A Lark Ascending

Some nice new stuff appearing or on the horizon:

Due next week: https://www.burningshed.com/store/panegyric/product/70/4065/

Fresh Sounds anyone?

There's a fascinating - if highly controversial - interpretation advanced by John Carey that modernism was all about the ruling class getting petrified by their exclusive zone of culture being invaded by the bourgeoisie and, in particular, the masses as a result of rising literacy in the late-19thC. The result was to create an art so difficult to penetrate that it would keep the riff-raff out. Those of a left-wing persuasion then justified it as what the proletariat ought to want if only they were free of their chains. As far as I can see 'abstract' art continues to be largely consumed by an upper/aspiring-middle class audience.

Interesting reading a Brahms biography last year. I was surprised to read that he was quite down to earth and realistic about the role of artists by contrast with the Liszt/Wagner axis who played the superiority of the artist card for all it was worth.

I agree that there is no imperative on a performer to live up to the crowd's expectations - I suspect a lot of us here pay, at least sometimes, to have our expectations challenged. Can't say I can see any reason for the performer to be arrogant or rude about it, though. Yes, occasionally a nerve will be hit and the performer, like the rest of the human race, might lose his or her rag. And some performers are just shy; what seems like indifference might just be self-consciousness. I just like the idea of performers as part of the rest of society doing their bit as I do mine. The Romantic ideal of the 'artist' as somehow above the herd, in communion with something higher, doing something more important than everyone else ('spiritual' to our 'temporal') just does not appeal. Always find it a bit odd that the 20thC musical radicals tore every part of Romanticism to bits - except the idea that the 'artist' can operate by different rules. Odd; but not surprising.

'You've Got To Be Taught' out of South Pacific is pretty brave for it's time (1949). Did that get left in when (if) the musical was produced in the Deep South? You might be right, crisp. But the only one I ever saw on stage was a regional production of 'The King and I'. I know them exclusively from the cinema (in most cases on TV) and from soundtrack recordings of those same films. They grabbed me.

No telling what you'll find in Joey... I know - back in '76 Dylan spent what seemed like aeons singing about him.

Is that something like pigs-in-blankets or toad-in-the-hole? The Sound of Music also has a goatherd and a sprinkling of Nazis. You won't find them in Pal Joey.

I wouldn't call Rodgers later music 'staid'. It might sound staid because it became one of the middle-of-the-road sounds by the 60s. But it's very rich harmonically - there are some heart stopping modulations. I was listening to Harry Allen's version of South Pacific yesterday and what I noticed was how the jazz versions actually iron out much of that richness in order to make it jazz-worthy. In its orginal form 'My girl back home' is a wonderful evocation of nostalgia for home, brilliantly evoked in the music; in the jazz version that tristese is lost. I think that's much closer to the mark. Those musicals are extremely sentimental - I wouldn't go near 'The Sound of Music' for decades after an infatuation with it as a ten year old. But I watched it again a couple of years back and was enchanted. The streetwise wise-crackers of Rodgers and Hart songs are always going to have more kudos than nuns and kids dressed in curtains. But I think that disguises a richness in Rodgers music that the knowing music fan often misses but the general public gets without even thinking about it.

Well she looked very different to that on the stage of the Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park, London on June 1st, 1974. Sang 'Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles' accompanied by harmonium.

So the definitive 100 best saxophonists can't be far off.

Agree with you entirely. My ideal is someone like the English folk singer/demon guitar player/seeker out of old songs/shape changer Martin Carthy. In the small pond of English folk music he is a true giant; yet when he plays a folk club he makes a point of coming out and listening to the floor singers, in and among the other listeners. Now I love Keith Jarrett's music and he too is worthy of the highest accolades (well, if you warm to his style); but, oh how different his response. When you read his musings you see he's bought into the Romantic idea of the artist as being outside of normal life and therefore excused from the normal decencies of engagement.

First time I've been thanked for my contrariness! Thanks for the thanks, fasstrack.

There's lots I like about Romanticism - I react to natural beauty in the countryside just as the Romantics taught us to react. And they certainly had a finger on the darker forces inside humanity in contrast to the idealism of the Enlightenment. But the whole pedestal thing doesn't really appeal to me.

The deification of 'the artist'. While the one-offs and utterly unique musicians are fabulous to behold I'd say the broader spectrum of music, often based on imitation and incremental change, is extremely rich. I love Paul Quinichette's contributions to the Billie Holiday 50s records despite the fact that he is clearly heavily influenced by Lester Young. I love E.J. Moeran even though I can hear the Vaughan Williams borrowings. It's also a Romantic thing to single out individual musicians (or politicians) from a complex context and project them as the driving force. Without belittling Martin Luther King's achievement he was very much the product of much broader socio-economic-political forces and the figurehead of a diverse and complex movement. Romanticism chose to smooth out the complexities and present cultural change in terms of 'Great Men' (and occasionally women). I think it's much more interesting than that.

That makes sense.

The spirit of 19thC Romanticism dies hard.

I always assumed it was because Rodgers and Hammerstein songs don't swing. They are closer in spirit to operetta than to modern Broadway; a bit more formal. The only ones that get seem to played regularly are Surrey with the Fringe on Top, My Favourite Things and It Might as Well Be Spring. That said, I love it when a jazz musician tackles one of the others, eg, Howard McGhee with The Sound of Music. A lot of Broadway tunes don't swing - jazz musicians find ways to swing them. Rodgers and Hart always sound to me to be very much out of the American vernacular tradition; R + Hamm, by contrast seem to have more in common harmonically with someone like Korngold. The music modulates to strange keys much more commonly - listen especial to the music for the ballet like dream sequences in some of those shows. Probably leads to them sounding a bit too Middle European, a bit too kafe und kuchen (mit schlagsahne) to be comfortable for jazz improvising. I did read a bio of Rodgers about ten years back - can't recall if it had anything to say about the change.

Two this week I heard on early morning radio that stopped me in my tracks. Don't know the performers but they were versions of: Bach: Violin Concerto No 1 - slow movement Mozart: Serenade 10 - 'Gran Partita' - slow movement I've know both for yonks but somehow they hit extra hard this week.

Seems 'simples' to me. Like others have said, it's daft having multiple threads posted in the same sort of time period. But when a couple of years go by and a new thread appears on a topic discussed before I can't see any harm in letting it grow its own shoots. Long time contributors will probably repeat themselves (or contradict themselves) but we all do that all the time anyway. If this was an erudite professorial forum aimed at academia then there might be a point at strict cataloguing. But as it's an informal place where we regularly shoot things off the top of our head without due reflection I don't feel the moderators should be breaking their backs trying to iron out multiple threads years apart. Having said that, when it comes to single musicians/groups or albums, a quick check on the search engine would seem to be common sense. On a long standing jazz board it is a bit silly starting a new thread called 'What do you think of Charlie Parker?' or 'Kind of Blue' without searching first.

I don't think these have ever made it to CD.

This is, of course, the data-maniac way that everything can be solved. It's overwhelmed education in the last 15 years. The list thing is endemic. When magazines are short of things to write about they roll out the '100 Greatest' this and thats. TV is forever having 100 best films/comedies/musicals programmes. It's a format - if you ignore the rankings it can be quite fun. But the idea that you can rank something as subjective as music (especially when everyone only hears a fraction of what is out there) is plain silly. If you want to see the silliness at it's worse just take a look at the classical world where asserting the superiority of X's interpretation over Y is de rigeur in order to be accepted into the inner sanctum (though it's actually an easy game to play - go for the older, out of print recordings and you score the highest points).