International Sad Hits

Seventy years ago today, June 21 1948, Columbia Records introduced the LP with two releases - one...

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 10:12:26 -0400

Seventy years ago today, June 21 1948, Columbia Records introduced the LP with two releases - one...

In a 2013 documentary about the Eagles (”History of the...

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 09:06:11 -0400

In a 2013 documentary about the Eagles (”History of the Eagles”), Don Henley explains that they stopped recording with Glyn Johns so they could work with someone who would mic each drum individually. They went on to record some of the most annoying music in the world.

The previous post about Galaxie 500 streaming song plays attracted the interest of Glenn McDonald,...

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 10:52:16 -0400

The previous post about Galaxie 500 streaming song plays attracted the interest of Glenn McDonald,...

Song streams by Galaxie 500 on Spotify, May 2018Alert listeners to Spotify have been noting its...

Sat, 02 Jun 2018 11:25:09 -0400

Song streams by Galaxie 500 on Spotify, May 2018Alert listeners to Spotify have been noting its...

Emma González’s silence at the March for Our Lives podium was almost precisely 4′33″.

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 10:49:53 -0400

Emma González’s silence at the March for Our Lives podium was almost precisely 4′33″.

All, formerly, bookstores in my neighborhood.

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 08:49:48 -0500

Reading International

Paperback Booksmith

Wordsworth

Schoenhof's Foreign Books

The Bookcase

Starr Bookshop

All, formerly, bookstores in my neighborhood.

The most mind-blowing book I read this year is A Million Years of Music, by Gary Tomlinson. It was...

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 11:10:02 -0500

The most mind-blowing book I read this year is A Million Years of Music, by Gary Tomlinson. It was...

The Grateful Dead in front of their “Wall of Sound” PA system, 1974. There’s an excellent new...

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 10:42:23 -0500

The Grateful Dead in front of their “Wall of Sound” PA system, 1974. There’s an excellent new...

My book was recently translated and published in Spain, so the Madrid paper El Pais asked me for a...

Thu, 28 Dec 2017 16:51:14 -0500

My book was recently translated and published in Spain, so the Madrid paper El Pais asked me for a...

“I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” (Irving Berlin), Billie...

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 09:18:59 -0500

“I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” (Irving Berlin), Billie Holiday and her Orchestra, 1937.

Among the miracles of 20th-century jazz was its ability to pluck a run-of-the-mill tune off the hit parade and turn it into high art. Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson (piano), Ben Webster (tenor sax), Jonah Jones (trumpet), Edgar Samson (clarinet), Allan Reuss (guitar), John Kirby (bass), and Cozy Cole (drums) made this landmark record the same year Irving Berlin’s song debuted in the film On the Avenue, where it’s a forced comedic number for Dick Powell and Alice Faye:

https://youtu.be/LRmGYCwsPpM

The film version is all clichés. Billie Holiday uses the same words - but you feel the cold, and the heat.

Marcel Proust, from Letters to His Neighbor, translated by Lydia Davis (New Directions, 2017) Proust...

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 08:47:01 -0500

Marcel Proust, from Letters to His Neighbor, translated by Lydia Davis (New Directions, 2017) Proust...

Sunny Murray, 1936–2017“Saw Sunny Murray with Sabir Mateen, at the Unitarian Church in Amherst:...

Sun, 10 Dec 2017 11:00:41 -0500

Sunny Murray, 1936–2017“Saw Sunny Murray with Sabir Mateen, at the Unitarian Church in Amherst:...

Hamza El Din, filmed by Robert Garfias, 1970.Found this passage...

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 09:59:45 -0500

Hamza El Din, filmed by Robert Garfias, 1970.

Found this passage in a history of the guitar written by Tom and Mary Anne Evans:

“For years guitars were used in jazz solely as rhythm instruments, as six-string drums which provided a beat.” [my italics]

The quote is about New Orleans music, but Hamza El Din’s oud playing is to me the perfect example of strings as percussion - it’s no wonder that Mickey Hart became a champion of his work. On his first album, recorded by ethnomusicologist Robert Garfias for Nonesuch, Hamza El Din even included a song without oud at all - accompanying his voice just on the tar. Garfias documented that same tune on film, so we get to see the drum played as a stringless oud.

The website HiLoBrow has published 10 prose poems of mine about...

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 13:42:50 -0500

The website HiLoBrow has published 10 prose poems of mine about...

Once upon a time in the 70s, Cambridge and Boston had not one but two weekly papers - they even had...

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 10:19:02 -0500

Once upon a time in the 70s, Cambridge and Boston had not one but two weekly papers - they even had...

Nirvana and Pulp: A Story of Scrapped CDs, by Jada Li (2013)When...

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 10:25:17 -0500

Nirvana and Pulp: A Story of Scrapped CDs, by Jada Li (2013)

When Naomi and I toured China last year, musicians we met told us they first heard our music via “cut” media - CDs and cassettes traded on the down low in the 1990s. What we initially took to be black-market slang turned out to be literally true: the discs and tapes they were talking about had been physically cut at European and American warehouses to prevent them from being sold, then shipped to China for plastic recycling. Once there, enterprising people figured out ways to play as much of the media as survived this damage - and thereby gain access to music unavailable in China.

Younger Chinese musicians - those who come of age in the online era - will have a different story to tell about obtaining music, one that is still (unfortunately) engaged with censorship, but not with physical media. Might they someday feel “romantic” about VPNs, the way rock critic Hao Fang describes his feelings toward cut media in this documentary? Or does the end of physical media spell the end of this particular kind of music fan, the one who keeps their original cut cassette of Daydream Nation alongside five editions of the CD, a vinyl copy for listening, and another just “for the collection”…

John Cohen, “The High Lonesome Sound,” 1963.There’s a new...

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 09:12:31 -0400

John Cohen, “The High Lonesome Sound,” 1963.

There’s a new documentary making the film festival rounds, “Linefork” by Vic Rawlings and Jeff Silva - it’s a portrait of elderly banjo player Lee Sexton, his wife Opal, and their community and environment in Eastern Kentucky.

The film is like an answer song to a folk revival classic: John Cohen’s “High Lonesome Sound,” from 1963. Cohen’s film is a portrait of Lee Sexton’s cousin, Roscoe Holcomb, who was about 50 years old at the time (Holcomb died in 1981). Roscoe Holcomb wasn’t a professional musician - Cohen had gone south looking for someone playing banjo on a porch, not a recording artist. But the process of Cohen’s documentation made one out of Holcomb. Cohen’s elegant black-and-white images were expensive to capture, and the preciousness of the medium reflected onto his subject. Everything in the film is presented as worthy of preservation - and if you miss that from the feel of the images, a narrative voiceover underscores their importance.

“Linefork” is a different kind of documentation, however. Co-produced by the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, it is highly conscious of its own complications as a work of observational anthropology - a film by northerners about the south; a film by those with many options, about those with next to none; a film shot in a matter of days about lives measured in decades. And it makes brilliant use of that self-consciousness by giving its subjects time and space to speak for themselves. There is no editorializing voiceover, as in Cohen’s film, and there are no interviews per se. Lee and Opal Sexton simply go about their business with the filmmakers present - not absent, or pretending to be (there are a couple key moments of exchange from behind the camera), but not directing either. Instead, the filmmakers keep us alert to their position in the scene - and ours by extension - while letting the cameras roll.

And roll. “Linefork” relies on the light footprint of digital media - cheap hard drives and portable equipment. The camera and mics run endlessly, stockpiling hundreds of hours of material. All its images are carefully framed, but the action is not precious. None of it feels “important,” in the manner of Cohen’s voiceover. On the contrary, the actions are ordinary.

But isn’t that what an old guy playing banjo on a porch always was, and precisely what Cohen went to find? “Linefork” gives us a glimpse of Lee Sexton and his folk music without turning him into a recording artist. Maybe that’s possible now cause in the digital age, recording itself is no longer special. It’s become a folk art.

Ways of Hearing is a 6-episode podcast about listening in the digital era, written and hosted by...

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 11:04:36 -0400

Ways of Hearing is a 6-episode podcast about listening in the digital era, written and hosted by...

The “vinyl revival” has made for some fantastic, borderline obsessive reissues of classic LPs - but...

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 17:44:27 -0400

The “vinyl revival” has made for some fantastic, borderline obsessive reissues of classic LPs - but...

Graph of my bands’ digital income streams, broken down by source (excluding Bandcamp), September...

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 09:55:45 -0400

Graph of my bands’ digital income streams, broken down by source (excluding Bandcamp), September...