Leap In The Dark

Do you know where Uruguay is? What's to know anyway, another backward country that can't even figure out how to run its own affairs. What's to know is that people have lived and died there for as long as people have lived and died anywhere else in this hemisphere. A small country, but still a country, Uruguay sits between Brazil and Argentina on the Atlantic coast of South America, whose major port town, Montevideo, takes its name from the Portuguese for " I see a mountain" Monte vide eu.

The Portuguese sailors who had landed there first had seen El Cerro, and perhaps after so long at sea it appeared a mountain to their eyes, but to Ignazio Firielli, freshly arrived from Italy in 1911, compared to the Alps of his former homeland, it's merely a hill. However, seeking to start a new life following the death of his mother and father - the latter had killed the former and then himself - he's not about to overly particular about these things. Finding work and surviving is what's important for him now. After four years of empty work chance takes him into a poker game with the members of a travelling carnival and his eventual employment as their new stable boy. It's thus that he travels inland and meets the woman who will be his wife, Pajarita, who will give birth to Eva, who in her turn will bear Salome, who in turn will give birth to Victoria.

The Invisible Mountain, the new novel by Carolina De Robertis published by Random House Canada, traces the history of Uruguay since 1900 through the eyes of its women. For, while Ignazio plays a necessary role in the proceedings, it's the first three generations of this family's women who we follow through the pages of this story as their struggle to find themselves runs parallel to their country's struggle for freedom. The story begins before Ignazio even sails to South American, and while it could be said to begin with the founding of Uruguay, as according to Pajarita's aunt Tita her great-grandfather was Jose Gervasio Artigas, the great liberator of the country who led the fight for independence with gauchos, Indians, and freed slaves, it really begins with the birth of Pajarita.

Pajarita's mother died giving birth to her, which was how her aunt Tita came to live with her and her brother Aritgas. However shortly after she was born one night the family laid down to sleep and woke the next morning to find the child had vanished. For the rest of the year Tita scoured the countryside surrounding the small village where they lived for the baby with no success. However, the following New Years Day - 1900 - Pajarita was found in the top of a tree thirty meters above the ground. It was only after Aritgas went to fetch Tita, and she shooed the assembled villagers away from the tree, that it shook itself and Pajarita flew into her aunt's waiting arms. Which is how she was given the name meaning "little bird".

Pajarita, her daughter Eva, and her granddaughter Salome are our guides through the twentieth century in South America. Pajarita listens to her brother as he recounts life in Brazil and the constant battle for power there make her and her friends grateful for their peaceful existence in Uruguay. There are laws protecting workers, unions, and good schools for their children. Eva has opportunities to better herself that her mother lacked. However events, and her father's demons, change the course of her life irrevocably. Hoping to find a better life Eva flees to Argentina and the bright promise offered by the new government of Juan Peron and his wife Evita.

Argentina almost proves a disaster but she's saved from ruin and maybe death by Dr. Robert Santos, who not only nurses her back to health in hospital, but falls in love with her. Instead of doing what other men his class have done for generations, and taking a low born mistress, he shocks and appals his family and friends by breaking off his engagement to a society girl in order to marry Eva. As well as having two children, Robert and Salome, Eva's nascent talent for poetry begins to bloom during her marriage and she even manages to publish the occasional poem. However the shiny promise of the Perons tarnishes with corruption, and when Eva assists a colleague of her husband's in writing a memorandum about the torture and framing of a political prisoner, she and her family are forced into exile. Late one night they steal away on a boat back to Uruguay.

However the Uruguay that Salome experiences is one heading down the path of oppression, and by the time she graduates from high school she has become a member of an urban guerilla group dedicated to overthrowing the government. After her cell successfully kidnaps an American special advisor to the police - he's teaching them torture techniques to be employed on political prisoners - it's only a matter of time before she is arrested, tortured, and jailed. Part of her torture consisted of rape, and so the fourth generation, Victoria, is born in prison. However at a month old, when the guards take the baby away to be Christened, it is stolen by resistance members who managed to escape, and sent away to live with her brother Robert in California.

The Invisible Mountain is fascinating and beautiful in the way De Robertis is able to mix grim reality with the elements of the fantastic that seems to be a hallmark of the best South American fiction. However what makes the book so effective is the masterful job the author has done with creating the characters populating the story. While it would have been easy and simplistic to make men the villains of the piece, she ensures the reader spends enough time with each that we can no more blame them completely for what happens than we would blame the rock we stub our toe on by accident. Of course the three women are the lead characters, and therefore we know them the best and De Robertis has created masterful portraits of each of them.

While they are the heroines of the piece they are not made out to be specifically heroic or perfect. In each case we are shown their weaknesses as well as their strengths so while we may admire them, we don't idealize them. This is not an attempt to make women out to be anything more than they are, and because of that we respect and admire the characters all the more. For it's in spite of their frailties that they are able to stand up and be proud of themselves, and that's an impressive accomplishment in any character no matter what their gender.

You may not have known much about the small South American country of Uruguay before starting to read The Invisible Mountain, but once you've finished it, you'll not only have a good grasp of its history, buy a deeper understanding of South America in general. For while the three women are the major characters, Uruguay itself is a character who makes its presence felt throughout the book. You'll never think of history as boring and impersonal again after reading this book and its intimate introduction to Uruguay.

The Invisible Mountain can be purchased either directly from Random House Canada or from an on line retailer like Amazon.ca

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:20 PM | Permalink

I've never been much of a fan of what's known as hard science fiction. You know people flying on space ships to distant galaxies and the alien life forms they meet while travelling. Part of that reason was when I started reading them back the in 1960's and 70's the majority of what I picked up always seemed to in some way reflect the cold war mentality that was prevalent at the time. Obviously there were some exceptions to that rule, Ray Bradbury, for instance, is a great story teller who happens to write science fiction and fantasy, but most else what I attempted to read by the supposed big names of the time, read like so much propaganda.

I might have even given up on the genre altogether if I hadn't come across The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. A Vietnam war veteran Haldeman not only took an anti-war stance, he openly questioned the us and them mentality and other black and white visions of the world that were commonplace in other books.
It's been over twenty-five years since I first read one of his books and he's yet to disappoint me, and his most recent release, the mass market paperback edition of Marsbound from Penguin Canada is no exception. Something I've always admired about Haldeman is his ability to take the standard science fiction plot idea and put his own distinct touch to it. In this case its a first contact story between humans and alien life and he's breathed some much needed new life into.

It's some unspecified time in the future when the story starts and eighteen year old Carmen Dula, her mom, dad, and little brother Card are about to go on the longest journey most of them have ever taken. They along with a couple dozen other people - family groups from around the world - have won the chance to join humanity's first tiny outpost on Mars. Carmen and Card had to spend a year studying so they could pass the pre-evaluation test for children and once they proved they wouldn't show any psychotic tendencies from being confined in a small space with a couple dozen other people for six months, it was a matter of hoping they would be chosen.

At least when they began the process it was a matter of hoping to be chosen but with the voyage immanent Carmen is starting to experience doubts. Some are, naturally enough, trepidation about the trip itself as there are still plenty of things that could go wrong on the voyage. First of all there's the fifty thousand mile ride in the Space Elevator that takes them out of Earth's atmosphere up to where the space ship John Carter is waiting to take them to Mars. If the cable should break on this elevator it's not the impact at the end of the fall that kills you, it's the burning up on re-entry. Carmen's trip to Mars ends up being relatively un-eventful save for a couple of scary minor hiccoughs with the Elevator cable and an oxygen leak on the space ship, and the fact that she began an affair with Paul the pilot of said ship after quite a bit of wine and a zero gravity dance party. Interestingly, the latter ends up setting off a chain of events that not only leads to first contact, but the near destruction of earth.

A drunken tryst in zero gravity nearly bringing about the annihilation of earth could be used by some as an argument against pre-material sex I suppose, except it's just the sort of person who would make an argument like that who actually sets in motion the chain of events leading up to the near cataclysm. Dargo Solingen, the general administrator of the Martian Outpost, takes such a dislike to Carmen because of her dalliance, she monitors all of her conversations either by bugging her room or eavesdropping on her radio when she's in a space suit in the hopes of catching her doing something wrong. Dargo can't punish Carmen and Paul for having sex, but she's in a position to make Carmen's live miserable whenever possible.

It's a fit of pique at the first of these punishments that sends Carmen unwisely out alone onto the surface of Mars. When she falls through the a thin section of the planet's surface and breaks her leg and damages her back-up oxygen supply she figures she's as good as dead. However she's rescued by beings who have been living under the surface of the planet for thousands of years - beings who mysteriously speak most of the main languages spoken on earth. Technically not Martians as they did come from another planet originally, and definitely not descended from any species ever known to exist on earth as they have eight appendages instead of the usual four of most primates and mammals, they're also more than just another life form. They're an organic early warning system put in place to warn their developers when humanity begins space travel and assess their potential as a threat.

While much of the scenario outlined might sound distressingly familiar to readers of science fiction, Haldeman as usual adds his own flavouring to make it much more interesting than you might think. Experiencing the story through the eyes of an eighteen year old young woman on the verge of adulthood gives the reader a far different perspective on this type of situation than they've probably ever experienced before. Haldeman has created a very realistic young person, filled with the insecurities and worries of all young adults learning how to take responsibility for their actions. Her reactions to Dargo are typical of those of any intelligent teenager to an autocratic and vindictive authority figure, it's just the circumstances and the results that aren't what we're used to.

Haldeman's message in this well told story is there for anyone who wants to see it as Dargo uses security as her excuse for compromising not only Carmen's personal rights, but in the end the safety of the whole human race. He makes it perfectly clear which side of the phone line tapping argument he comes down on, as Dargo's continued, and increased, unauthorized and illegal surveillance of Carmen pushes things dangerously closer to disaster. One person can't take the law into their own hands, no matter what their position or their excuse. While Carmen, as the person who first made contact is designated ambassador to the Martians, is being advised by scientists of all stripes, Dargo's actions are based on her personal prejudices and carried out without consultation with anyone.

One of the things I've always appreciated about Joe Haldeman's writing is his ability to make the extraordinary matter of fact. The worlds he creates in his books are all the more believable because the characters go about their business just as you and I do. We might not recognize the circumstances, but we can see ourselves in the people who are trying to deal with them which makes it much easier for us to believe in what's going on. Marsbound is no exception as Carmen is a teenager much like many teenagers - maybe a little smarter than average, but still filled with the same hopes and doubts. We've all been there - but not all of us have travelled to Mars. Part coming of age story, part romance, and part mystery Marsbound is an excellent read providing a new twist on an old science fiction theme. This is another fine book from one of science fiction's most original and thought provoking writers.

You can purchase a copy of Joe Haldemans' Marsbound either directly from Penguin Canada or an on line retailer like Amazon.ca.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:11 AM | Permalink

After the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City in September of 2001 the unfortunate but unhappily expected backlash against Islamic people and all things Muslim took place. It didn't matter that those responsible for the act were no more representative of Muslims worldwide then right wing extremist Christians trying to bring about Armageddon represent the majority of their faith, if you looked Arabic you became the enemy. (Believe me I know - I'm dark skinned of Jewish descent and "look" Muslim enough for the red necks that I had my share of "towel heads" thrown my way, which would have been laughable if it wasn't so sad and scary).

