The Penultimate Word

Peter Neubäcker, who developed Melodyne, the premier pitch-correction program, has new software out which can take a music recording of, say, a piano or string quartet, separate out the individual notes in all the chords, and allow you to change them at will. Want to change a major chord to a minor? No problem. This is a video of him demoing the software at Musikmesse Frankfurt. This is incredible stuff.

(Via Alex Ross)

One of my favorite musicians, Jeff Healey, died yesterday of cancer. Healey, blind from the age on one, had a unique style of playing the guitar with the instrument flat on his lap. He spent his childhoood in Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada, and his adult life in Toronto. He was discovered by Stevie Ray Vaughan who gave him international exposure. His only real American hit was Angel Eyes, released in 1988 on the album “See The Light”, but he was always very popular in Canada.

He had a club in Toronto called Jeff Healey’s Roadhouse, which was a mandatory stop for me whenever I was in that city.

The guy could flat-out play. Here is a live version of the title track from “See The Light”. I have no idea where or when this vid was taped, but Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) (!) is playing the piano.

Update: I figured out where this vid is from. It is from a show called Sunday Night, later Night Music, hosted by David Sanborn and Jools Holland. This was an extremely eclectic show, featuring artists from all types of jazz, pop, rock, blues, etc. backgrounds. It was a great show and it is too bad it lasted only two seasons.

Sunday I drove out to Ohio to visit my friends Ken and Trudy, who live about 40 minutes outside Cleveland, and with them hear the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra in the visuallly stunning and acoustically perfect Severance Hall. The concert was conducted by the CSO’s Music Director, Franz Welser-Möst.

The first work on the program was by the Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud. Called Apeiron, it is scored for a massive orchestra of 101 musicians. In the program notes, Staud says “… what I attempted was to bring the ‘unlimited’ (an infinity comprised solely of the combinatorial possibilities afforded by a large orchestra) and the ‘determinate’ (derivation from a few basic building blocks, plus a clear formal construction based on the simplest of arithmetical relationships) into a harmonious relationship with each other.” I have no idea what the hell that means, and after listening to the 20-minute work, I still don’t.

The problem that my friends and I had was that we couldn’t discern any organizing principle around which to make sense of the sounds the orchestra was making. There was no underlying rythmic structure that I could make out. Much of it was atonal. There were stretches of tonalilty, but the tonal passages seemed unrelated to each other. The orchestra played it vigorously and apparently with a lot of enthusiasm, so maybe they had it figured out.

The next work was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Alfred Brendel, piano. Brendel, who is retiring from public performance this year, gave a very thoughtful and moving reading of the piece. He is not a showy player, but is economical in his gestures and concise in his playing. The orchestra and soloist complemented each other very well.

The final work was Brahm’s Fourth Symphony, again played really well by the CSO. The CSO is a terrific band, with a rich, highly polished sound, and a flawless sense of ensemble, so this type of repertoire suits them well.

If I had to choose my favorite female pop or jazz singer, it would be a toss-up between Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. Ella was the perfect interpreter - she knew exactly how to sing a song to bring out its emotional content. Sarah simply breaks my heart. Here she is singing The Nearness of You. The sound is pretty crappy, but Sarah’s vulnerability and underlying sadness shines right through.

Stevie Ray Vaughan performing Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile at the Midtfyns Festival in 1988.

Every thousand years or so the Grammy people shock the world by giving the Album of the Year award to one that actually deserves the honor. Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters was named Album of the Year for 2007, making this year was one of those millenial events. River is an album of songs by Joni Mitchell, arranged by Hancock and played by his band and guests. One of the stronger tracks - they are all strong - is “Edith and the Kingpin” with Tina Turner. Tina justs nails it.

(This is a funny commentary on the usual Grammy stupidity.)

Afro Cuban Jazz Suite by Chico O’Farrill performed by the Chico O’Farrill AFJO (Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchetra? It’s not clear what AFJO stands for).

NASA is transmitting Lennon & McCartney’s Across the Universe across the universe on its Deep Space Network on Monday, Feb 4, at 7pm EST. Cosmic.

Rufus Wainwright’s cover is better than the original, I think.

A pretty pleasant jazz arrangement of the famous Bach chorale by some guy I’ve never heard of.

I’ve never heard of this singer, but man what a voice! This is from a live session recorded in the Abbey Road studios with Jeff Beck, guitar, Peter King, sax, Jon Cleary, piano, and an unidentified drummer. I ran across this during one my perambulations through YouTube.

Yesterday, I went to the 31st Collage Concert staged by the University of Michigan’s Music School at the venerable Hill Auditorium. The format of these concerts is unusual - the last note of one piece overlaps with the first note of the next piece, no break for applause between pieces, with each piece being different, sometimes wildly different, from its predecessor. For example, the first few pieces of last night’s concert were:

1. Overture to Colas Breugnon by Dmitri Kabalevsky, performed by the Symphony Band
2. Kaddish from Deux Mélodies Hebraiques by Maurice Ravel, performed by a soprano with piano accompaniment
3. Samsara, performed with two sitars, bansuri and tabla
4. Gloria from The Masque of Angels by Dominick Argento, performed by a massed choir and symphony band.

I had not heard of any of those works either, but the list illustrates the wide range of music presented. There was some familiar music, but much of it was performed on unexpected instruments. For example, Bach’s famous Partita No. 3 for solo violin, was performed (fantastically) last night on a marimba. There were also jazz ensembles, some dance, Shakespeare, musical theater, and some things completely unclassifiable. The whole concert lasted around and hour and half, with an intermission about halfway through.

U-M’s Music School is one of the top schools around. All of the students enrolled there are going to careers in music, theater or dance, so the level of musicianship is very high. This is a great concert to take people who don’t go to concerts, because there is a lot going on and it is wildly diverse.

Ella is my favorite female pop/jazz singer - her artistry takes a back seat to no one’s, and I love her voice. This is Angel Eyes from a 1957 performance in Amsterdam.

DC-area vocalist Sharon Clark with her quintet performing You Go To My Head.

Pianist Gene Harris, another one of my favorite jazz musicians, here playing one of the bluesiest versions of Summertime you’ll ever hear.

Happy New Year everyone!

This is the late Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s gorgeous version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World.

(yes, I know it’s Saturday).

Oscar Peterson, one of the most talented pianists the jazz world has ever known, died this past Sunday (23 Dec.). It was Peterson who really got me interested in jazz. His artistry and virtuosity (which sometimes threatened to overhelm his artistry) just astonished me when I first heard him. Listening to him led me to seek out other jazz musicians, and I have been a jazz fan ever since.

This clip is of Oscar playing You Look Good to Me at the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival. The trio is rather unusual, with two stringed basses backing him up.

(click on the images for larger sizes)
This the Chapel of King’s College at Cambridge University in England. We usually think of chapels as small spaces for worship, but this one is mammoth, the interior being 290 feet long and 40 feet wide. The foundation stone of the chapel was laid by King Henry VI in 1446, who caused it to be built and was determined that it be the largest and most beautiful college chapel around. Work was interrupted in 1461 when Henry was taken prisoner by Edward Duke of York during the War of the Roses. Work was begun again under Richard III, continued under Henry VII after he overthrew Richard, and eventually completed in 1547 under Henry VIII.

The world-famous chapel choir was part of Henry VI’s plan for the chapel from the beginning. It exists to participate in the worship life of the chapel, but its reach and influence is world-wide. The choir is in the English cathedral choir tradition, which means that, among other things, the trebles (sopranos and altos) are boys whose voices have not yet changed. The tenors and basses are music students at the college, the boys attend a boarding school run by the college.

Every year on Christmas Eve the chapel holds the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ using nine scripture lessons interspersed with congregational carol singing and anthems sung by the choir. The first Festival was held in 1918 and has been held every year since. It is so popular people begin lining up early in the morning on Christmas Eve for the 3:30 pm service. Except in 1930, it has been broadcast over BBC radio every year since 1928. It was broadcast even during World War II though the glass (and heat) had been removed from the building in case it was bombed. Every few years a shorter version is filmed for television. The service is now heard and watched by millions of people worldwide, and the format of the service has been adapted by churches worldwide for their own use.

Every year since 1919 the service begins with the carol Once in Royal David’s City. The first verse is a solo by one of the choirboys. The choir director never tells his charges ahead of time who he has chosen as the soloist, he simply beckons him forward at the start of the service.

Another carol sung at the festival is In Dulci Jubilo (Good Christian Men Rejoice), an old German carol dating back to the 14th century. One of the verses (”O Patris caritas”) was likely written by Martin Luther in the 16th century. It is a macaronic carol, which means that the text combines Latin and a vernacular language - German in the original, English in this arrangement written by R. L. Pearsall in 1837. Pearsall’s absolutely beautiful arrangement sometimes splits the choir into two 4-part choruses and sometimes combines it into one 5-part chorus. It also uses a small group of voices in the beginning of verse 3 (”O Patris caritas”) and an octet in the middle of verse 4 (”Ubi sunt gaudia”).

More Stairway, this by guitarist Stanley Jordan.

Someone put together a page of 101 covers of Stairway to Heaven. Some are absolutely (albeit unintentionally) hilarious (like Pat Boone’s [!]), others rather endearing (like Dolly’s).

This version by an Australian Beatles tribute band is rather cute.

(Via Scalzi)

This is Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida with the Modern Jazz Quartet playing Samba de Uma Nota Só (One Note Samba). This is a lovely performance.

Since I am on a Hanukkah theme, here is Tom Lehrer’s classic Hanukkah in Santa Monica.

Us3’s Cantaloop, which samples Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island

Brilliant

DG now has an online store, and it is freakin’ awesome. It has over 2400 releases, including 600 out-of-print releases, any of which can be downloaded instantly. All the downloads are in 320kpbs mp3 format, which is a very high-quality format. The files are DRM-free, that is, not copy-protected, which means you can download them to your computer and copy them to whatever playback device or other computer you wish without restriction. You can, of course, import the files into iTunes and then to your iPod. The one drawback to 320kpbs is that the files are really large, but that is a tradeoff I will gladly make.

You can purchase entire albums or individual tracks. The store keeps track of what you have purchased, so if your internet connection craps out during the middle of a download, you can simply reconnect to the store and try downloading again without having to repurchase the track. Their pricing is very reasonable, although they charge different prices for different tracks, unlike iTunes which charges a flat $0.99/track. I haven’t figured out their pricing yet.

As I write this I am downloading a performance of the Beethoven Quintet for Piano and Wind Quartet in E-flat, performed by Friedrich Gulda and the Vienna Philharmonic Wind Ensemble. My dad purchased the LP of this performance probably in the 1960s, and it was always a favorite of mine. Both the LP and CD reissue have long since gone out of print, and I was frustrated by my inability to find a copy. So I was really happy to find it available for download from the DG store.

The only problem I had with the site is that they make a big deal out of something called the Download Manager, but I could not get it to start (and I am pretty competent in these matters). It wasn’t a huge deal as there are other ways to download files besides using the Download Manager, but it was a little frustrating to be unable to get the thing to work. Other than that minor issue, I am really impressed with the store.

(via Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise)