ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2012 (part two).

ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2012 (part two).

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Purportedly, this second segment of my annual review of music was supposed to be devoted to listings of classical, world music and jazz, as intended to illustrate the sublime well-roundedness of my artistic taste.

This time around, you’ll have to take my word for it, because no new ground was broken in the year recently passed. There was stasis. So it goes. It remains a matter of overt pride and personal enrichment for me that all types of music can be enthralling at any given time, in a certain place, and according to variable moods.

For example, at some undisclosed point each year on a Saturday, I switch on WUOL-90.5 and listen to an opera broadcast from the Met. It doesn’t even matter which opera it is, because I don’t know enough about the genre to be selective. If nothing else, it helps to keep the Marx Brothers satire alive.

Elsewhere, my favorite classical works – medieval music, Smetana, chamber works, Shostakovich – are revisited regularly. These come from my own CD collection, and also via WUOL, for which I am thankful, and need to get back to supporting with some real money in 2013.

My world travel schedule has taken a hiatus in recent years, but music from the remainder of the planet still features regularly on my play list. I browse Internet radio stations and YouTube, delve into the CD collection, and make pairings: Fado for a Port night, or Dengue Fever with Asian cuisine. In fact, the Cambodian-American band’s documentary, “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong,” was a 2012 milestone, and I regret coming to it so tardily.

And then there are my first true loves, jazz and swing, the prototypically American musical styles I literally was raised to appreciate. Alas, I have been profligate of late. In 2012, the death of Dave Brubeck probably served as the only reminder of jazz for many observers of the Lady Gaga cohort, and while sad, it’s not unexpected. Perhaps 2013 finally will be the year when I muster the necessary organization to wire the WCTU Reading Room at Bank Street Brewhouse for sound, and begin devoting certain nights entirely to jazz. Or samba. Perhaps Handel or Borodin.

After all, we need listenable diversity.

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Last week I reviewed the list of my favorite pop/rock recordings of 2012. One release was purposefully omitted, because while influential in its limited time, I suspect it won’t stand the ultimate test of shelf life, in the sense of music worth returning to again and again. However, I might yet be wrong, and that’s why it’s time to talk a bit about Van Halen.

Early in 2012, there was much fanfare when the group announced a new album, the band’s first since 1984 (both the year and the title) with original singer David Lee Roth, and a tour to follow. I skipped the cash outlay for the tour date in Louisville and bought the CD instead. Interestingly, there was little truly “new” material therein. Rather, the songs were assembled largely from leftover, unused or discarded demos from the heyday of Van Halen during the Reagan Administration, newly recorded for the digital age.

For three weeks straight, I listened to Van Halen’s comeback CD. It made such a profound impression that when I started writing these musical columns in December, I couldn’t even remember the album’s title. Forced to scan the rack for a look see, it came back to me: “A Different Kind of Truth.”

The album isn’t entirely bad, although I’d be guilty of damning Van Halen with faint praise if I were to call it the “best” since the band’s last album with Sammy Hagar in 1993.

Gary Cherone, where have you gone?

There is formulaic filler, reminding the listener of why certain songs were omitted in the first place, but there also are moments of bliss and excellence, as when the lumbering leviathan belatedly gets rolling during Eddie Van Halen’s inspired, throwback solos on the song “Blood and Fire.” Thus was the air guitar duly enabled, back when we were sweaty and utterly shameless.

Eddie still has it, but David Lee’s voice isn’t at all the same, even if he’s crafty like a vaudevillian and adept at concealing vastly reduced range. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the single most noticeable absence is that of former band member Michael Anthony, ingloriously booted by the conspiratorial brothers to make room for Eddie’s son Wolfgang. “A Different Kind of Truth” proves definitively that Anthony’s backing vocals always were an integral part of the band’s sound. Without them, something vital is missing.

So, why will Van Halen still be a memorable presence for me whenever I think back on music in 2012, even if the new album was so-so, and in spite of missing them live? It’s precisely because it compelled me to return to the archive, and to listen again to those first five albums from the band’s original incarnation.

I liked the Van Hagar era, too, but indeed, there was a time when Roth prancing in spandex, screaming, and a grinning Eddie with his axe, shredding, meant quite a lot for the rock oeuvre as a whole. After finishing those five timeless albums, the new release seemed utterly irrelevant. And so collectively we age, gracefully or otherwise.