Thankfully there are some saner heads in this world and though it took a while to get off the ground individuals and organizations around the Western world began work geared at countering the image of all Muslims as fanatical terrorists. MENA Music (ME - Middle Eastern and NA - North African) was set up in New York City in 2006 by Kazko Kawai a Japanese American who has lived in the US since 1985. Her thought was that through music she could enhance mutual understanding between the Arab world and her new country. MENA are committed to bringing the best musicians of the Middle East and North Africa to North America in order to develop audiences for the music from those regions. Ironically the orchestras which have been brought to North America to date have predominately been ones playing music that originated in the west. Andalusia was once one of the cultural capitals of the Ottoman Empire which stretched from Istanbul through the Middle East, North Africa, across the Mediterranean into Spain, parts of Austria, Bulgaria, to the former Yugoslavia and most of the Balkans.

While under the Ottoman rule Christians and Jews were allowed the freedom to practice their religions and in some cases hold positions of real authority. (In Cordoba the principal advisor to the Caliph was Jewish) After the Reconquista, when the Spanish retook their former territories, there was no reciprocation of tolerance. Under the Inquisition Muslims, Jews, and gypsies were forced to flee, convert or burn. It is the descendants of refugees in North Africa, primarily Jewish and Muslim, from this era who have preserved and developed the musical and poetic traditions from the Middle ages that from the basis for today's Andalusian Music.

The Orchestra Of Tetouan were formed in 1944 in Morocco and is now into its third generation of musicians playing the music of their ancestors and are about to embark on a tour of the American Mid-West sponsored by MENA. So far dates have been announced in Madison, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Bloomington with tickets for the Boston and New York concerts , September 23rd and 24th respectively, currently on sale and available for purchase by following the links at the MENA home page However those wishing a preview of what's in store can search out a recording the Orchestra made a few years back on the Pneuma label called Escuela de Tetuan Tanger - Musique Andalouse (The School of Tetuan Tangiers - Music of Andalusia)

While there have been recent recordings made that have featured music from that period re-interpreted for modern and Western instruments, they don't really prepare you for listening to the real thing. Although a recording like Siwan by contemporary musicians and singers is based on the same traditions, and is beautiful in its own right, in reality it has little in common with the original music. For while there might be some similarities in arrangements, there's not much else in the original for a Western listener to hold onto that's familiar.

Everything, from the strings to the vocals, are higher on the scale than what most of us are comfortable listening to. In fact, I have to admit that it initially set my teeth on edge. However I encourage you to persevere, for although it might be work to listen to for the first little while, once you become accustomed to the difference you begin to feel it's power. While the lyrics are of course incomprehensible if you don't speak Arabic the music is not without it's power. Gradually what was annoying becomes enthralling and you're swept up in the swirl of sounds and the hypnotic rhythm tapped out on the goblet drums and tambourine of the percussionists. Of course it's not too surprising that we find the music initially alien to out ears as the instruments used aren't ones we're liable to hear everyday, and the ones we are familiar with are tuned to different keys and played in ways we're not used to.

The lute, violin, and viola might all have been used at one time or another in Western music, and some of you might have heard a zither, but the rebab a one to three stringed bowed instrument, one of the central instruments in the traditional orchestra, will be unknown to most. The music relies heavily on periods of improvisation on the part of the players called taksim or taqsim which literally translates as division, interspersed with vocals. Each taqsim is based on a complex system of modes or melodies and rhythms, with each melody being a combination of twenty-four different quarter notes and each combination having its own mood associated with particular feelings. There are one hundred and eleven distinct rhythmic patterns that a musician can use, the simplest being the rajaz based on the rhythm a camel's hooves make on the sand. Obviously the taqsim chosen will reflect the mood of the vocals in order to provide the proper atmosphere for their theme.

The majority of the vocals seem to have been taken from Sufi poetry which used human love as a metaphor for divine love. As a result this music has the distinction of being secular and divine simultaneously. While a true appreciation of this music would only come with a better understanding of which combination of notes is associated with which feelings, it is still possible to listen to this music and appreciate it for the magnificence of the spectacle and the way it manages to hold your attention. There is something about the combination of the sound and the beat that is enticing, and gradually, almost without noticing, you'll find yourself held by the plaintive keening of the vocals, the shifting sands of the rhythms, and the mysteries of the melodies.

The music of Andalusia was known as the music of love, and while we may not completely understand the message being delivered by the Orchestra of Tetouan, we can't help but be fascinated by it. If you have the opportunity to catch one of their concerts when they are in the US this fall, check them out - it will be an experience unlike any you've had before.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:26 PM | Permalink

People are always surprised to hear that I like country music. I'm not sure what a country music fan is supposed to look like, but whatever it is I'd hazard a guess that I don't fit the image. On the other hand the country music I tend to like isn't the stuff one hears on the radio on a regular basis, so maybe that explains a good deal of people's confusion. For as far as I'm concerned the stuff that gets passed off as country music on the radio these days is just so much sentimental twaddle which shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as music written by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Graham Parsons, and Emmylou Harris.

I don't seem to the only one dissatisfied with the rhinestone and Stetson crowd either as in recent years there's been a resurgence of interest in, for lack of a better word, traditional country music. Whether it's people rediscovering the joys of an old Hank Williams tune, or new performers recording songs that harken back to the older sound, it appears people are finally getting sick of the plastic heart that beats at the centre of mainstream country. Oh they've created all sorts of new categories within which to slot this new stuff; Americana, alt-country, or even roots music; so they can keep calling the shlock on the radio country, but when you hear an album like Watermelon Slim's new release, Escape From The Chicken Coop, on the Northern Blues label, there's no disguising who or what it really is.

Now most of you probably know Watermelon Slim as a blues artist, one of the most well respected and awarded blues artists in recent memory as he's won almost every award offered to a contemporary blues performer at the Blues Music Awards for the last three years. However Bill Homans had a life before he became Watermelon Slim that included serving a stint in Viet Nam, being the only veteran of the Viet Nam war to release an album of protest music against the war, driving eighteen wheelers, picking watermelons (hence the stage name) and even some petty larceny for a while. It was the truck driving though that sounds like it was the worst and meanest of all those jobs at least in terms of the wear and tear it took on Slim.

Now looking back at his history the real surprise is that he hasn't recorded a country album before this. It may sound like a bit of cliche, but there's not many other genres that lend themselves to stories about the lonely life of an eighteen wheeler driver than country music. The problem is of course how much of a joke the country song about a trucker has become. However I'm betting that ninety per cent of the songs that fed the joke weren't written by guys who ever sat behind the wheel of one of those behemoths, let alone drove loads of industrial waste for crooked bosses like Slim did.

Those of you who have heard Watermelon Slim before knows his music comes from his heart and he's not one to gloss over real emotions with sentimentality or pretty words, and this disc isn't any different from his other recordings in that regard. In fact there's really not much difference between this disc and any of his previous ones. For when you come right down to it good country music sings the blues as well as any blues song ever has. Anyway, Slim is still the same compassionate and honest person he was before, so the lyrics, and the stories they tell, of his new material is as real and sincere as ever.

There's a couple of songs on Chicken Coop whose titles might make you wonder a little bit, and if it were anyone else songs like "American Wives" and "Should Have Done More" might have ended up being maudlin tear jerkers. However Slim is able to take the subject matter of how difficult it is for the wife of a long distance trucker to make ends meet and the regret felt by somebody for not being willing to help out a panhandler and create songs that touch you in a real way. Part of that is his ability to bring a scene to life with his words so you can see what he's talking about in your mind's eye as he's singing. You see the harried and worried woman in her kitchen and can imagine the cracked tile flooring and her furrowed brow as she tries to work out how she's going to feed her kids, pay the rent, and the bills with the little money her husband was able to leave her with while he's out on the road.

There's nothing romantic about that image anymore than there is anything romantic about the image he creates of the man feeling remorse over refusing to give someone a handout. These are both real people whose thought processes we can identify with even if we may not have been in their exact circumstances. Like a good story teller Slim brings situations and circumstances to life so anybody listening can find a way to relate to them even if they've never actually experienced it themselves. I have the feeling it wouldn't matter what genre of music he was singing and he could still write a song that everybody could take to their hearts.

Slim isn't a complicated guy, he's not out to change the world with his music or anything silly like that. Yet what he does with his music is nothing short of miraculous. Everybody talks about the little guy, the average American out there slaving away to try and make ends meet, but the reality is that hardly anyone ever gives these people a second thought or cares enough to tell their stories. Slim hasn't forgotten what it's like to have a thankless job whose only reward is to keep the devil at bay by providing shelter and food for the family. There's no glamour or glory in this life and what dreams there might have been have long since flown away. Where others might make some sentimental palaver about these folk being the backbone of America, Slim doesn't try and disguise the hardships and difficulties that's their daily bread.

Escape From The Chicken Coop proves that not only is Watermelon Slim a great blues artist, but he's a great song writer. There hasn't been a songwriter whose been able to capture the lives of Americans in quite the same way Slim does since Woody Guthrie stopped writing. While others may try and write these types of songs they just don't have the understanding or the life experience to do them justice. Like Woody before him, Slim has been down the same roads as the people he sings about, and he sings about them honestly and sincerely. Call this disc what you like, country, folk, or blues, but in the end its a collection of great songs and that's what really matters.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:53 AM | Permalink

I'd say I get close to a CD a day being delivered in the mail from somebody looking for me to write a review, the majority of which come from people promoting blues performers. Don't get me wrong I love the blues, but after five years of listening to who know how many different bands and solo performers playing everything from old time country blues to hard rock electric blues... Well let's just say I'm not as easily impressed as I once was. Now I'm not so crass as to say that I've heard it all, however if I'm being honest with myself and others, there are a lot of folk out playing the same thing.

However that makes it all the more of a pleasure when you come across somebody who mixes it up as much on their disc as Dennis Jones does on his new release Pleasure & Pain. For although Jones plays electric blues like countless others, he distinguishes himself from the pack by not being satisfied with simply playing loud, hard and fast. In fact he plays more than just your standard twelve bar electric blues by adding in dollops of other flavours to many of his songs.

Sure he can rock out with best of them as he proves on tracks like "Try Not To Lie" which is full of power chords and searing solos. Heck if you only listened to that song and the two that follow it on the disc, "I Want It Yesterday" and "Him Or Me" you'd label him a hard rocking blues man and be done with him. I have to confess when I first looked at the cover of Pleasure & Pain I fully expected a whole album of that type of music. However, this disc offers solid proof that there is truth in the old saying that you should never judge a book by its cover. Sure he may look like a gunslinger on the front cover, but that doesn't mean he's not capable of delivering other styles equally well.

In fact the first song on the disc, "Brand New Day", lets you know right away that he's more than a one dimensional player. It's a great up tempo song with a real swing to it that immediately takes the edge off any hardness the cover might have suggested. What you don't know, as its only the first song, is that its also an indication of his ability to marry his guitar style with the mood of the song's lyrics. Now that may not sound like much to some of you, but it seems to becoming something of a lost art these days for guitar players to be able to adjust their style of playing to suit a song's atmosphere.

As you move through this disc you'll notice how Jones' guitar changes with the needs of a song and not just in the usual obvious ways that most players can handle. For while so many can adjust their volume or their speed Jones manages to add textures to his playing which make for subtle difference in tone and style. This is really clear on the song "Kill The Pain", one of the more compassionate songs I've heard about substance abuse, for although it's a pretty standard electric blues tune, there's something about his guitar that really communicates the sadness and regret that he's feeling over the suffering this person is experiencing.

The other thing that impressed me about Jones and his band (Michael Turner drums and Tony Ruiz bass) is the whole time I was listening to this disc I never once thought of them as a power trio. They are joined by guest musicians on the first and seventh tracks, but on the other nine songs its just the three of them. In fact it wasn't until I was preparing to write this review and I went to check the credits for the album that I realized the core of this group was only three people. While a lot of the credit has to go to Jones' ability to create different moods and atmospheres with his guitar playing, the other two are also responsible for helping to create the richness of sound that fooled me.

Jones doesn't have the most powerful of voices, nor the greatest of ranges, but he more than makes up for any deficiencies in those areas with character and expressiveness. He is clear and articulate and you can hear what he is feeling in his voice without him trying to "emote". While there's the usual element of bravado and toughness that comes with the territory of being a blues/rocker, there's also a certain amount of wry self awareness that lets you know he doesn't take himself overly seriously.

I don't know how many blues CDs I've reviewed over the last five years, but I do know for somebody to stand out as much as Dennis Jones has done with his new release Pleasure & Pain means he's doing something different from the others. While I can tell you that he plays a variety of styles of electric blues equally well, that he writes all his own material, and he's an exemplary guitar player, that still doesn't quite cover what distinguished him for me. There was something about him and his music that keeps you listening where with others you might not. I'm not sure how to describe it other than to say he and his music have a type of charisma that attracts and won't let you go.

That's not something I can really describe in a review, and you'll pretty much have to experience it for yourself. However, once you start listening to Pleasure & Pain you'll understand, and you also won't want to stop. It's not often I'm surprised by a blues CD these days, but this one did. Give it a listen and perhaps it will surprise you too.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 11:00 AM | Permalink

For some reason the more civilized we become the more we look to find what we've lost on the way amongst those who we at one time would have dismissed as primitive or savage. Even as early as the 19th century, when we were still forcing them onto reserves and destroying their means of livelihood, Native Americans were beginning to be seen as figures of romance. Photographer Edward S Curtis took to stamping about the "wilds" taking photos of various nations in traditional costumes. That the costumes he photographed people in happened to come out of his luggage and were usually garb only worn by those who lived on the great plains, mattered little to the white audience who to this day still lap up his photos of "authentic Indians caught in their natural habitat".

As the twentieth century progressed and people began experiencing dissatisfaction with their own cultural identities and the social mores they saw around them, their eyes began turning to other cultures and belief systems. The problem was that most of them had no idea what it was they were actually looking for and answers are hard to find if you don't know what questions to ask. As a result there has developed a tendency to idealize various cultures and their lifestyles and decide that the secret to a better world lies in emulating something that never existed. Attempts to take bits and pieces of a culture and apply them out of context don't do anything but diminish those one is trying to imitate.

One of the most disturbing trends is how people then begin to market what they've "discovered" about this other culture. I'm sure most of you have seen some variation on books with titles like Find The Inner Shaman Within You or some such crap. They promise you a better life through a spiritual awakening achieved by practising the secrets of the Amazon that they preach in their book. Of course if you're having difficulty with the achieving success with the book, you can take their workshop to get the full experience.

Unfortunately these attitudes aren't limited to those trying to make a quick buck as I discovered watching the DVD of director Kathi Von Koerber's movie Footsteps In Africa: A Nomadic Journey from Kiahkeya Productions. Presented as a documentary about nomads, and the Tuareg of the North Sahara in particular, Footsteps comes across as being far more a mixture of "The Noble Savage" and "Discover Your Inner Nomad" rather than a true examination of what life among the Tuareg is like. The hour long film splits its time between shots taken in and around a small camp, and those taken at a couple of major festivals held in the Malian part of the Sahara.

One only needs to read the notes on the back cover of the disc to be warned that this isn't really a documentary, but rather a film made by people setting out to prove their own agenda. For in them it states that the director believes "the wisdom that nomadic life entails, gives deep insight into human's relationship to the earth". So instead of merely observing life among these people of the Northern Sahara, she skewed the footage to show what she wanted to show. Interviews with what she called tribal "elders" and a "healer" produced homilies like "nature is life" and "the further we move towards science the more we move away from nature". While those sound like noble sentiments, what the film doesn't do is place them in their proper context.

The Tuareg people are nomads who live in one of the harshest environments in the world. Like the Inuit of the far north their entire belief system is going to be based around what it takes to survive in their particular environment. Calling them keepers of an ancient wisdom is to wilfully misrepresent what their knowledge represents. Take the Tuareg out of their habitat and they suffer horribly, because nothing of what they know has prepared them for life outside it. Sure they have a deep understanding of the natural forces that are prevalent in their world, but it was born out of an understanding of what it takes to survive there and its not wisdom that can be applied in other situations.

Nothing is mentioned in the film about the struggle the Tuareg have had to hold on to their habitat. Like how in Mali where this movie was filmed, there was recently an armed rebellion. Or how this has been the third major rebellion since the 1960's in an attempt to stop the steady encroachment of civilization into their traditional territory. While the Tuareg have roamed the Sahara for centuries, their primary territory now resides within the borders of Algeria, Mali, and Niger, with the latter two being the countries they have fought with the most.

It's incomprehensible to me, and also irresponsible as far as I'm concerned, that the film makers have completely ignored the reality of just how tenuous the Tuareg existence has become. By only focusing on one encampment and activities at festivals they have presented an extremely distorted view of life among the Tuareg. In fact the whole movie does them a great disservice by not telling the truth about their circumstances. Knowing this it's hard to take anything the moviemakers claim in this movie seriously, and I found the whole project distasteful and exploitive.

There have been a number of quite fascinating movies made about the Tuareg people of the Northern Sahara. Desert Rebel and Palace Of The Winds have done a good job of explaining their situation and depicting the environment they live in. Unfortunately Footsteps In Africa is not one of them as it presents a highly idealized and romanticized version of who and what these people are. I would look elsewhere for the truth.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:16 PM | Permalink

I have to admit that I've never been the biggest fan of what's known as the power trio in rock and roll. Guitar, bass, and drums aren't a combination of instruments that I've ever found conducive to making the most innovating music. Of course there have been exceptions, Jimi Hendrix somehow managed to turn that configuration into something that transcended the form, but that had more to do with his extraordinary abilities as a musician than anything else. The majority of power trios have simply ended up sounding remarkably similar after a while with nobody deviating too far from the same formulae of electric blues played loud and fast.

So when the German blues label Ruf Records sent me a copy of their latest release, Seven Moons Live featuring former Cream bass player Jack Bruce and 1970's guitar hero Robin Trower accompanied by Gary Husband on drums, I was less than enthusiastic about sitting down to give it a listen. It probably didn't help any when I looked at the track listing and "Sunshine Of Your Love" and "White Room", two old hits from Bruce's days with Cream, were the first titles to catch my eye. If any two songs have been played to death by rock and roll radio stations over the past forty years it's them.

To make matters worse live albums like this one only seem to encourage the type of playing from power trios I find the most irritating - the obligatory long winded solo from the guitar player that ends up sounding tedious before it's even half over. It wouldn't be so bad if they only did it once or twice per recording, but when they fill a record's worth of songs with guitar solos that do nothing for the music, it becomes boring awfully fast. I had remembered Trower as one of those guys who would play a guitar solo at the drop of the hat in the seventies, but if your looking for a disc full of his solos, you'll have to look elsewhere, for it turns out this disc is one of those exceptions to the rule about power trios that I was talking about.

I don't know whether it's age that's mellowed Bruce and Trower, but their approach to music seems to have changed radically since the last time I cast an ear in their directions. Although to be honest, and fair, I've not followed either of them very closely so what I heard on Seven Moons Live could be the continuation of a process begun some time ago. For while the disc is still a collection of electric blues based rock they appear far more interested in developing the subtle intricacies of a song than blasting their way through them. While there still are guitar solos scattered through out the disc, instead of feeling like the exercises in ego stroking
I was used to hearing, Trower now ensures that his individual efforts compliment whatever song he is working on.

Naturally as a bass player Bruce doesn't have the same opportunities for solo work as Trower on this recording. However unlike most recordings which bury the bass in the mix so your are left with only the sensation of the bass being played while never hearing, or aware, of any notes being played. Now when I say hearing the bass, I'm not talking about that mega-bass shit that people have for their car stereos that rattles windows and sterilizes frogs at twenty paces, I'm talking about listening to the individual notes being played. Like a jazz musician Bruce does more with his bass then keep time, and instead of his playing being like having a concrete pylon shoved into your chest because the volume is too loud, it's like hearing a complicated rhythm being played on a set of congas.

However, like Trower's leads, his playing doesn't draw attention to himself at the expense of the song. Instead it serves to make each piece that much more interesting by adding an extra layer of texture that is normally absent from the power trio configuration. In fact, musically, these three have more in common with a jazz trio than they do most rock trios that I've heard in the past. Even the old chestnuts, "Sunshine Of Your Love" and "White Room", are given a far more interesting treatment on this recording than any I've heard before. Sure they still have the same distinctive tune that has the audience cheering as soon as they hear the first notes, but within that framework Trower, Bruce, and Husband take a much more sophisticated approach than you're liable to hear elsewhere.

The one area on this disc that was slightly weaker than the rest was Bruce's vocals. I don't know how much of a range he may have had at one time, but now it's quite limited and he sounded like he was straining to reach most notes most of the time. However, to give credit where credit is due, he's also not a screamer, nor one of those vocalists who tries to hide any of his or her deficiencies behind a mess of effects. He was articulate and clear at all times, so you could actually understand every word of his singing. He also made every effort to be as expressive as possible in spite of his limitations, which almost compensated for any straining that became too obvious.

All in all Seven Moons Live is a surprisingly well performed and interestingly presented collection of songs. For instead of merely being at attempt by fading rock stars to recapture some of their former glory by blasting their way through a collection of their former hits, these three have taken their considerable talents and applied them to making the music more sophisticated and interesting. It just goes to show that some old dogs can learn new tricks, and in the process take that which once old and stale and make it new and interesting.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 11:40 AM | Permalink

When we look at the names of the acts who were performing at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival in 1969 we see them as we know them today. To us Santana, Johnny Winter, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, and others are established stars who headline festivals all the time. However this was forty years ago, and even the most established star had to have his or her early career when they weren't well known. According to the liner notes accompanying the Legacy Recordings release, Johnny Winter: The Woodstock Experience, the producers of the Woodstock festival had been very deliberate about booking bands who were relatively unknown at the time to mix with the established groups.

One of those unknowns was the young man from Mississippi Johnny Winter who had only just released his first album, Johnny Winter, earlier that year. Now if you had asked me if Winter had played at Woodstock, I would have said no way, because up to now there has been no record of his having appeared on stage at the festival. He hadn't been on either of the albums, or any version of the movie, released. So the Johnny Winter: The Woodstock Experience package represents the first time his eight song performance from August 17th 1969 has been heard. As with all the other packages of this type being released the manufactures have also included a copy of the album he had released earlier in the year, the above mentioned Johnny Winter, and a poster made from a photo taken during his concert.

