Category: MUSIC

     On  September 13th, 1965 the Beatles released a single in the United States that they had been arguing for months about.  The signature Beatles sound was a carefully developed synthesis of the rockabilly roots and rhythm beats of the so called Merseybeat produced by local bands from Liverpool by the Mersey River, such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Americans such as Buddy Holly and the Crickets.  Time perfecting their craft in Germany gave the Liverpool lads a somewhat harder edge that they were quite proud of, and they clearly saw themselves as a rock and roll band.  They had leapfrogged everybody in the highly competitive British music scene to position themselves as THE music act in Britain and became concerned when Paul McCartney suggested a solo ballad be included in their next album.  He had obtained the whole of the song as the legend goes in a single dream, and worried for some time given its unique birth as a finished melody that he had possibly heard it elsewhere and taken it as his own.  When performed for others , all felt it was unique, but unlike anything the Beatles were writing or performing, and therefore, not likely the type of thing that would promote the group. 

     The original lyrics were space fillers, “scrambled eggs, my baby how I love your legs.”  Eventually McCartney tinkered with the song until inspiration brought to him the linear lyrics that secured the ballad.  George Martin, the band’s producer, saw the song in keeping with a long line of troubadour songs and positioned it solo with backing of a string quartet, to the dismay of the other band members.  John Lennon is quoted as saying, “Paul’s lyrics did not resolve into any sense. They’re good, but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything, you don’t know what happened.  She left, and he wishes it were yesterday.” (beatles interview database).   Most disconcertingly, it put Paul out in front in solo – was this now Paul or was this still the Beatles?  It is hard now to believe, given the eventual historical breakup and solo carreers, but in 1965 it matter to all members of the group.  Finally, with hesitation, the song was included in the HELP! album supplementing the Beatles recent movie and released as a single.  And all hell broke lose…

     Yesterday spent four consecutive weeks number 1 in American charts and remained the most played song on American radio for the next eight years.  It has conclusively become the most covered song ever, with over 1600 versions by various artists publically recorded.  With its ballad form and string quartet it change the Beatles forever into performers experimenting in the recording studio, rather than a live performing group.  The demands of creating a new sound with each album became a challenge that eventually consumed their comfort with each other, and strained this most prolific of composition duos, Lennon and McCartney to the point of complete fracture.

       All that from a song…

 

    

     Every July and August since 1918, with the single interruption of 1944, a music festival has been held in the Austrian city of Salzburg celebrating its home town hero , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  This year’s festival occurs in the 254th anniversary of Mozart’s birth and presents the master in many venues in addition to other composers.  I am writing about this fine event in hopes that I will someday take the plunge and attend the festival , a lifelong dream.  Certainly Mozart’s music is universally available and paying the absurd price for the events at this most famous of music festivals is likely not the most efficient way of absorbing the beauty of Mozart’s music.  So be it – you have your musical event fantasy, and I have mine.

      Salzburg, Austria sits in some of the most picturesque landscape on earth and was a fitting inspiration for the soaring beauty of Mozart’s greatest gift to the musical world, the Andante, or slow movement.   The Andante is a tempo of walking, contemplative slowness taking in the beauty and spirit of one’s surroundings without the abject loneliness and desperate sadness of the slower Adagio.  Mozart was a very spiritual person who believed in an afterlife that guaranteed an alleviation of life’s sufferings and a joyful affirmation of the eternal nature of the soul.  His moments of internalizing and personalizing the musical score invite the listener to contemplate a higher plane of awareness, where the sounds achieve purity and beauty that few composers other than perhaps Beethoven ever achieved, approaching harmonic celestial perfection.  If this was not heaven, it was Mozart’s earthbound version of it.

     If someday I find myself in Salzburg walking down  the Getreidegasse and look up to see No. 9, the birthplace of the old master Mozart, I expect to think first of the supreme Andantes and their connection with the man who brought such beauty to life.  Would not the world be a little better place if at times of such instability and trial as we live in today, events were blissfully soundtracked with the sound of the world as it ought to be…,.

Andante, Mozart Piano Concerto No 23

Andante, Mozart Clarinet concerto

Over thirty years have passed since a group of rather unassuming but extremely talented musicians rose out of East Los Angeles to teach the the United States about the synthesis of culture, rhythm, tradition, and musicality. First and foremost the the band Los Lobos are musicians of the first order. David Hildago, the lead guitarist, has not met an instrument he can not play better than anyone, from the traditional guitars of the mariachi to the squeeze box of tejano music to the best lead rock guitar lines anyone has put forth. Cesar Ruiz has the tenor voice instrument that can recall the romance and heartbreak of the best cancion singer, or the growly power of American blues or rockabilly, with equal ease. Conrad Lozano, Louis Perez, and Steve Berlin bring the sound permanent depth of soul with equal virtuosity on the synthesizer, guitar, drum, and saxophone. It has come together for thirty years in such a wide expanse of musical recording that most casual listeners are unsure they are listening to the same band.
Los Lobos started as the neighborhood wedding band, but word spread fast that these kids could really play, and it was not long before they were playing progressive venues on the LA music scene in the early 1980’s with other relatively radical performers, such as Dwight Yoakam, exploring what has become known as roots rock. The album How Will The Wolf Survive? brought them to national prominence and critical acclaim in 1984, with its unique blend of roots rock, Mexican traditionalism , and sophisticated performance and lyrics.  They achieved commercial success with La Bamba in 1987 and a new appreciation of hispanic  influences in the music of Americas began to gain traction. Throughout they never left traditional sounds behind recording fresh and tight performances of  traditional rancheras, cumbias, and nortenos that reminded audiences of the enormous depth of Latin musical culture.  In 1991 Kiko shifted the direction of the music again to sophisticated rhythm and jazz influences, country, blues and rock, the essential panorama of the modern American musical experience.  Albums have followed, equally as enthralling, but Kiko stands as an exemplary cross section of the American voice that will likely remain unequalled.

     The wedding band boys from LA are now relatively elder musical statesmen, but each live performance continues to remind you that you are listening to performers for the ages. Take the time to listen to all they have to offer, and if you love great music as I do, you will likely find no time better spent.

     Vladimir Horowitz was a one of a kind performer piano virtuoso who in his stage life received adulation rarely seen from the typically staid classical music audience.  It was borne of his rare pyrotechnic technique filled with booming rushes of volume and transcendent and delicately displayed motifs that never ceased to enthrall and conquer the listener.  His musical life bridged the great string of classical pianists from his connections to  Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff to his eternal connection to the great musical soul and talents of the Eastern European and Russian Jewish cultural tradition.   His unique bravura branded him  forever as the holder of the flame of the great classical romantic tradition of Chopin and Liszt and he was acknowledged in his later years as the Last Romantic.

     Born in 1903 in Kiev in Czarist Russia,  Horowitz was recognized early as a special talent and moved rapidly through elite conservatories of music to meet the performance public by age 16.  The tsunami of the Russian Revolution hit his family especially hard,  and Horowitz used a rising musical star status as an excuse to study abroad in 1925, and he left his family in Russia permanently behind and transitioned to the West.  A 1928 debut at Carnegie Hall  performing Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto directed by Sir Thomas Beecham catapulted him to performance super-stardom, a perch he essentially never left for his adult life, despite rocky personal and professional travails.

      By the 1980’s he was an old man and rarely performed extended concert performances beyond recitals.  A special sequence of events in the middle 1980’s  brought an opportunity he simply could not turn down, and a challenge that pulled from him at the advanced age of 83 a font of performance the world had thought long gone.  Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian Soviet leader recently ushered into the Kremlin to attempt a resuscitation of the moribund Communist governance initiated the policy of Glasnost,  an opening of Russian society to transparency and openness, invited the the Jewish expatriate Horowitz to return to Moscow and celebrate his reunion with his family and people with a series of concerts.  Horowitz jumped at the idea and saw himself as a messenger of peace between long warring cultures, the democratic west and communism, the pogromic Russian overlords and the peasant russian jewish society, the reflection of dormant romantic impulses in a society long devoid of personal expression.

