Misc.

Crepuscule with Nellie

2012-02-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

"The secret of a great melody is a secret". I can't think of a better exemplar than Thelonius Sphere Monk. Here's one of his zaniest:

Uncharitable

2012-02-15T10:51:00.001-08:00

"Hope he will rest in peace."

Period Piece

2012-02-14T11:22:00.002-08:00

Old Hindi songs and movies, especially from the seventies and eighties fill me with a strange combination of nostalgia and fear. They remind me of the Marianne Moore poem --

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
Here we have thirst

and patience, from the first,
    and art, as in a wave held up for us to see
    in its essential perpendicularity;
not brittle but
intense—the spectrum, that
    spectacular and nimble animal the fish,
    whose scales turn aside the sun's sword by their polish.

This nazm, written by Shahryar, who passed away earlier today, frames those dead decades well.

The cat who walked by herself

2012-02-11T04:37:00.000-08:00

I've been listening to a lot of Sofia Gubaidulina's concert music the last few months. I find her coldness a little off-putting and have never been able to sit through a piece of hers without getting bored. However I've persevered with the hope of encountering one of her thrilling soundscapes which arrive seemingly at random and, so far, I feel I have been amply rewarded for the effort. Here's an animated movie that sort of crystallized my thoughts on her music. The background score is by her and contains some very pretty writing for brass and solo voice:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2717941286977874486

I find a striking similarity between her music and the cat in the above story.

Khayal Master vs Khayal Amateur

2012-01-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

As kids, one of our favorite performances of Raag Sohini was by a (then) relatively unknown Prabhakar Karekar recorded live in Ranchi. It is a recording that received much airtime in our house and has entered our collective consciousness. Even now, when someone in our family is off sulking he/she is accosted with the lines "Bolo Re" (Karekar's drut is set to the lines "Bolo bolo bolo saajan tum").

In spite of the memories, that recording became almost unlistenable for me in later years as I heard better singers. Here is Sohini by one of the best:

James Bond Lullaby

2012-01-24T01:01:00.000-08:00

The silly James Bond theme has ruined my listening experience when it comes to this pretty piece:

Firebird

2012-01-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

At the end of the day, what I remember of Stravinsky is neither crazy rhythm nor Mozartean melody but the viola trills and harp glissandi in the final hymn from Firebird. For some unfathomable reason many conductors, Boulez among them, de-emphasize the violas. Stravinsky doesn't, but the recording on youtube isn't of a very good quality. I had a tough time locating a performance that I found satisfying. Here is one pointed out to me by kiddo that comes close:

I can never get over the strangeness of that passage 0:25 - 1:30, more remarkable due to the fact that Stravinsky never steps outside the bounds of traditional tonality. My favourite moment is when the violas trill on G# and on A(natural) rocking the tonal boat with minimum fuss. The quickness of the the whole effect is just breathtaking.

Lonnie Paaji

2012-01-04T23:58:00.000-08:00

A lot of jazzers who converted to Islam show influences of middle eastern music in their playing -- Yusuf Lateef and Abdullah Ibrahim come immediately to mind. By the same token we should be hearing some Bhangra from Dr Lonnie Smith who converted to Sikhism way back in the sixties.

There is none of that, though, in the following piece -- it was one of the first "pure" jazz pieces that I heard (cassette borrowed off Dr J from adjacent hostel room, and kept indefinitely) and liked. The solos by Benson and Ron Cuber are superb but what I like best is that loony passage (4:55 - 6:20) featuring the good doctor on organ:

Mr T

2012-01-02T01:03:00.000-08:00

I heard some soulful r&b and jazz at the Raj Pavilion, Windsor Manor yesterday -- a piano-and-voice duo doing standards. Unfortunately we were at the adjacent Royal Afghan, almost out of earshot, and the poolside noise didn't make it any easier to hear them. I actually excused myself and timed a trip to the restroom, while they were performing an inspired arrangement of Blues in the Night, so as to better hear them do the chorus. It reminded me a lot of the brilliant arrangements of Turrentine, Sebesky and others on their CTI albums.

Not surprisingly, I've been digging the sugar man all day today. Here's a typically sweet, no-frills, all-soul performance:

Monk's Dance

2011-12-29T09:30:00.000-08:00

For kiddo who will never see a classical musician do this on stage:

The Head Roll

2011-12-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

Is it just me or has Jay Kay started doing the Stevie Wonder head roll?
For example see 0:17 - 0:20 of this video:

Maybe if you spend a lifetime channelling Stevie in your music the mannerisms creep in automatically...