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These intense musical dalliances and re-immersions are hallmarks of my year I music. It always happens. In 2012, there was Van Halen, the “pop” period of Genesis, wonderful recaps of King Crimson and Soft Machine, and two Blu-ray/CD purchases to close the year: Led Zeppelin’s “Celebration Day” (the 2007 London reunion show with Jason Bonham on drums) and “Hungarian Rhapsody” by Queen, a concert from 1986 in Budapest.

In the days of my youth … it never could be said that I was a Led Zeppelin fan. It may have been a cultural phenomenon, given that the pot smokers in my school milieu steered toward Zepp, while the drinkers listened to the Stones and the Who. Whatever the case, the band’s performance as elder statesmen is quite compelling. Listen to Robert Plant as a lion in winter, wisely reinterpreting his own rock singer legacy, not as a shouter, but as a craftsman.

To view the very epitome of the now-discredited stadium rock genre, rewind to 1986 and revel in the excess as Queen plays the soccer stadium in Budapest, with every movie camera in the entirety of Communist-era Hungary assembled to capture the rare spectacle of a Western concert behind the Iron Curtain.

The film, unreleased until now, is an essential gem, capturing the late, lamented Freddie Mercury and his band mates at their post-Live Aid pinnacle, with interspersed footage of Queen as bemused tourists that chills me to the bone, so redolent of the mood in Budapest just one year later, when I purchased a ticket for $7 and saw Genesis on the very same stage.

As much as seeing Genesis meant to me at the time, after seeing the Queen film these many years later, I’d have happily swapped Phil Collins for Mercury. He was a one-off. Then again, so are we all.

Radio, someone still loves you. But that’s a tale for another time.

ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2011, Part One.

ON THE AVENUES: The musical year 2011, Part One.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Part two here)

There’s no use in pretending.

Ear X-tacy’s demise is metaphorical, and the game of contemporary relevance in musical taste is almost certainly finished for me. In terms of chronology, I’ve effectively pole vaulted the shark.

Perhaps this state of irrefutable old fogeyism owes as much to technology, and my ongoing refusal to embrace it, as to any other single factor. I fail to utilize the handy mechanisms that currently exist to convey packaged music to waiting ears. I’ve no Sirius, Pandora or Spotify, and not a single song is stored on my phone or computer. You might as well bring on the 8-tracks.

Glancing at the year-end lists in the media, I’m struck by how few of the artists are familiar to me. Needless to say, I’ve heard next to none of their songs. Of those managing to strike a chord in my comfy hermetic world, most came from listening sporadically to Louisville’s 91.9 FM throughout the year.

Perhaps my current feelings mirror those of an imagined, long-forgotten devotee of the “swing era,” watching Elvis on the Dorsey Brothers Stage Show in 1956, and asking himself: What on earth compelled these two dependable veterans of hot jazz, sweet pop and the Lindy Hop to feature this pouty-lipped, swivel-hipped kid from Memphis? It’s not unlike the words Archie and Edith once sang:

And you knew who you was then
Girls were girls and men were men
Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again

In point of fact, my parents raised me on these very same big bands, but when those LPs were safely put away into their dust jackets, I liked to retreat to my room to fiddle with the AM radio dial. That’s where I heard the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Doors and Beach Boys somewhere behind the pervasive static.

My conversion didn’t transpire overnight, but in due time, an immersion in rock and pop music blindingly occurred. Now it seems that rock’s dying, if not already buried, and pop is submerged somewhere beneath hip hop, electronica and a slew of performers whose names I don’t even know how to pronounce correctly, from Gaga to Kanye to Beyonce.

Still, I try mightily to resist the temptation to slip permanently into the illusory trance of the past by listening exclusively to my old favorites. Balance is difficult, but always sought. My goal remains to find the next rock band that speaks to me like the Who’s Quadrophenia did – except now, today, in the present tense. Is there music to help me feel the way I did when I was younger, when certain songs were magical talismans, and lengthy periods of life were defined almost exclusively by what I happened to be hearing at the time?

Alas, perhaps all that raw adrenalin has left the building for good, and I’m not actually supposed to feel transformed any longer. Increasingly, the daily memo suggests that instead of running over there and listening to one hugely transformative power chord, I should slowly walk, and try to absorb the subtleties of many types of different music as possible.

This I do, and yet it’s too bad the old-fashioned thrill seems gone.

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In 2011, I finally installed ad-hoc audio in my office. While assuredly not made of wax cylinders, it is late model, but aurally suitable for CDs and radio. Laboriously, and over time, most of my compact discs have been hauled home from work, and accordingly, I’ve been delving back into the classical, jazz and world music collections.

Classical

The Baylor household will remember 2011 as the year we completed our long-term, chronological viewing of all eleven seasons of M*A*S*H on DVD, culminating with the series’ enduring, final episode, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen.” In it, Major Winchester endeavors to teach Mozart to captive Chinese folk musicians. It is the first movement of the Clarinet Quintet in A, K. 581, and it was lodged in my memory for quite some time.

The available collection includes at least a dozen compilations of music from the medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe, which hold an enduring fascination. I turn back to them frequently, but cannot pick one above the rest. Of slightly more recent vintage is Music for Egon Schiele, a 1996 release from the group Rachel's. It was scored as music for a play about the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, a great personal favorite.

Across the seasons, binding 2011 together for me was a multi-disc copy of Shostakovich’s complete string quartets (1-15), which occupied numerous early mornings of solitude, writing and espresso. This is “chamber music” of a high and inspiring order, and a sublime artistic achievement.

Jazz

I must confess to it being a sub-par year for me in terms of jazz listening. Local favorite Dick Sisto’s sole appearance at Bank Street Brewhouse was a high point, as was digging out the Smithsonian’s Big Band Renaissance compilation for repeated listening. Seeing Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris produced a scramble not for Cole Porter, whose music is pivotal in the narrative, but Sidney Bechet, the virtuoso soprano sax player who, like many African-American musicians, sought refuge from racism in France.

World Music

Three archival releases spoke to me in 2011.

To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929 … A three-CD gathering of tunes recorded during the early 1902’s in New York City by immigrants of numerous nationalities, who came to America from the collapsing Ottoman empire. Spellbinding.

Bossa Nova: Rise of Brazilian Music in the 1960s … a wide-ranging look at bossa nova as a pathway from samba to jazz.

Funky Frauleins, Vol. 2 … West German female pop performers, also from the 1960’s, doing original material and some crazy covers, like “I Dig Rock and Roll Music.”

Esoterica

It’s the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, and to observe it, there is Songs of the Civil War, which I first examined in July: Civil War songs: "I’m a Good Old Rebel," but assuredly not like this. I never grow tired of these robust, poignant, devotional and confrontational tunes.

(In Part Two next Thursday, it’s from Booker T to Twilight Singers to Wild Beasts, all in the year 2011)

ON THE AVENUES: From the Liffey to the Ohio.

ON THE AVENUES: From the Liffey to the Ohio.

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

In my memory I will always see
the town that I have loved so well
Where our school played ball by the gas yard wall
and we laughed through the smoke and the smell
Going home in the rain, running up the dark lane
past the jail and down behind the fountain
Those were happy days in so many, many ways
in the town I loved so well
-- “The Town I Loved So Well,” by Phil Coulter

The extent to which I love, and seemingly just as often loathe, my own town of New Albany is a subject requiring more column inches than time permits, not to mention occasional bouts of psychotherapy. Beer helps, too.

But another festive cultural weekend looms, and before it receives its due coverage, there’s a wee bit of back story for us to peruse. Find a chair, pour a jar, and smoke’ em if you’ve got ‘em – before someone makes fun like this illegal.

Consider first the distinctively American sport of basketball. Although the squad didn’t make this year’s NBA finals, you may have heard of the Celtics, the perennially successful team in Boston, itself arguably the world capital of the Irish Diaspora.

To my mind, the Celtics should never be the SELL-tics, as we insist on calling the team, but the KELL-tics. The team’s name comes from the Celts (properly pronounced “Kelts”), who were ancient tribal Europeans of the Iron Age, and the ancestors of today’s Irish.

The hard “k” is easier to remember by fixing an image of Bushmill’s, Jameson’s or Tullamore Dew in one’s mind, and asking the bartender for a belt of the Kelts … or two.

Long ago, Celtic cultures expanded into many European territories. The advent of the Roman Empire gradually pushed them toward the continent’s western periphery, to remote green islands and misty, isolated coasts. In modern times, we think of the Celts as comprising Gaels (Irish, Scottish and Manx peoples), Welsh and Bretons.

It’s far more complicated than all that, but for our purposes today, it’s enough to know that a few central elements of convivial living, including music, beer, conversation and food, are stocks-in-trade of the Celts, and that among Celts, the Irish stand out as visible and enthusiastic proponents of these timeless virtues.

It’s 2011, and is there any place of consequence on the planet outside of North Korea that doesn’t have a mostly authentic Irish pub serving Guinness and some variant of fish and potatoes?

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It’s been more than a quarter-century since I first visited Ireland, eagerly draining countless pints of the national black elixir, and depleting adjacent seas of any marine life capable of being battered and subjected to frying. About the same time, my well-traveled cousin Don Barry introduced me to classic albums recorded by the Dubliners, Wolfe Tones, Tommy Makem, the Clancy Brothers, and other Irish folk bands.

While Stouts, Porters and Red Ales do a man’s body good, his mind craves a governing context to accompany the liquid, and it is in words and music that the Irish experience truly comes alive. The recipe is simple. One adds equal literary elements of James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, John Synge and W.B. Yeats to gifted instrumental musicianship, complete with fiddles, tin whistles, guitars and banjos, which on occasion can lead to jigs and reels.

Spice the emerging concoction with everyday speaking voices that transform common English into lilting melodies, even when reading the Dublin phone book, and listen as golden-throated singers render these tunes into the realm of the ethereal and sublime. Enjoy the results as often as possible, with pints of black gold at the ready.

This is where the town we (well, something) so well, New Albany, re-enters the narrative.

On Saturday, June 18, the hard-working volunteers from the Kentuckiana Celtic Fest return to New Albany’s revamped riverfront amphitheater with the third annual “Celts on the River,” a free concert running from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

This year’s musical headliner is Brendan Loughrey, who was born in County Donegal, an isolated, rural area clinging to the northwest coast of the island. Donegal is part of the Irish Republic, but most of its land border is with Northern Ireland, and Loughrey’s childhood coincided with the worst period of the Troubles. While still very young, Loughrey’s father gifted him with a guitar and said, "You'll reach more people with this guitar son, than you'll ever reach with a rifle."

On the 18th, supporting local and regional artists will include Cloigheann, Mark Geary and John Skelton. There’ll be food from area purveyors, arts and crafts vendors, and beer from the New Albanian Brewing Company, including the 2011 releases of Haggis Laddie (Irish Red) and Strathpeffer (honey and heather ale, Scottish-style).

The Irish Exit will be assisting NABC this year with bar service, and the Exit will be hosting the Celts on the River after party (10:00 p.m. to dawn’s early light). The concert also provides support for Kentucky Harvest’s Blessing in a Backpack.

Did I mention that there is no cover charge? For more information, visit http://celtsontheriver.com, and enjoy this anecdote, as relayed by Sean Cannon of the Dubliners.

In the Irish love triangle there are three parties involved: A man, and a woman – and drink. And so the girl gives an ultimatum to her boyfriend: It's either the drink, or me. And he chooses the drink. But afterwards, he relents. They get married and live happily ever after … the three of them.

Pangea Day and worldwide live broadcast at the Market Street Fish House: Saturday, May 10.

Bluegill offered this preview a few weeks back: Pangea Day, May 10, New Albany. Note also that tomorrow is a Downtown Saturday: Downtown Saturday & a sneak peak at the Pearl Street Gems: Saturday, May 10.

Pangea Day, May 10, New Albany.

What Is Pangea Day?

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

On May 10, 2008 - Pangea Day - sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.

The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Of course, movies alone can't change the world. But the people who watch them can. So following May 10, 2008, Pangea Day organizers will facilitate community-building activities around the world by connecting inspired viewers with numerous organizations which are already doing groundbreaking work.




The first graphic says to sign up to host an event, so I did.

Details will be forthcoming, but know that NAC is on the case, making it possible to participate in Pangea Day activities somewhere in New Albany on May 10 beginning around 1:00 to 2:00 in the afternoon.

Pangea Day FAQ

Five albums and five more musical noteworthy listens during 2007.

As originally posted to samizdat, our private chat and literary discussion group.

ALBUMS

Crowded House – Time on Earth
Idiosyncratic eighties pop now yielding to bittersweet middle aged musings on the meaning of life, loss and endurance, owing primarily to the suicide of drummer Paul Hester, with sufficient doses of Neil Finn’s trademark subversive lyricism to inspire thought even if the pop isn’t nearly as bouncy as during the group’s Reagan Era heyday. No ground is broken, but great melodies are proffered, packaged with understated yet suitably intense performances.