Now I have to admit to never having really listened to Winter's music before, as I had wrongly assumed it was along the lines of so many other rock power trios, or even his brother Edgar's power pop. I hadn't known that Johnny has always considered himself a blues player and nothing else. So for the first time I actually sat down and listened to his music and discovered that although he doesn't play a type of music that I would listen to everyday, what he does play is some really well executed electric blues.

It's pretty normal today for there to be white electric blues players, but in the late sixties it was nowhere near as common, especially for young men from Mississippi, to want to play the blues. However, as teenagers Johnny and his brother Edgar had hung out in the black bars and catch performances by people like Muddy Waters and BB King. He actually began his performance career on the ukulele at the age of ten on a children's television show and switched to guitar when he was a teenager. He appeared on two recordings prior to his own release; a forty-five by Roy Head and The Traits and another album called The Progressive Blues Experiment

So when he appeared at Woodstock, although he had only released one recording under his own name, he had accumulated far more musical experience than most twenty-five year olds could hope (he was born on Feb.23rd 1944) and it shows. Unlike many others appearing at the festival who simply played the music from their most recently released recordings, Winter's set included only one song from his album, "Leland Mississippi Blues". Aside from it the other seven songs were either blues tunes like "Tobacco Road" and "You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now" or the early rock and roll classic "Johnny B Goode". He was even confident enough in his own abilities that he brought his brother Edgar out half-way through the set to jam with them on keyboards and saxophone.

Like I said earlier the music he played isn't the kind of stuff that I'm liable to listen to on a regular basis, but it's played extremely well. In fact the most impressive thing about his music in this set is that it doesn't fall into any of the usual electric blues/power trio cliches. True it's still hard and driving, but it has far more elements of blues music than I had expected. I had thought it would be all hard rock noise and solos, instead it was rough hewn and strong electric blues which managed to retain a good deal of the emotional depth that so many players in this genre let fall by the wayside in their pursuit of power and speed.

The other surprising thing about Winter is the quality of his voice. Unlike far too many others, who seem to consider vocals a matter of muttering and growling incomprehensibly into the microphone, he paid attention to how he sang. His voice might not be the best in the world in terms of range and body, but he showed that he knew how to make the best use possible of it. In fact its roughness and ragged edges were perfectly suited to his musical style, as it matched his guitar's strong and abrasive emotional honesty.

The other great thing about Johnny Winter's performance on the live disc is how obvious it is that he has a great sense of humour and doesn't take himself anywhere near as seriously as other guitar slingers do. There's something about his choice of performing "Johnny B Goode", and the way he sings it in an almost self-mocking tone, that's like he's dropping the audience a giant wink to let them know it's all in good fun. In fact more than anything else what makes his music so good is it's obvious how much fun he is having and how much he loves what he is doing. He knows that this music isn't about to change the world, but it's what he loves doing and he has a great time doing it. It's a combination that is hard to resist.

Now a days white electric blues players are a dime a dozen and a great many of them are about that original in their playing. Johnny Winter may not be the most innovative of players, or even the best electric blues guitar player to come down the pipe, but he brings to his playing the passion and joy of playing that so many other seem to be lacking. Listening to the live tracks from his Woodstock appearance on Johnny Winter: The Woodstock Experience really make that obvious, and it can't help but bring a smile to your lips.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:19 AM | Permalink

Growing up in a bastion of white Protestant wealth, opportunities to hear really good funk or soul music were severely limited. The radio stations in the 1970's were either awash with disco, pseudo-intellectual rock, or vacuous pop music. Everybody was either listening to that stuff, or just as bad, strutting white boys trying to make as much noise as possible while still calling it music. So it wasn't until one fateful night in a second run movie theatre which showed a battered print of Woodstock on alternating nights with The Rocky Horror Picture Show that I received my first real dose of funk.

Okay reading that back I know it sounds bad, but I can't think of any other way of describing what happened when Sly & The Family Stone invaded the movie screen that night. By the time they show up on screen in the movie you've already been sitting for a couple hours and for any number of reasons you've descended into a bit of a stupor. In those days you didn't even have to bring your own dope to get high at the movies as sooner of later one of the clouds drifting through the theatre would land on you head and you'd be gone. Then all of a sudden the screen explodes in a burst of sound and colour as Sly and company burst onto stage bedecked in a bedazzling array of colours and material.

After a few moments of preening the bass starts churning, horns start blaring, and the guitar and keyboard are pounding out a rhythm that wakes up your blood - and that's only the intro. That first time watching "The Family" was a blur of horns and vocal pyrotechnics as Sly reached out and grabbed those hundreds of thousands of people in the dark beyond the stage by the throat and shook them awake (They went on stage at three in the morning). On the original soundtrack and in the movie all you get is a taste of what they performed that early Sunday morning, and even just the medley of "Music Lover/Higher" was enough to rouse even the most stoned of us sitting in that run down theatre. Now that I've heard their entire set as part of the Legacy Recordings' release Sly And The Family Stone: The Woodstock Experience, I'm trying to imagine what it must have like for those in the audience at Woodstock to have that thrust in front of their eyes at 3:00 am.

As well as the disc containing the live recording of their set at Woodstock, also included in this package is a reissued version of the studio recording the band had released earlier that year, Stand!. Like all of their music it contained a mixture of high stepping funk music that would knock your socks off and political messages like the song "Don't Call Me Nigger Whitey". While they didn't play that particular track at the Woodstock festival, the majority of their set was drawn from that album, including their hit "Everyday People", as well as "Stand", "Sing A Simple Song", "You Can Make It If You Try", and "I Want To Take You Higher".

It was that last song that had made such an impression on me during the movie, but now I was just listening to their performance without the visual stimulation, or any other kind for that matter, of seeing the band. So I was a little concerned that the music on the disc wouldn't stand up well in comparison to my memories of that first time watching them on screen. Well I needn't have worried because the live CD is a great experience. The sound quality is wonderful as you're able to hear everything from the great harmonies on "Everyday People" to the power of the horns on "Dance To The Music".

In fact upon comparing the live recording with the studio versions of the same songs I found the latter to be less impressive. Oh sure the sound quality is better in the studio, but this band seems to big for a studio, and it felt like they were held in check. It was like the difference between seeing a horse trotting around in a paddock and watching it gallop full speed across a range towards the horizon. In part that's because of the way Sly And The Family Stone include the audiences in their shows, as you can hear on the call and response sing alongs that they instigate during the "Music Lover/Higher" medley, but mainly it's because when they hit their stride they generate enough energy to power a small city.

It's true that on the studio album one is more aware of the social/political nature of their material because you're able to focus on their lyrics a little easier. On the other hand Sly does make sure to literally spell out part of the band's message during the live show by enticing the audience to spell out a four letter word. As they had participated in the "Fish Cheer" led by Joe McDonald of Country Joe And The Fish earlier in the weekend, you can be forgiven for not guessing that the word he had in mind was Love. However in the church of Sly And The Family Stone, peace, love and harmony were the message.

Aside from the two discs that are part of the Sly And The Family Stone: The Woodstock Experience package, there's also a poster of Sly from the concert included. The photo captures him from the chest up and shows the beginnings of his arms reaching for the sky with the fringes of his jacket spreading like feathers from the sleeves. His mouth is open in what appears to be an ecstatic shout of exultation and all in all he seems to be about to take flight. That picture captures something of the energy you feel from the music performed on the live disc and gives you some small indication of how the band must have looked to their audience that early morning in August.

It's not often that a live recording is able to recreate the energy of a concert. However, in this instance, you really feel like you're carried back forty years to when Sly And The Family Stone took the stage at Woodstock. It's an experience not to be missed.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:59 AM | Permalink

White woman in North American popular music in the early 1960's were expected to be one of a few types. There was the earnest folk music type with long hair who didn't wear very much make-up and sang very seriously about love, politics and social injustice. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the teeny bopper pop singer who could be seen on American Bandstand wondering who would take her to the prom or crying about the boy who broke her heart. As long as a woman agreed to play one of those roles and had a modicum of talent she could ride the back of the music industry up the pop charts.

Of course women didn't have to be like that, and as the decade progressed there were those who charted their own path instead of worrying about the path up the charts, but you'd have to look long and hard for them.This attitude has more to do with the nature of popular music than any sort of sexism as there has always seemed to be some sort of law against demonstrating real emotion while singing if you want to be on the hit parade. Like cotton candy, popular music has always been light and fluffy with little or no substance. It wasn't Elvis's sex appeal that was so scary when he burst on the scene, it was that his music stirred emotions, and even worse, he sang with emotion.

While that was all right for jazz and blues singers, it just wouldn't do for pop music, so all those rough edges had to be smoothed down, and the raw energy turned down. So popular music was scrubbed clean of as much of its "colour" as possible in order to make it palatable for as many people as possible. So when Janis Joplin came along sounding like Big Momma Thornton and fronting a band playing psychedelic blues it was unlike anything the majority of people had heard before. By the time she got to Woodstock in 1969 she was getting ready to release her I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama. For reasons that have always escaped me her performances at the festival weren't included in the movie or its soundtrack, so the Legacy Recordings two disc release Janis Joplin: The Woodstock Experience is like a forty year old mistake finally being corrected.

Disc one of the set is a reissue of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama and disc two is her complete performance from August 17th/69 at the Woodstock festival. The album and the gig marked a change for Joplin as they were the beginnings of her solo career. For her performance at the festival she took the chance of mixing material from her forthcoming album which people wouldn't know with old crowd favourites like "Ball And Chain", "Piece Of My Heart", and the Gershwin classic "Summertime". Some of her new material included "Try ( Just A Little Bit Harder)", Kozmic Blues", and her cover of the Bee Gees "To Love Somebody".

Now I've seen some footage of Janis Joplin singing live before, I think it was from the Monterey Pop Festival when she was with Big Brother And The Holding Company, and have heard plenty of studio recordings of her singing before, but nothing had prepared me for the rawness of what was on display when she went on stage and started singing that night. I've heard people describe her concerts as a lone victim being sucked dry by thousands of vampires because she opened herself up so wide and was so emotionally raw on stage. I don't know about that, but it was almost frightening to hear how much of herself she was pouring into each song that night. It was hard to believe that one person could to stand in front of an audience and bare her soul in that way.

When she sings "Piece Of My Heart", and she starts into inviting whoever to take another little piece of her heart, she sounds like she is pleading to be loved, by somebody, anybody, so intense is her offer of giving up her heart. In fact it almost feels like intruding upon something highly personal. She sounds so desperate to be loved, and so willing to put up with anything in exchange you forget you're listening to someone performing a song, but rather feel as if you are eavesdropping on her thoughts.

You might think that something like George Gershwins "Summertime", from his opera Porgy and Bess, would be a little less intense, but not the way Joplin sings it. Most people merely sing about the hope implied in the song's lyrics, and if it's done really well you'll feel some of the wistfulness of the singer as she hopes for her daughter's future. Listening to Joplin sing it and there's very little hope, more the anguish of telling someone you love a lie in order to preserve their hope. For what hope is their really for the daughter of slave that her life will be any different from her parents? Little to none. Somehow, without saying anything about the subject, Joplin is able to capture the emotional damage done by slavery to a person's heart and soul.

There are times when the sound system fails Joplin and her voice distorts, yet even on those occasions when you can't understand what she is singing, you can still feel what she is singing about. When you listen to this concert, listen to the timber of her voice and the slight catches in it as she becomes momentarily chocked by what she is trying to express. In the world of popular music where singers have long been discouraged from showing anything close to real emotion and lyrics are designed to say nothing of substance, Janis Joplin was an anomaly. She felt everything she was singing about, and only sung about those things important to her. In her you were able to hear the potential for music to be a catharsis for those listening as well as performing, for you could not come away unmoved after hearing her sing.

If you've never heard Janis Joplin sing, than Janis Joplin: The Woodstock Experience offers an amazing opportunity to experience her at the peak of her professional prowess. For the rest of us, this package is a reminder of what a truly unique and amazing performer she was. Just be careful she doesn't take a little piece of your heart.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 11:08 AM | Permalink

The first time you see a performer or a group in action goes a long way towards forming your opinion of them and their work no matter what you see and hear of them anytime after. Well that's the case with me anyway and, whether its fair or not, if they suck the first time I see them its going to take a whale of a performance in the future for me to change my opinion of their music. That first exposure will have made an indelible impression on my memory banks, and somewhere in the back of my mind I'll always carry the awareness of that lousy gig and be waiting for them to repeat it. Than again if they are magnificent the first time, and it will take a lot for me to give up on them.

The first time I saw Santana in action was also the first time I saw the movie Woodstock. It looked like Santana was the first group to go on after the infamous rain storm which had turned Yasgur's farm into a mud bath. In the movie the crowd had started to do their own percussion thing to entertain themselves with people playing on everything from fence posts to beer bottles in order to participate. After a couple minutes of that the movie segued into Carlos and the boys playing "Soul Sacrifice". While I had heard them play the same song on the soundtrack, actually seeing them perform it was completely different experience.

Although both the movie and its soundtrack only have Santana playing the one song, like everyone else who played "The Woodstock Music & Art Festival" they played between forty-five minutes and an hour. Now, for the first time, the whole set Santana played Saturday August 16th 1969 has been released on one recording as part of Legacy Recordings' Santana: The Woodstock Experience. The two CD package also contains a copy of the group's 1969 release, the self-titled Santana, their first recording, and a poster of the group performing at the Woodstock festival.

I have to assume the eight tracks on the Woodstock disc represent the entire set performed by Santana that afternoon after the rainstorm, and the order they appear in on the CD match the original performance order, as it doesn't say different anywhere on the packaging. There's two reasons that's important to me; one it means they basically performed, with the addition of "Fried Neck Bones And Some Home Fries" and the subtraction of "Shades Of Time" and "Treat", their album for the concert, and two, "Soul Sacrifice" hadn't followed directly after the audience's spontaneous percussion performance as the movie implies, as it was the second last song in their set. What happened on screen was the result of creative editing on the part of the film makers, not some shared experience between audience and performers.

While that was a little disappointing to discover it did nothing to diminish the electricity of the band's overall performance on the live recording. For not only was "Soul Sacrafice" as good and exciting as it was the first time I heard it in the movie theatre all those years ago, now that it was placed in its proper context as being part of the band's overall set, it somehow became even more exciting. Santana is one of those bands whose performances are a cumulative thing, with each song building on the momentum and energy created by the one preceding. Like a rising tide the music builds in its intensity until it finally reaches its high water mark leaving the audience feeling like they've experienced something equivalent to a force of nature.

It's not often you have the opportunity to listen to a band doing studio versions and then live version of pretty much the same songs on the same release. This is especially interesting when dealing with a band like Sanatan where everybody from Carlos Santana on lead guitar, the conga and percussion players Mike Carabello and Jose Chepito Areas, drummer Mike Shrieve, bass player Dave Brown, to Gregg Rolie on keyboards (which in those days meant piano and organ) are such gifted musicians they can play extended solos on their respective instruments that are miniature performances unto themselves. The embellishments they each add to a song during a live performance aren't just gilding, they almost take it to a new dimension as they push the material as far as it can go without becoming self indulgent.

Something you have to realize listening to these two discs, especially the live one, is that in 1969 the type of music Santana was playing was something most people hadn't heard before. While today bands like Los Lobos and others have made the mixture of Spanish music, blues, and rock and roll well known, it was Carlos Santana and his band who first popularized it, and it was this concert that started it all. Before they had played Woodstock Santana hadn't been known outside of the San Francisco Bay area and this concert brought their sound east for the first time.

Mike Shrieve's drum solo in "Soul Sacrifice" is now one of those seminal moments in rock and roll history for the impact it had on the audience that day. Michael Lang, co-producer of the Woodstock festival recalls, according to the liner notes, it was that solo that captivated the audience and completed the job of winning them over. While they may have missed some of the subtler nuances of the performance simply because of the size of the audience and the primitive sound system, Shrieve's drumming wasn't something that anybody could miss. While normally I find there's nothing more boring than a rock and roll drum solo, and am ever so grateful that they are now mostly gone the way of the dinasour, the solo he uncorked that concert was like the best of jazz drumming, but tinged with the wild abandon of rock and roll.

When Carlos Santana and the rest of his band strode onto stage on Saturday afternoon on the 16th of August 1969, nobody quite knew what they were going to hear. Unlike them we've had the privilege of being able to listen to Carlos Santana for forty some years now, but you've probably not heard him quite like you'll hear him on the live from Woodstock disc. Of course according to this article in Rolling Stone Magazine he was peaking on mescaline when they went on stage, which might have made some difference. However that, after all, was part of what the era was about too and you can just consider that part of the spice that makes the music so special. The sound quality might not be the best on these live recordings, but that doesn't really do anything to diminish their significance and how the music will make you feel and what you just might experience listening to it.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:57 PM | Permalink

I didn't actually hear any music by Jefferson Airplane until after the band had changed its name to Jefferson Starship sometime in the 1970's. As was the case with most of my music my first exposure to them came through my older brother. The first album of theirs that I bought on my own was a double album retrospective that came out in the mid to late 1970's which covered their career from their first album, Jefferson Airplane, through to Red Octopus by the Starship.

Even though there was some great stuff from Crown Of Creation in this set, it was the rough edged anthem "Volunteers" and their eerie version of "Wooden Ships" from the Volunteers album that made the biggest impression on me. Compared to what was being played on the radio at the time, these songs from some eight years earlier were a breath of fresh air. It wasn't until I heard the Clash for the first time a couple of years latter that anyone was able to match the intensity of the call to arms for social change of Volunteers.

Ironically it had been about a year earlier I had first seen the movie Woodstock in one of the second run theatres scattered around Toronto Canada. The version they were showing in the theatres those days didn't include the footage since added to the director's cuts that have been released in recent years, so I had no idea the Airplane had even played at the festival. I had listened to the triple album that had been released as a soundtrack a number of times before seeing the movie - thanks again to my brother - and they hadn't been included on it either. It wasn't until years later I found out they had been there, and it was only when I got hold of a copy of a director's cut a few years ago that I even heard any of the set they performed.

Now, forty years since the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival and the release of Volunteers, Sony's Legacy Recordings have released a series of five numbered, limited edition, re-mastered recordings featuring performer's complete sets from Woodstock and the album that they released the year of the concert. Jefferson Airplane: The Woodstock Experience contains all thirteen songs Jefferson Airplane performed that Sunday morning in August of 1969 when the sun was coming up over Yasgur's farm and a copy of Volunteers. Disc one of the two disc set includes the ten tracks from the studio album and the first five cuts from their Woodstock set, including Grace Slick's slightly trippy greeting to the crowd. As well as including a second disc containing the rest of the band's live set, in a throwback to the old days of albums, the package comes complete with a poster of the band on stage at the festival.

When I first heard the Airplane's set had been left out of the movie and the soundtrack album I had figured it was because the sound quality just hadn't been good enough to warrant including it. Remember technology in 1969 was primitive compared to what we're used to today and it was quite possible that because of the rain and other problems, the sound for their set had sucked. However, when I saw what had been included in the director's cut of the movie I knew that couldn't be the case for the sound was as good as anything else included in the earlier version. What makes their exclusion even odder is, as the packaging says, in 1969 Jefferson Airplane was "the" headlining act for festivals.

We might look at a line up including the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Santana, and think one of them might have been bigger. However, Santana had just released their first album that year and the Who hadn't broken through in the States yet. It was their appearance at Woodstock that jumped started both bands' careers. According to the liner notes of this package, Jefferson Airplane had been the first group that the festival's organizers had booked for the weekend. They were included on the far less popular Woodstock Two album, along with other bands who didn't appear in the original movie or the soundtrack, but that's an odd way to treat your headliner, don't you think?

Forty years later listening to their set its as much a mystery to me now as it was when I first found out as to why they weren't included in either the original soundtrack or the movie. Sure the version of "Wooden Ships" they do is nearly thirty minutes long, and the sound is a little iffy on a couple of other cuts, but there's some great stuff among these thirteen tracks. There are six songs whose versions here have never been released before, including the epic "Wooden Ships", and two of their classic psychedelic numbers "The House At Pooneil Corners" and "The Ballad Of You & Me & Pooneil". Combined with "Whit Rabbit", Somebody To Love", "Volunteers", and the rest of the material on the two discs, this collection works as a pretty damn good greatest hits package of Jefferson Airplane.

Listening to Marty Balin's and Grace Slick's voices arc and soar over the churning guitars of Jorma Kaukonen and Paul Kantner and the driving beat laid down by Spencer Dryden's drums and Jack Casady's bass is to experience what psychedelic rock was all about. While there were others who tried to emulate them, it was the Airplane who were pushing the boundaries and creating something otherworldly on stage with their music. They could bring the house down with their wild energy and send you deep into inner space with the spiral of their lyrics. They sang of a hopeful future where "We Can Be Together" and called for "Volunteers" to help in the fight they knew it would take to bring about the better world their songs promised.

Jefferson Airplane were the epitome of the optimism of that generation, and while it's easy for cynical ears to dismiss them as naive and unrealistic, at the time they were expressing the hopes and dreams people had for changing the world. They had already seen a revolution in the America South with the empowerment of African Americans, so why couldn't it be possible to throw off the restrictive behaviour and attitudes of previous generations? Unfortunately the dream was already dying in August of 1969 as both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated the previous year, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew were occupying the White House in the United States, and Marty Balin would leave the Airplane by the end of the year. Although nowhere near as significant as any of the other events, his departure changed the band irrevocably, and they drifted off into dreams of escape on starships instead of trying to save the world.

Listen to Jefferson Airplane: The Woodstock Experience and you can hear the sound of what it must have been like to believe, if even for only a short while, the world could be a place where "We Can Be Together". It's wonderfully and beautifully, crazy and naive, and I can't help feel regret there aren't people out there who can help us feel like that again. Music should be able to take us places we can't go on our own, and when you flew with the Airplane, you went quite a distance.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:39 AM | Permalink

Timing, as they say, is everything. So it seems appropriate that a day or so after someone died whose passion for life and his art was one of the glorious inspirations of my life, I'm reviewing a CD of music inspired by all the word remembrance can mean. In his liner notes to his new release Remebrance on the Concord Music Group label, John Patitucci talks about how not only was he attempting to pay tribute to those who have passed, but also remembering those who are still around and continue to inspire him with their playing on a daily basis. However, the disc is not just about remembering people - its about remembering to be in the present and enjoy the moments we are blessed with and not allowing ourselves to become caught up in the past or preoccupied with the future.