The Anthologist

2011-12-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

On the flight back from Chicago I was reading "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker, which is about a middle-of-the-road writer trying to write an introduction to the poetry anthology he was compiling and editing. I literally laughed out loud at the following passage:

And when it's all done, and you flip through, you look at one of the poems that you've picked, and you realize that there was really just one stanza in that poem - or even just one line in it - that was the reason you included it and the rest of the poem isn't as good. For instance, "They flee from me that sometime did me seek." or "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet." And you think, Maybe I should have made an anthology of single lines. Would that have worked?

But then, if you stare for a while at one of the single lines... you realize that there's usually one particular word in that line that slays you. That word is so shockingly great. Maybe it's the word "sometime." Or maybe it's the word "quiet." Do you hear the way "scallop" is folded and absorbed into the word "quiet"? .... And so you think, maybe I should have made an anthology of individual words taken from poems like this:

sometime

-- Thomas Wyatt

Or:

quiet

-- Sir Walter Raleigh

And of course that's not going to work. That's just a bunch of disembodied words plucked from great poems. And that's when you realize you're not an anthologist.

Heck, that's just the way I feel whenever I recommend a piece of music to anyone. All of the piece seems embarrassingly bad except for that one killer note.

Hugo Wolf

2011-12-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

Recently I was reading an essay by Harold Schonberg where he refers to Hugo Wolf as a "minor" composer. I haven't heard anyone else described that way. I think it would be akin to saying Oscar Wilde was a minor writer. What on earth is a minor composer?

I realized I knew next to nothing about Wolf's life though I've spent a lot of time studying his music, so I read up a little. He turned out to be quite a colourful character:

Apparently, as a young critic he approached Brahms for music lessons but got turned down. He felt so insulted that he spent the rest of his life writing nasty reviews of Brahms' music, but since Brahms was already a legend by that time, he ended up ruining his own reputation. He also picked up petty quarrels with everyone in the musical establishment and consequently remained homeless for most of his life, surviving on food parcels sent by his family (he only ate once a day)...

...in the final years of his life he had delusions about being appointed Director of the Vienna Opera (replacing Mahler). In one memorable episode he broke into the house of a famous operatic tenor and ordered him to sing then and there; the singer secretly summoned the police who arrived in fancy dress to humour the madman and escorted him to the lunatic asylum.

In the midst of all this chaos he also found time to compose some of the best songs I've heard -- the Morike lieder. I like them better than Schubert's Winterreise and far better than anything else in that genre by Schumann and Brahms. Here's an old favourite from that collection:

Quincy at the Clavier

2011-12-09T23:48:00.000-08:00

I love Quincy Jones as arranger/producer much more than as composer. Whether he's working with synclavier factory patches or with an 18 piece horn section what strikes me is the sheer polish. I wouldn't want to mess with a single note on this:

Quincy?

2011-12-08T18:24:00.000-08:00

A gutbucket blues number by the Quince:

I recently found out that he shares credit for this song with Rod Temperton and Lionel Ritchie! Temperton I like and respect (he's written some decent R&B stuff) but I nearly turned purple at the mention of Ritchie, composer nonpareil of soup songs, whose greatest contribution to pop culture is the introduction of Nicole Ritchie, baby talk (Say you, say me) and questionable rhyming practices (he rhymed "Hello" with "looking for").

I cooled down somewhat when I learned that his involvement was only on the lyrics front. I guess Quincy needed someone to blame for the weaker lines in this song.

Beyond the Music

2011-12-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

Apropos my previous post on Lee Morgan, here's the famous interview with his wife Helen: https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dw4w5qx_0gsjhqb&pli=1.
It raises several disturbing questions about jazz, drugs, black culture, misogyny, violence and racism that lie not too far beyond the music. As an outsider to the culture I have always avoided peering into its closet but it would be disingenuous to think that glimpses of its contents, some first hand, would not colour my own snapped-off perceptions. That is the reason I refuse to braid them into anything substantial not only on this blog but even in my own mind.*

*Here are some of my favourite lines in all of poetry.

Ceora

2011-12-06T18:42:00.000-08:00

Pretty Pretty Pretty tune, Lee Morgan's prettiest, in my opinion. According to Herbie Hancock, Morgan was approached by a young woman named Ceora who asked him to write a tune dedicated to her. Morgan obliged and in 5 minutes scribbled this tune on a scrap of paper. See, this is precisely the kind of thing that gets you killed.*

* Morgan was shot to death in a jazz club by his wife just as he was getting on to the bandstand.

Drifting Curtains

2011-12-01T03:27:00.000-08:00

Much as I like the sturm and drang of Beethoven, it is the adagios in his late quartets that I go back to most frequently.

They remind me a lot of this poem not least because they are inseparable from many of my afternoons.

Mr Bean vs Beethoven

2011-11-29T22:09:00.000-08:00

I find this hilarious:

Broken Hearted Blues

2011-11-29T09:35:00.000-08:00

I have a very low tolerance for 12 bar blues. But I like this tune, cliches and all:

Delivers a pizza

2011-11-23T16:28:00.000-08:00

One of the funniest songs I've heard:

I think the delivery is perfect though it makes the words a little hard to follow at first. Here are the lyrics. The rest of the band (Lew Tabackin on tenor, Shelly Mann on drums) is not half bad either.

Tone Colour - II

2011-11-21T17:45:00.000-08:00

Messiaen playing passages from Act 1 of Pelleas and Melisande and talking about tone colour:

Here are the orchestral versions of the chordal motifs he plays to illustrate grey-violet and orange-blue:

Recently, I was expounding on Debussy, impressionism, "tone colour" etc to a humanities prof who seemed amused by the use of the term "colour" in music. I would be amused too, had I not been inured due to its common usage in mus. crit. I think the term is an abomination thrust upon us by the synaesthetes.

Lazy execution

2011-11-20T17:05:00.000-08:00

Brilliant, swinging rhythm section:

I'm trying to figure out how the composer came up with this stuff. Some principles he may have started with:

Take syncopation to its logical conclusion. ie change the stress on every beat.
Don't use percussion to stress beat. Use guitar and/or piano instead.
Don't use guitar and piano for anything else. No sustained notes please.
Forget about balance. Don't play anything on base until the whole ensemble threatens to tip over.
When (4) is about to happen get busy. Never square up the rhythm, though.
Use drums for space filling purposes. No drum sticks, use fly swatter.

Birds

2011-11-09T23:37:00.000-08:00

I recently noticed a curious coincidence re two of the pieces I have been working on the last few weeks. One of them is an idiosyncratic short piece by Schumann called Vogel als Prophet:

the other is Oiseaux Tristes from Ravel's Miroirs:

They are both pieces for solo piano and they are both connected with birds and birdsong. Now, I don't even like birds; I don't think their squeaks are musical. Also, I don't think the piano is the right instrument to portray birdsong, the abominable piccolo being better suited. So I find it surprising that I picked these pieces.

Maybe, after the non-stop battles I've been having with all the pigeons in my neighbourhood which have picked my apartment balcony as their favourite public toilet, these birds are finally getting to me.

Later, I came across two cute videos where Messiaen describes his fascination with birds:

which might make me reconsider my antipathy towards them, maybe even understand the above Schumann piece where he equates the sure footed bird that compresses its entire being into a couple of chirps with a prophet.

Artifice

2011-11-08T23:44:00.000-08:00

"Has it occurred to them that I might be artificial by nature?" -- Maurice Ravel, responding to critics who termed him and his music artificial/unnatural.

I have a hard time warming up to Ravel's large scale works for orchestra. Masquerades that I find charming in his miniatures seem to me, for example in his piano concertos and orchestral song cycles, mere artifice. One exception is the following piece:

Diaghilev, who originally commissioned it, may have found it cold¹, but I think it is precisely Ravel's characteristic restraint that distinguishes it from the waltzes churned out by the late Romantics². The only other orchestral waltz I like is the one from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique:

[1] Kiddo informs me that Diaghilev's exact comment was that " [it's] not a waltz, but a painting of a waltz".
[2] Just the thought of the maudlin depths someone from the Strauss clan would have taken that beautiful passage 2:03 -- 2:23 to is enough to induce vertigo, among other ailments.

Music and Law

2011-11-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

"My whole life has been a struggle between Poetry and Prose, or call it Music and Law." -- Robert Schumann.

Compressed intensity of the anti-lyric

2011-10-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

I was listening the intermezzo (second movement) from Schumann's Piano Concerto today:

and was reminded of my reaction to it when I first heard it as a teenager. In brief it was "WTF???"

The opening theme sounded so stupid, the staccato piano phrases and the fragmented, off-balance lines contrasted so strongly with the high lyricism of the first movement that I felt it didn't belong in the piece. I skipped this track and went directly to the third movement -- the giddy finale which quickly became a kind of obsession for me. I remember there were days when I missed breakfast, lunch and all my classes, listening to the third movement. It remains one of those rare pieces about which I am as enthusiastic today as I was during my teens.

The intermezzo on the other hand grew on me slowly. I came to see its short, intense, incomplete lines that trail off into silence as a sign of the composer refusing to dilute them with the extraneous affects of lyricism.

Can't believe it isn't Monk

2011-10-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

Ronnie Matthews is the star on this beautiful tune but the hero for me is the silent killer on bass -- Ray Drummond. Best Monk tribute I've heard.

A puzzle for Dad

2011-10-17T03:20:00.000-07:00

A cute problem came up today while I was trying to analyze a clustering algorithm:

Given 2 points chosen uniformly at random inside an n-dimensional hypercube, what is the expected distance between them?

My integration skills have deteriorated greatly since my second year in college so it took me an hour to work it out. It is surprisingly messy for the n-dimensional case but when n=2 the situation is reasonably clean:

Ans for n = 2: 1/15(2 + sqrt(2) + 5 * arcsinh(1)).

Going deeper, what does the distribution of d(p1,p2) look like for d <= 1?
Challenge: figure this out without putting pen to paper (there is a nice geometric argument that eliminates all calculation).

Symphony and Novel

2011-10-14T03:38:00.000-07:00

For kiddo, who is the only guy I know who has read Ulysses carefully and also has a deep understanding of symphonic music:

"...there was also an intuition I had that my own practice as a novelist – when, that is, my mojo was properly working – had far more in common with how composers conceive of the symphonic, than it did with the lit-crit – let alone the "creative writing" – view of how it is writers actually write" -- William Woodard Self.

He goes on:

"I think it is in the realm of pure praxis that the forms really speak to one another... in my view Ulysses stands at the very point where the novel and the symphonic forms approach nearest to one another... its prose, like music, happens in a continuous present; [it] deploys colour as a modal effect with unrivalled consistency... and perhaps most significantly of all, the entire work is conceived of as a grand exercise in the contrapuntal..."

Tilting at Windmills

2011-10-12T19:56:00.000-07:00

I have a very weak voice -- high pitched and unsteady like a goat's, so I doubly crave for a voice with the beauty and strength of John Coltrane's tenor saxophone. It is criminal how he can sometimes carry off not-so-great ideas on the strength of his tone alone.

That's probably why I find myself rooting for the underdog in this tune -- Eric Dolphy on the flute. I don't know why Dolphy even attempted anything so quixotic as going up against a trumpet, especially that of Booker Little, he of the majestic tone. But I'm glad Dolphy did it and recorded it. It gives hope to weaklings like me.

http://youtu.be/qXlAuRt90KE

One for the old folks

2011-10-08T00:09:00.000-07:00

I know you'll like this one. It's the music that reminds me of of childhood -- home made amps, speakers, pick ups, spools and spools of insulated copper wire, soldering irons, PCBs, "banjo" made out of a block of wood and some nails, late nights watching DD's "pop music" at Murthy Uncle's house.

Perfection

2011-10-06T04:22:00.000-07:00

I once attended a discussion led by Daniel Barenboim and Don Randel where Barenboim argued that he would consider a forward thinking composer like Berlioz superior to someone like Mendelssohn because of the influence the former had on the history of music. Though I agree with the argument in principle, I find it far less persuasive while listening to this little gem. It is one of the few pieces of which I can say "all-killer-no-filler". I can't think of a Berlioz piece that would merit that label.

"Tone Colour"

2011-10-03T23:46:00.000-07:00

One of the messages constantly reinforced by my Carnatic music teacher in my childhood was that natural gifts especially of the physical variety are of no consequence. One could be cursed with a voice like mine and still become a good singer through practice. The physical characteristics of the voice were as superficial/irrelevant to the music as the physical beauty of the singer. Being shortchanged at birth on both fronts I took this message to heart.

Over time, this and similar prejudices, some innate, some learnt, developed into an ideology where the only things that mattered to me in a piece of music, in fact the only things that I registered while listening, were the notes. It is not that I did not hear timbre and texture but just that I did not derive any specific pleasure from them. I would be moved by Beethoven's symphonies but be completely impervious to the timbre of the bassoon in the upper register that he so effectively uses in the most emotionally charged sections. I would enjoy the delightful harmonies in "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" but miss the fierce, menacing undertones which I now perceive as inherent in Tchaikovsky's writing for the celesta.

I don't remember when and how my listening changed but suspect it had something to do with my long struggle with Debussy's music. Rondes des Printemps from the magnificent Images for orchestra is the first piece I remember which made me conscious of the pleasures to be had from sound texture alone. I also remember the specific passage that caught my attention -- the twin flutes supported by twin clarinets over tremolo strings et al (3:00 - 4:05).

Here's my favourite recording of this piece (Boulez/Cleveland Orchestra):

Bonfa

2011-10-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

Great arrangement of a Bonfa tune:

Great arrangement of "Tenderly" played by Bonfa (2:00 - 4:10):

Ballade in A-flat

2011-09-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

The highlight for me is the passage 4:25 - 4:45. It would be crass to think of hooks in a piece as perfectly crafted as this but I find myself waiting for one moment --

which stands out, even in this unusually terse passage.

Chopin Prelude No. 17

2011-09-23T02:35:00.000-07:00

Mendelssohn said about this: "I love it! I cannot tell you how much or why; except perhaps that it is something which I could never at all have written."

I find that the base line makes or breaks this piece for me. Previously I had only heard a Pollini recording where the base notes are barely audible and I think that is why this never really stood out among Chopin's other preludes. Hearing the singing base line especially that low F at 0:33 really opened up this piece for me.

Cosby on Drumming

2011-09-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

Dining Philosophers' Problem

2011-09-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

Sounds more profound than it actually is. I suspect Hoare knew that the problem was too trivial to attract anyone's attention all by itself, so he decided to seat philosophers at the table, even though they were amongst the least deserving communities for the feast he was planning to serve up.Some quibbles:

A deadlock is a low probability event if the diners aren't people with regular habits. When was the last time any philosopher was spotted within a ten mile radius of regular habits?
Put a Voltaire and a Socrates at the table (they will naturally refuse to sit next to each other) and you've eliminated stalemate situations altogether.
All this is of course contingent on your ability to find five philosophers who could bear to be with each other in the same room at the same time.

I would instead suggest Middle Managers for this role. They possess all the required qualities:

Their entire state diagram can be programmed into a punched card which, as we know, is the fundamental but unspoken assumption in this problem.
They spend all their time congregating with their peers at round tables.
They can create deadlocks out of thin air.

Cute

2011-09-17T01:35:00.000-07:00

I first heard this song on a flight to Toronto in 1995. There's that thing she does with her voice between 1:10 and 1:15, which got stuck in my mind and refused to go away. In those pre-internet, pre-spare-money days I had to wait for two years before I heard it again -- it was one of the first cassette purchases I made as a college student in Chennai. One tries not waste precious money on such such blatant cuteness but sometimes one is powerless.

Response to Socrates

2011-09-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

An examined life is a life under surveillance and is not worth living.

Do I know you?

2011-09-12T03:15:00.000-07:00

At work a fellow I had never met before -- looked like he was in from out of town for a job interview -- stopped me and said, "Hey buddy, where's Sudhir?"

I'm slow on the uptake even at peak alertness so this left me even more puzzled than usual. I said -- "I'm sorry, I don't know any Sudhir. Talk to the receptionist, she'll set you up with your contact person."

I now feel bad for nipping his friendly approach in the bud.

I should have said -- "Sudhir??! He's in Singapore!!! You didn't know?"

We'd then sit down and reminisce about our old friend. I'd tell him all about Pseudy's recent peccadilloes, he'd start nodding in recognition at each story even before I finished it and say that the rascal hadn't changed a bit since college. We'd part reluctantly and promise to catch up more thoroughly the next time we ran into each other by accident.

Piano and Voice

2011-09-11T13:44:00.000-07:00

I have always felt that relying on a piano or an orchestra to fill your vocal lines is a cop out especially in jazz. But I have to make an exception for Billie Holiday.

After hearing 1:35 - 2:05 it's impossible for me to think of this song in a piano-less setting.

Brune Figures

2011-09-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Sublime music submerged in meaningless prattle.
Illustration:

This isn't a put down. Some things achieve transcendence when half hidden. I think this is what Wallace Stevens is on about most of the time.

Art Pepper can knock me out with a single phrase. Coltrane is the only other jazz player I can think of who has a similar effect. There is a story that Pepper landed in NYC after a decade in jail and telephoned every alto player in town that he was coming to blow them off the stage. The story is probably apocryphal but that passage from 1:40 -- 1:55 blows my mind all the way to the back rows every time I listen to it.