Friday, September 9th

September 9, 2016 by 2 Comments

louisstewart.jpg
ONE RIP LOUIS STEWART
Sweet-toned Irish jazz guitarist, and a kind and gentle man, at whose feet I sat a few times in the late 70s. It was usually at the Jazz Centre Society in Covent Garden, as I attempted to figure out how a camera worked. Nikkormat FT-N, 35mm lens, Tri-x pushed to 1600 ASA.

TWO THAT MAN BISCHOFF AGAIN
The most fascinating figure in the recent Bowie Prom for me was the arranger and bassist Jherek Bischoff, and in investigating his oeuvre, I discovered a couple of interesting things. His 2012 release, Composed, featuring nine orchestral pieces, with different vocalists, was first written on a ukulele. “This record was recorded with one microphone, an Mbox and a laptop. I recorded each individual musician of the ‘orchestra’ in their very own living rooms. I then layered each instrument (sometimes one violinist playing one part twenty times for instance) until it was the size of a huge orchestra. I spent the summer bike riding from house to house recording each musician.”

Now, that’s an interesting approach. Pitchfork wrote that listening to the album whilst being aware of the process “is like imagining someone filling an Olympic-sized pool with an eye dropper: the mind balks, both at the enormity of the undertaking and at the disposition of the person behind it.”

For his next one, he almost did that: “Bischoff began recording the album Cistern in an empty two million gallon underground water tank under Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington. The size of the space was a huge factor in the development of the album. In an interview Bischoff described how “the vast emptiness of the cistern generates a reverb decay that lasts 45 seconds. That means, if you snap your fingers, the sound lasts 45 seconds. That amount of reverberation is an absolutely wild environment to try to create music in.” He was bought up on a sailboat, which sort of explains the ukelele…

Oh, and he played a very gorgeous bass guitar at the Proms, a kind of glammed-up version of McCartney’s Hofner violin bass. He also played chords on it at various points, a sound I love. Hear his arrangement of “Ashes to Ashes” in the music player on the right.

THREE ANOTHER GREAT DAY IN HARLEM
Bob G sends me a link to this fascinating interactive piece in the Daily News, which shows just how many backgrounds and genres within Jazz that extraordinary amalgamation contained. Click on any musician to hear a performance clip. Hats off to Art Director/Photographer Art Kane.

FOUR JONNY TRUNK’S FRIDAY 50p MAILER IS ALWAYS FUN…
“Also this week I got sent this ace film about The Mellotron by someone on the mailing list. It’s great and stars Richard Nixon, who used to have a magic show on the TV – his able assistant at the time was the divine Anita Harris, who possibly still opens the Barnes Jumble Sale twice a year. Let’s hope she does…” The clip is terrific, until David Nixon – not Richard, sadly, as the Richard Nixon Magic Show has a great ring about it, especially as his nickname was ‘Tricky Dick’ – actually plays. Obviously none of the members of King Crimson or the Moody Blues actually saw this Pathe demonstration or they would never have bought Mellotrons in the first place. There’s a fascinating shot of the tape loops inside the cabinet, followed by a professional pianist playing, who is actually worse than David Nixon.

FIVE RIP PRINCE BUSTER
Richard Williams wrote a very nice piece on thebluemoment about the Prince – and just check out the bassline on this baby…

If you’re receiving the e-mailout, please click on the Date Headline of the page for the full 5 Things experience. It will bring you to the site (which allows you to see the Music Player) and all the links will open in another tab or window in your browser.

 

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

Tuesday, May 10th

May 10, 2016 by 4 Comments

AL GREEN NITE!
A chance stumbling across a Bee Gees concert the other night while my mother was staying with us led to an across-the-board agreement that the Bros Gibb wrote some crackers, which then led on to an Al Green YouTube-athon, Al being one of my mother’s favourite singers. I said “You have to see this!” and lined up Al in 1973 doing the Robin and Barry Gibb classic “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” (which I have previously mentioned here). That led on to many delights, but it was the Soul Train version of “Take Me to the River” that took the biscuit. With a horn intro that I’d swear was sampled by Gil Scott Heron for “B Movie”, the drummer starts working a storm up behind Al. Al whips his arm around in the air like he’s lassoing the band to join him in the river itself. The drummer holds back his fills ’til the last moment each time around. He’s playing a space age kit with bowl drums – I’ve never seen one like it before. Once you’ve spotted Homer Simpson’s face in those bowls, it’s hard not to keep seeing it. Make sure to play this loud – as Don Cornelius says at the end, it’s a Stone Gas…

CRAFT BEER LABELS REALLY PUSHING WORDPLAY TO NEW LEVEL
Peter, Pale and Mary, anyone?

!beer

A BONUS OF OCCASIONAL LECTURING…
…is that, apart from spending a day with a really nice engaged group of people, you get a poster done for your visit, and in the case of working at Southampton for Chris Arran and Jonny Hanmsotonnah, a hand-crafted CD (Songs from the Mermaid Café , in association with Trunk Records, to tie in with Jonny’s exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park).It has now accompanied me on a few trips and is a fluid mixture of things known and unknown. We’ve long thrilled to the calypso stylings of Robert Mitchum, but were not au fait with Pinky Winters, whose “Cool Sazerac” is a highlight. My favourite track is not the title music to Kes, or even the beat-driven “Comin’ Home Baby”, by The Velvet Fog, Mr Mel Tormé, apparently a Northern Soul classic, and totally terrific. No, it’s the beautiful “Melodie Pour Les Radio Taxis”, played by Barney Wilen, Kenny Clarke, Kenny Dorham, Paul Rovere and Duke Jordan, from the soundtrack to Un Témoin Dans La Ville – totally unknown to me, but found by Jonny in the Trunk Record archives. Hear it in the music player to the right…
From a site devoted to Wilen: “The main character of his playing continues to lie in his even trajectory. His solos have a serene assurance which eschews dynamic shifts in favor of a single flowing line. With his tone still exceptionally bright and refined, it grants his playing a rare, persuasive power.”
And Jonny’s own liner notes are a treat: “The trunk itself has more than a touch of the Tardis about it. Once you open the lid, you soon find yourself diving in headlong, ’til only your loafers are seen popping out. And once the rummaging begins, there’s no possible way to stop. And why would you want to? This particular record shop, above us in the great internet wen, is far more interesting than anything you’ll find on most high streets…”

AN EXCERPT FROM TOM JONES’ “OVER THE TOP AND BACK”
Dip into Tom’s book anywhere and you’ll be rewarded with a pithy take on his career at that point…
“And then an opportunity opens up for me to become a recording artist at the home of the world’s most notorious gangsta rap label… Tom Jones at Interscope. It couldn’t seem less likely. Of all the records companies in all the world, at this point in time. So suddenly my world is now Jimmy Iovine’s phonebook And Jimmy Iovone’s phone book is not short of numbers. Furthermore, during the making of the album we happily sign up for, he seems ready to use every single one of them…
Teddy Riley from the Backstreet Boys, the king of new jack swing, gets asked to produce some tracks. So does Jeff Lynne. So does Trevor Horn. So does Flood, who has worked with U2 and Nine Inch Nails. So does Youth, the techno and dub producer. So, for all I know, do any number of other people who aren’t too fussy about having a surname in 1994.
As the album comes together, Jimmy gets in touch. ‘I’ve been listening to everything , and it’s great,’ he says. ‘But I’m just trying to think of the track my mother is going to like.’ Seriously? Even now, at Interscope, with lethal rap acts down the hall and armed guards on the door, with money flying around to bring in the hippest producers and writers known to man, we’re still wondering how to please Jimmy Iovine’s mother?
Nothing against Jimmy Iovine’s mother, obviously.”
It’s a cracking read, poor proofreading notwithstanding (Porter Wagner? Shell Talmay?). And the CD that was released to tie in with the publication, Long Lost Suitcase, is a nice evocation of 50s music of all stripes, with one standout track – a version of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ “Elvis Presley Blues”. It was a strong song when it appeared on Time (The Revelator), but here it’s given depth by an arrangement brilliant in its simplicity – the only backing is producer Ethan Johns’ guitar over-amped and tremolo’d to the point of feedback, throbbing from left to right in the speakers, providing a bluesy plaincloth for Jones to sing over, just the right amount of unpolished. And Tom has something to give the song; after all, he knew Presley as peer and friend, and the lyric stares him in the face – “I was thinking that night about Elvis / Day that he died, day that he died/ He was all alone in a long decline…”

WHAT DID YOU DO AT WORK TODAY, DARLING…
“Well, I played my clarinet, I mean I held my clarinet, through two holes, um, in a sound stage and lifted it, you know, miming, when the clarinet section played… no, I couldn’t play it, it was just my arms through the stage, I had no way of blowing, just my arms, I couldn’t see anything, the floorboards were very close to my nose…”

Marc Myers at JazzWax posts this incredibly weird clip: Ann Miller, tap dancing like a champion,while a disembodied orchestra plays…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, and in a non-music-related way, this, by Charles Pierce for US Esquire, is worth reading…

 

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

Friday, 25th September

September 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment

bobedge

VISUAL OF THE WEEK
This may be some form of Holy Grail. I tried working out how long this would take to listen to – I’m not even sure I’ve heard all of the 6CD Basement Tapes yet – and came up with 32 hours (379 times an average of 5 minutes per track (obviously some are uncompleted takes, but some will run longer and there’ll be lots of chat). I’ve put something on the music player on the right that will be included – an outtake/alternate version of “I’ll Keep it with Mine (or, Bank Account Blues)”.

Excerpts from a few things that I liked recently but forgot, or only just got round to reading

SHOUT-OUT TO THE DRUMMER’S MUM
Charlotte Church writing in The Guardian: “But, in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus against it, how can anybody possibly think that drilling in the Arctic is OK? There have already been many, much more scholarly and informed articles and books written on the subject than I could offer, such as Rick Steiner’s essay on Arctic drilling, Terry Macalister’s book Polar Opposites: Opportunities and Threats in the Arctic; and Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and Annie Leonard, published in June. I wouldn’t have read any of them had I not been approached by my drummer’s mum, who spoke to me extensively in my kitchen about the (at that point) intended drilling plans, and encouraged me to sign the Arctic Declaration. I implore you all to go speak to your own drummer’s mum.”

KEITH RICHARDS INTERVIEWED BY SCOTT RAAB, US ESQUIRE:
Do you know that José 
Feliciano lives in the same town as you in Connecticut?
“I do know that, but I’ve never met him. We’ve never crossed paths, even though Weston is a very small town – there’s a gas station and a market.
So you’re actually the 
second-best guitarist in Weston, Connecticut.
“I’d go for that. He’s a far better guitar player than me.”
I don’t think so.
“No – I mean technically, classically. I ain’t trained that way. I force the thing to do as it’s told.
I don’t know much beyond the sounds I hear.
“Thank God, nor do I. The technical aspects – my horror is doing interviews with Guitar Magazine or something. I’ve got my favorite axes that I 
do know quite a bit about, 
but when they start to go, “Is that the Gibson S3?” – I don’t fucking know. It works all right for me.”

Listening to Crosseyed Heart, Keith’s new album, I’m struck by the youthfulness of his voice, and the fact that, in places, he sounds like Mark Knopfler. Hell, in places it even sounds like a Dire Straits record…

SUBSCRIPTION ADVICE
Tune in to Joe Boyd’s A-Z. He’s up to F! The first [A] is partly about Andy Razaf, lyricist on “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You”, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose”, the second [B] about Rastafarians in Jamaica and the birth of Reggae. Toots & The Maytals song “Bam Bam” is the B of the A-Z. “Those trombone parts were overdubbed by Rico Rodriguez, a great Rasta trombone player. Toots had no written arrangements, he would just go into the studio and hum a melody line in Rico’s ear, and Rico would try and follow it. When he got one line done, Toots would them hum a harmony, and once they’d got that done, we’d move on to the next bar. It was a very, very slow process – they went in the studio about nine, and emerged about four in the morning with blood trickling down Rico’s chin from his split lip. But he was grinning…”

That’s as far as I’ve got, but they are highly recommended for information illumination par excellence.

ONE MORE PIECE OF FILM (FOR THE ROAD)
Watch this staggering film. I was sent there by Jonny Trunk in his always amusing 50p Friday emails: “I managed to license some very good music this week by the amazing Ernest Berk. He was a ballet dancer, teacher and modern creative thinker who turned to avant-garde composing for his own ballets. All I can say is wow. And then wow again. I came across him a few years ago and it’s taken me years to track down some music and actually license it. To give you a flavour of what lies ahead here is one of his scores, made for David Gladwell’s 1964 An Unitled Film for the BFI. Hold tight. I suggest you do not look if you are a vegetarian. [Ed’s note… Type lovers, check out the titles, where more prominence is given to the words FOR THE than either the filmaker or the BFI. David Gladwell, best known as an editor (Lindsay Anderson’s If… and O Lucky Man!) filmed this short at 200 fps. As the BFI says, “it depicts a series of pastoral scenes from a British farm, edited together to produce a suggestion of violence in contrast to its visual beauty”].

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

Friday, 12th June

June 12, 2015 by 1 Comment

VISUAL OF THE WEEK: BIRD TRAMWAY
It seems to be film week here at Five Things. Calum posts on his blog likeahammerinthesink about a film he made on his phone… “as I crossed between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island on the tramway. Then I re-shot the film through a mirrored box that I found one night on the King’s Road in Chelsea. I looked for songs that were exactly the same length as the footage (4’46”) and tried out various combinations. The juxtaposition of “No One is Lost” by Stars (a kind of disco-rock crossover number) with a kaleidoscopic view of New York, the Williamsburg Bridge and the East River worked…”

Calum

He’s then asked to take it down for copyright reasons by Vimeo, so he records caged birds in Tooting’s covered market and uses that as the soundtrack instead. However, should you want, you can start his film on Vimeo at the same time as starting the Stars song on YouTube, and enjoy it as its creator intended, the mirrored box making the images come kaleidoscopically alive.

It took me back to a time when, as students at Chelsea we found tins of 16mm offcuts outside a Wardour Street editing suite and cut them randomly together, playing it back with a soundtrack of equally random records. There are always moments where the sound and picture line up to make something so right that it seems planned. That happens here as the cars emerge out of the ground to perfectly-timed synth throbs, and the struts of the bridge arrive on screen at the same time as the drums recede…

SOMETHING I LEARNED 1
That, having brilliantly embodied MLK in Selma, David Oyelowo is playing Nina Simone’s personal assistant in the troubled biopic, Nina – hey, what other kind of biopic is there? With social media as it stands you can inflame a lot of people, a lot of the time, often over nothing, or nothing that most of them know about. Nina is played by American/Domenican actress Zoe Saldana (whose husband, Marco Perego, took her surname when they got married). “I didn’t think I was right for the part, and I know a lot of people will agree, but then again, I don’t think Elizabeth Taylor was right for Cleopatra either. An artist is colorless, genderless… It’s more complex than just ‘Oh, you chose the Halle Berry look-alike to play a dark, strikingly beautiful, iconic black woman.’ The truth is, they chose an artist who was willing to sacrifice herself. We needed to tell her story because she deserves it.”

SOMETHING I LEARNED 2
That there’s also a new Nina documentary premiering on Netflix on June 24, What Happened, Miss Simone?, directed by Liz Garbus. She made the brilliant Love, Marilyn. She also made the excellent Bobby Fisher Against The World – her titles are always good, as is her production company’s name, Moxie Firecracker. [As an aside, her favorite songs are “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan, “Black Coffee in Bed” by Squeeze, and “Mesmerizing” by Liz Phair].

Her father is the legendary civil rights attorney, Martin Garbus, who represented Daniel Ellsberg and Lenny Bruce among countless others. His book, Tough Talk: How I Fought for Writers, Comics, Bigots, and the American Way sounds a must-read.

Liz Garbus grew up knowing Simone, and the film looks a cracker… Variety’s Scott Foundas: “Garbus limits the third-party talking heads to Simone’s close friends and collaborators (including her longtime guitarist and musical director Al Shackman), but smartly resists turning the movie into a pageant of present-day testimonials about the singer’s influence and legacy. Mostly, she just lets Simone take the stage, reasoning that the best way to understand her is through her songs – performances in which Simone seems to be pouring out every ounce of herself, the music flowing through her like an electric current, her voice echoing forth as if from some place deep inside the earth”. Watch the trailer here.

O, DEATH
Jonny Trunk, Trunk Records: “And let’s all hope today is better than yesterday, with three extraordinary deaths all in row – of people who have certainly shaped my life in one way or another: Christopher Lee, Ron Moody and Ornette Coleman. I remember getting phone calls from Mr Lee when I first issued The Wicker Man. He used to phone up on a regular basis and sing “Tinker Of Rye” down the phone. One day, he phoned and I wasn’t in – these were pre-mobile days. My flat mate answered the phone and told him I was out. He asked, “are you Christopher Lee by any chance?”. “Why, yes”, came the reply – “how did you know it was me?”. Well I recognised your voice Mr Lee, from all those classic horror films you made”. “Horror!”, shouted Mr Lee – “I don’t do horror!” and slammed down the phone. He will be sorely missed, certainly around central London where he used to spook about the place, signing anything he was involved with (posters, soundtracks, you name it). There was (to me) another classic Christopher Lee moment, when he put some of his possessions into a James Bond sale at Christies in the 1990s. He put in a pair of his white Scaramanga loafers – both signed inside in black pen of course. Trouble was, he’d put in two left shoes. Brilliant.

As for Ron Moody, there will be his odd and only LP up for 50p next week, and I will be playing Coleman’s Chappaqua Suite, made for Conran Rook’s Chappaqua film but [judged] “too beautiful to use” on tomorrow’s OST Show.” Watch this mashed-up trailer made for it recently (not using Coleman’s score, but extraordinary nonetheless.

AND ON THE PLAYLIST THIS WEEK…
Various mentions of Mary Margaret O’Hara this week also synchronise with me finding a Canadian musicians’ tribute album to The Band, presented by Garth Hudson (who plays on every track). It came out in 2010 and, I guess like biopics, there’s good and there’s bad. As usual, those who cleave too closely fail, and those who dive in with both feet win. I think this is the best track by far, a forgotten song that was tacked onto the Last Waltz album, a song which pointed ahead to the style that Robbie Robertson would adopt for his first solo album, a glassy atmosphere of synths and chiming guitars. Robbie’s singing had vastly improved from “To Kingdom Come” on Music from Big Pink, but I think MM O’H has more to give the song or – it may be more accurate to say – to drag out of it.

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

Wednesday, 17 December

December 18, 2014 by 5 Comments

A ‘Five Things’ film recommendation
I notice that Whiplash is coming out early in the New Year. I saw it at the London Film Festival, and thought it was a terrific addition to a small genre: the struggling musician film. It’s really difficult to make fictional music films. As John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote of Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis, “It’s easy to find actors who can play and sing, and it’s easy to find musicians who believe they can act, but to find someone who can do both at the level needed, and at the same time, is rare… the problem with putting live performance in a narrative movie, the reason nobody does it, is you can’t splice the film together later; if the tempo is even a hair off between takes, the flow is ruined.” Issac was like a metronome, according to T Bone Burnette, who “sat off camera with a stopwatch, timing his individual measures.” What also makes Whiplash work is its twist on the “inspirational teacher movie”: As its young director, Damien Chazelle, says, “it’s structured like any inspirational teacher movie is structured, except my teacher is an asshole.”

Joe Keohane, in American Esquire captured it well: “The gist: Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) is a first-year student at the top conservatory in New York. He’s a promising jazz drummer, but no one seems to notice. Legendary music teacher Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) takes the kid under his wing, and sure enough, over time, whole worlds of potential are revealed. Ah, the magic of great teaching! Thing is, Fletcher isn’t a great teacher in the way, say, Robin Williams was in Dead Poets Society. He’s more of a sadistic monster, a bulging forehead vein of a man who believes there are no two more harmful words than good job. He screams at his students, pits them against one another, and pushes them until they cry and bleed… Sure, it might sound like something Ayn Rand wrote with Gordon Ramsay and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, but thankfully Whiplash resists any easy conclusions. It just looks at greatness, the seductive power of it, the collateral damage done in its pursuit, and asks, again and again: Is it worth it? You watch the drumming and you look at the human wreckage trailing in its wake, and it doesn’t look good, frankly. But then you watch more of that drumming, the stray beads of sweat on the ride and the blood on the snare, riot straining against rhythm, the whole of it capturing something elemental and profound, and you think, in spite of yourself, It is.”

“The American jazz musician who saved my life”
Hidden away in Family (for the most part, a fairly ghastly section of the Saturday Guardian), this astonishing tale. It’s introduced thus: “Aged 21, Francois Grosjean’s father introduced him to a dinner guest one night, with a cryptic remark. They never met again but 45 years later, he discovered that this old friend of his parents had been pivotal to his existence.” He is looking through a short autobiography his mother wrote: “As I was reading about her pregnancy, I came across a few sentences that startled me, and that I had to read twice. My mother had written, “One day (my husband) brought home to dinner an American soldier, Jimmy Davis, a musician. He had just finished writing a song called “Lover Man” which became a big success. He persuaded me that it was wrong to abort. With his help, I decided to keep the baby.” It starts his search to find out more about Jimmy Davis…

Bob. An Audience of one. Totally Bonkers: “Will he experience the complete euphoria?”
Gabe alerts me to this, in which a Swedish company asks (with a little help from Google Translate) this: “Do we have more fun together with others? In Experiment Alone gambling company Paf investigates the role of community to human enjoyment and well-being. After five experiments and with more than 700,000 viewers, We Have Reached now the Grand Finale. One of Sweden’s, perhaps even the world’s, biggest Bob Dylan fans Is About To See his idol performances at an arena gig – all alone. How Will Frederick Find the experiment? Will he experience the complete euphoria or Will a feeling of emptiness come creeping It When there is no one to share the experience with?” Hear Bob and Band play Buddy Holly’s “Heartbeat” to an almost empty theatre, and the sound of one man clapping. Then hear Bob do a truly weird, deconstructed, voodoo version of “Blueberry Hill” that sounds like a bad New Orleans dream…

Jonny Trunk’s demented ordering instructions for his release of rare Brazilian album “Tam…Tam…Tam…!”
“Yes, I’d not heard of it either until August this year, which is why the LP is quite unexpected. Originally it was released in 1958 (in Brazil), and is a recording made relating to a musical extravaganza called “Braziliana” that toured the world in the 1950s. The music is a potent mix of hypnotic tribal chants, rhythms and extraordinary melodies – it sounds like no other album I can think of… The more you listen to Tam…Tam…Tam…! the more of the future you hear. To Order:
1) First decide what you version you would like.
2) Find yourself the correct note(s) – £5, £10. £20 etc.
3) Find yourself a piece of paper, upon which you must write i) your name, ii) your address, and iii) what format(s) you would like.
4) At the bottom of the paper draw something to do with Brazil or Brazilians. And yes, I know what you are thinking. Your drawing could be as good or as bad as you like. A simple football will suffice.
5) Finally wrap your money up in the paper, put it in an envelope and send it.

Image Of The Week: Gods Own Junkyard
At Lights of Soho, Brewer Street, the great creations of Neon Man, Chris Bracey…

Neon

 

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

Five Things, Wednesday 10th September

September 10, 2014 by 2 Comments

Jonny Trunk’s newsletter, always amusing.
“Hello, I hope you are well. I am back from a mammoth tour of England. Nine counties. In fact I lost county. Also, 50p Friday can now begin again, and today we have a musical treat by Edmundo Ros – his cover versions of the classics from The Sound Of Music. This was before the film was made so there are cues you may not be aware of. It’s a charming and quite excellent album, with a killer version of “My Favourite Things”. It’s slightly exotic, slightly classical, very jazzy and most entertaining. It’s the first Friday of the month, which means it’s Spitalfield Record Fayre day (punches air with fist). Which also means I can go and buy a load of vinyl that I don’t really need and add it to the pile of other vinyl I bought last time that I don’t really need. Thanks for listening, Jonny” Eds Note: If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this thing.

Folk Art, Let’s Dance!
At Tate Britain, the Folk Art exhibition. Not sure about the curation – it was a confused affair, with far too many paintings that were just outsider or naive, rather than folk – but it had two fantastic objects made from mutton bones by Napoleonic prisoners of war. A beautifully-wrought cockerel (that was used on some posters for the show) and this violin.

Violin

Blue Ruin
Great murder/revenge tale, almost tragically ordinary and low-key, helped by an eerie soundscape – songs heard through car stereos or barroom walls alternating with a series of low tones and throbs, courtesy of Brooke and Will Blair. Partly funded through Kickstarter, where director Jeremy Saulnier’s pitch was, “It’s like plucking a character from a Hal Ashby film and tossing them into No Country for Old Men. Or if Wendy and Lucy got caught in the crossfire of Taxi Driver.” There’s also a lovely recurring use of Little Willie John singing “No Regrets” by the great Otis Blackwell, its rough edges and slight hysteria perfectly mirroring the events in the film. Look out for a terrific performance by Devin Ratray as an old high school buddy of the protagonist, Dwight (played by an equally good Macon Blair).

A low point in Graphic Design
Iggy Azalea’s album comes complete with the interesting blond-on-blonde treatment of lyrics and credits. And the most godawful choice of fonts – Broadway & Brush Script & some featureless sub-Helvetica – that I’m pretty sure are not being used ironically…

Izzy

Can you be more than ubiquitous?
Last refuge of the restless artistic soul – the perfume.

Girl

Extra! Claves to the fore!
Oh, and Jonny was right, “My Favourite Things” is fantastic. In fact the whole album (no song over 2:49, it’s done and dusted in 29 minutes) is joyful. I mean, who can resist “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” as a light samba featuring a harp as lead instrument? On second thoughts, don’t answer that.

Filed Under: Weekly Roundup Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
%d bloggers like this: