “weird,” “quirky” cousin who gets included in the family because of the artistic cachet s/he brings.

Below is a clip of Thelonious, in a trio setting sometime in the late 50s, playing “Blue Monk.” I love all of the incarntions of Thelonious’s bands, but lately I find myself digging the trios the most, particularly the early Blue Note sessions from the late 40s that made up his first recordings. This video gives a glimpse of why.

Filed under: Recordings

Complete unknown

(My little post on Bowie prompted me to reread this post I started several months ago on Dylan and leftist politics, which I abandoned. Looking back over it, I find it’s not quite as horrible as I’d remembered, but nonetheless not what I’d hoped it would be. Still, I’ll put it up. Maybe someone will get something from it.)

Filed under: Minor, Opposition, Recordings