Patitucci doesn't draw a line connecting the former and the latter parts of the above, but the way I see it is that the work of those who have truly inspired us will have the power to ensure that we stay in the present. For their music, painting, or writing wouldn't inspire us if it wasn't able to attract out complete attention and keep us in the moment. Now these are all fine and noble sentiments, but how do you translate them into music? The first option is to create pieces in tribute to the folk you're going to miss and try to recreate some of what they had done that inspired you (the same can be done for those still living), while the other option is to create pieces of music that are powerful incentives to keep people focused on the here and now.

For this effort he's joined by other members of his trio, Joe Lovano (tenor saxophone) and Brian Blade (drums) on ten of the eleven tracks on the disc, while his wife adds some beautiful cello work to "Scenes From An Opera" and Rogerio Boccato fills some gaps with percussion on four tracks. For the final track of the disc, the title track, Patitucci plays against himself, bass against a piccolo bass. Oh - had I failed to mention that Patitucci was a bass player until now? Well he is, and while Jaco Pastorous was magnificent, there's something about the quality of Patitucci's playing that makes me feel like he is the superior musician. I didn't say bass player, I said musician which is an important distinction.

Don't get me wrong I love Pastorous' playing just as much as anybody's but he died young, before he had a chance to fully develop as a musician. What he could have accomplished if he had the time is another thing altogether. However, listening to Patitucci's playing and his compositions on this disc, he wrote all eleven tracks, you can't help but be impressed by his range of expression, the breadth of his artistic awareness, and his imagination. For while "Monk/Trane" is obviously a tribute to John & Alice Coletrane and Thelonious Monk as the title suggests, he doesn't just try and write something that will imitate those three great players, the song also manages to express something of what the music meant to him personally as well.

The same goes for any of the obvious tribute songs, "Blues For Freddie" and "Sonny Side" (for Freddie Hubbard and Sonny Rollins respectively I assume) as each of them contains elements of the named person's style while telling something of what their music meant to Patitucci. How did he manage to do that you might be asking, create a song that talks about how music made him feel? Well first of all instead of any of these songs having anything at all to do with a dirge or eulogy of some sort or another, they all are full of life and elaborate creations that are too involved to be depressing. Secondly they live up to his last objective in creating this disc - they absorb your attention so completely that you are held in the moment by the music.

Well, you might say, what's so hard about that? Well let me ask you something in return. When you're listening to music how often do you find your mind wandering and you start thinking about things other than the song you're supposedly paying attention to? Now there is the occasional song where the composer has gone out of his way to trigger certain reactions in their listener which will bring various thoughts to mind, but that's not the same as you're brain wandering all over the place. Anyway, when a songwriter's intent is for you to feel something in particular, it's not so you wallow in it at the expense of what you're doing in the moment, it's in order to ensure that you feel or experience things as intensely as possible at the moment of impact.

The title song, "Remembrance", on this disc is a great example of this in action. Patitucci has dedicated this song to Michael Brecker, not somebody whose music I'm familiar with so I wouldn't be able to tell you if it sounded like something he created or not, and while there is something decidedly poignant about the song, it's not designed to make you wallow in those emotions. While I was listening to the track I couldn't help but think of the person I knew who had just passed away, and while there was definitely hurt involved in that reaction as it brought my sadness to the surface, it was also positive. For as I listened to the song I wasn't thinking about how awful it was that he had died, I was thinking about all the wonderful things he had brought into my life. It helped me to celebrate his memory instead of only thinking about the grief that his loss caused.

There are many ways we can remember those who have influenced and inspired us. We can choose to mourn the loss and wallow in that, or we can count our blessings for having had the chance to have them in our lives and rejoice in the gifts they left us. Of course that same options apply to how we live our lives; either relishing every moment we are given for the opportunity that it presents us, or worrying ourselves sick over what might lie ahead and what came before. John Patitucci has created in his new disc Remembrance, eleven songs which manage to help us remember those lessons. Through heartfelt creations and loving performances he and his fellow musicians have created an album that is wonderful to listen to as well as being good for the soul. A gift which all of us can appreciate.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 10:39 AM | Permalink

Being the son of one of the most revered folk singers in the United States hasn't always been easy for Arlo Guthrie. It's not every child who has to come home from school and ask his dad to teach him the lyrics to a song he wrote because everybody else in his class knows the words to "This Land Is Your Land". It sounded funny at the time, hearing Arlo recount that story during a documentary television special about his famous father, Woody Guthrie. Some people never overcome the shadows cast on their lives by the deeds of their parents, and an incident like the one described above could have been a disaster. However, in this case it didn't take long for the son to establish himself as a singer and songwriter in his own right.

It was in 1966 that he wrote the song that would make him famous the world over, "Alice's Restaurant", and later released an album and stared in a movie of the same name. For those of you who somehow might have missed hearing about it, the song recounts - in detail - the story of how Arlo and some friends of his were arrested for littering Thanksgiving Day and his subsequent visit to the draft board and how his criminal record from the incident impacted on that visit. Of course "Alice's Restaurant" was only one song in Arlo's arsenal, and by 1969 songs like "Coming Into Los Angeles" and "The Motorcycle Song" had further cemented his reputation by the time he appeared at the Woodstock Muisic Festival in Bethal New York in 1969.

Now that big concert in 1969 wasn't the only gig Arlo had that year, and the folk at Rising Son Records, the label Arlo put together for his family and friends, have uncovered some old tapes in the basement from another concert he gave just before he went down to Woodstock. They've done all the usual magical stuff that can be done with digital re-mastering, and the result is Tales Of '69 which is scheduled for an August 18th/09 release, pretty much forty years to the day that Arlo would have been saying "New York State Freeway is closed man" before singing "Coming Into Los Angeles" for 500,000 people.

As anybody who has ever seen Arlo in concert knows half the fun are the stories he uses to introduce the songs. So aside from the fact that three tracks on this disc are songs that have never been released before, if you were wondering about the attraction of buying a forty year old collection of live songs, it's for the way Arlo performs them and introduces them. Sure we've all heard "Coming Into Los Angles", his cautionary tale of trying to bring controlled substances through LA Ex, but you've never heard it introduced with Arlo giving the audience real estate advice in advance of the quake that's supposed to move the West Coast further east. Suffice to say he's talking about buying beach front property somewhere in the Mid-West.

The disc kicks off with "The Unbelievable Motorcycle Tale", probably better known to most as simply "The Motorcycle Song", and its presented in all its gory original details here; including the audience cheering when he and his bass player (who was in the side car) go off the cliff and are saved from certain death because they land on a cop car whose occupant doesn't survive. This version also includes the startling story of the undercover pickle who is working as a police informer. Something that you'll notice quite quickly when listening to this disc, is that this younger version of Arlo Guthrie is one heck of a lot more militant then the current model, and a lot more frank in his talk about drug use then what you'll hear from folk now a days.

The little asides that he gives out during some of introductions, and the content of a couple of the previously unreleased tracks, makes this pretty obvious, but it's the version of "Alice's Restaurant" he performs on this night that really brings it home. Having just seen Arlo performing the song during its fortieth anniversary tour I had assumed I knew the song intimately - heck I even used to have the whole damn thing memorized. However, aside from the tune and the chorus, I didn't recognize a thing about the version of the song he sang on this night back in 1969. First of all there was no mention of any garbage, officer Obie, or of the boys sitting on the Group "W" bench at the draft board. The story he spun on this night was all about the intrigue involving a new secret weapon - a rainbow coloured roach. (For those unfamiliar with drug parlance roach is the term given to the butt end of a marijuana cigarette, or joint as they say).

It's a hilarious story involving spies from Russia and China discovering the secret rainbow coloured roach in Alice's Restaurant and sneaking off with it back to their countries in the hopes of creating the ultimate secret weapon - a bomb that will get the populace of the United States "bombed". Of course when American security services find out about this they send a group of agents down to the restaurant to see if they too can get their own roach - they need to devise a means of defending the red, white, and blue from this horrible threat. They not only discover their own roach, but one that's the biggest roach ever seen, some four foot long and a foot around.

Well the story goes on from there to include both the Russians and Chinese making use of tape to adhere roaches to missiles. Lydon Johnson and Hubert Humphry, (President and Vice President respectively of the United States as the incident took place prior to the 1968 election of Nixon) and everybody else running the government licking and sucking on that giant roach and getting high and devising literally blanket protection for continental United States. That image alone, of LBJ and Hubert Humphry getting stoned, makes this song worth listening to, but for those of you like me who have heard the "traditional" version countless times, it's a treat to hear a version unlike any I've ever heard before.

Tales Of '69 is not only great because of the different versions of old favourites it includes alongside songs that have never been released before, its also a chance to take a glimpse back in time to when things were a whole lot different then they are now. Hearing a young Arlo Guthrie singing some of the songs that we've all come to identify with him when they were newly written makes you appreciate even more how he's able to still keep them sounding fresh forty years later. Young or old Arlo is a delight to listen to and this disc is no exception.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:14 AM | Permalink

At about 11:30 on the night of August 6th 2009 we lost one of the great voices of American music. At the age of fifty-nine Willy DeVille has succumbed to Pancreatic Cancer. His death came as a shock to those who loved him and his music, for his diagnosis came only shortly before his death. Earlier this year Willy had informed his fans that he would be having to take some time off from performing and recording as he was having to undergo treatment for Hepatitis C, but in May of 2009 the doctors discovered that he had Stage Four Pancreatic Cancer.

Born on August 25th 1950 as William Borsey, he changed his to name to DeVille with the formation of the band that propelled him to international renown - The Mink DeVille Band. When asked about the genesis of the band's name in an interview Willy replied that the band had been sitting around talking of names when one of the guys said how about Mink DeVille, there can't be anything cooler than a fur lined Cadillac can there? While the band was put together in San Francisco, it was in New York they caught fire. In 1975 CBGB's was one of the few clubs hiring live rock and roll bands so along with hundreds of others Willy and the band auditioned and the roller coaster began.

While most of us associate CBGB's with the early days of punk rock; The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, and Blondie; Mink DeVille were playing the type of music that Willy had first fallen in love with as a kid listening to the radio around the breakfast table. The rock and roll and R&B of the early sixties that was big on American Bandstand. Willy described listening to bands like the Drifters as being a magical experience and how the drama of it would hypnotize him..

No matter that they were formed in San Francisco, you'd never think of Mink DeVille as anything but a New York City band. The Latin beats came from the lower east side and their cool was that of the street. While everybody else was in ripped t-shirts and jeans, Willy was even then developing the elegance and grace that would become the hallmarks of his stage presence throughout his career. It was one of those happy accidents that can only be put down to destiny that he and Jack Nietzsche were brought together for his first album with Capital records. It was Jack who had been involved with so much of the music that Willy had loved as a kid. Cabretta, released in 1977, was the first indication of the unique talents hidden within Willy as it showed him equally comfortable singing R&B, Latin, rock, and blues. Nobody before or since Willy has been able to blend the diverse elements of American popular music into one sound with such authenticity, soul, and passion.

Unfortunately nobody has ever known what to do with that sound once it was pressed onto wax. Even back in the early days Willy remembers Nietzsche saying that he never understood why Capital signed Mink DeVille as they were the label of safe bands like the Beatles and the Beach Boys. There's no need to look further than Willy's lack of recognition is his own country to see how screwed up the music business in North America is. Here's someone who is the quintessence of American music, yet his last CD, Pistola, wasn't even released domestically and Crow Jane Alley, released prior to that, only had 500 made for domestic release.