     The concerts, jealously guarded by Russian communist elite , soon became deluged and overrun with students and triumphant youth straining to bond with the old master, and the audiences were enraptured and ecstatic.  And bond he did, with an emotional and spectacular return to the legendary play of his youth with the beautiful tone and interpretation of a virtuoso  performer who was the living embodiment of the great masters.  The Great Hall in Moscow 1986 through Horowitz’s hands  reverbirated with the presence of a natural synthesis of common humanity and the greatness of the highest capacity for human expression rarely seen before, and rarely seen since.  Whatever the myriad of reasons for the eventual fall of the curtain of communism in 1989, Horowitz’s grasp of the baton of human freedom and individual genius played an eventful part.

     Stringed instruments have played a profound role in the musical expressions of western civilization’s development. The vibration of the taunt string to create a musical note is delivered by sliding over the string with a bow, plucking the string, or hammering it. The stringed instrument as the focus of the composer’s musical vision took many forms by the 17th century ,and each fashion of delivering the sound from the string – plucking with the lyre, the guitar, the mandolin, the harp, and the harpsichord; bowing with violin, viola, and cello; and eventually hammering with the clavichord and piano – had equal attraction and performance exposure. The development of the concert hall as the primary means of performance in the 19th century lead to the dominance of instruments such as the violin, and especially piano, capable of projection to the back row, and a resultant decline in relative concert repertoire available to the other instruments. The guitar fell into particular decline as a concert instrument, left to world of song accompaniment and amateurish strumming.

     Andres Segovia (1893-1987) changed forever the way the music world looked at the guitar, in a single lifetime. Born in Andalusia, the southern most province of Spain, he could not help but be steeped in the traditions of both the court musician and flamenco artist who were carved from the thousand year history of Moorish and Christian interactions in the provincial towns of Granada and Seville. Though trained in flamenco at a young age, his extraordinary ear for the guitar’s virtuosity capacity as a musical soundboard to rival the piano in expression, intimacy, emotion and complex timbres was unique, and he developed both virtuoso technique and compositional transcriptions of pieces written for other instruments that rapidly opened the musical public’s eyes again to the possibilities of the guitar as a concert instrument. Composers such as Rodrigo, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Villa-Lobos collaborated with Segovia in putting forth signature pieces that are popular and important contributors to any major orchestra’s concert series’ today. Additionally, Segovia’s recognition of the power of both new inventions of recording and radio being particularly friendly to the volume limitations of the guitar while capturing its complex intonations, made him a fixture with the public at large. He became the singular voice of musical expression on the guitar, and his style profoundly influenced generations of later concert guitarists in how they would sound, perform, and interpret the music.

     Segovia lived to the advanced age of 94, and performed until his last breath. His contributions to music as we know it today, the way we wish to hear it, the composers we consider worthy, and the respect for guitar performance can be summed up in one word – Segovia.

     Appreciate a unique exposure to the teacher Segovia in a masterclass for young performers in 1965, then experience the Master performer himself…

     A casual fan of classical music often has a typical collection of greatest hits that they delve into when they are in the mood for a little introspective listening.  The performances are often attached to movies, such as the musical interlude Hannibal Lector listens to for solace in jail in “Silence of the Lambs“, the Goldberg  Variations – Aria, by Johann Sebastian Bach.  Few would realize that the musical expression that so entrances Lector is performed by Glenn Gould, an equally eccentric genius who changed the way we listen to Bach forever.  

     Glenn Gould (1932-1982) was a Canadian pianist with completely unique stylings, performance concepts, and interpretations of music.  He had a special ability to pull melody and emotion out of the mathematical structures of Bach that brought a modern sense of enlightenment to what often was felt to be the flaw of Baroque music, its relative detachment from human emotional reflexes.  At the same time he brought a prodigious technique to his play, in which the musical melody would soar over but not vanquish the individual notes of the composition, regardless of the speed of play.  This created a Glenn Gould sound that is immediately apparent in his recordings.  With many outstanding performers over the years having put their stamp on Bach, no one sounds like Glenn Gould, and none quite make you feel that you have heard what Bach himself was trying to express, until you have heard Glenn Gould perform it. 

     The zenith of Glenn Gould’s contributions are Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  Gould made two completely different interpretations of the composition, the “young” Gould in 1955 and the “old” Gould  in 1981, both of which are legendary performances, available today, and both requiring separate and complete immersion.   Gould stated that he rarely practiced in the formal sense, tending to “play” in his mind the music directly off the score for hours before physically performing it on the piano.   This technique allowed him to bring out the amazing waves of sub-melodies, different timbres, and counterposed rhythms, all while maintaining the a perfect musical metronome demanded by Bach’s passion for musical structure.  It also lead to the irritating habit in his performances of humming over his play as he reconstructed in real time the many layers of the piece, a practice that worsened as he got older.   He became more eccentric as he got older, refusing to publicly perform, cantankerous in the recording studio, and notorious for unrehearsed spontaneous conversions of performances that would often leave the orchestra and conductor completely mystified.   Leonard Bernstein, who loved Gould and his singular creativity, took to warning audiences ahead of Gould and New York Philharmonic performances that Bernstein “could assume no responsibility for what they were about to hear”.   What they were about to hear more often then not , was wondrous magic.

     Gould died of a stroke at the two young age of 50 years, but he left us a tremendous collection of music and film to digest forever. Enjoy an excellent presentation of Gould in the video below,  The Art of the Piano,  then, revel in the incredible technique and musicality Gould brings to bear in one of the Goldberg Variations, No. 5.  

 

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     Mary O’Brien, an british born singer better known as Dusty Springfield, created a new world of music in the 1960’s with soul inflected sensual music that resonates to this day.  She managed to marry the intense internalization of emotions reflected in American soul music of the urban street and rural south with the cheerful, upbeat, and hip sound of the modern British band into a unique synthesis of sound, presented with a beautiful stage presence that separated her from all pretenders.   Hits poured out of her delivery with songs such as “I Only Want to Be With You”, “The Look of Love”,  “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me”, and “Just a  Little Lovin'”  definitive performances of the 1960’s  music avalanche.  She reached a zenith with the album “Dusty In Memphis“, where her personal vocal mark was able to drive the sound into an intimacy not usually allowed by the era’s overproduced, string and horn distorted female performers.  It remains an album for all time, ranked 89 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the 500  best music albums.

     Recently Shelby Lynne,  a performer with Nashville roots, but expansive musical tastes, took on the challenge of capturing the Dusty Springfield sound, and delivering her own special sensitivity and emotion to Dusty’s discography, with her tribute album, “Just A Little Lovin'” .   Compare for your self how she did side by side and reflect on the gift that is musical talent and inspiration.

      France in the 17th century had a special definition for the poet-musicians who could emote the intense internal feelings of courtly love in lyrical fashion – the troubadour.  The tradition of poet-musician transformed in the 20th century to the concept of singer-songwriter, with the quality bar established by Bob Dylan.  Prior to Dylan, the talented singer-musician tended to interpret the expressions of  lyricists and composers such as Gershwin, Cole-Porter, and Irving Berlin, and reflected the personality of the song. not the internal workings of the performer.  Dylan brought poetry to performance and changed the way the performer’s talents were considered.  As one might imagine, with success and adulation came copy cats, and the pressure to achieve something with more depth than, say, “you love me, I love you, no matter what happens I will always be true,” seemed woefully insufficient.  Performers like Van Morrison, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Gram Parsons, and other notables held up the troubadour standard, and with it, the concept of timeless music, true sound pictures not bound by their time or culture.

     David Ryan Adams is a modern troubadour who carries the tradition onward, with intimate musical structure, themes of lost love and human struggle, and melodies of timeless beauty.  With solo work of prodigious expanse, and group stylings with Whiskeytown and the Cardinals, he has elevated the song again to the forefront of the western musical expression in a fashion that would make the Tin Pan Alley songmeisters proud.

     Every once in a while  the right combination of talent, charisma, looks, and showmanship elevate a performer above all the equally hard working and committed artists to become a star for the ages.  In 1958, a young classical pianist from Texas boldly took the musical prize that Russians considered their birthright, the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, and took the musical world’s heart with him.  The United States had been on its heels after the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957, and on the most unlikely stage in the Cold War, a concert stage in Moscow, seized the momentum back.  In the style of Lindbergh  in 1927 before him, and the American Olympic hockey team in 1980, unassuming Americans performed for the ages and tilted the world briefly on its axis towards the Western Ideal.

First a video that captures the moment:

Then, enjoy the genius of Van Cliburn: