Music appreciation sessions are becoming regular fixtures in the schedule of our group. With the possible exception of those parts of a session when the selections of the present writer (Mark Conlon) are played, they are thoroughly enjoyed by all involved. In recent weeks there have been two of them – for the sake of clarity and simplicity, I will combine discussion of both in the present blog entry.
Dominic Orosun introduced us to ‘I Have Seen’ from electronic duo Zero 7’s 2001 debut album Simple Things. As Dom suggested, this marries a harmonious vocal melody with a propulsive bassline to agreeable effect. (It should be noted en passant that Dom is currently working with director Chris Stone on the production of a film called Legend of the Sword – the first instalment of which was premiered at the local Film Theatre, with Dom, Dave Sweetsur, Dave Williams and myself from the Pathways group in attendance – about which he may wish to write a future piece for this site.)
Dave Sweetsur chose the title track from Canadian band Arcade Fire’s acclaimed third album The Suburbs (2010). Sara Cooper perceived the song as reminiscent of the Eagles, and it did indeed have something of a country-rock flavour to it. (Sara forgot to bring any discs to the group, but says Finnish rock band Nightwish are one of her current favourites.) Dave, knowing my predilection – he might characterize it as a weakness – for progressive rock, said that the CD struck him as a concept album; not an entirely mischievous claim, as Arcade Fire have at times been bracketed as an art-rock group, albeit one more in the mould of Talking Heads – David Byrne is an admirer and collaborator – than Yes or ELP. Dave’s interest in soul music, meanwhile, was represented by Otis Redding’s cover of Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ from Redding’s classic 1965 Stax album Otis Blue.
Polly Jean Harvey’s Mercury Music Prize-winning album Let England Shake (2011) is described by Dave as an acidic love letter addressed by the Dorset-born musician to her home country. He picked out ‘All and Everywhere’ as one of the outstanding songs from the disc. Polly Harvey states that her lyrics are influenced by poets such as Eliot, Yeats and Ted Hughes, and it therefore makes sense that her work should appeal to Dave, who has had a volume of his own poetry published (with the Sergio Leone-referencing title The Bad, the Ugly and the Good – interested parties can purchase a copy from Amazon). For me, Harvey’s recent albums are, disappointingly, less intense and emotionally raw than her first two, Dry and (especially) the lacerating Rid of Me, though there is no doubt that she towers above most other popular music figures in the current age of mediocrity (and worse).
Dave’s final choice of music was Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the jazz trumpeter’s celebrated 1959 session that has been enormously influential over the last half-century (critic Richard Williams has devoted a book, The Blue Moment, to tracing its implications for everything and everyone from American minimalism to James Brown and Brian Eno). Dave pointed out that this was made at a time when Miles was immersed in the French cultural scene of the day, having formed friendships with such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Vian, and composed the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s 1958 film Ascenseur pour l’echafaud. At my proposal, we played ‘Flamenco Sketches’ – the last and most abstract of the LP’s five pieces, and one of two jointly composed with pianist Bill Evans. Phil Leese, one of the new recruits to our group, confesses that, in general, he finds jazz unnecessarily profligate in its use of notes, but had to concede that the restrained modal improvisation on Kind of Blue is exemplary in its economy. Its reputation as the one jazz recording everyone will like notwithstanding, the album may not have convinced all who were present of the merits of the genre – Sara Cooper remains a sceptic – but it was certainly more hospitably received than the free-jazz explorations to which I exposed them last year (see the entry for 25 July 2011). They would, perhaps, have been startled had we compared John Coltrane’s melodic solo on ‘Flamenco Sketches’ with the very different solos on the saxophonist’s own major contribution to the free jazz movement, 1965’s tempestuous Ascension. Miles Davis himself, who denigrated as “psychotic” the pioneering free jazz of Ornette Coleman, must have been bemused by the transformation in Coltrane’s art. Dave, incidentally, also owns a copy of Miles’s 1970 jazz-rock landmark, Bitches Brew, which he considers a challenging but rewarding listen.
