Tom Waits — Alice

I’m sorry about the delay. I just moved cross country and I simultaneously lost both of my computers. My pick for this week is Tom Waits’ Alice.

Alice seems like one of those albums that people own but have forgotten. I for one bought this album its first week in stores. I might have listened to it three times before forgetting it and subsequently loosing it. It was only the Alice theme that stuck with me as I was I racking my brain for ideas.

The songs on Alice were written for an avant-garde Robert Wilson opera performed at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, Germany in 1992. It is loosely based on the inner life of Lewis Carroll and his seeming obsession with the young Alice Liddell (who inspired Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass). He describes his work this way:

“Alice is adult songs for children, or children’s songs for adults. It’s a maelstrom or fever-dream, a tone poem, with torch songs and waltzes…an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense.”

Waits also sources his wife, Kathleen Brennan, as a major inspiration for the album. “Kathleen is my Alice,” said Waits. “We met on New Year’s Eve, 1980. We used to play a game called ‘Let’s Go Get Lost.’ She’d say ‘turn here, turn here…until we were lost. It’s kind of like writing songs together. In the studio, Kathleen will submerge herself in seven newspapers and a novel, and then at just the right time she’ll raise her head and make a remark that will become the eyes and ears of the song. Will and Ariel Durant said, ‘A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another and may erupt irrevocably in blood or ink.’ That’s kind of like me and Kathleen writing. When we’re totally lost, we know we have something.”

On second listen, I’ve decided it’s a shame I lost this record. It’s everything you might expect from Waits collected into one album, crooning and madness. Much like the Alice books, at any moment anything could happen. Metacritic chose Alice as the best album of the 1990’s.

wynton kelly — kelly blue

wynton kelly was a jazz pianist from brooklyn that recorded mostly on blue note.  he was fantastic at accompaniment.  he was part of most of dizzy gillespie’s bands, he played with charles mingus early in mingus’ career, he backed dinah washington, sonny rollins, billie holiday, cannonball adderly, and paul chambers.  most notably, he spent four years in miles davis’ band and he can be heard on freddie freeloader on davis’ kind of blue.  he also played on one track of john coltrane’s giant steps, naima.  throughout this time he also recorded 14 of his own albums, many of which he recorded as part of the trio that backed miles davis from 1959 to 1963.  miles davis called him a cross between red garland and bill evans.

kelly blue features wynton kelly on piano,  paul chambers on bass, and jimmy cobb on drums.  the 1st, 6th and 7th tracks also feature nat adderley on cornet, bobby jasper on flute, and benny golson on tenor saxophone.

track 6 and 7 are two versions of the same song by kelly.  the first and the last track are also original compositions while tracks 2,3,4, and 5 are wynton kelly renditions of some jazz standards.

Relatively Clean Rivers

I’m going to jump ahead of Interstellar in order to give him some time to get settled.

I picked this album after reading an interview with Jeff Tweedy who cited it as  having an influence when he was writing “You Are My Face” from Sky Blue Sky.  That’s my favorite track off that album, so I thought it this album might be worth a listen.

From Record Geek:  “

“Recorded in 1975, this is a west coast psych tour de force that combines elements of vintage Grateful Dead with folk psych and BTL rural rock (in fact, an album like this very clearly illustrates the difference between rural rock and country rock, as it’s very clearly Americana-influenced but really has no country reference points. That’s one reason the term BTL is useful, it’s an umbrella that encompasses both). Phil Pearlman is the singer and songwriter, and plays the lion’s share of the instruments. [...] A very California record, this is full of lots of wide open spaces, jangly acoustic-guitar folk-rock tapestries, twangy, reverbed, Garcia-like electric leads, reedy vocal harmonies, and extended songs that achieve a stoned, dreamy feel. [...] I’ve read that only 500 copies were originally made and Pearlman “distributed” many of those just by discreetly depositing them around college campuses and record stores unannounced.”

Pearlman was also the driving force for Beat of the Earth in the mid-60s, a psychedelic, beat-whatever band that he formed, I read, as a school project while at UC-Irvine.  I’ve got that album, which is a forty minute, two track, free-form psych-jam mess.  It’s hard to listen to, but if you want to give it a shot, let me know.

Of further interest, you could check out this article from The New Yorker that is about Pearlman’s son, Adam Gadahn, who is the first American charged with treason in over fifty years and a high ranking al Qaeda operative.  The article briefly discusses Pearlman and Relatively Clean Rivers on the second page.

Henryk Gorecki Symphony No. 3 Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976)

This recording:

Dawn Upshaw, soprano

London Sinfonietta, David Zinman, Conductor (1992)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._3_%28G%C3%B3recki%29

Interstellar

Your turn, when you’re ready.

Bessie Smith – Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues

I’m really excited about this album. Bessie Smith is someone I’ve heard about, but have never really given enough attention to in favor of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and other really well-known blues singers. But, from what I’ve heard so far, she seems totally awesome. The lyrics to the first song on this album are so sad, but she sings it in this voice that’s just like “well-what-can-you-do?”

She has a way of sounding sexy and on the verge of cracking up at the same time.

And I chose this collection because it seems like Scorsese puts a lot of effort into finding the most authentic performances in his blues documentary series. I guess there have been a lot of problems with her recordings with pitch and tone, and from what I’ve read this one is pretty close.

So far I’m in love. I hope you guys like it.

pop france

I got this 60’s French Cuts Pop Music stuff pretty much by accident and it is blowing my mind. Reminds me of the best ever British Nuggets Box. Seems like they like the hip British 60’s stuff in France. There are some covers i could do without but it’s really cool to hear what’s happening in French popular culture during the French New Wave. This what i found out about this compilation “This collection has been put together by some Francophiles in Munich, who have selected tracks that are popular in their club.” If i were you i’d put this on random and listen to it for a week straight. (oh yeah. good luck organizing it in itunes, since it’s all different artists.)

p.s. Bridgette Bardot is foxy.

the wipers – youth of america

my pick fell on the weekend i ended up in oregon, so i’m going with portland’s favorite punk band.

lately i’ve been into long songs and the title track from the wipers 2nd record clocks in at over ten minutes. greg sage, the principal songwriter of the wipers, claims that this song was inspired by a futuristic dream: “this dream had such a sense of realism and intensity to it that i went overboard with the recording to symbolize it. there are about 50 guitars in some parts.”

other things to (possibly) know:
-i heard that kurt cobain loved these guys
-two separate reviews of the record referred to the title track as a behemoth
-this record was released in 1981

Roy Orbison – The Essential [Disc 1]

(Note: Fixed.  Check out disc 2 if you’d like.  Later career stuff.)

I got screwed hardcore with my schedule slot.  I’m supposed to follow Mingus?  Thanks a lot, Aaron.

Anyway, we’re going with something a little sweeter, more frivolous this week.  I usually prefer to avoid hit compilations, but after (half-assedly) looking around for what might be considered his greatest, proper album, the consesus seemed to be Mystery Girl, which was recorded just before, and released just after his death in December of 1988.  The end of his career didn’t seem like a good place to start, so I opted for the hits.  Seems like Orbison made his name on his singles, rather than his albums anyway, so I guess a hits comp is okay.  Whatever.

It’s up so enjoy.  He really does have a great voice.  This is what Bob Dylan said about it: “Orbison … transcended all the genres. … With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. … [He sang] his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. … His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it’. His songs had songs within songs. Orbison was deadly serious–no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn’t anything else on the radio like him.”

Street Scene

I wanted to link each of our picks up with a visual art piece that matched it, to me, stylistically or thematically. I had a hard time with Mingus and I realize now that that’s because I don’t have a very large mental library of great art images. I did connect with this swimming pool for “Hissing”, however. Today I listened to “Black Saint” and kept seeing images of an opera I attended a year or so ago called “Street Scene” by Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes. May be kind of a cheat if it was suggested by my reading that “Black Saint” was written as a ballet, but I don’t think so. These images I googled look very similar to the performance I saw.

That thing was about a neighborhood just waiting to explode. That’s how “Black Saint” feels. It’s angry and crazy, right? Sounds like blood boiling. Maybe I’m wrong, but this shit sounds nervous and a little bit mean. I don’t know if Mingus had a real narrative in mind, but if he did, I bet somebody died.