The most recognition Willy ever received in his home country was a nomination for an Academy Award for his song "Storybook Love" from the album Miracle that he made with Mark Knopfler. The album itself came about because of a suggestion made by Knopfler's wife at the time, Lourdes. According to Willy she had said to Mark you really like Willy's stuff so why don't you make an album with him? When Willy got to London he was playing Knopfler some of the songs he wanted to record and when he heard "Storybook Love", he asked Willy how he had found out that he was doing the soundtrack for Princess Bride as Willy had just written a song perfect for it. They sent director Rob Reiner a rough copy of the song and he loved it.

I've been an admirer of Willy's since hearing his stunning voice on the radio for the first time. He has an enormous range, with influences from all corners of the country, from Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and New Orleans music to Latin, folk-rock, doo-wop, Ben E. King style soul and R&B - all part of the New York mix.  The songs he writes are original, often romantic and always straight from the heart.  He can paint a character in a few words.  When we worked on his Miracle album I enjoyed the occasional opportunity to offer a chord or two to go with his great lyrics. Mark Knopfler

While Willy may not have ever been properly appreciated in North America during his life time, he was adored in Europe where he was appreciated for his artistry and diversity. We have our flavours of the minute and we celebrate stardom not talent or passion. In that kind of environment there was no room for an artist of the calibre of Willy DeVille. Like any artist Willy wasn't satisfied with doing the same thing over and over and again - what painter would want to paint the same painting repeatedly? - and was always experimenting with different styles of music and presentation. But in the cookie cutter environment of North American popular music originality is looked upon as only slightly less a sin than honesty and integrity, both of which Willy also happened to be cursed with.

All told, either as himself or under the Mink DeVille banner, Willy released sixteen albums, and fourteen compilation packages of his material were also released over the years. He also appeared on tribute albums for people ranging from Edith Piaf to Johnny Thunders, and two other film scores aside from Princess Bride, Cruising and Death Proof. All this in spite of the fact that he went a good chunk of the 1990's without a record contract. Most people when faced with the type of career adversity he's had, on top of the troubles he faced at times in his personal life, would have thrown in the towel long ago. However, as anybody who knew him will attest, Willy wasn't most people.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to talk with Willy on two occasions, and each time I was impressed by both his love for what he did and his warmth as a human being. We talked for hours each time about his music, but also about the common struggle we had shared with addictions. His compassion and heart were boundless, and in spite of the troubles he had in his life - finding his second wife when she had committed suicide - he still found time for others and their problems. A friend of his recounted to me how she and her husband coached a young man who had lost his arms and legs in singing as he had been chosen as the Variety Club poster child. The young man had wanted to sing one of Willy's song for The Variety Club Telethon and had needed to supply sheet music for the event. Not only did Willy arrange for his bass player at the time to write out a score for the song, (Willy was living in New Orleans at the time and the young man was in New York City) when the young man came to see Willy playing at the Bitter End the next time he was in New York, Willy spent two hours talking with him after the show.

There aren't many people who I've come into contact with in the past few years of reviewing and interviewing music who I can honestly say have had the same effect on me as Willy did. It was something about the way he talked about his art, his music that was genuinely inspiring. I'm not a musician, but talking to him rekindled my own passion for writing and to always push myself as much as possible. In the acknowledgements to my book being published this fall I wrote "Over the course of two very long and wide ranging conversations Willy DeVille taught me what the word passion really meant..." and that's a gift he gave me that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life. I'll not only miss his music, but I'll miss him - it's hard to believe that I'll not hear his voice coming down my phone wire ever again or that I won't have the opportunity to go and meet him and his wife Nina for a coffee in New York like we talked about.

Of course it's not only me who will miss Willy there are millions of fans all over the world who were touched by his music. One person who knew him better than a lot of us did was John Phillip Shenale who produced Willy's Crow Jane Alley and Pistola albums and he offered the following comment about Willy after hearing of his death. "He left us, as he lived. Brilliant and eccentric, surrounded by love. I will deeply miss him."

Willy loved what he did, especially performing, and in his description of how that made him feel you can begin to hear something of the passion he felt and exuded.

There's this feeling you get of absolute silence when you know that the crowd are listening and that silence is louder than anything else I've ever heard in my life. Those are my moments of absolute bliss and I feel sorry for people who can't feel those moments of euphoria. But in order to feel passion you have to be passionate about something in the first place. For me that's music.

A distinctly American voice has gone silent and we are greatly reduced by its sudden quiet. We're not likely to hear his kind again and those of us who have heard it will not soon forget it.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 11:10 AM | Permalink

Although the diaspora of Jews from Israel began as early as 8th century BCE, it was the destruction of the Second Temple and the razing of Jerusalem in CE 70 by the Roman Empire that finally succeeded in scattering their population throughout the known world. Over the next century or so communities of Jews were established from India to Great Britain, and a period of mourning was declared which included a Rabbinical edict banning secular music.

The ban lasted to the middle ages, and the music that developed after was much like the language, Yiddish, that was used in daily life, a hybrid of the various cultures and people they found themselves living among. So you can hear Slavic and German influences in both the music they played and the language the lyrics they sung. Therefore it's not difficult to see Jewish music easily adapting itself to work with most other cultures. However, the idea of mixing Irish and Jewish music together still seems at first blush as maybe pushing that envelope a little too far. Can Gaelic and Yiddish have enough in common for such an effort to be possible? Yet that's exactly what Susan McKown and Lorin Sklamberg have done on Saints & Tzadiks, a new release on the World Village Music label.

This is nothing new for this duo, they won a Grammy award three years ago for their first collaboration, Wonder Wheel, so there are plenty of expectations for them to live up to with this recording. Well I haven't heard the previous work, but all I can say is if anybody finds Saints & Tzadiks a disappointment they need to consider having their ears checked for hearing loss. Each of the twelve tracks on this disc are a wonder and a joy that tap into the wide range of emotions both traditions are famous for. What's really wonderful is that for two cultures with plenty of reasons for music to be replete with sadness, the collection on this disc does more than just break your heart as they have uncovered treasures to lift the heart and well as making it ache.

While the majority of the tracks are sang either in Yiddish, Old Irish, (Gaelic) or English, some are actually a mix of all three. "Prayer For The Dead" starts off by blending together the old anti-war song, "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ya", with the Yiddish song "kh'bin Osygeforn felder,velder, oy'vey!" (I've travelled across fields and forests, Oh woe), sung in alternating verses by McKown and Sklamberg respectively, and then concludes with the singing in Gaelic and Latin of "Deus Meus Adiuva Me" (My God come to my aid). While McKown sings the part of the young woman not recognizing her beloved come home from the war for all the body parts he's missing in "Johnny", Sklamberg sings of finding the corpse of a soldier in a field and wondering who will do the funeral rites for him. Finally they conclude with the haunting prayer, written in the 11th century, asking God to fill the soul with love and sunlight.

The effect of the three songs blended together in this manner changes what are nominally anti-war songs, and songs about misfortune, into a prayer for something better. For, after hearing the litany of sufferings brought about by war, the beseeching a God to be filled with light and love is made much more powerful and turns the song into something more than the sum of its parts. The two principle tunes blend sufficiently well together they don't sound out of place being alternating verses of the same song, while the contrast between the two, ensures they become more than just one culture's lament by emphasizing the universality of suffering.

Like I said earlier this is more than just a disc about how horrible it is to be either Irish or Jewish as the two also have some fun. " My Little Belly" is an old Yiddish children's rhyming song that lists off various ailments by running through the various body parts with the two vocalists alternating verses. Sklamberg in particular has fun with making himself sound as plaintive and suffering as possible. "The Hag With The Money" is another combination of three songs, this time three Irish tunes; "I'm In Arrears", "The Hag With The Money", and the instrumental "I Buried My Wife And Danced On Her Grave". This time the two alternate singing the Gaelic verses of the first song, and then McKeown sings her verses of "The Hag" in Gaelic and Sklamberg sings it in English and Gaelic. The story that's told by stringing the three together is a warning to all women of means - don't be marrying a guy in debt or you just might find him dancing a jig on your grave.

While the material is equally wonderful throughout the disc, listening to how McKeown's and Sklamberg's voice mix and contrast is the real marvel. Sklamberg has a beautiful tenor with which he communicates a wide range of emotions in all of his singing, while McKewon is a husky voiced alto with a rich sound. While it initially sounds like her voice will overpower his as they're not competing with each other that's not a problem, and the way in which their voices compliment each other is a marvel. If you can imagine two voices dancing and alternating who is leading as the music behind them shifts, you'll have a good idea of how well they work in tandem. Each of them serve as a perfect conduit for the meaning of their songs, so even though much of the material isn't sung in English listeners, should have no problem drawing a general idea of each song's emotional tenor.

Even if you need to acclimatize yourself to the idea of Yiddish and Gaelic material being sung together, you can't help but be moved and impressed - even awed - by what Susan McKeown and Lorin Sklamberg create on Saints & Tzadiks. The combination of their voices and the material being sung is as powerful as any music I've listened to in the past. It's not often that secular music is able to obtain the heights of beauty one would normally associate with religious music, but this recording iss as full of passion and wonder as any oratorio to a god.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:58 PM | Permalink

The roots of English language comedic writing can be found in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer put together an extremely odd collection of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, had them tell each other stories to pass the time, and English literary comedy was born. The trail between the Medieval England and present day leads through Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and other great satirists and humorists down through the years.

When this comic sensibility met up with Science Fiction in the twentieth century the possibilities seemed endless. First of all there was the tendency among science fiction aficionados to take themselves and their genre far too seriously creating endless opportunities for satire. However, the potential for absurdity reached new heights with Star Trek and the obsessive fan syndrome it spawned. Of course when adults are prepared to dress up as their favourite species from a fictionalized television show and attend conventions with others so inclined, you don't have to look far to invent absurd situations. In fact one of the great difficulties in creating comic science fiction is absurdity is so thick on the ground in the first place that writers have to be careful not to go over the top and ruin their premise.

Even the best of the contemporary comic writers in the genre, the late Douglas Adams, fell into that trap with Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by going back to that well even when it was tapped out. Setting something in outer space in the future does not automatically make it funny - if a joke doesn't work it doesn't work no matter where you have it being told and who or what's telling it. Of course humour is a highly personal thing and what one of us finds funny another might find stupid. However there's more to writing a funny book than turning it into a series of jokes, or stringing together a series of comedy sketches loosely tied together by the fact the same characters appear in all of them.

Unfortunately the new novel by Michael Rubens', The Sheriff Of Yernameer (Your name here) published by Random House Canada released August 4th/09, falls into that latter category. For while the novel has a loose over all framework, the characters stumble through a series of unrelated situations while travelling across space to their final destination. This structure isn't surprising when you consider Ruben's previous experience was either producing or writing for television, including sketch comedy shows like the Daily Show With Jon Stewart. However what works for a television sketch comedy show, for all its intelligence and humour, isn't going to necessarily work in a novel.

The story revolves around the misadventures of Cole a failed smuggler and second rate crook. Not only does he owe money to a particularly nasty bounty hunter named Kenneth, his girl friend has just dumped him for his side kick, and his space ship has just been turned to dust for his failure to pay his docking fees. In order to get away from it all, specifically Kenneth whose offered to lay his eggs in Cole's brain in lieu of payment, he steals a fellow, far more successful, crook's ship and in the process inherits its current mission. Transporting a colony of freeze dried orphans to Yernameer, the last unbranded planet in known space.