Phil Leese has been with the Pathways group for a few months. He is an expert on the work of Bob Dylan, whose concerts he has been attending since the 1970s, most recently Dylan’s appearance at London’s 02 Arena in 2010. Phil is also an accomplished musician, having sung and played guitar with his group Time Bandits – named after the 1981 film of the same name – before illness curtailed his activities. We listened to a Dylan collaboration with Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler from the 1983 album Infidels – Phil endorses the critical consensus that this, coming on the heels of Dylan’s disconcerting born-again phase, is one of Bob’s better latter-day efforts – and to a bootleg recording, performed in starker folk-protest style, of a university campus gig from the 1960s.
In making my own selections, my aim was to complement Dylan’s songs with politically oriented material from the fields of classical music and left-field rock. To this end, we heard an excerpt from American composer George Crumb’s Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land), written in 1970 at the height of US atrocities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – in tempore belli, as Crumb’s inscription in the score puts it. Its scoring for amplified string quartet (plus percussion and vocal interjections) invites comparison with John Cale’s employment of an amplified viola in LaMonte Young’s ensemble and later in the Velvet Underground: the sounds produced, aided by extended techniques such as bowing on the underside of the strings or stopping them with thimble-sheathed fingers, are strident and unnerving – as psychiatric nurse Jane Lord can attest – and entirely apposite in evoking the napalm-soaked horror of the Vietnam War.
Cale’s ‘Mercenaries (Ready for War)’ – the opening track on his turbulent 1979 LP Sabotage/Live, recorded in concert during his infamous chicken-beheading period – was my next choice. The song’s lyrics are prescient in sensing the emergence of an intensified phase in the Cold War (Ronald Reagan was to win the presidential election of the following year), and in pinpointing a development in the fighting of imperialist wars that culminated two decades later in the founding of Blackwater’s lawless mercenary army. All the more reason, then, to regret Cale’s acceptance of an OBE in 2010, even if it is astonishing that someone responsible for such confrontational music was ever offered one. After listening to the song, Phil commented that he was reminded of the work of Adrian Henri – not a connection that had previously occurred to me, but an interesting and relevant one in light of the anti-Bomb poetry Henri wrote during the era of the heyday of CND.
My third choice comprised songs by Peter Hammill from his 1978 LP The Future Now: ‘A Motorbike in Afrika’ is a fierce denunciation of the iniquities of apartheid that was covered by Dutch anarchists The Ex on their 1988 album Aural Guerrilla; while ‘Mediaevil’ (Hammill’s spelling) is a scathing critique, performed in mock-religious choral style, of a world of obdurate superstition and hypocrisy where “those who are strange are still locked in asylums/And a sterile Pope proscribes the Pill/And those who are rich are still getting richer/And those who are poor still foot the bill.” Plus ca change! Hammill’s songwriting, though it may not have immediately resonated with those in attendance (“interesting” was one noncommittal comment), demonstrates if nothing else that progressive rock is by no means, as its detractors would have you believe, a genre exclusively given over to escapist lyrical fantasy. The point could have been made more forcefully still by playing something from the mordant 1981 masterpiece The World As It Is Today by Marxist proggers Art Bears, but unfortunately there was insufficient time in the session for this.
In conclusion, I must apologize to the shade of Frank Zappa for neglecting, once more with the excuse of limited time, to play anything from a CD of works by legendary modernist composer Edgard Varese (conducted by the equally iconic – and also Zappa-connected – Pierre Boulez, who continues, at the age of eighty-seven, to live out Varese’s defiant declaration that modern composers refuse to die). As Hot Rats had been aired in one of our previous meetings (see, again, the entry for 25 July 2011), an opportunity for Zappaesque “conceptual continuity” was thereby missed. I look forward, however, to correcting this lapse in a future Pathways session – and there was in fact an obscure thread of such continuity in that Zappa, prior to Mark Knopfler being assigned the job, was one of those approached to serve as producer on Dylan’s Infidels LP.
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