The Feeling – Twelve Stops and Home
Youthful and expert Brit borrowers of every trick in the pop music playbook, chock full of hooks and melodies (apply alcohol to create ear worms) and schlock-cocked-eyebrow lyrics about love and loss. That’s enough for me, and yet it should be noted that the results hardly can be classified as bubblegum: “My love is stronger than you think/Much stronger now I’ve had a drink.”

Bruce Springsteen – Magic
At first, the Boss’s latest collection of songs didn’t strike me as overtly political or daring; in fact, in spite of the energetic backing of the E Street Band, the project almost seemed pedestrian, but a half dozen listens revealed a depth that has continued to impress ever since. The song “Magic” provides half the epitaph for the clueless supporting the failed Bush regime, with John Fogerty’s live rendering of “Fortunate Son” supplying the other (see below).

Manic Street Preachers – Send Away the Tigers
Commended by critics as a return to form, although my preferences continue to lie with the dark and elegiac Lifeblood (2004). Spare production accenting a classic power trio, minimal embellishments, with emphasis on short, succinct pop anthems, but bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire still manages to name drop Lee Harvey Oswald in what is ostensibly a love song (“I am just a patsy/the Oswald in Lee Harvey”), guitarist James Dean Bradfield is in fine voice throughout, and Sean Moore finally is permitted to play drums in a manner that would elicit at least a drunken leer of approval from the late Keith Moon.

Radiohead – In Rainbows
It’s fairly obvious that this latest stage in Radiohead’s artistic growth melds the experimentation of post OK Computer with excellent songs. Oddly, not one piece stands out, and yet I hear something different and tasteful each time I listen. A nuanced and rewarding effort.

NOTEWORTHY LISTENS (VARIOUS)

LIVE: John Fogerty in Louisville and Bruce Springsteen in Cologne, Germany
By sheer happenstance, these two performances by rock legends occurred a scant ten days apart in December, and on two different continents. In both cases, it was the first time I’d seen the performer in question live. Elderly pros Fogerty (two hours) and Springsteen (two and a half) provided memorable bang for the buck. Crack musicianship included Kenny Aronoff on drums and Billy Burnette on rhythm guitar (Fogerty’s current traveling band) and the E Street Band’s familiar and stellar lineup (nine people can make big noise, folks). See: This is what will be: The Boss, live in Cologne.

LIVE: Snow Patrol at White River State Park in Indianapolis (August 3)
The band’s Eyes Open album landed in 2006, but I didn’t get around to buying it until 2007. Fortunately there was a live show in Indy, which turned out to be on my birthday. Clever road weary stage banter was some of the best I’ve heard, and the outdoor venue at White River has good acoustics, pristine sound and is highly organized. A wonderful experience all around.

DVD: U2 ZooTV Live from Sydney
The final show of one of the most renowned tours in rock’s modern era is admittedly uneven, having been scripted for a worldwide satellite television broadcast. It doesn’t matter, because my chronological Irish contemporaries have simply never been in as thunderously fine a form as during the show’s seven opening songs, all taken from Achtung Baby, and played with skill and fury that is positively riveting. During the two hours that follow, the usual set list suspects are happily accented by the presence of three seldom performed cuts from Zooropa, including “Stay (Faraway, So Close)”, but unfortunately sans “The Wanderer.”

WEB: Wolfgang’s Vault
On-line repository for four decades of streaming audio concerts, many of which originally were King Biscuit Flour Hour broadcasts back in FM radio days when so little content was available to poor schmucks in places like New Albany. Everyone from Miles Davis to Elvin Bishop, and entirely free of charge.

BOOK: Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie, by Alyn Shipton
While not the most arresting biography I’ve read, Shipton nonetheless has I important and plausible things to say about the position of Gillespie in the development of bebop, and I was inspired to listen again to the recordings that I have for proof of the trumpeter’s genius.

Speaking of jazz geniuses, there was also a memorable time during my recovery from shoulder surgery when I bonded again with Mr. Beiderbecke: Quality time with Bix.

And, finally, a local musical event made a big impression: In the Mood: Saturday at the Speakeasy with the Glenn Miller Orchestra ... and more than a few ghosts.

International Jazz Downtown Tonight

Our own Carnegie Center for Art and History is hosting a free concert this evening at 7:30 featuring the Halcyon Jazz Trio, a part of the much larger and wonderfully ambitious Roads to You international music series, connecting the Arab Muslim world with hometown USA via concerts, lectures, and workshops.

Another full ensemble concert will follow on May 19th at Louisville Male High School.

If Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan digs it, I'm guessing the local intelligentsia can groove to it, too.