Like many American children, many of my initial cultural experiences were mediated by Walt Disney. I’m thinking specifically of the film, The Three Caballeros, which I have always loved for its music and animation/live action sequences. Only later did I learn it was part of the studio’s almost-propagandistic effort to participate in the US government’s Good Neighboor policy of the time. Anyway, as a kid, my favorite part was the Bahia sequence where Donald Duck and José Carioca meet Aurora Miranda and sing an infectious samba about who has the best cookies. I was reminded about my love for that song, “Os Quindins de Yayá,” when it popped up again in the middle of Strictly Ballroom last night (Yes, I was watching that movie. As well as three or four others in an orgy of Christmas relaxation).
So, now I’m on a binge to learn more about the history of “Os Quindins de Yayá”: who originally composed it, and what Latin- and South- American artists have performed it over the years. Bring in the ethnomusicologists! Teh internets are revealing very little. Disney has never released a soundtrack for the movie. On the Strictly Ballroom soundtrack, the credited artist is Stanley Black. It also seems that Roberto Inglez (a Scotsman posing as a Latin American bandleader so that he could ride the Latin dance music craze of the 40s) also covered the tune. iTunes shows that Cuban songwriter Bola de Nieve has contributed a more rubato rendition. And in my favorite recent post, a passionate fan loved the music so much that he ripped it from the Disney VHS and posted for all to download and enjoy. So, the mystery of composer/original artist remains unsolved until I can talk to an expert. In the meantime, here is the original clip from the movie. Rock on!
Hello Sylvia and readers of Onda Carolina.I wanted to take the time to respond to your post publicly: as it stands, our local Latin music community is still small enough that there needn’t be an unapproachable distance between the artist, the critic, the listener.
I definitely encourage more discussion like this amongst local dancers and aficianados.The last thing I would want to see is an attitude of “Wow, the Triangle is so blessed to have a big salsa orchestra, so we best not criticize it, lest its success be diminished.”Hardly.Y’all are allowed to hold us up to your high standards, that’s how we grow and improve.
If you’ll remember the discussion from a previous post, I mentioned GarDel’s struggles of entertainer vs. artist, dance band vs. listening band, and cover band vs. original material, and how those dualities complicate our decision making process.If our catalog has recently become slightly homogenized, it is because we weren’t looking carefully at the band’s presentation at that level.Andy and I have spent the last few rehearsals guiding the band through a series of exercises that help the members listen to each other more, towards a better rhythmic concept for the rhythm section and a conscious focus on dynamics and articulations for the horns.These incremental improvements may not be readily apparent to an audience, especially for a band that rehearses and plays out only so often, but it is the essence of ensemble playing.Diversifying the musical library is one of the next tasks Andy and I will fold into the mix.Even then, we will learn the lesson of “you can’t satisfy everyone” (even amongst band members).Which artists should we focus on?What about this album?Should GarDel ever play merengue and cumbia or should it remain a “pure” salsa band?And so on.
Looking back on 2008, I think GarDel has entered its early adolescence and 2009 will see the band mature into a “grownup band.”Andy and I have a dream for the band that sees it becoming its own master, defining a sound that places it beyond “cover band/dance band/local all-star jam session” and into a realm of mostly original material, inspired by the bands roots as a “salsa dura” ensemble, but influenced by our diverse cultural backgrounds and eclectic taste in music.The current roadblock?A lyricist!But that is for another post.
Hey all, great news! The Grammy nominations were announced about an hour ago and Zenph Studios is involved! As a present for being such a gracious emcee at the Art Tatum Shrine Auditorium concert in 2007, we let Gordon Goodwin create a big band arrangement around one of our Art Tatum re-performances. As you may know, Gordon is a very talended composer and big band arranger on the West Coast. He leads Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, and their latest album, Act Your Age, just now got nominated for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. My hearty congratulations go to Gordon and his super-talented group of musicians.
Well, it just so happens that Gordon put his Tatum piece on this album: he chose to create a playful orchestration around Tatum’s “Yesterdays.” Think about that for a second: in 2008 a big band recorded with Art Tatum as the guest artist! This is the wonder and creative potential of re-performance. I am very pleased to announce that the Goodwin/Zenph/Tatum track “Yesterdays” has been nominated for Best Instrumental Arrangement. This is a huge milestone for music industry awareness/acceptance of this groundbreaking technology. My hope is that in a few years time we will see some Zenph albums get their own Grammy nominations (if only because Steve Epstein is such a great producer).
I see you there: scanning your Google Reader instead of doing your work. Don’t worry, I won’t tell. Instead, I will offer you some interesting arts-related tidbits to round out your selection of smarmy political commentary and funny animal videos.
