Category: Music

Atop the charts

“Irreplaceable” by Beyoncé is in its seventh week as Billboard’s number one. The Dreamgirls soundtrack is the number one album.

Surely one of the great live albums

Johnny Cash performed his historic concert at Folsom Prison on this date in 1968.

I hear the train a comin’
It’s rollin’ ’round the bend,
And I ain’t seen the sunshine,
Since, I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison,
And time keeps draggin’ on,
But that train keeps a-rollin’,
On down to San Antone.

[The song itself was originally recorded at Sun in 1956.]

Music of the Hemispheres

“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” He hit a button on his computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in Elton John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.”

Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only one note, and you already know who it is,” he said. “So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?”

The New York Times

An intriguing article. One thing though. If you attend a concert by any well-known performer there are always those that react to the first few notes. But there is the larger group that doesn’t seem to catch on until the lyrics begin.

But more from the article:

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense of reward.

The cerebellum, an area normally associated with physical movement, reacted too, responding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was the brain’s predictions of where the song was going to go. As the brain internalizes the tempo, rhythm and emotional peaks of a song, the cerebellum begins reacting every time the song produces tension (that is, subtle deviations from its normal melody or tempo).

“When we saw all this activity going on precisely in sync, in this order, we knew we had the smoking gun,” he said. “We’ve always known that music is good for improving your mood. But this showed precisely how it happens.”

Funny how they keep finding out that sex, drugs and rock and roll really are good for you. As if we didn’t know.

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

The 100 Best Songs of 2006

From Rolling Stone. Here’s the top three.

1 “Crazy”
Gnarls Barkley
In a perfect world, Al Green could still sing collard-green soul gems like this one, but Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse stepped up with an instant classic, winning this year’s “Hey Ya!” award for the song nobody even pretended not to like. Everybody tried to cover it (our personal fave: the Raconteurs’) — but nobody can hit the chorus like Cee-Lo, and nobody ever will.

2 “Steady As She Goes”
The Raconteurs
The first single from Brendan Benson and Jack White’s garage-glam band was a perfect dirty sundae of fuzz-box stutter, metallic zoom and pop-chorale candy. It is also a good reason to hope the Raconteurs are no one-album project.

3 “Ridin”
Chamillionaire
The song least likely to be played in Drivers’ Ed.: Chamillionaire dodges the cops, riding dirty with a car full of thugs who don’t care where they’re rolling or if they get there in one piece.

Roll Over Tchaikovsky

And tell Beethoven some news of your own. They do “The Nutcracker Ballet” in Albuquerque just fine, too.

Having ventured out to see and hear Nutcracker on the Rocks last weekend, tonight NewMexiKen took in the real thing presented by the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and the New Mexico Ballet Company. Bravo!

When, just before the overture, a tiny little girl in front of me was asked if this was her first “Nutcracker,” I had to marvel because, well, it was my first “Nutcracker,” too. (Unless you count the dancing hippos in Walt Disney’s Fantasia.) And it was really wonderful; like the two boys near me (age seven or eight and nine or ten) I sat engrossed.

While it’s hard to fault James Brown or The Stones as heard in “Nutcracker on the Rocks,” a live orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s masterful music is really beyond marvelous. I also have to laugh because in no way do I feel capable of commenting on dance, yet after two performances in one calendar week I began to notice things. The prima ballerina, Angelie Renay Melzer as the Sugar Plum Fairy tonight, taught me how it’s done. While there were many excellent dancers, and many athletic ones, she was the dancer who brought the music and the dance into one. Just sublime.

Life offers so many moments of beauty and pleasure if we just give them a chance.

Thunder on the Mountain

Slate Magazine has the Bob Dylan video.

The video for “Thunder on the Mountain,” which Slate is proud to premiere, is a whirlwind tour of the many phases, and faces, of Bob—from fierce ’60s folk-rock tyro to white-makeup-caked troubadour to craggy old bard with a gleam in his eye and a Vincent Price mustache. The video draws on several decades of archival footage, some of it previously unseen. It’s a panorama of 40-odd years of American musical history, and—for Dylan freaks—a trainspotter’s dream.

And a damn fine rock and roll tune.

The Trouble with Magazines

Is that they can really pile up on you in a hurry.

Anyway, a couple of quick items from Rolling Stone Issue 1015 (the one with Snoop in the Santa hat).

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s first New York girlfriend (the woman with him on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan) is selling some of her memorabilia. Included is a valentine card (1963): “Love, Love, Money, Booze, I’d swap ‘m all to be with youse, love love me Bob.” It’s a good thing he didn’t choose to write romantic ballads.

Oh, and there’s a good best line of the day in RS, too. “[T]hey’re pretty people who wear white coats so they can drip tears on them, and carry stethoscopes only so they can listen to their own heartbeats in sad, private moments.”

The reference is, of course, to “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Roll Over Beethoven

And tell Tchaikovsky the news. In Albuquerque they perform The Nutcracker to a different beat.

NewMexiKen had the enjoyable pleasure this evening of attending a tenth anniversary performance of Nutcracker on the Rocks, a reinvented version of the traditional Nutcracker ballet. The music of Tchaikovsky opens and closes the dance, but in between we hear — and the dancers dance to — James Brown (“I Got You”), Van Morrison (“Moondance”), The Velvet Underground (“Rock ‘n Roll”), Aretha Franklin (“Rock Steady”) Billie Holiday, The Rolling Stones (“Sympathy for the Devil”), Morphine (“You Look Like Rain”), Janis Joplin (“Move Over”) and others. There were nearly 100 individual dancers, some of them very young, all of them enthusiastic, many quite good. Keshet founding company member Sarah Elizabeth Bennett was terrific as the Rat Queen.

And it makes me proud and happy that I live in a time and place where some of the “snowflakes” danced in their wheelchairs — and that even the chairs were choreographed into the dance movements.

The performance was at the Roy E. Disney Center for the Arts at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, an Albuquerque gem. The run is over for this year, but make plans for 2007.

Keshet Dance Company is a community supported, non-profit professional dance company. Keshet is Hebrew for rainbow.

Why is Music Legal?

Scott Adams asks:

Sometimes I wonder why music is legal. Music can alter your mood and your body chemistry just like any illegal drug. The fact that it goes into your body through your ear shouldn’t make a difference. We take drugs via practically every other hole in our body – mouth, butt, eyeballs, nose – you name it. Ain’t nothing special about an ear.

Music is clearly unsafe. Suppose you’re in a perfectly good mood and a depressing song comes on. That could make you sad and break down your body’s natural defenses. You could get sick and die. Thank you very much Tori Amos.

He continues.

November 26th is the birthday

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Tina Turner (with Ike); she’s 67.

The Ike and Tina Turner Revue was one of the highest energy ensembles on the soul circuit in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Ike Turner had begun as a bandleader and talent scout in the ‘40s for blues and R&B performers. He recorded “Rocket 88,” considered by many the first rock ‘n’ roll recording, under the name of his baritone sax player, Jackie Brenston, in 1951.

Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm, found a young singer named Annie Mae Bullock in 1956. Eventually, the singer was renamed Tina Turner and the two married.

Their first hit, “A Fool in Love,” was recorded in 1961 when another singer failed to show up for a session. After several early ‘60s hit R&B singles, including “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” in 1961, they became major stars in England.

A 1971 cover version of John Fogerty’s “Proud Mary” reached No. 4 on the pop chart. Ike and Tina divorced in 1976.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Oakland Raiders coach Art Shell. He’s 60. Shell is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player and he was the first African-American head coach in modern NFL history.

Hall of Fame pitcher Vernon Louis “Lefty” Gomez was born on this date in 1908. He died in 1989.

“No one hit home runs the way Babe (Ruth) did. They were something special. They were like homing pigeons. The ball would leave the bat, pause briefly, suddenly gain its bearings, then take off for the stands.” Lefty Gomez

“When Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, he and all the space scientists were puzzled by an unidentifiable white object. I knew immediately what it was. That was a home run ball hit off me in 1933 by Jimmie Foxx.” Lefty Gomez

CharlieBrown.gif

Charles M. Schulz was born on this date in 1922. He died in February 2000, the night before his last Sunday strip appeared.

I Think I’ll Have Dinner at Alice’s Today

Thanksgiving Day brings us a rare moment of coming together. A tradition that crosses boundaries. No, it’s not eating supper with family or even watching football. For radio fans and programmers alike, today’s holiday is best celebrated by the playing of one song, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” That song, which was originally released as the 18-minute “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” will be heard today ….

The song, which is usually broadcast in either the original album track form or the even longer 30th anniversary live version, relates a Thanksgiving story. In it, Guthrie talks about enjoying a Thanksgiving feast with friends in Stockbridge at the title restaurant. After that, things get weird. The singer relates taking out the trash and, having no place to legally drop it because of the holiday, dumping it illegally. This leads to a long, shaggy-dog tale of being arrested for littering that turns into both an anti-Vietnam War protest and a statement of human rights. Somehow, by the end, he has turned the song into a statement that in union there is strength. And the best way to demonstrate that communal strength? Everyone, as listeners know, must sing along with the familiar refrain: “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.” As the singer points out, if we can pull ourselves together to do that, we can change the world.

The Boston Globe

Downloadable versions from the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree Concert / Radio Show.

Alice Brock — the actual Alice.

Minimalist Music

NewMexiKen guesses he is the last kid on his block to learn a little about the music of composer Steve Reich (I wasn’t totally ignorant, just unfamiliar), but an article in The New Yorker earlier this month got me interested. So far I’ve just been listening around the edges at the iTunes Store, but it’s fascinating.

I don’t know enough to begin to explain what Reich does. Let this paragraph from Alex Ross’ article suffice as an introduction:

In this sense, “Different Trains,” for recorded voices and string quartet, may be Reich’s most staggering achievement, even if “Music for 18” gives the purest pleasure. He wrote the piece in 1988, after recalling cross-country train trips that he had taken as a child. “As a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period, I would have had to ride very different trains,” he has said. Recordings of his nanny reminiscing about their journeys and of an elderly man named Lawrence Davis recalling his career as a Pullman porter are juxtaposed with the testimonies of three Holocaust survivors. These voices give a picture of the dividedness of twentieth-century experience, of the irreconcilability of American idyll and European horror—and something in Mr. Davis’s weary voice also reminds us that America was never an idyll for all. The hidden melodies of the spoken material generate string writing that is rich in fragmentary modal tunes and gently pulsing rhythms.

The NPR 100 included Reich’s “Drumming” among its “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.” Here’s that report. (RealPlayer)

Aargh!

So I buy J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton’s new CD last night. This morning I go to import it into iTunes, which happily pulls up the track names from some database on the internets. If you’re obsessive-compulsive as NewMexiKen is from time-to-time, you verify the iTunes information against the actual CD.

iTunes title: “The Road To Escondito”
Actual title: “The Road to Escondido” (Escondido is an actual place not far from San Diego. I’ve been there.)

iTunes song title: “When The War Is Over”
Actual song title: “When This War Is Over”

OK, not exactly the end of the world, but doesn’t anybody proof their work anymore — or take any pride in getting it right?

(It’s rare for the database to have the album title wrong, but song titles are often incorrect.)

Time

The playlist for this week’s Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan.

The theme is Time.

Time is on My Side – Irma Thomas
Right Place, Wrong Time – Dr. John
As Time Goes By – Dooley Wilson
Time Marches On – Derek Morgan
All The Time – Sleepy La Beef
Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong) – Count Basie
Only Time Will Tell – Etta James
24 Hours – Eddie Boyd
Turn Back the Hands of Time – Tyrone Davis
Life Begins At 4 O’Clock – Bobby Milano
60 Minute Man – Billy Ward and the Dominos
15 Minute Intermission – Cab Calloway
Funny How Time Slips Away – Willie Nelson
September Song – Lou Reed
Two Years of Torture – Ray Charles
Walking After Midnight – Patsy Cline
Midnight Hour – Clarence Gatemouth Brown
What Time Is It – The Jive Five
Real Rock – The Soul Vendors
Armigedion Time – Willy Williams
Time Has Come Today – The Chambers Brothers
Time is Tight – Booker T and the MGs

I hate to see that evening sun go down

W.C. Handy was born on this date in 1873. Handy was the first to write sheet music for the blues and for that reason is known as the Father of the Blues. Though associated with Memphis and Beale Street, Handy’s most famous song is St. Louis Blues (1914).

NPR told the Handy and St. Louis Blues stories as part of the NPR 100. Click to hear the NPR report, which includes Handy’s own reminiscences and the complete recording of the song by Bessie Smith accompanied by Louis Armstrong, possibly the most influential recording in American music history. (RealPlayer file.)

W.C. Handy died in 1958.

Oklahoma!

…became a state on this date in 1907. It was the 46th state to enter the Union.

The official song and anthem of the State of Oklahoma is “Oklahoma,” composed and written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Oddly enough, the song, arguably the best “state song” of them all, wasn’t mentioned when we tried to list a song for each state here last month.

Brand new state, Brand new state, gonna treat you great!
Gonna give you barley, carrots and pertaters,
Pasture fer the cattle, Spinach and Termayters!
Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom,
Plen’y of air and plen’y of room,
Plen’y of room to swing a rope!
Plen’y of heart and plen’y of hope!
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain,
And the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
Oklahoma, ev’ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk makin’ lazy circles in the sky.
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say – Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!
We’re only sayin’ You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma! Oklahoma – O.K.