Category Archives: Song

Tete Mbambisa "Black Heroes" CD release concert, University of Cape Town

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At the showing of "Mama Goema: the Cape Town Beat in Five Movements", I was alerted by Calum MacNaughton to a concert concert by South African pianist Tete Mbambisa, celebrating the release of his new solo piano CD "Black Heroes", on April 22nd. We missed the first few numbers, as we were driving up from Cape Point after a day spent watching surfers at Muizenberg, watching penguins at the Boulder Beach unit of Table Mountain National Park, and walking to Diaz Beach and the Cape of Good Hope. And finding the school of music at UCT took a little while. What a finish to a fantastic day, though. Tete wrapped up a number with a crack rhythm section consisting of Ivan Bell on drums and Wesley Rustin on bass, and then his wife Vuyiswa Ngcwangu/uMambisa joined the band, in great voice, singing a standard whose name I've let slip, then Key Largo, then an excellent blues with refrain "I need a mellow man", really rocking the place.

It was great to talk to Calum, Gregory, and Vuyiswa at intermission, and Gregory gave me the info about the local jam Monday night jam session at Swingers' in Wetton. After intermission Tete came back on solo piano, playing a beautiful piece made up on the spot and titled "Gregory" for Gregory Franz, who has been photographing and blogging about the Cape jazz scene recently. Tete lamented the fact that since he had just made it up, he might not remember it---so he played it again. (Someone had been doing a video, so the tune is probably recorded.) More excellent solo piano including selections from the new CD, and then the rhythm section, along with saxophonist Sisonke, joined for Emavundleni, from the new CD, dedicated to his ancestors ("not mine", Tete's wife had earlier joked). Then a sanctified-sounding tune, with excellent sax work, segueing toward the end into a fantastic free-bop kind of interlude.

Mbambisa's piano style seems to me to mix mostly straight-ahead bop/hard bop with a bit of a more African sound, maybe influenced a bit by the repetition-with-slowly-evolving changes and additions of Mbira music. He has a very solid, round, ringing touch that can also be delicate when needed---and the sound he got from the Steinway (I think it was a D, the 9 foot concert grand) on stage was superb. He also has a good melodic sense, and tends to avoid cliche, often putting together short bits of melodic line in surprising but logical ways, leaving space, varying and developing rather than always running on.

A very informal concert, with very high-calibre music-making. At one point Tete was calling out the changes, teaching the bass-player one of his tunes on the spot---it sounded great as this went on, and after a chorus everything was locked in.

The last two were a slow, very pretty song, with lovely sax work, and (on the insistent request of, I think, relatives in the audience) Paul Desmond's "Take Five", the sax player sitting out. This was absolutely the most cooking version of that tune I've ever heard---with its ostinato in 5 (or a measure of 3 followed by a measure of 2) laid down in hard-rocking, hard-swinging style with changing harmonic colors, and piano lines and chordal interludes reminiscent of McCoy Tyner or mid-1960s Herbie Hancock (but all Mbambisa's) spun out over it, building a long, rollicking solo. Lines ringing out, then repeated up a half step, then punctuated by some block chords. I had never realized that Take Five was basically a hard-charging 1960s modal rave-up avant la lettre (well, barely), but Tete, playing with power but still relaxed, left no doubt about it. A fantastic closer. I bought the CD, which I will review in more detail soon; it's highly recommended and you can buy it at the link at the top of the post, and listen to excerpts here.

To wrap things up, from Youtube here's Inhlupeko from the out of print 1969 record of the same name by the Soul Jazzmen, Mbambisa on piano with Duku Makasi, saxophone, "Big T" Ntsele, bass, and Mafufu Jama, drums.

Mama Goema: the Cape Town Beat at District Six

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On April 21 I caught a screening of "Mama Goema: The Cape Town Beat in Five Movements", at the District Six Museum in Cape Town.  Here's the trailer:

Part of a hip-hop film festival (schedule and more here), which casts its net rather broadly, including the musical roots of Cape Town hip-hop.  Two of the three directors, Sara Gouveia and Calum MacNaughton, were present for a Q&A session after the screening, as was musician Hilton Schilder.  Goema seems to be a type of drum, and a type of music growing from certain musical traditions of the Cape Carnival, but exactly what it is appears to be a bit fluid.  Calum is quoted in Cape Town Magazine saying "Carnival culture is the Goema blueprint and Cape Jazz is its link to modern sound..."  Possibly, it's especially associated with a certain beat, found also in some Brazilian carnival music, as claimed here. Common influences on Brazilian and Cape Carnival culture and music can, I think, be ascribed in part to connections between the two areas via the slave trade. The Cape Carnival is more commonly known as Kaapse Klopse, or---no offense intended, this is one of the most common local names for it---the Coon Carnival. The latter name may derive from the strong influence of minstrel troupes---whether black or white in blackface is not clear---that visited Cape Town in the late 19th or early 20th century. Besides the Carnival music and dancing, there were a couple of revelations for me in the movie---firstly,  the music of Xhosa musician Madosini (who was participating in a performance of a Goema symphony by Mac MacKenzie, and was further featured in the film to represent black African influences on Cape music), and secondly, the music of The Genuines, a 1980s thrash/pop/rock/jazz group of which keyboardist Hilton Schilder and bassist Mac MacKenzie were members and vocalists.

I talked with Hilton and Calum a bit after the event. Calum hipped me to Tete Mbambisa's CD release concert the next day at the University of Cape Town. You can stream---or better, buy---the music Hilton and Mac made with the Genuines at their bandcamp.com page.  Here's their track "Goema" from the album of the same name:

Thrift store LP finds: Albinoni oboe from de Vries, Mozart from Radu Lupu

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I've been down a rabbit hole of differential geometry and representation theory, as well as doing some work on a review article with a collaborator lately, so apologies for the posting hiatus.

A quick note on weekend listening: I picked up an EMI/Angel LP (SZ-37802) of Albinoni oboe concertos Nos. 2, 5, 8, and 11 for a buck at a thrift shop. Han de Vries, soloist, with Alma Musica Amsterdam, produced in 1981. Bob van Asperen, harpsichord, is billed just after de Vries, so perhaps this is a harpsichordist-led ensemble.  Very pleasing listening---I got a good copy with very little surface noise and distortion. The sound is reminiscent of 1970s and early 80s Phillips LPs (like the Marriner/ Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Musical Offering)---a slight, but not excessive thinness, but more liquidity and sweetness, good detail and separation of instruments---a reasonable soundstage if not a huge sense of room acoustics.  The music is excellent, not the world's deepest and most intense stuff, but melodic, at times dancing, and very assured writing.  Nothing really breaking out of baroque conventions (although I'm not hugely up on baroque musical history, and Albinoni, along with Vivaldi, Telemann, and Handel, may well have been establishing said conventions here), but very poised and graceful writing, with a lot of low-key melodic interest to lift it well above generic baroque.  Superb playing from oboeist and orchestra both, to my ear.

One of my favorite pianists, Radu Lupu, playing Mozart concertos Nos. 21 in C and 12 with the English Chamber Orchestra and Uri Segal (London LP CS 6894, from 1974) is also sounding great, a slightly noisier copy but no problems with the music.  Another excellent recording job---really good piano tone, a slightly more midrangy balance than the above, to judge by the strings, well-captured bass.   But in general, in the same ballpark of slightly-on-the-lush-side, detailed but sweet sound that some of the major classical labels seem to have locked onto in the late 70s and early 80s, especially with chamber to moderate-sized orchestral ensembles.  Easy to hear what's going in each part of the orchestra, and to separate the soloist from the orchestra.  Is it a natural soundstage, or is the piano closely miked?  Who knows... who cares.  I love Radu Lupu's playing on this.  Relaxed, lyrical, but not exaggeratedly so.  Fantastic touch as always, and sensitivity to nuances in the music.  His work in the brilliant arpeggiated passages is, perhaps surprisingly, as nuanced and singing as the more cantabile passages, and fantastically accurate and rhythmically perfectly placed, while remaining unstrained and natural.  The orchestra is superb and superbly conducted---able to provide drama when needed without excessive Sturm und Drang.  And that's just the first movement of No. 21 so far... now here comes Lupu on the melody of the sublime second movement, Andante... not surprisingly, magic.  Not as heart-on-the-sleeve as some renditions of this classic slow movement can be... but none the less moving for that.  Just beautiful.  (This is some of the deepest and most intense stuff around.)  I've long loved Lupu's Schubert... marveled at his Debussy at a concert in Santa Fe a few years back... and now I'm a big fan of his Mozart.  One of the truly great pianists.

Stravinsky's "Les Noces" (Svadebka) on Hyperion (Voronezh, New London)

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I finally listened to my Hyperion CD of a 1990 recording of Stravinsky's "Les Noces" (Svadebka, The Wedding), with the New London Chamber Choir and Ensemble, directed by James Wood, and The Voronezh Chamber Choir, directed by Oleg Shepel. Stunning. I knew this work previously through the Bernstein/English Bach Festival Orchestra and Choir version on Deutsche Grammophon.  In that version, I found it an interesting work, but a bit hard to sit through the whole thing repeatedly.  Bernstein's version emphasized the percussive aspects.  I probably was moved to buy the Hyperion version by composer John Adams' praise for it on his blog, Hellmouth.  The NL/Voronezh version is much more nuanced and for me, balances percussiveness and aggression better with lyricism.  It has superb sound overall, with a fairly realistic, broad and deep soundstage and good hall atmospherics.  I'm not completely sure how naturally it was achieved---there are either drummers on each side of the stage, or the drums were recorded with multiple mikes and mixed with excessive stereo separation of the different drums, but it sounds good overall.  Very sweet and clear instrumental timbres, and extremely good resolution of accompanying instruments allowing subtle details of the piece to be heard.  I found some of the higher female voices to sound a bit thin and perhaps distorted at times (could be my system, or an issue with microphone preamps (distortion) or with mixing or even the actual voices (thinness)).  But overall the quality of the voices and singing, and the recording of them, is excellent.

Musically, the piece sounds like it could have been a predecessor, rather than, as it actually was, a successor, to the Rite of Spring.  It provides a more relaxed, less avant-garde setting than Rite for exploring the folk-music-based modes, and the percussiveness and somewhat dissonant chord extensions, and the occasional use of multiple modal melodies in dissonant counterpoint, that provide a lot of the musical language of Rite.  Even before reading it in the liner notes, you sense that the often arranged, and highly ritualized, Russian peasant weddings being portrayed, are a less extreme analog of the sacrifice in Rite, though with less predictably dire results, from a modern point of view.  And in the hands of this ensemble, the piece's goal of portraying the human drama of such an event (or at least, the version Stravinsky wants us to experience), is fully achieved.  Though similarities to Rite are there, the texture and mood are overall quite different.  I'd earlier not thought Noces to be even nearly on the level of the great triumvirate of Firebird, Petrushka, and the Rite, but on the strength of this recording, I now think it's close.

9.5 overall for this CD on my 10 point scale that goes to 11.

 

 

John Rangel / Michael Anthony ---- jazz duet at El Meson, Santa Fe

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El Meson has excellent tapas and excellent live music, often jazz, in its bar and jazz room, ¡Chispa!.  (I've never eaten in the main dining room.)  For a long time Thursdays were given over to local pianist John Rangel (who moved to Santa Fe a few years back from Los Angeles) playing duets with different guest musicians.  I've enjoyed John's playing in a variety of settings, and I heard him with Albuquerque-based guitarist Michael Anthony (another LA transplant with lots of film recording credits to his name) last Nov. 17 (2011).  It was a very enjoyable evening of jazz, with the musicians playing close attention to each other and creating different moods and interludes on the fly.  Exchanges of "fours" and such were especially interesting.  I didn't take notes, and a run-through would be pointless anyway, but the repertoire was a lot of standards, jazz classics, some bossa and samba, and blues.   Fairly straightahead bop and post bop, played with a sophisticated harmonic sense and plenty of chromaticism on the part of both players, but nothing too far-out.  I definitely recommend going to any gig John is playing on... he is frequently to be heard with the Tribute Trio (w/ Michael Glynn on bass, Cal Haines on drums), either on their own or with guest horn players.

Tapas at El Meson are often superb---the Cordoban style fried eggplant ($9.50) is very fresh-tasting, almost sweet, and practically melts in your mouth---it is especially good in late summer when eggplant is in season, but always worthwhile.  House-roasted peppers in a little earthenware terrine with Spanish goat cheese ($7.50) are also superb.  I like fried oysters with Romesco sauce ($9.50) as well.  Setas a la Parilla ($9.50), oyster mushrooms grilled with garlic, parsley, and olive oil, are also excellent, if less exotic.   The sherries by the glass have all been excellent as well.

Highly recomended for both food and music.

Samuel Blais, Jean-Nicolas Trottier, Fraser Hollins quintet at Dièse Onze, Montréal

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Heard a quintet of alto saxophonist Samuel Blais, trombonist Jean-Nicolas Trottier, bassist Fraser Hollins with Rafael Zaldivar on piano and Jim Doxas on drums, at Dièse Onze jazz club and restaurant in Montréal, last Saturday December 10. A fantastic couple of sets. Although Zaldivar and Doxas aren't listed in the name of the quintet (perhaps the drummer and piano change at times?), Doxas in particular was, I think, one of the keys to the group's smashing success in this gig. He plays an almost hyperactive, yet always tasteful, kind of drums... not falling frequently into the ching ching-a-aching implied triplets on ride cymbal that is a standard of bop and post-bop mainstream jazz drumming (though he doesn't entirely eschew it, either). He seemed to me to be more flexible about dividing the beat by twos or threes, but playing lots of fast, and hard-hitting, patterns implying a lot of subdivision of the beat, whether on ride, hard hat, snare, snare rim, or whatever. The drumming behind you can make a lot of difference to an improvisor, and I think energy was surging through Doxas into saxophonoist Blais and trombonist Trottier in particular. They both played intense solos in the area between bop and post-bop, the latter mostly not so much in highly colored, modal areas but in a more angular, major and chromatic sounding, and perhaps a bit free-jazz influenced bag...consistent with lots of bop influence, as mentioned. Some standards but given unique treatments, lots of very interesting compositions by band members. Excellent piano playing and bass too. Although I suspect this band is less well-known than the (apparently well-known in Canada, and certainly excellent) François Bourassa quartet I heard the previous night at Upstairs, it was at least equally exciting---in some ways more intense, probably due to Doxas' unique drumming. I had a decent Loupiac and a nice Armagnac at the bar, and enjoyed a conversation with Philippe, a computer programmer with a physics degree from McGill and a lifelong jazz fan. I was having trouble figuring out why the place was named "Dièse Onze" until he translated it "Sharp Eleven". Now that's hip, eh?

Morrissey: selected 2011 tour videos, Santa Fe 11/19 setlist

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I was at the November 19 Morrissey concert at the Convention Center in Santa Fe, NM. I've made up this set of embedded Youtube videos from the 2011 tour, with all the songs from that concert in the same order, using Santa Fe footage when possible, and otherwise from concerts mostly shortly before or after on the North American leg of the tour, with a few European ones mixed in. Enjoy.

I Want the One I Can't Have (Santa Fe, November 19; partial but with spoken intro and good sound quality)

I Want the One I Can't Have (Santa Fe, November 19; full but no intro and mediocre sound quality)

You Have Killed Me (Santa Fe, November 19)

You're The One For Me, Fatty (Fox Theater, Pomona, CA Nov 28):

Black Cloud (Shrine Auditorium, LA, Nov 26):

When Last I Spoke to Carol (Music Box, LA, Nov. 23):

Every Day is Like Sunday (Santa Fe, Nov 19)

Maladjusted (Music Box, Los Angeles, Nov 23)

Meat Is Murder (Krakow, July)

I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris (Dallas, Nov 17)

Action Is My Middle Name (Santa Fe, Nov 19 (partial))

Action Is My Middle Name (Opera, Copenhagen, July 11, full)

Speedway (Palladium, London, Aug 11)

People Are The Same Everywhere (Dallas, Nov 17)

Ouija Board, Ouija Board (Fox Theater, Pomona, CA, Nov 28)

All the Lazy Dykes (Escondido Center for the Arts, CA, Nov 22):

Satellite of Love [Lou Reed] (Dallas, Nov 17)

Scandinavia (Dallas, Nov. 17)

I Know It's Over (Palladium, London, Aug 11)

Encore: Still Ill (Santa Fe, Nov. 19)

Lights up, recorded music heard at the end of the preceding video signals the end of the show and continues to play over the PA as the venue empties: When I Am Laid In Earth (aka Dido's Lament), from the opera Dido and Aeneas by English composer Henry Purcell (~1659--1695). Video below with Emma Kirkby, soprano; Taverner players, Andrew Parrott, conductor; I'm not sure which version was on the PA in Santa Fe.

Morrissey at Santa Fe Convention Center, Nov. 19 2011: Setlist and initial review

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My wife and I went to hear Morrissey at the Santa Fe Convention Center last night, Nov. 19th.  The setlist posted here agrees with my recollection: every song on the list was played, and the order seems correct although I wasn't keeping track in real time.  In detail:

I Want The One I Can't Have / You Have Killed Me / You're The One For Me, Fatty / Black Cloud / When Last I Spoke To Carol / Everyday Is Like Sunday / Maladjusted / Meat Is Murder / I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris / Action Is My Middle Name / Speedway / People Are The Same Everywhere / Ouija Board, Ouija Board / All The Lazy Dykes / Satellite Of Love / Scandinavia / I Know It's Over // Still Ill

I'll probably write a lengthier review later; but a quick reaction is that if he's appearing near you later on this tour (check here) and it's not sold out, you should just get tickets and go.  I'm not a seasoned Morrissey fan---my familiarity was basically limited to the two-CD "Best Of" collection by the Smiths---but I'm a big fan now.   Granted I haven't been to a huge number of shows in the rock/pop vein, broadly construed, but his is probably one of the best two such concerts that I've ever been to.  (The other one in this league was Bob Marley at Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, in 1978...the first US date of his Kaya tour.)   The two key things about Morrissey seem to me to be first, honest, emotionally true expression of what he thinks is important about life, and second, doing this through beautiful, melodic songs, beautifully sung.  His voice is clear and sweet, but with just the right amount of richness and resonance.  The result can be downright poetic, whether lyrical, stirring, melancholy, or all three.  The sound at the convention center was excellent, the words were mostly very clear.  A great place to attend a concert---being able to get so near the stage so easily was fantastic (though it wasn't enough for many who jumped the security fence, Morrissey then grasping their hands as he walked the front of the stage).  The band was excellent, tight and rocking hard, equally capable of putting over piano-heavy ballads and power rock.  Overall, they probably come down more toward hard rock than his typical backing, and this was no bad thing.  Morrissey came across as totally committed to communicating with his audience, and to pure, on-pitch, beautifully-phrased, from-the-heart singing.  The songs, including recent ones some of which are not even on record yet, were mostly excellent to great.  I may get around to a more detailed review later, but just wanted to put it out there that this was one truly great show by a man who is the genuine article---a star if I have ever seen one.  Don't miss a chance to hear him.

New Album: Only in Dreams (Dum Dum Girls)

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New album "Only in Dreams" by the Dum Dum Girls is out on Sub Pop records. The quick summary? Doo-wop with fuzz guitars. Worthwhile.  Check it out.

Dum Dum Girls - Only in Dreams by subpop

Choice bits include the driving Always Looking (whose grungish main strain is followed by some even more retro stylings); the garage-fuzz-meets-50s Bedroom Eyes; the snappy, poppy In My Head; Heartbeat with its doowopish verse; Wasting Away; and the slow guitar anthem Comin' Down (with a sound, and chord changes, reminiscent of Knocking on Heaven's Door).  But really, it's all pretty choice.