Everything, from the bullet about to kill you to the crook who fired it at you, are sponsored by somebody. Some items - like the guns that shoot the bullets - even come with little messages telling you how proud they are to be sponsoring this event and how wonderful a job their product is going to do in killing you. Hence the attraction of the last unbranded planet to those who wish a return to simpler times, or who are on the run from the law or other types. However Cole and his clients are in for a rude surprise when they arrive on Yernameer, as its not just happy settlers who have come to this final outpost on the edge of the frontier. It turns out the universe's nastiest gang of inter-species outlaws have crash landed here and are about to start making life miserable for those living in the one town on the planet.

When Cole does a Dorothy and lands his spaceship on a band of the outlaws delivering an ultimatum to the townsfolk, it's decided he's the one to protect the settlement from the bad guys and he's made sheriff. Which, in spite of his best intentions otherwise, he somehow manages to do. Even Kenneth showing up looking to do some nesting doesn't change matters, and Cole stumbles through to the end a winner and a loser all at once. While Cole's character is likeable enough, in a he's really pathetic sort of way, everything about him and his adventures have a strong air of deja-vu written all over them. Even though some of the scenarios might be original, there's the constant feeling of, I've read this before, permeating the whole book.

As a result the humour quickly becomes tired as the jokes sound all too familiar. From the space station full of middle management types on a training course who have turned into cannibals because of an implant to the world's stupidest computer named Peter, nothing about the book is really that funny. It's unfortunate because the potential is there for a very funny book about branding, logos, and sponsorship, but Rubens opted for easy jokes instead of exploring the topic with any depth.

While there's nothing wrong with The Sheriff Of Yrnameer, there's also nothing about it that is of particular interest to hold your attention. While the comparisons to the work of the late Douglas Adams are inevitable they're not going to be favourable as this book lacks the freshness that made his initial works so captivating. There's a galaxy of humour out there waiting to be discovered, but unfortunately this book goes places where far too many have gone before and the scenery has become boring.

You can purchase a copy of The Sheriff Of Yrnameer either directly from Random House Canada or an on line retailer like Amazon.ca.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:17 AM | Permalink

What do you think of, if you think of it at all, Northern Europe pop music? Although I know that like everywhere else the Scandinavian countries have diverse musical tastes and bands there run the gamut from death metal to electrobeat/house music with stops in the middle for frothy pop music, I can't rid myself of the image of rather severe looking individuals standing at keyboards playing very grim, but intellectual, atmospheric electronic compositions. Part of the problem is that we know so little about the popular music scene in countries like Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland. I mean aside from Abba and Bjork can you name any pop music groups from that part of the world off the top of your head?

As an example it has only been in the last year or so that I've learned anything at the music scene in Norway. Did you know that in 1967 one of the stops on the Stax Records' tour of Europe was in Oslo, the capital city of Norway? Or that this years Notodden Blues Festival in Norway featured acts like Buddy Guy and the Homemade Jamz Blues Band, and it is one of the biggest blues festivals in the world? However it wasn't until I reviewed Money Will Ruin Everything: The Second Edition, a two disc compilation release from the Norwegian label Rune Grammofon that I began to get some idea of just how much music was being generated by home grown musicians. As in any compilation release there was some music that I couldn't tolerate, some that was interesting enough, and some that was sufficiently intriguing to merit further investigation.

One of those bands was Susanna And The Magical Orchestra, (SATMO) whose newest release 3 will be released on August 24th and distributed in North America by the good folk at Forced Exposure. Susanna And The Magical Orchestra are in actual fact only two people; Susanna Karolina Wallumrod, vocals and Morten Qvenild on keyboards. While they are joined by friends for a couple of songs to help pad out the sound with additional vocals, guitar, or drums, for the majority of the tracks on this release it's just the two of them. Of the ten songs on 3 each of them have written four tracks with the other two being covers of Roy Harper's "Another Day" and Canadian power trio Rush's "Subdivisions".

If that seems like a strange mix of genres and styles - 1970's British folk rock (Harper) and overblown pretentious hard rock (Rush) - well, apparently SATMO seem to be one of the few groups out there who can genuinely say they're musically colour blind. If they like a song and can find something in it that appeals to them, than why shouldn't the play it? Considering that previous releases have included covers of Dolly Parton ("Jolene"), Leonard Bernstein ("Who Am I"), and Joy Division ("Love Will Tear Us Apart"), this will come as no surprise to those familiar with the band. However the rest of us are just going to have to get used to a band who have the capacity to appreciate a piece of music for what it says, not how it was performed originally.

The most surprising thing about SATMO is their sound. I don't know about anybody else but my preconceived notions of a band consisting of primarily a keyboardist and a vocalist led me to expect something far different to what I heard on this album. For instead of the swirling electronics and layer upon layer of sound that I had anticipated, it's Wallumrod's voice that's front and centre throughout with Qvenild, and any others who join them, providing a bare bones structure in support. On the songs where it is just the two of them there are times when Qvenild plays the bare minimum required to sketch out the framework of a tune to serve as a backdrop for Wallumrod's voice. He's like those great guitar players who feel a song so well they say as much with one perfectly selected note as others do playing a hundred.

Of course when you have a vocalist of the calibre of Susanna Wallumrod you want to keep the focus on her as much as possible. As you listen to the first song on the disc, "Recall", at first you can't help but think of Joni Mitchell, as her voice is so high and clear. However, you have the sense that there is more to her than just this, as she doesn't have that breathless quality that marks thin voiced singers who only sing in the higher registers. And, before "Recall" is even over, Wallumrod has shifted gears, dropped into a middle register and added an edge of power to her voice the likes you'd never hear in most female folk singers.

Being from Canada, and having been forced to listen to Rush whether I've wanted to or not since the early 1970's, I was anticipating/dreading SATMO's version of "Subdivisions". I've been told by Rush apologists for years the band's lyrics were intelligent, but as I always thought that was just a pathetic attempt on their part to justify bad taste I'd ignored them. So it was disconcerting to hear the song and find that it did have something interesting to say. However even that wasn't what was most unsetteling about this version. You see Wallumrod and Qvenild make sure that if you're at all familiar with Rush, you'll recognize this as being one of their songs. It's almost like they're sticking their tongues out at people like me who want to damn Rush while praising this version. For all they've done is pare down the original's music to a minimum, while keeping the tune and the song otherwise intact, so you can't avoid praising the writers whether you want to or not. It's as brilliant a cover as I've ever heard.

Normally when you think of a duo made up of keyboards and vocals you can't help but think of atmospheric music replete with thick layers of electronics and treated vocals, which instead of being complimentary almost compete one against the other. However that's not the case with Susanna And The Magical Orchestra's forthcoming release 3 as the two principals, Susanna Wallumrod and Morten Qvenild have created music designed around making certain her voice is the foundation around which each song is built. Don't get me wrong, there is still plenty of atmosphere, but its created through the power of the songs themselves not through electronic effects or processors. At times ethereal, at times earthy, this is an intelligent and beautiful recording that never lets technology supplant the human element that gives music its real power.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 10:04 AM | Permalink

Like most people who've ever set pen to paper I've taken my stabs at writing poetry. In the misguided belief that others might be interested enough in reading those attempts to pay out money for that privilege, I even had the gall to self-publish two short collections. Two of the best things about print on demand self-publishing is the only thing it costs to produce something is your time and you learn quickly enough whether or not there is any demand for a particular title. While I still don't think zero sales are an actual indication of the work's quality, its sufficient indication of underwhelming demand for me to understand that whatever talent I might have for writing resides in prose.

Of course that doesn't stop the occasional impulse, akin to a muscle spasm or a cramp, to call upon a muse in the hopes of being answered as the romantic burnish surrounding being "A Poet" has yet to completely fade. Thankfully those twitches are fewer and much farther apart from each other these days as I've no desire to leave behind a legacy of mediocre poems - it would be far better if they were at least awful as that would make them somewhat interesting in a macabre sort of way - and am more than willing to leave their creation to those who actually know what their doing.

One of those who, without a doubt, knows what he is doing is Scott Wannberg. His latest collection of work, Strange Movie Full Of Death published by Perceval Press reaches out off the page, grabs you around the throat, shakes you by the ears until your brain rattles and demands that you pay attention to it. Reading his work is to understand poetry is so much more than what most people expect it to be, and that we're satisfied far too easily if we're willing to call half the stuff published these days poetry. For compared to Wannberg's work most others that I've read have been bloodless words lying limply on the page. Black lines connected together as letters,words, and phrases that do nothing to stir your passions.

I first came across Scott Wannberg and his poetry on a CD/DVD collection called 3 Fools 4 April in which he joined Viggo and Hank Mortensen in a poetry reading to raise money for the Beyond Baroque Foundation in Venice California. I was already familiar with Viggo Mortensen's poetry, both written and read aloud, and so had a pretty good idea of what to expect from him and neither he nor his son Hank (who now goes by Henry and did an excellent job of editing Strange Movie Full Of Death) disappointed with either their material or presentation. However they were both blown out of the water by Wannberg.

Listening and watching him read was like being in the presence of an elemental force - a thing of nature that swept in and took your breath away it was so powerful and potent. There were emotional roller coasters to be ridden and strange paths snaking into the psyche of America to be followed, inside his poetry. I was amazed at what was coming out of this man's soul via his brain and his mouth - where did these words come from? Well I still can't answer that question, because if I could I would probably be able to write poetry as well as Wannberg.

Having experienced him live, or at least in performance, I had been waiting for an opportunity to read his poetry and see how it stood up to being static on the page. What I discovered was that a good many of his works couldn't be read silently, lips pursed, not allowing the words to form fully. There was too much power in them and they had to be read aloud. It was exhilarating to feel the poems resonate inside my chest and their words exploring the inside of my mouth as I formed them. Wannberg's words say things in ways I hadn't imagined possible, and find ways to express ideas so they are sharp and clear as the ice on a hard winter's day. You want to pick up his ideas and hold them in your hands and carry them around with you to spring out on people during the day and watch how they react. You figure you can learn a lot about a person based on how they react to being told "durability does not mean ramming your head repeatedly into a solid wall" from his poem "lost souls go down good with red wine".

Some are going to find his style of seemingly unconnected thoughts and sentences piled on top of each other disconcerting at first, especially if they try and find the logical connection between the ones that come before and after. Instead, try and track the path he wanders, with them as signposts to mark his way, and gradually the lights will come on and you'll will see what he is saying. On other occasions though he can be very direct, maybe in ways that you don't wish. In the poem "suicide river" he recounts the attempted suicide of a teenage boy. After wondering about the boy's reasons for attempting to kill himself, he warns others that "the world will ram its body into you/a metaphysical slamdance/you gotta to role with it/or go under".

Far too much poetry has a habit of setting itself aloof from the things around it and talks about them in abstractions that distance them from anything actual. Wannberg's poetry on the other hand is set firmly in our world. He strives to involve us in the emotional and spiritual realities, the toll it takes on all of us, of living in the early part of the twenty-first century in America. This is some of the most powerful and invigorating poetry you're liable to read in a long time. However, be forewarned, this is not a book you should read in public as it's more than likely you'll end up reading it aloud.

You can purchase a copy of Scott Wannberg's Strange Movie Full Of Death directly from Perceval Press.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 12:13 PM | Permalink