Friday, June 2nd

June 2, 2017 by 3 Comments

A visually-driven 5 Things this week…

ONE FOUND ON THE BOOKSHELF
I found this the other day (while attempting to lay my hands on a Raymond Chandler book that I’m convinced I own but can’t find). I bought it a few years ago, mostly for the cover, and it cost £5 (it’s a 1963 third reprint, with pages 82-96 bound in upside down). It’s a good knockabout read, and it occurs to me that it could easily be updated with a little Photoshop work. Hell, the Russian guard even looks like Vlad…

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“During the charity golf tournament, I was just addressing the ball to tee off the first hole, when suddenly all hell broke loose. A wild cacophony of sounds fractured the air like the testing area of a bagpipe factory. For a moment I thought Spike Jones had parachuted in. Then I saw where all this was coming from. A ragged group of tall, bearded, white-turbanned Berbers were standing at the edge of the green. As the noise they produced from thin clarinet-like pipes and twelve-foot horns beat through my skull, I got a glimmer of what was going on. They were brother Jack’s newest ‘discoveries’ and they were ‘audiotioning’. I’d never heard anything like the Riff (sic) Mountain Boys, and I was sure no-one else had either, so later I had them on my television show… their music blew out tubes in sets all over America. I’ll never forget them. Whenever I drive by the plush headquarters of the musicians’ union in Hollywood, I think of those tall, bearded tribesmen and their weird instruments. If there’s any music on the moon, it probably sounds like the stuff the Riff Mountain Boys turn out.”

TWO FOUND AT CHRISTIES
Among the Enigma Ciphers, a working Apple-1 (originally priced at $666.66, current estimate, $300,000 – $500,000), and a letter from Charlie Parker appealing a union fine of $350 levied after his resignation from the American Federation of Musicians, the “Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts Including Americana” auction on June 15 has this example of an early Excel spreadsheet: a newly discovered preliminary plan for the festival at Woodstock.

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“A testament to the moving target that was the Woodstock festival during its planning stages, it appears to have been intended to run from Wednesday 13 August to Wednesday 20 August 1969. The plan lists each day horizontally, and each row is divided into smaller, but unspecified time intervals (perhaps 10 minutes per slot?). Only the prime nights (Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) were scheduled, and many of several of the planned acts, including Joan Baez, The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane and The Who, were scheduled to play four nights in a row. Jean Val Ernst, a staff member of Woodstock Ventures discovered the chart in a trailer behind the stage after the conclusion of the festival.” I liked this note on the listing: “accomplished in various color markers and pencil”.

THREE FOUND AT PHOTO LONDON
I could feel myself falling out of love with photography as I walked around Photo London. Too much of the work felt plastic and unmoored. The vintage photojournalism is great (but we all knew that) and there was a considerable amount that had been done better before. The artier end of stuff is foundation level and the transgressive stuff unengaging and yawny. In music-related finds, Taschen had the handsome Dan Kramer book on Bob, there was a nice shot of John Cale in front of Warhol’s Double Elvis, and Brian May was on hand to give you his favourites from the whole show.

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Two good things: NYTimes Pic Ed Kathy Ryan’s talk with young Jack Davison was great, as was David Hurn’s Swaps, a neat exhibit curated by Martin Parr, with Hurn, that put the pictures Hurn had swapped with other photographers – over sixty years – next to those they’d given him in return.

FOUR SPEAKING OF PHOTOGRAPHY…
I came across this cover for Bill Evans & Jim Hall’s Undercurrent album, which I had never seen, shot by a photographer I didn’t know. Whatever, it’s beautiful and seems to have been released at various points with no type at all.

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It’s by Toni Frissell, and was shot at Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida, in 1947. Fast fact: When she grew tired of fashion photography for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, she was hired as the first woman on the staff of Sports Illustrated in 1953.

FIVE THE STANLEY BOOK OF FURNITURE
Found at my father-in-law’s. Where Dad has his cool new sterogram, and the teen bedroom has an, I’d guess, Italian-made electric guitar in the wardrobe. Well done the art director, for flipping the picture

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EXTRA A PLUG FOR PATRICK…
Patrick Humphreys’ emails… “Just to let you know that the programme I have been developing for years will be broadcast on Saturday 3 June at 10.30am. Howzat For Hollywood tells the intriguing and little-known story of the Hollywood Cricket Club. Just imagine, Errol Flynn at Silly Mid-Off… David Niven, 12 Not Out and Boris Karloff as wicket keeper… Jim Carter, taking time off from butler duties at Downton Abbey, presents the half-hour documentary.”

EXTRA TWO FIVE THINGS IS CURRENTLY ENJOYING…
Two albums that tangentially look back to Laurel Canyon, while feeling absolutely now. Laura Marling’s exceptional Semper Femina has great singing, fine songs, and an intriguing Blake Mills’ production. It’s an album that, as they used to say, repays careful listening. Check “Wild Fire”, “Nothing, Not Nearly” (with its one-chord, one-minute guitar solo) and especially “Soothing”, with its gorgeous dual bass part. Interestingly, I can’t find out who actually plays on the record. So few reviews even concern themselves with anything but the lyrics, which seems to miss at least 50% of what the album’s about, but is still typical of how music is approached by the press.

And Josh Tillman as Father John Misty (on Pure Comedy) is strange as strange can be but successful on its own terms – I just don’t know what they are. It’s baffling and fascinating in equal measure. Thanks, Tim!

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Thursday, May 25th

May 25, 2017 by Leave a Comment

ONE LIL BUCK
Dance is my Cultural Achilles Heel™ but I overcome it to marvel at this, filmed while the Shchukin collection was at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. “I was born in Chicago,” Lil Buck says, “Raised in Memphis, Tennessee…” Well, that’s a blues lyric right there.

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“It’s a dance style that started with Memphis underground rap music, and that music, the way it was produced, gave us a certain bounce. When I was around 16 years old I got into ballet. We made a deal with this artistic director that we would teach hip-hop, and they would teach us ballet…” There’s a moment at 2:45 in front of Picasso’s Three Women that is just astounding, but it’s not the locale, or the music, or the amazing art – this would be as strange and beguiling wherever it was performed.

TWO “I WAS HIS PERPETUAL +1”
In the 80s Mark and I went to see, more than once, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, a band that consisted of eight brass players and one drummer. The man on the non-brass instrument was Phillip Wilson. A great drummer, he was equally adept at keeping the band ticking and purring through the buildup of “Saving All My Love for You” as slashing and slapping back at the horns as they riffed violently to the song’s climax. It was a holy noise, great on record but best experienced live. The only other things I knew about Phillip Wilson were that he was involved in the Art Ensemble of Chicago and that he had drummed with the Paul Butterfield Band around the end of the Sixties. This fascinating interview by Ethan Iverson with David Sanborn, the sax player, is about how important Wilson was to Sanborn.

“Through Phillip, I met Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, and Hamiet Bluiett. Lester was the comedian king: like the wise philosopher of St. Louis but funny and fearless. Phillip and Lester did not discriminate about styles of music. Lester played in a circus band, society gigs, straight-ahead gigs. He played with Jimmy Forrest. He met his wife Fontella “Rescue Me” Bass on a gig with the Clara Ward Gospel Singers. Everyone had a day job except for Lester. Julius Hemphill sold furniture, Oliver Lake worked in the post office, Phillip worked as an arc welder at McDonnell Aircraft. Phillip worked at McDonnell all day, like from six in the morning to three or four in the afternoon, and he might have gone home and slept a bit before playing and hanging all night. Sometimes we would be hanging at like four in the morning and he’d say, ‘I’ve got to go home, change my clothes, and go to work.’”

THREE WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE
I loved this pastel drawing, a forgery passed off as Bob Dylan’s work a week or so ago, but actually a rather great picture of The Band. As Richard Manuel sang “The hoot owl and his song, will bring you along / Where else on earth would you wanna go?”

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FOUR “MY HEAD SAYS NO! BUT MY HEART SAYS GO!”
This NY Times video, by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson, is simply people climbing up a Ten Meter Diving Platform and jumping off. The twist is that none of them has ever done it before, and it takes some negotiating, either with friends or themselves, as they build up the courage to do it. And the reason that I’m writing about it is that the editing of the film is so brilliant, and the sounds are as important as the visuals. Tension and release personified – finger clicking, nervous scratching and deep breaths before the screams and the splash.

FIVE SPIRITLAND
Tim and I meet at Spiritland, somewhere that I’ve been meaning to go to since it opened. Then a couple of days later, Oobah Butler on Mr. Hyde wrote a piece on it that perfectly summed up my mixed feelings about it.

“Novelty has become the lifeblood of London. Most new spots open with a sideways glance, crazed gurn and elbow nudge, rather than straight-faced sincerity. But a new hero is bucking the trend: Spiritland, the “listening bar” in Kings Cross that’s “a paradise for anyone from the aficionado to the curious”. It definitely takes itself seriously, from its one-of-a-kind speaker system to DJ sets from big names like Hot Chip and Jarvis Cocker. And that’s great! But one issue: what the hot hell is a listening bar? Dudes in At The Drive-In T-shirts who occasionally look up from their William Burroughs novel to give an appreciative nod? An immersive experience that leaves no room for anything but absorbing tunes? One so intoxicating that it can get you drunk on music? I tried to stay sober on a Thursday night to find out.

Spiritland is tucked away in a ghost town of half-finished apartment buildings, mournful Bella Italias and broad, empty streets. It’s a diverse crowd, but everyone has one thing in common: we’re sat in a spartan room with dinner and drinks, facing The Bloody Big Music Blaster. Neither imbalanced nor throttling, the setup sounds wonderful. It’s official: I am woozy; totally drunk on music. But getting there requires an indulgent, eyes-closed isolationism that goes against its appeal to groups going out. You can have a table-banging debate about zero-hours contracts with the squad, or you can surrender to sound and fully appreciate the tech. Doing both is harder.

There’s also the Dad’s-cologne whiff of pragmatism over the layout. If you were to place all your focus on the listening experience, you wouldn’t have so many tables right at the front. The speakers would creep away from the wall. You wouldn’t serve food. So Spiritland finds itself in a no man’s land, ostensibly appealing to both the casuals and the committed, but not being quite right for either. But this is probably as music-obsessed as we can get in London 2017 – it could have been more dedicated elsewhere in Europe, but the closure of clubs and gig venues shows we turned our backs on music. So I order a beer, relax and enjoy Spiritland for what it is: an imperfect yet inventive space for a bit of small-group musical nerding.”

If you’re receiving the e-mail out, 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: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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