Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 21st November

November 22, 2012 by 3 Comments

Cover Me
Around the time of the singer songwriter boom of the early 70’s, cover versions used to be odd one-offs, musicians showing respect for their elders & forbears, and subsidiary to the act’s own material. Then covers became cute—hipper bands would cover less hip pop songs, thus hipping them up. Then it all seemed to go wrong when people stared making tribute cover albums. Steve McL, who posts interesting and entertaining covers, usually themed, at the excellent coverfreak, puts it pithily in his manifesto:

“You should only cover a song if you have a reason for covering it. Financial considerations don’t count. Bring something new to the song. Make it your own. You’re a musician, interpret the music! It can be good or bad, just make it different from the original. Otherwise, what’s the point? My mission here is to spread Good Covers in the hope that they will overtake the bland and boring ones. If I post one that you enjoy, tell your friends and help me in my lonely battle…”

This is all a roundabout way of saying that Meshell Ndegeocello’s album of songs associated with the late, great Nina Simone—Pour une âme souveraine [“For a sovereign soul”]—is great. So far, her reworkings of Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Feelin’ Good (I know, daunting to even attempt), Don’t Take All Night with Sinead, and Young Gifted & Black with Cody ChesnuTT are the ones I keep going back to, but the whole album is a triumph, and in a week where I heard the Mumfords wanly strum through The Boxer, a necessity.

The First Thirty Seconds Of “Jive Talking”
Go on, listen to them. Chunks of muted guitar. Then a kick drum and a nasty, grungy synth bass. Then some sweetness with a little Chic-like rhythm guitar before the snare and a double-tracked Barry come strutting in. Actually the whole song is pretty wonderful, especially the great drumming of Dennis Bryon.

Leonard Cohen Screensaver. Thanks, Antonio Zazueta Olmos

Southern Soul Odyssey One
An email with this attachment from my relative Brett, taking a break from touring and holidaying in Alabama: “Trip Down Memory Lane!”

I’m put in mind of time spent in the Shoals. I found this scan the other day of Jimmy Johnson’s pick, which later served time as the rocksbackpages logo…


Southern Soul Odyssey Two
Coincidentally, we were talking about artworks where someone instructs others to do the work, with the visiting Bob & Sam Gumpert. I was obsessed at one time with Letterpress printing and sourced an order form for a great Printshop in the 80s called Tribune Showprint, out of Earl Park, Indiana. They printed posters for the Chiltlin’ circuit and Soul Shows, often on hand screenprinted ‘rainbow’ cards. Mark and I immediately got them to do posters and covers for Hot House, our band. How great—typing out the wording and enclosing a glossy 10 x 8, posting the order off airmail, and three weeks later getting 50 cardboard posters back.


I’m pretty sure that it influenced this…

Boris Vian, Man Of Vision
From the IHT auction catalogue (see last week). “The Pianoctail is a strange instrument, imagined by Boris Vian in his novel L’Écume des Jours. The renowned writer, who died in 1959, conceived this cocktail-making piano which would make a drink according to the notes played. An Americano is made when a major chord is played, and when a triad or tonic chord is played, you get a gin-fizz. The instrument was displayed this morning in a Parisian cinema, where the film is being shown tonight. March 20, 1968.”

“For each note there’s a corresponding drink – either a wine, spirit, liqueur or fruit juice. The loud pedal puts in egg flip and the soft pedal adds ice. For soda you play a cadenza in F sharp. The quantities depend on how long a note is held – you get the sixteenth of a measure for a hemidemisemiquaver; a whole measure for a black note; and four measures for a semibreve. When you play a slow tune, then tone comes into control to prevent the amounts growing too large and the drink getting too big for a cocktail – but the alcoholic content remains unchanged. And, depending on the length of the tune, you can, if you like, vary the measures used, reducing them, say, to a hundredth in order to get a drink taking advantage of all the harmonics, by means of an adjustment on the side.”

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 14th November

November 14, 2012 by 4 Comments

Steely Dan Sang, “Call Me Deacon Blue…”
Steve Miller sang, “Some people call me the Space Cowboy, some call me the Gangster Of Love.” Carly Rae Jepsen sang Call Me Maybe. Blondie and Al Green just sang “Call Me…” Beth Orton, on her new album Sugaring Time, sings “Call Me The Breeze.” And it’s wonderful. It sits on a groove that doesn’t quit—the great jazzist Brian Blade drums, with Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and a loopy Nick Drakesque folk guitar—and builds on the interplay between the dead-on bass pulse and Blade’s drums skipping and punctuating the 4/4, keeping it off-kilter enough to really hook you in. Atop this sit wonderful entwining vocals and a glorious organ solo that creeps up out of the track, attempting to wrest it away from the massed ranks of Beth. Beth just about wins. Interestingly, I can barely find a reference to this song in any review that I’ve read. It doesn’t fall into the “mournful serious intense thang” that all reviewers seem to need in female singer songwriters, like only those type of songs have any heft. Go figure.

Is There A “Boutique Festival” Setting?

My brother-in-law has a brilliant new stereo set-up in his house, and his new Yamaha amp offers to model the sound of your tracks for you—giving them the vibe and atmos of a Viennese Concert Hall, say, or a Cellar Club. At the rock end it offers two clubs from the Seventies, The Roxy in Los Angeles, and The Bottom Line in New York. If you buy a more expensive model, it gives you the Village Vanguard (“Nice!”) or a Warehouse loft (how bad does that sound, I wonder). Sadly, there’s no Boutique Festival, where the music is drowned out by the clatter of glasses and middle-class chatter. We decide the sound is kind of great with no modelling at all.

Shaken, Not Stirred. Credit Sequence, Skyfall
Yes, Adele’s song is very nice, all Bassey-isms present and correct, and it insinuates itself into your head really efficiently, but oh my, the film… Following an Istanbul-set opening sequence that isn’t a patch on Taken 2’s Istanbul-set chase sequences (and let’s not forget that Taken 2 is a B picture photocopied from another B picture, albeit a great one) the credits are unbelievably cheesy. Incoherent and naff images glide by with no stylistic consistency at all and it just makes you fearful of the next two hours. Rightly, as it turns out. Has Sam Mendes not seen The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?

Trey Songz’ Rhythm Section, Later, Friday
Trey sings his glassy, glossy pop hit, Simply Amazing, his schtick a little out of place on Later, and it’s all pretty groovy and pleasant enough until about a minute and a half in, when you’re not listening to Trey at all, you’re just listening for what Nate Jones on bass will do next—adding little filigree high-register melodies, dropping back to the root notes on his way deep 5 string, totally in the pocket of the groove. About a minute from the end they drop into a breakdown section, and that’s when drummer Antwan “Amadeus” Thompson and Jones decide to have a party on the tune. An outrageous series of rolls and hi-hat snaps are followed by Nate giving it the full Level 42, bass jutted out in front of him like he was Chuck Berry. At the end Trey does a boxer’s shuffle and feint to the bassist, which I fondly think is to honour an exceptional performance.

The Crop Marks & Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune
The International Herald Tribune, celebrating its 125th anniversary, has an auction of pictures from its archives on Monday 19 November. Looking through the catalogue, I’m mostly struck by the pictures of musicians, especially the ones that have compositors marks and instructions and arrows on, showing how the photo will be cropped, focusing on who the editors deemed the important part of the story…

Bennie Goodman clowning with Steve Allen; The Stones in Paris (only Brian Jones escapes a wax pencil cross); Dylan press release shot for The Times They Are A Changin’; Jane Birkin with Serge Gainsbourg; Lionel Hampton clowning around with Elsie Smith; notice how Jazz musicians always seem forced to ‘clown around’…

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 7th November

November 7, 2012 by 1 Comment

Best Music-Related Tok Pisin Phrase
“The Prince of Wales spoke in the local language called Tok Pisin as he introduced himself as the nambawan pikinini bilong Misis Kwin—the number one child belonging to Mrs Queen. It is a creole language widely spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tok is derived from the English word talk and Pisin from pidgin. Much of its vocabulary has a charm of its own. For instance, liklik box you pull him he cry you push him he cry is an accordion…”

The Video That Killed A Career
Alexis Petridis wrote an interesting piece about the new book, I Want My MTV, a few weeks back, and mentioned eighties arena rock star Billy Squier and the video for the track Rock Me Tonite, directed by Kenny Ortega. I finally got around to watching it, and it is quite the most deranged and strange video ever made (it often makes lists of the worst videos of all time), after which Billy’s career tanked. As I watched it I felt sad for Billy, and perused the usual sidebar links to other Billy Squier videos. I alighted on one where he’s sitting on a high stool in a lecture theatre, alone except for a blonde Telecaster, capo’d at A. I clicked the link. He’s playing a smallish fundraiser, fairly recently. He has a suit jacket on, and looks like a better preserved, more dignified Joe Perry. The guitar is powerfully amped, and he starts a strutting riff as he plays In The Dark. It’s terrific. A fairly generic eighties rock number, he gives it 110%, wailing and bending strings like a man possessed, and for as long as it plays you want to be driving down a road, really fast, at night.

Nail. Head. Ladies & Gentlemen, Robbie Fulks
On sifting and sorting and downsizing his CD collection: “Scrapping fat glossy packages by the likes of Timbaland, Nelly, Luke Bryan, and T.G. Sheppard (to be clear, and not to inflame everyone, I like a few songs by all these guys okay, but can’t justify the permanent storage of dozens of them) reminds me of the passing nature of fashionable taste, and the extravagance of the moneyed sector of the music industry in satisfying it. The photography on the Timbaland record that has somehow come into my possession looks like it cost a hundred thousand dollars. The booklet is so thick you can hardly coax it from the jewel case. If some dude turns a goofball idea into a popular hit and everyone dances around and enjoys the summer more, it doesn’t seem very objectionable. But when you give a moment’s thought to the year-of-vaccines-for-Bangladeshis’ worth of art design, the carbon footprint of multiple buses crisscrossing the country for years on end, and the transfer of millions upon millions of dollars from work-weary parents to summer-enjoying kids… you almost have to weep.”

Albert Hall Ceiling

No Day In The Life references here, no siree…

What Has Happened Down Here Is The Wind Have Changed
Listening to jazz clarinetist Sammy Rimington sing River Stay Away From My Door on Saturday night, I’m put in mind of the effects of Hurricane Sandy on friends on the East Coast. Rick in NYC: “It’s weird and slightly creepy walking back into the deep dark of lower Manhattan below 30th Street at night. I expect highwaymen with every breeze.” And John in Woodstock: “A bunch of big old trees came down, leaving us cold and dark and off the grid until early this morning. The soundtrack is chainsaws, nothing but chainsaws.” As the song’s lovely Carmichaelish melody unfolds, Sammy sings plaintively over the top: “Don’t come up any higher/Cause I’m all so alone/Just stay away from my bed and my fire/Cause that’s all I own…”

The Sammy Rimington International Band, Headcorn Village Hall

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 31st October

October 31, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Danny Baker, Shortlist Questionnaire
Who’s the most overrated band of your lifetime? “Queen. A dreadful group. They were neither Led Zeppelin nor Bowie and they played that middle ground in between. Punk rock didn’t come around because of prog rock or anything like that, it came around because of Queen. Abba, Queen and ELO—that was what people were trying to move away from. You can find everything Queen did better elsewhere.”

Bob Dylan & The Poetry Of The Blues
Michael Gray, my favourite writer on Bob Dylan, gives a talk in Canterbury, close enough to drive to. Mick Gold comes with me, supplying an excellent compilation CD and fascinating conversation for our tiny road trip. Michael’s presentation is terrific—funny and revelatory. Over a meal afterwards we talk about the fact that Freddy Koella is both Michael and my favourite Dylan guitarslinger. Mick reveals that the night before, Freddy had guested for two songs at Bob’s Santa Barbara gig—the first time since he was a member of the Never-Ending Tour Band in 2004.
Michael on Freddy: “Freddy was Dylan’s best-ever lead electric guitarist (and just might be the best electric guitarist altogether since the heyday of Hubert Sumlin). Robbie Robertson was near sublime—the next best, a very close second—but Freddy was better. And in The Band all the other musicians were crucial too, whereas in Dylan’s band Freddy had to carry the whole front line. Of course you could say Mike Bloomfield was right up there, but he was, though a virtuoso, essentially more limited (Dylan had to tell him, for Like A Rolling Stone, to play ‘none of that B.B. King shit’); and G.E. Smith was terrific, but safe. You never wondered excitedly what he might do next. Whereas Freddy played by living on the edge, like Bob, fusing Django Reinhardt and Carl Perkins and playing as if it were 1957 now. He was the electric lead guitarist Dylan himself would have been, had Dylan ever bothered to master the instrument.” That line is fantastic, and spot on—“Playing as if it were 1957 now…”

Papa Nez’s Blues
To the Queen Elizabeth Hall with my mum to see her old fave, Mike Nesmith (The First & Second National Band stuff, not The Monkees, just so’s you know). I seem to be making it a point lately to see only Senior Citizens Of Rock™ but it’s just coincidental. It’s instructive to compare and contrast the approaches, however.
Leonard “Ladies’ Man” Cohen, 78, 4 years into his latest group of tours, is in fantastic voice, playing three-and-a half-hour shows with some of the finest musicians on God’s earth and playing versions of his songs that make the original tracks seem pale shadows. It is, in all senses, not just another show. It’s a summation of a life’s work.
Ian “Mott To Trot” Hunter, 73, belts out his impressive and rockin’ back catalogue with ferocious intent, fronting a hell-for-leather combo, The Rant Band. On lead guitar, Mark Bosch is a passionate and note/feel-perfect Seventies/Eighties Noo Yawk (think Leslie West or Mike Rathke) player, matching Hunter every step of the way. His tribute to Mick Ronson, Michael Picasso, is really moving, and the sense of community between him and his fans something to feel.
Mike “Papa Nez” Nesmith, 70, hasn’t played London since 1975, and makes a rather terrible decision. Sold to the audience as cutting edge technology by Nesmith, the three musicians on stage play along with pre-recorded tracks (mostly triggered by the keyboardist), which a) makes the sound terrible, all clunky Casio drums and booming sound effects, and b) forces everyone into a rather tight and metronomic way of playing—an already fairly predictable bass player becomes almost immobile, and the music has no sway or grace. This seems a real shame, as Nesmith’s use of soundscapes on tracks like Nevada Fighter, Bonaparte’s Retreat or Beyond The Blue Horizon were really innovative, especially in a country rock context. There are some beautiful songs here, from Joanne to The Grand Ennui to Rio, and Nesmith has the fine idea of setting up each song with a short piece of fiction contextualising the events that have (supposedly) led up to the song. But the bad sound, the gloopy and excessive synth string playing, the hopeless beats and Nesmith’s out of practice and strained voice leaves us feeling underwhelmed.

www.bullettmedia.com/article/music-journalism-cliches-that-need-to-be-retired-today/
Well, this brilliant broadside by Luke O’Neil makes rock journalism just that bit more difficult (but—hey—upside… potentially better!)

Not So Lucky, Lucky, Lucky
“I love all the PWL stuff slowed down, it sounds great.” says Kylie talking about The Abbey Road Sessions, where she re-records her pop hits of the eighties. I remember when the band I was part of (who NME saw as the antithesis of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s PWL stuff—Rick Astley, Kylie, Jason Donovan etc.) decided to record a slow version of Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky for a radio session. Sounded great when Mark roughed it out on piano with Heather, but someone somewhere hit the Irony Alert! button and thought better of it…

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 17th October

October 17, 2012 by 1 Comment

Rock Me, Davy!
1972, Fulham. Tony Cane Honeysett calls me over to his record player. Listen to this! he says. The 45 starts with a snarly riff, before going into a moody, groovy blues, with snappy drums and hooky fuzz guitars. The singer sounds both pop and familiar. After a few minutes I tumble. It’s David Cassidy, essaying a new, more grown-up direction, trying to move on from teen fandom to a kind of rock/blues. In May of ’72 he’ll pose nearly naked for Annie Leibovitz in Rolling Stone. This week in 2012, four of Cassidy’s albums from this period are re-released. Not sure I’ll check them out, but for old times sake (Hey, Tone!) I re-listen to Rock Me Baby, and it’s great. The Wrecking Crew rhythm section—Hal Blaine on drums and Joe Osbourne on bass—get down while Mike Melvoin (father of Wendy) prowls around the edges on piano. In the centre of the soundstage Larry Carlton and Dean Parks strut and fret, combining to brew up a nasty Southern Rock snarl. It’s just great, and I’m back in Anselm Road with Tony…

Seamus Ryan Sings ‘Liverpool Lou’
We had 12 minutes to photograph Billy Connolly in a room in a painfully Boutique Hotel™ this week. Photographer [to the stars] Seamus breaks the ice and makes a connection by revealing that he’s Dominic Behan’s godson, and Billy, famously, once decked Dominic in a bar, a fight broken up by Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners. Billy remembers the incident in detail, including the fact that he apologized the next morning to Dominic (sober throughout the whole fracas). At one point in the twelve minutes Seamus sings a few bars of Liverpool Lou, one of his godfather’s most famous songs [he also wrote The Patriot Game], very prettily. On a recent Desert Island Discs, Yoko Ono selected Liverpool Lou as one of her choices, remembering that her husband had sung it to their son as a lullaby. Oh, and Seamus delivered, as always.

Now This Sounds Intriguing…
The Coen brothers’ next film is Inside Llewyn Davis, about a struggling folk musician in the Village at the height of the 1960s folk scene. Apparently, the film’s title character is based on Dave Van Ronk. Bob Sheldon called him The Mayor of MacDougal Street [the name of Van Ronk’s autobiography, written with Elijah Wald] and everyone who went through Greenwich Village at that time seems to owe him a debt, most famously Dylan. John Goodman was interviewed in US Esquire this month by Scott Raab, and talked about it:
Raab: What are you shooting in New York?
Goodman: Inside Llewyn Davis. I’m playing a junkie jazz musician for Joel and Ethan Coen. I haven’t worked with them since O Brother, Where Art Thou?—15 years. Boy, it’s great to be back with them again. We have a real good comfort zone. I just adore being with those guys. It’s like hanging around with high school guys or something.
Raab: I’ve heard the film is based on folk singer Dave Van Ronk’s life. So it’s set in Greenwich Village in the ’60s?
Goodman: Right on the cusp of Dylan’s big explosion.
Raab: I’m probably one of the few people who’s seen Masked and Anonymous, the movie you were in with Dylan, half a dozen times. It’s such a strange movie, and it has so many moving parts. It’s a fascinating film. How was Dylan on set?
Goodman: Being around Bob was a trip. I just hung back and watched him. When the cats had downtime, they’d go somewhere and play together. And I’d listen to that. The film got a god-awful reception at Sundance. There were a lot of walkouts, but who cares? It was kind of an absurdist, futurist piece. It was fun. And I got to work with Jeff Bridges again. I got to stand next to the fabulous Penélope Cruz for a little while. That was worth the price of admission. Senorita Cruz.”

Mortification Corner
1> “Diana Krall has collaborated with Academy Award winning costume designer Colleen Atwood and acclaimed photographer Mark Seliger to create a series of beautiful and striking images for Krall’s new album, Glad Rag Doll. They are inspired by Alfred Cheney Johnston’s pictures of the girls of the Ziegfeld Follies taken during the 1920s.” Well, if you say so…
2> Pity poor Art Garfunkel as he sits on the sofa being interviewed by the One Show dolts whilst they implore the Mrs Robinson’s in their audience to text photos of themselves, preferably with toyboys. Art tried to modify the disdain in his expression, but didn’t quite succeed…

King Harvest (Has Surely Come): Hyde Park, Saturday

“Corn in the field, listen to the cars when they cross Hyde Park Corner…”

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 10th October

October 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Genius Idea Of The Week
Nick Paumgarten writes about record producer Scott Litt, New Yorker, October 1st.
When Scott Litt built a recording studio in the back of his house, in Venice, California, seven years ago, he did it with Bob Dylan in mind. He pictured Dylan sitting there at the Hammond organ, accompanied by nothing but drums and a standup bass. Or maybe in an arrangement featuring a banjo and a trumpet. “I always imagined him having a Louis Armstrong Hello, Dolly sound,” Litt said the other day. “Musically, that’s as American as it gets.” [Sadly, when Litt was hired to engineer Bob’s latest, Tempest, and] …got up the nerve to mention his idea, it didn’t go over very well. [Bob] just went, “Heh heh heh—Hello Dolly.”

This, From The Very Wonderful “Letters Of Note”
In 1919 [at which point he was just 9 years old] Samuel Barber wrote the following letter to his mother and left it on his desk for her to find. She did, and a year later Barber began to compose his first opera, The Rose Tree. He was still only 26 years of age when, in 1936, he finished his most famous work, Adagio for Strings.
“NOTICE to Mother and nobody else
Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don’t cry when you read it because it is neither yours nor my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with I was not meant to be an athlet [sic]. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure. I’ll ask you one more thing.—Don’t ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football.—Please—Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very),
Love,
Sam Barber II

Roll On, John
Stanley Reynolds’ piece for The Guardian, 3 June 1963, reprinted this week: “Inside the club, down CND symbol smeared walls to a dark and bronchial cave, the dancers have originated the Cavern Stomp, because they did not have room enough to twist. In the dressing room off stage a steady flow of rock artistes come to talk with Mr Bob Wooler, the Cavern’s full-time disc jockey whose visiting card tells you, with Dickensian charm, that he is “a rhythm and blues consultant.” That is The Cavern, duffel coats and feigned boredom. On tour it is like a Hollywood success story. At the Odeon, Manchester, in the Beatles’ dressing room, the four boys were asking a reporter from a disc magazine to please see if she could do something to stop girls from sending them jelly babies. She had once said they liked them. “We’ve got two ton of them now,” John Lennon said. “Tell them to send us E-type Jaguars or button-down shirts.” Someone came in and said two girls had won them in a contest. “Just who are these girls who won us?” John Lennon asked. “I mean, how long have they won us for.”

“Hear What I’m Saying, I’m Not Saying It Right”
Random Acts [a series of short films chosen for their bold and original expressions of creativity] Channel 4.
Comedian and poet Sean Mahoney, directed by Jeremy Cole. An age-old subject, a harrington jacket, a little bit of Mike Skinner in the delivery. Vulnerable and sharp at the same time. A talent. Lovely.

Record Cover Of The Week

Paris flea market purchase. Just listened to. As you’d expect, The Surfaris via St Malo.

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Extra! 5 Things Concerning Leonard Cohen in Paris

October 5, 2012 by 7 Comments

Public Piano, Eurostar Terminal, Friday: Hallelujah
In some kind of omen, as we walk through the train terminal, a man sits and starts playing a lovely, stately version of Len’s now-most-famous-song. As he finishes we say thanks for starting our trip off in such perfect style. He advises us to buy a lottery ticket.

Montparnasse Cemetery, Sunday: Gainsbourg
A small detour to the tombs of Man Ray, de Beauvoir and Sartre, and here, covered in metro tokens, roses, kisses and poor pencil drawings, the grave of Serge Gainsbourg.



Olympia Theatre, Sunday: A Pilgrimage
The couple sitting next to us met at a Cohen concert at Leeds University on his first tour in May 1970. And here they were, celebrating at the Paris Olympia 42 years later. And my bad photography has cropped the grey fedora—adopted, I was assured, long before Len.

Olympia Theatre, Sunday.
The Concert: In numbers
33 songs.
3 hours 40 minutes.
3 encores comprising seven songs.
9 musicians, made up of three women and six men—two singers from Kent, England, one from Los Angeles, USA, one from Montreal, Canada; one drummer from Mexico City, Mexico; one keyboardist from Florida, USA; one guitarist from Texas, USA; one bassist from New York State, USA; one violinist from Moldova; one multi-instrumental string player from Zaragoza, Spain.

The Concert: Five Great Moments
1  A brilliant performance of Everybody Knows, every verse a work of genius, every verse a still-accurate assessment of human weakness and failure. Co-written with Sharon Robinson, who later sings a glorious solo version of Alexandra Leaving.
2  A bravura moment at the last verse of The Future where Leonard sings the “There’ll be fires on the road/and the white man dancing,” and bassist Roscoe Beck does a stately piroutte, which is followed by LC singing “And all the lousy little poets/coming round/tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson/and the white girls dancing,” whereupon the Webb Sisters turn away from their mikes, take one step back and, synchronised, do perfect cartwheels…
3  Leonard soloing on a Jew’s Harp, that most American of instruments on the hoedown breaks of Closing Time, one of two songs (Heart With No Companion being the other) where he sounds uncannily like Tom T. Hall, only deeper. Also, Take This Waltz in a Weimar-ish arrangement, has a hint of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Honest.
4  Night Comes On. I hadn’t dared to hope that I’d hear Leonard sing my favourite song. And sing it he does, causing some spontaneous tears in the audience, its mournful and beautiful melody letting the words cascade in their stoic and weary way, on the cushion of warmth the band create.
5  I remember catching a version of Who By Fire in the late 80s in a hotel room in LA by chance. It was on Night Music, a show hosted by David Sanborn, with Hal Willner and Jools Holland involved—like a precursor to Later. Sonny Rollins joined Leonard, and played an unaccompanied intro that tore the roof off before the band (including half of Was Not Was and Robben Ford) came in. Tonight, Javier Mas was the star turn, a masterclass in flamenco, playing the bandurria like a man possessed, the elastic strings rolling and tumbling to a frenzied crescendo…

The Concert: Some Observations
You have to make your peace with the fact that a certain amount of drama is missed by muting the drums quite this much. The sound is perfect and balanced, intentionally allowing every word to ring clearly through. To make up for the lack of beat, Larson’s churchy Hammond B3, Alex Bublitchi’s muscular violin and Javier’s Mas’s extraordinary Laud provide thrilling dynamics. Mitch Watkins on guitar (after eleven years in Lyle Lovett’s Large Band) provides structure, architecture and blues—his moaning slur at the end of a Wes Montgomery-like solo on Amen the coup de grâce.

The older-type singer (the ones who aren’t Mick Jagger, anyway) are very fond of the prizefighter pose. Len takes this even further than the bob-and-weave and sings at least half the set on his knees on the patterned rugs that cover the stage, James Brown-style. It also emphasised the supplicant nature of many of the songs: to God, to Poetry, to lust, love, the musicians and to the audience, who he always addresses as “Friends.” His ability to get back up from his knees with grace is very impressive.

The only singer with a deeper voice than Len is Barry White. Fact.

1976: The First Time I Saw Leonard
Was on the south coast of England in 1976. A friend of my mother’s was managing the hotel where Leonard and his musicians were staying and had tickets. I didn’t really know much about his music then—but this was World Music before it had a name, with the flamenco melodies, the gypsy violin and the Moorish oud. Backstage for a meet and greet, we were struck dumb. The next morning, having breakfast at the next table, we were even more tongue-tied.

Leonard, Hand In Pocket, photograph by Michelle Clement.
Filed Under: Extra! Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 3rd October

October 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine, Rolling Stone Magazine
“Paul Ryan claims that he likes Rage’s sound but not the lyrics. Well, I don’t care for Paul Ryan’s sound or his lyrics… Basically, the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s grovelling in front of for campaign contributions. You see, the super-rich must rationalize having more than they could ever spend, while millions of children in the US go to bed hungry every night.” Excellent Raging against The Republican Machine in a magazine that veers worryingly between Tiger Beat-style fawning over popstrels and top-notch political reportage and comment. Read Matt Taibbi on Mitt Romney. Read it and weep.

Rolling Stone Gathers Some Grapes

Excuse my French, but HFL is this? Very lame, I think…

Homeland Trailers, Channel 4
The first one is filled to the brim with all the creeping paranoia of the series, as an childrens’ choir sings the Star Spangled Banner, before clattering drumming (military? Middle Eastern?) drowns it out in a series of shots of the characters all at different places, screaming… The second, using Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin’s God’s Gonna Cut You Down is even better, and is mostly about Claire Danes’ eyes… “Go tell that long-tongue liar/Go and tell that midnight ride/Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter/Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down/Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down.” Of course, the only question is: Whose God?

More Duquesne On This Blog, Oh!
In Paris to see Leonard Cohen (there’ll be a Five Things extra later in the week, folks!) I found this keyring in Vanves’ antiques market. Is there a pun on de Cane [sugar] here?

Hound Dog Taylor Poster, aupassage Restaurant

I’ve been listening to Hound Dog Taylor lately and who should I find on the walls of an artfully lo-fi restaurant but the man himself, complete with great quote: “He couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good!” I should point out that these were his own words, prefaced with “When I die, they’ll say…”

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Five Things I Saw & Heard This Week: Wednesday 26th September

September 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Then, Our Next Fixture Is Jethro Tull of Wiesbaden…
Montpellier boss Rene Girard has lashed out at the fixture schedule as his side continue to stutter in their title defence. Girard’s team have struggled in the early part of the season, while big-spending Paris Saint-Germain appear to be finding top gear. Girard was angered that his side had to play Arsenal in the Champions League on Tuesday evening and then face Saint Etienne just a couple of days later on Friday, where they managed to scrape a 1-1 draw. “I am not paranoid. I simply say that it’s a question of fairness. We played Arsenal, one of the best sides in Europe; we did not play Pink Floyd of Kiev,” Girard said scathingly. (I’m guessing that this is an amusing reference to Young Boys of Bern, who recently played Liverpool in the Europa league).

Stephen Collins vs Mumford & Sons. The Man’s A Genius!

Muse, Later, 25th September
Playing Madness, reigned in and close to the chest, they sounded for all the world like the house band in a bar in a Philip K Dick novel, with disco overtones. A Triumph!

Van The Man Sat-Nav: A Step Closer
My friend Steve phones up one evening, the sound of jazz behind him, as he leaves a message on the ansaphone: “Hi Martin, it’s Steve, I’m playing Van live and I just sort of realised the way to do the SatNav is to just play it and let me do it live… not that I can sing like him but you can do it if you’re listening to him, cos stuff occurs. But if you’re sitting there cold with a blank piece of paper you can’t do it. You realise when you’re listening to the tracks, like Tupelo Honey—“Well you can take the A45 or whatever…” and you can do it to the tune so it’s real. That’s the way we’ll do it, alright, Cheers!” So I download the set of instructions from the TomTom site and all I have to do is record Steve and figure out how to save the commands as OGG Vorbis files [what!?!] More anon…

I Saw The Splendor Of The Moonlight, On Honolulu Bay
We had a uke moment, in 1968, with the great Richard Perry-produced God Bless Tiny Tim album, then again in ’72 on Arlo Guthrie’s wonderful Hobo’s Lullaby. There were few sightings until Evan Hurd (great photographer!) gave us Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and his extraordinary “OK, this one’s for Gabby*” version of Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World in the early nineties. But now we have The Ukulele Orchestra Of Great Britain for all our ukelele requirements, busting their way through Ennio Morricone, Handel and Lady Gaga in a smorgasbord of styles and genres. At the Albert Hall on Friday they revisited the site of their Proms triumph of last year. Showing someone who’d never heard of them a clip on YouTube I was thrilled to catch Lloyd and I strumming Beethoven’s Ode To Joy along with 1,006 other ukes…

*That’s Gabby Pahinui, whose slack key guitar playing so inspired Ry Cooder that he went to Hawaii to make a record with him. He features heavily on Chicken Skin Music.

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , ,
«Previous Page
Next Page»