One thing that has been on my mind lately is community. I’ve been reflecting on how grateful I am for the communities around me (via some essays for a workshop application) and the fascinating ways in which they intersect. Salsa dancers and journalists, undergraduate music majors, bloggers, community activists, jazz elders, marketers, neighborhood associations, theater employees, rich entertainment clients, local politicians: I affect and am affected by my participation in all of these and more. I am only a moderate Facebook-user, and I am new to Twitter. At that reasonable level of non-addiction it is easy to see how these technologies really do help connect busy people to each others’ happenings, even if is only by a thin, virtual fishing line.
On a different topic, I recently reconnected with my good friend Yuri, who talked about self-publishing, pedagogy and education in the “real world” (outside of the university system) and the specific desire to start a blog/internet resource for more advanced, but ever-exploring jazz pianists along the lines of NewMusicBox. If I were to find time to be a member of the writing team, one of my first posts would most certainly be about injury-preventive technique. I’ve managed to avoid back and wrist pain in my playing for quite some time, but with some increased stress they have returned. The prerogative is to recognize the whole-body athleticism of piano playing and develop a pre-cognitive body awareness that allows you to naturally support your body and use your muscles without undue wear-and-tear. The result can be liberating. Though I am early on my journey here, I can recommend two great resources:
2. this person: Barbara Lister-Sink. Only an hour from where I live resides a super-friendly piano health guru, with a great DVD and training curriculum to boot. I saw her give a workshop and I’ll certainly be back for more.
The purpose of these techniques isn’t just to prevent injury, but rather to liberate the body so that a deeper musician expression might be executed, unencumbered by any form of resistance, physical, mental, or otherwise.
One last note before I head off to rehearsal: I am still in love with “Vento Em Madeira” by Lea Freire. Soundtrack of my life!
Anyone who has been keeping track of my shows calendar has noticed that it has recently exploded with an abundance of Beast gigs. I’m thrilled about this, it’s great to watch that band really get off the ground, but I certainly miss the weeks where one night I played jazz at a club, another was an improv comedy show: the variety of artistic experience was really rewarding.
This week, a project near and dear to my heart returns for the first time in years: a modern jazz ensemble that plays my own compositions. Back in 2005-2006 you might have remembered a group called PrimeraJazz. It was led by percussionist (and great friend) Brevan Hampden and featured a rotating cast of fiery young jazz cats playing moody, out-there, bacchic latin jazz. We held down Thursday nights at Tallulas in Chapel Hill for awhile, the vibe was fantastic. Well, this week that group returns with much of its original lineup in tact: myself on piano, Pete Kimosh on bass, Stephen Coffman on drums, Brevan Hampden on percussion, and Al Strong on trumpet. Rehearsals have been a lot of fun: most of us have only gotten to play jazz in damped-down restaurant and wedding settings lately, so here is a chance to really let go. We’ll be performing this Friday at the North Carolina Museum of Art as part of their Art in the Evenings series. There will be Cuban food and Latin American wines, and the galleries will be open for late viewing. It should be a great hang. I even get to play on a real grand piano (don’t get me started on what a luxury this is for the contemporary gigging jazz pianist)! This will more than likely be our only appearance in 2008: here’s hoping we can find some more venues and become a Triangle mainstay in 2009 (which is fast approaching!).
In other news, The Beast travels to New York City this weekend for the final round of auditions for Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad, which is something of a jazz ambassadors international tour hosted by the US State Department and Jazz at the Lincoln Center. Wish us luck!
I woke up at 4:30am this morning to drive an hour to Greensboro with The Beast where we appeared on WFMY Channel 2’s Good Morning Show. I am about to take a power nap before I can make it through the rest of the day, but while I sleep you can enjoy the clip which has already been posted to the WFMY website. Check it out!
This weekend is the Shakori Hills Grassroots Music Festival and The Beast is appearing on the main stage Friday 10/10 at 5:45pm. If you want to hear some great music and relive your Woodstock days, head on down to Silk Hope, NC!
Hey all, this is a big week for The Beast. I just spent six hours at The Kitchen Mastering with sonic wizard Brent Lambert yesterday, putting the final touches on our debut CD. As a band, we’ve decided to eschew the traditional pattern of EP –> album for a variety of reasons. Instead we are collecting our artistry and resources around a project entitled “In The Belly of the Beast.” This will come in three installments (I like serial deliverables!) of our own music, plus intriguing graphic art by Durham’s own Gabriel Eng-Goetz. The first chapter is called “Belly” and will be released this coming Thursday at a free show at the Broad Street Cafe in Durham. Besides the band, the album features an all-start cast of North Carolina’s finest jazz and soul musicians, including Nnenna Freelon, YahZarah, Mark Wells, Scott Sawyer, the See and Harvest Gospel Choir, and the Orquesta GarDel horns. Ridiculous, right? I had a blast arranging for and recording with each of those artists.
I’m particularly excited for the next morning when we’ll be a featured interview on NPR/WUNC’s “The State of Things.” We’ll be talking to Frank Stasio live and also performing live in the studio. I’ve recorded interviews for Zenph to tape but never for live broadcast, so this will be a first for me. I’m thrilled, but a little nervous of course.
The show is at Broad Street Cafe, 1116 Broad Street, in Durham, North Carolina. It is free and starts around 10pm. They have a new pizza oven and lots of beers on tap, albums will be only $5, I’d love to see you there! I’ll soon post where you can get the album at local stores, and an e-tailer will be set up soon enough. I’ll also post a track here on my site for your listening pleasure.
To tune into “The State of Things”, set your dial to 91.5 FM at 12pm Friday 9/12, or if you aren’t local catch the online stream here.
****UPDTATE 09/12/08 4:36pm****
The show went great! Here is the link to download the mp3.
Hey all, I’m writing to you from the mountains of Eastern Tennessee where I am resting and relaxing before a big push on all fronts (Beast, GarDel, my own jazz group, Zenph research). I am writing this post on a dial-up connection. Do you realize how addicted we’ve become to fast bandwidth and processing? Waiting one minute for Google News to load is apparently the most excruciating thing ever. And you can just forget about images. But the sound of the modem brings me back to childhood. That was when you had to reboot your Mac LC so that you could plug in your external CD-ROM drive via SCSI so you could load up your encyclopedia program so you could do homework.
But I digress. Next week I’ll be announcing some really big things for my hip hop band, The Beast. For now we’ll say that it involves dope beats, a gospel choir, Nnenna Freelon, crazy-awesome graphic art, NPR, and a club near you.. I haven’t properly introduced The Beast on this blog, so I’ll give some background, pics, music next week. In the meantime, I’m really excited to share with you the result of our first year’s work together. It will all have to wait for my cable modem though..
So far I’ve been using this blog professionally, to give you updates on various news articles and achievements. I’m thrilled to be sharing those things with you, but I also want to bring some interactivity in the mix by posting some reflections on music and spirituality to generate discussions (see here for 2006’s failed attempt at the same thing). Let’s play “getting to know you” so that you can have a sense of the soul behind these posts!
I just spent lunch catching up with my brother, Greg, before he heads back to college. We started comparing iTunes libraries and musical tastes which highlighted my continued disinterest in/aversion to giving rank or superlative to music that I like. I am very much an intuitive person, many times at the expense of my ability to process the world rationally or articulate an intellectual point to someone. My conversation with Greg got me excited enough to realize I do have favorite music, it’s just that the reason for picking it all is a strange combination of irrational and aesthetic.
I’ve noticed it is easier for me to have favorite individual works. But there are a few albums that have come into my life that I can listen to all the way through over and over again and still feel that profound sense of joy and alive-ness. And, like many people, I tend to fondly associate each album with a certain time in my life. Here they are in something of an order:
10. Henry Purcell, Dido and Æneas
What? A baroque opera? A graduate student in musicology could probably inform you that this is nowhere near the greatest opera of the period, or that I should be checking out other aspects of Purcell’s career. But, hey, I like this one. We’re so used to rich, textural film scores and crazy layers of sound. I like that this music can still feel so powerful and beautiful with only a continuo and an SATB choir. Perhaps I’m a sucker for fairly obvious tonal motion. But man, that choral finale (”With Drooping Wings”)? Takes my breath away.
9. Foreighn Exchange, Connected
I first heard this album over the PA while breaking down after a gig. After hearing the first few beats I dropped everything and asked the drummer “What is this??” This collaboration between local emcee Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay is a cover-to-cover hip hop masterpiece, especially the beats. You can really lose yourself in the aural space created by the production on each track. The music psychologist in me is absolutely fascinated by Nicolay’s use of microtiming within the rhythmic rhetoric of the drums. When I first moved to Durham, this is all I listened to in the car for a month.
8. Adam Guettel, The Light In The Piazza
Easily my favorite musical of the latter-20th-century (probably because it aligns closer to contemporary opera than Broadway drivel). I spent an afternoon talking shop with Adam once, such a humble and generous guy! After making it’s way to Broadway and going on an American tour, LITP gets it’s operatic premiere (that is, staged by an opera company, not a theater company) in Winston-Salem, NC this October.
7. Jazzanova, In Between
Most of the techno I listen to falls in downtempo/nu-jazz/drum n’ bass/IDM territory. If I had to pick a favorite album amongst all of theseIn Between would be the clear winner. A really catchy blend of old jazz samples, new compositional ideas, sultry vocal hooks, and pseudo-Brazillian grooves. Each track is really multifaceted and tells a story.
6. LP Outsiders, All Purpose Crackers
Although this now-retired band is based out of my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri, I only got hip to this CD after I had moved to North Carolina (and a friend back in St. Louis sent it to me). For me it’s a testament to the gems of independent music culture: somewhere out there, in a town you’ve never visited, there is a band making amazingly high-quality awesome music. I really like the versatile blending of 2 male and 1 female lead singer (and they play trumpet, trumpet, flute, respectively). This was my “I just moved to North Carolina” CD. It has shades of Jamiroquai and Maroon 5 (who hadn’t even formed by the time of this release).
5. Israel, Whisper It Loud
The Christians in the house will recognize the name Israel Houghton as the leader of “Israel & New Breed,” a successful worship music franchise that fuses elements of gospel, jazz, and funk. But years and years before you could see him at every mega-church, he quietly put out this album, which has been out of print for quite some time. My father and I led the youth band at our church when I was a young teenager. Another music director lent us this CD and we fell in love. Simply put, this is some of the most cogent Christian songwriting I’ve ever heard. The arrangements and musicians are dope, the lyrics are poignant (rather than vaguely preachy), and Israel himself is just a fantastic vocalist. Find your own copy on eBay today!
4. Frou Frou, Details
I’ll admit that I got hip to Frou Frou like everyone else: watching the end credits to Garden State in the movie theater. But rather than go get the soundtrack, I went straight for the source. This gets my vote for “Best All Time Pop Record.” The songs are pop. But the production is perfect. Guy Sigsworth really knows how to give you a lot of enveloping ear candy without taking away from the meaning of the song itself. This record is so influential on me that it is difficult for me not to emulate it when trying to work on some electro-pop songs.
3. Dave Grusin, West Side Story
West Side Story easily gets my vote for best work of musical theatre. And lots of people have covered the songs from the show (from Oscar Peterson to bazillions of pop orchestras). But Dave Grusin, arranger for the GRP All-Star Big Band was somehow able to understand the original orchestrations, infuse them with even more jazz and Latin music, and come out with something better than the original (!!). This is my favorite big band album for such lush but rhythmic arrangements, chords that are so angular but still true to Bernstein. And it features some of the best New York jazz cats. My old piano teacher gave me a cassette tape that had “America” on it, and I wore it through until I could get the CD.
2. Kurt Elling, Man In The Air
Honestly, it’s really hard for me to listen to most contemporary jazz albums all they way through. If everyone is covering the same standards or writing the same kind of 7/4-polytonal-hiphop originals, then the end product is pretty hit-or-miss. And let’s not get started on jazz vocalists. Since when did it become OK to add horrendous lyrics to just-fine-as-is Monk compositions? Diana Krall and Harry Connick don’t count. But along comes this guy Kurt Elling, who used to be in Divinity School, is not afraid to explore the full range and timbre of his instrument, and is known to bust out an improvised rendition of a Shakespeare sonnet in the middle of “My Foolish Heart.” Something is going on here. Elling writes strange, spiritual, compelling original lyrics to carefully selected previous jazz works. And I think his pianist, Laurence Hobgood, is an underdog. When he solos, it makes me listen. There is something so clear about his ideas, as if he was playing for you as much as he was playing for himself. Also, I wish I had his job. I’ve met Kurt a few times at shows and IAJE conferences: another guy who is refreshingly humble and very Aware of his musical purpose.
And Eric’s Number One Favorite Album of all time….
1. Katia Labèque Band, Unspoken
If I had to sum up all of my inspirations and passions about music and find one existing work that represented it, it would be this album. Classical/jazz pianist Katia Labèque teams up with electronic composer David Maric and ridiculous drummer Marque Gilmore to produce a tremendously beautiful set of pieces. A really evocative balance of rich piano sonorities, subtle electronics, staggered beats, neo-romanticism, a large harmonic vocabulary (from atonalism to pandiatonicism), with jazz and drum n’ bass influences. But enough of the intellectual labels. I can’t say enough about this album (and you can see I once enthusiastically posted a review). I know Katia and David have long since moved on to other projects, but I would love to see a live tour happen again. Sadly, the way I found out about this music was from my best friend, who had gone to the concert at UNC the night before (I didn’t even know about it) and bought the album there. This is music that breathes and flows. I’d love to make a living doing this.
So there you have it! What trends or themes do you notice in this list? What is missing? What might it say about me? And most importantly, what are you’re Top 10 Favorite Albums, and why? Let the comments begin!
