Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Pub Choir sings ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ (Cher)
I had never heard of Pub Choir, which according to Wikipedia is an Australian thing:
Pub Choir is a musical act founded in Brisbane, Australia, directed by Astrid Jorgensen.[1][2][3]
At each Pub Choir event Jorgensen arranges a popular song and teaches it to the audience in three-part harmony, concluding with a performance which is filmed and shared on social media.[4][5] There is no formal recurring membership and participants purchase tickets to attend each show, which is usually held at a licensed venue
There’s more at the link, and they have their own YouTube channel.
In this performance I glimpsed a double-bell trumpet like the one at the right but in a brass finish. Most double-bell trumpets seem to have the second bell mounted at a 45º angle, à la Dizzy Gillespie. This one is more unusual. (A YouTube video explains more about two-bell trumpets.) The common use seems to put a mute in one bell so the player can switch quickly between muted and open sound without have to fumble with the mute.
Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer
Back in the day, Tom Lehrer (now 95) was a rollicking breath of fresh air, and his music and lyrics still stand up well. Lehrer has put all his work into the public domain and has a website where you can read the lyrics and listen to (and download) the songs. It’s quite a list. Some favorites: The Vatican Rag; Be Prepared (The Boy Scouts’ Marching Song); Fight Fiercely, Harvard.
Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps
Or: When a Defense Lawyer Hears a Rap Song. Caleb Mason has an interesting article in the Saint Louis University Law Journal. It begins:
ABSTRACT
This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor. It’s intended as a resource for law students and teachers, and for anyone who’s interested in what pop culture gets right about criminal justice, and what it gets wrong.
INTRODUCTION
99 Problems is a song by Jay-Z.1 It’s a good song. It was a big hit in 2004.2 I’m writing about it now because it’s time we added it to the canon of criminal procedure pedagogy. In one compact, teachable verse (Verse 2), the song forces us to think about traffic stops, vehicle searches, drug smuggling, probable cause, and racial profiling, and it beautifully tees up my favorite pedagogical heuristic: life lessons for cops and robbers. And as it turns out, I’m not late to the game after all: Jay-Z recently published a well-received volume of criticism and commentary that includes his own marginal notes on Verse 2 of 99 Problems. 3 When I teach the Fourth Amendment, I ask my students what the doctrines tell us about, on the one hand, how to catch bad guys and not risk suppression, and on the other, how to avoid capture or at least beat the rap if not the ride.4 I’m always happy to tell my own stories, but the song struck me as the perfect teaching tool. All the students know it, and importantly for pedagogical purposes, it gets some things right—and some things very wrong.
It turns out that, while some other law professors have noticed 99 Problems, no one has yet provided a detailed, accurate analysis of the Fourth Amendment issues Verse 2 raises.5 In this Essay, I remedy that deficiency in the literature. This is, after all, one of the most popular songs of the last decade,6 and we should seize the opportunity to use it in our teaching. My audience, accordingly, is primarily teachers and students of criminal procedure, but I hope that my comments may be of some interest to cops and perps as well.
I. LYRICS, VERSE 2
1. The year is ‘94 and in my trunk is raw
2. In my rearview mirror is the motherfucking law
3. I got two choices y’all, pull over the car or
4. Bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor
5. Now I ain’t trying to see no highway chase with jake
6. Plus I got a few dollars I can fight the case
7. So I . . . pull over to the side of the road
8. And I Heard “Son do you know what I’m stopping you for?”
9. “Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low?
10. Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don’t know
11. Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?”
12. “Well you was doing fifty-five in a fifty-four
13. License and registration and step out of the car
14. Are you carrying a weapon on you, I know a lot of you are”
15. “I ain’t stepping out of shit all my papers legit” 1
6. “Do you mind if I look around the car a little bit?”
17. “Well, my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk and the back,
18. And I know my rights so you go’n need a warrant for that”
19. “Aren’t you sharp as a tack, some type of lawyer or something
20. Or somebody important or something?”
21. “Nah I ain’t pass the bar but I know a little bit
22. Enough that you won’t illegally search my shit”
23. “We’ll see how smart you are when the K-9s come”
24. I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t oneII. ANALYSIS
A. Line 1
The year is ‘94, and in my trunk is raw . . . Jay-Z was transporting drugs in his car, like many of the protagonists who populate the core cases of Fourth Amendment law.8 Unlike most of them, he gets away with it. Jay-Z says that the story in 99 Problems describes a real incident. In 1994, Jay-Z was dealing crack in New York City and was expanding to other markets.9 As he puts it, “New York guys had better connects and opened up drug markets down the I95 corridor.”10 Drug prices increase with distance from importation zones, and New York was a key transshipment hub, so presumably he was able to offer better product and prices to smaller regional markets.11
For several reasons, the transportation of illegal drugs has produced a veritable cornucopia of Fourth Amendment case law.12
Continue reading.
A 20-string Doolin Harp Guitar
I had never heard of a harp guitar, and now I see them a lot. Here’s one with a set of treble strings as well as the usual bass strings.
Retrospection for a Ragtime King: Scott Joplin and the American devaluation of Black art
I found the above in a post that collected seven performances of Scott Joplin’s compositions. I wanted to go beyond the familiar pieces — The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag. I was looking for a Joplin introduction to Adrienne Davich’s fine essay in Van Magazine, which begins:
In 1991, when I was eight years old, I found a simplified version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and relished playing it for most of the year that I was in third grade. My parents had recently divorced. I’d moved from Las Vegas to Reno with my mother, a kindergarten teacher. Before and after school, I played “The Entertainer” on an out-of-tune piano in my mother’s classroom. I played it obsessively, perhaps because it occupied my hands and sounded jolly. I didn’t feel sad when I played it, though I missed my dad fiercely; instead, I felt indefatigable and industrious. The lyrics on my sheet music described a clownish performer doing “snappy patter and jokes” that please “the folks.” I know I imagined a Black man on stage, but I didn’t know about minstrel shows or much else about America’s racist past and present.
My babysitter, who was 13 and also white, loved “The Entertainer” so much that she asked me to teach her how to play it. She’d never taken piano lessons, but she patiently learned the right-hand notes and I accompanied her with the left-hand part. We created a duet and took turns singing the words. I don’t know about her, but I never once thought deeply about what the lyrics evoked: a “mask that grins and lies.” The entertainer I envisioned was a lot like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who looks happy tap-dancing alongside Shirley Temple in her childhood movie series. I presumed that the imagery associated with minstrelsy was normal and innocuous, just as I thought topless showgirls performing in my city’s casinos was. I’m not ashamed of this, but it’s baffling to think that in the 1990s I lived in a place where I was able to spend a year playing “The Entertainer” and learn absolutely nothing about the history of African American music, specifically ragtime, and the life of Scott Joplin.
I still knew nothing about Joplin, the man, when I was 14 and my piano teacher asked me to learn “Maple Leaf Rag.” Or I knew almost nothing. I’d at least learned that Joplin was Black because his photo appeared on my spiral-bound volume of his music. His race didn’t register with me as particularly important, but on the other hand, from somewhere I’d absorbed the idea that ragtime music was simpler and less important than the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. When my teacher, who was a professor of music at the university, handed me the “Maple Leaf,” I presumed it was because he’d disqualified me from playing other, “more serious” pieces. I felt bad about being asked to devote my time to a piece that’s often programmed into player pianos.
That is, until something unexpected happened: I began playing it reasonably well and people loved it. When guests came to my mother’s house, my stepfather urged me to play it. He never asked for Mozart or Scarlatti. Joplin’s rag was more delightful and impressive. It is, after all, a vivacious, happy piece that looks harder to play than it actually is.
Can you play a piece of music well without knowing its background? Is everything you need to know really on the page?
During the years I studied piano, we presumed yes. At weekly lessons, I learned theory, practiced sight-reading, and played pieces from every musical period. Although I was expected to know the dates and features of different musical styles, my teachers rarely if ever contextualized the music they asked me to play. It’s curious to me now that we didn’t talk about historical backdrops and personal tragedies. I know for certain that my teachers had rigorously studied classical music history. Did they think that I didn’t care? Or had they found that students fared better focusing solely on the music as written and their technique in playing it?
I’ve asked these questions because the pieces I played during my formative years are embedded in my soul. They’re part of my identity. I didn’t choose to bring them into my life (a teacher usually did), but ultimately, I did choose them, because I stuck with them. The two pieces that have haunted me the most are ones I started playing at 13 and 14 years old. I felt proud to play the first of these, Debussy’s “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”; I believed it represented me, with its melancholic air and evocation of loneliness and longing. But the other piece, Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” didn’t flow from somewhere inside me. I would have to inhabit it in a different way.
Joplin was born around 1868, possibly in the vicinity of . . .
1st Prize Winner ECU Guitar Competition 2019
Oscar Somersalo, 1st prize winner of ECU GuitarCompetition 2019
Music:
Variations on Carnival of Venice by Francisco Tárrega
1st movement, Fandangos y Boleros from Sonata by Leo BrouwerPerformed on July 16, 2019
Guitar: Gabriele Lodi
I Ain’t Got Nothing But Time: The mostly true legend of Hank Williams
David Ramsey writes in Oxford American:
BUT SLEEP WON’T COME
It seems fitting to begin at the end. The final recording session Hank Williams had was banged out over a couple hours in a studio in Nashville on September 23, 1952. Four songs, four classics—including “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” That’s just how it was for Hank, even then, at the tail end of drinking himself to death. A little more than three months later, he died in the backseat of a baby blue Cadillac. He was in a bad way on booze and pills and injections, but the circumstances of his death, like his life, remain murky. We’ll get to that.
Hank’s second wife swore “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was about his first wife; his first wife swore he had written it about himself. It hardly matters.
On the one hand, we can say heartbreak is an essentially generic topic for a song, and the lament of the cuckold is a rather sour brand of the form. Still: Just listen. The lilt and longing in Hank’s voice. The freakish adrenaline in his delivery. His rubbery tenor, the way the tune yo-yos up and down like something about to snap. It is just one of those songs: Slinks up as lazily as a python; before you know it, you’re smothered. Sometimes I think it’s the meanest lullaby ever written.
The brief career of Hank Williams became such a definitional anchor for what was then mostly known as hillbilly music and is now known as country that you can catch yourself wondering if the whole genre might have had slightly different preoccupations if Hank wasn’t so fixated on cheating and drinking. There’s a tear in my beer, and so on and on. But he was a medium. He knew what the people wanted.
“If you’re gonna sing,” Hank said, “sing ’em something they can understand.”
After he died, a Wisconsin woman wrote in to a newspaper in Montgomery: “We have listened to Hank Williams on disc jockey shows so often that we felt he was a friend of ours; someone we had known for a long time.”
Hank called it folk music, before that term took on another connotation. Songs for the people. Drinking and cheating are familiar troubles, but they are also proxies, let’s say. There are so many ways to feel cheated, so many longings and lacks. There are so many troubles. I’m not here to tell you what country music is, but that’s what it is to me. You’ll cry and cry, and try to sleep.
They called him the Hillbilly Shakespeare, but that almost seems to miss the point. There is no meter to a certain sort of sorrow. Sometimes all we can do is howl. When the light fades to dusk, when the night is quiet and our mind is not, when the medicine wears off, when the road is long, when time is short. I got a feeling called the blues.
THE BOOK OF KINGS
He was born outside of Georgiana, Alabama, to Lon and Lillie Williams. His first name, according to state records, was Hiriam. They meant to give him the Old Testament name Hiram, but there was a mix-up on the birth certificate. As a boy, he went by “Harm” or “Herky” or “Skeets.”
His mother ran a boarding house that may or may not have doubled as a brothel. She was a large, intimidating woman who eventually worked the door when he played shows. “There ain’t nobody I’d rather have alongside me in a fight,” her son was heard to say, “than my mama with a broken bottle in her hand.”
His father sustained a serious head injury during his service in World War I, which may or may not have happened in a fight with another soldier over a French girl. Later, Lon had either an aneurysm or something like shellshock, and he left for the VA hospital when the boy was six years old. Likely in part due to Lillie’s efforts, he was mostly . . .
Bandcamp
Bandcamp is new to me, but looks good and interesting. It’s a site where you can specify the various musical genres that interest you, browse offerings, and buy CDs (physical or digital) or individual tracks or stream music. Some seem to be free samples.
For example, take a look at the album More Touch, by Patricia Brennan:
Marimbist, improviser and composer Patricia Brennan “has been widely feted as one of the instrument’s newerleaders.” observed The New York City Jazz Record. She has performed in venues such as Newport Jazz Festival, SF JAZZ, and Carnegie Hall, as well as international venues such as Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, Austria, and Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
Listen to “Unquiet Respect,” the first tune on the album.
released November 18, 2022
Marcus Gilmore drums
Mauricio Herrera percussion
Kim Cass bass
Patricia Brennan vibraphone with electronics, marimba
It’s sort of like Spotify, but with Bandcamp, the musicians get the money.
And if jazz isn’t your thing, they offer many genres and sub-genres.
Also:
On the first Friday of the month since March of 2020, we’ve waived our revenue share to help support the many artists who have seen their livelihoods disrupted by the pandemic. Over the course of 23 days, fans have paid artists and labels more than $84 million dollars, helping cover rents, mortgages, groceries, medications, and much more. If you’re among the nearly 800,000 fans who have participated, thank you.
The next Bandcamp Friday is January 6th. As always, isitbandcampfriday.com has the details.
If you’ve started to feel guilty about buying music on any other day of the month, here’s something to keep in mind: on Bandcamp Fridays, an average of 93% of your money reaches the artist/label (after payment processor fees). When you make a purchase on any other day (as millions of you have, with close to $1 billion now paid directly to artists), an average of 82% reaches the artist/label. Every day is a good day to support artists on Bandcamp!
The Death of the Key Change
An interesting article on pop music sheds some light on one of the reasons popular music hasn’t appealed to me for quite a while. A combination of style and the technology used in songwriting has flattened the musical aspect. For example, think of a recent pop song you’ve heard — and it’s likely to be hip-hop — and hum the melody. You probably cannot, because hip-hop’s focus is on lyrics and rhythm, and melody is just an unimportant add-on.
In the music I like, melody (and lyrics) are the focus. For example,
There’s no love song finer,
But how strange the change from major to minor
Every time we say goodbye.
The line, from Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” includes a key change, as discussed in this article.
Boston Public Library Vinyl LP Collection
Some great titles. I’m listening to one now.
Some are complete, some have only 30-second samples from each tune. 😦
Unheard-of instruments in the saxophone family
Full disclosure: I played a tenor saxophone in high school, though not very well.
A contrabassoon is all well and good, but what about a subcontrabassoon?
Here’s the contrabassoon:
I like people who have a vision and determination/obsession, particularly if the goal is not in the direction of making money or gaining power.
Richard Bobo, pictured at right, wants very much to have and play a subcontrabassoon, which did not exist save as his dream, so he set about to make one.
You can read more about it at his website, and if you search YouTube on “subcontrabassoon,” you’ll find a few videos.
And don’t overlook the octobass, a stringed instrument whose lowest note is outside the range of human hearing.
List of common misconceptions
Wikipedia has a listicle of common misconceptions.
- 1Arts and culture
- 2History
- 3Science, technology, and mathematics
- 4See also
Later On 