Hi, Katie. Congrats on making the playoffs. Looking forward to the game. I’m a Niners fan but loved the Madden era Raiders. Rooting against you today, but will be happy for you if you advance. Mark Weiss In Palo Alto Your Dartmouth classmate
I just noticed that a song I helped produce with Gaye Adegbalola during the covid lockdowns is released as a single on Vizztone, a blues cooperative co-managed by Bob Margolin. I thought the song cycle would be released on my own imprint Lions With Wings but the industry standard heavies that Bob deals with set me straight. Gaye was on my books for an Earthwise Productions at the Mitch residency this winter but we cancelled due to worst-case scenario of the Covid Omicron being a threat. Gaye is a 77-year-old blues musican and activist in Northern Virginia. I was a fan of Saffire the Uppity Blues Women band and cold-called her after reading more about her in Bruce Iglauer’s memoir about Alligator Records. Unlike most of the projects from Lions With Wings, Gaye waited until the threat of illness was manageable then booked time with a trusted studio in her community. The others made due in their home studios and by epistolary methods. I am not sure how much our conversations and correspondence helped her create these songs but obviously I would be thrilled if it was as good for her as it was for me. Sometimes just telling a musician or creative person that there would be even one eager listener or viewer is enough of an inspiration for a work to take flight. I guess. I’m no Hal Willner. I’m just a guy with a cellphone and too much time on my hand. Or as Groucho Marx said “times flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana”. She’s talking.
and1: Groucho also said that prunes cooked like apricots taste more like rhubarb than watermelon water tastes like sasparilla. Do. Or dew. If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste more like prunes than rhubarb does.
What if America had nothing but 77-year-old Black lesbian musicians as President for the next 250 years?
I am saying that the Sri Lankan Woody Guthrie should record a John Lee Hooker record focused on the ones cowritten so to speak by Ukrainian émigré businessman Bernard Besman
Friday night I likely will have my first concert of the new year, lord willing and the infections rates don’t rise. We are spiking in terms of cases of the “om” variant of the dreaded death, yet potentially if you are vaxed and masked and have $20 you can check out Johnny A at The Mitch. Tickets are available here.
Johnny wowed us all in January, 2020, just before we got shut down. On that night a highlight was his version of the Beattles “Strawberry Fields Forever”. I taped a bit of that here.
Jerry Hannan opened for Johnny A. I don’t remember what I was thinking in terms of the match. I taped a bit of his most famous song “Society” here.
The opening act Friday – January 14, 2022 – -is Anna Konstantopoulos and Billy White. I admit that part of my rationale for the booking is that Johnny is Greek and so is Anna. I figure putting two Greeks on the bill will at least hermetically or mercurially as it were push back the “Omicron” variant. I met Anna on September 14, 2021, singing on University Avenue with Billy and Lukas Vezley — Jacob Savage’s crew.
We shall look deeper into the crystal ball for 2022 in terms of music, life and death. As a Janus birthday, I am of course looking back to 2021 and forward to 2022.
“Inside Llewyn Davis” 2013 by Coen Brothers is about folk but also jazz, pop, country, blues and sea shanty.
“I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” Tommy Dorsey;“
“Moon River” Louis Armstrong;
“Stardust” Artie Shaw
“Lord of The Rings”
“Star Wars”
“How to Train Your Dragon”
“Woodlawn Park” Anime
“Chicago Diner” Kota the Friend
“Wellerman” Nathan Evans
“Drunker Sailor” Irish Rovers
“John Kanaka” Fisherman’s Friends
“Silk Chiffon” MUNA f Phoebe Bridgers
“Ok” Wallows
“Furniture” Maude LaTour
“No Sleep” Skepta
“Welcome to the Show” Cody Johnston
“Blown Away” Carrie Underwood
“God’s Country” Blake Shelton
This educational music list brought to you by Pitchfork and Kelefa Sanneh, and his new book “Major Labels”:
Kelefa Sanneh:One of the things that I didn’t quite realize until I started looking at archives was the idea that genre is disappearing. It reoccurs in the history of music, whether it’s Billboard getting rid of the R&B chart in the 1960s for a minute, because R&B records were going pop and they’re thinking, Maybe it’s kind of all one music. There was a similar impulse in disco—the Rolling Stones and the Star Wars soundtrack are now the same genre; everyone’s making disco hits, so maybe disco is going to be universal. And you have bits of that in the ’80s with R&B and pop coming together. You have that in the late-’90s and early 2000s, the TRL era on MTV, when all of a sudden it’s like teen pop, and N-SYNC is a pop group, but they’re making R&B records. And they’re collaborating with hip-hop producers and rappers.
and1:
I was also listening to the first 60 minutes of Ethan Iverson on a podcast with Dartmouth solider-writer Phil Klay and someone named Siegel. They were commenting on an essay by Wynton Marsalis from 30 years ago. This is mission creep but it occurs to be that I sometimes confuse Cyrus Chestnut, Cecil Taylor and Cedar Walton. And then Andrew Hill (hipped by Nels Cline). And John Goodman plays Roland Turner in the Coen Brothers movie, which is about Bob Dylan, whose version of “Moon River” sounds more country than jazz. And I thought Adam Driver played Johnny Five, Goodman’s “valet”. And Dayna Stephens likes the Jim Jarmusch movie about Paterson, NJ although I haven’t figured out how to access it. And if you are here from the previous feature that was: Alice Waters, Jello Biafra, Errol Morris himself, Jerry Brown –I was looking for Ken Arrow but don’t know what he looks like. His sons were in school with me, at Gunn, in the early 1980s. He won the Nobel Prize. And my tv — paused from Elwin Davis — says Klay is back. The splash brother not war hero scribe.
andand: KOIT 96.5 updated mix of today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites like Bruno Mars, Maroon 5, Madonna, Ace of Base.
andandand: found myself digressing to and really digging not just the crate but the greatness of taylor eigsti with becca stevens and maya kronfeld and singer casey abrams from a tv contest doing an original I think “accidentally” then digging further to Frente “Accidentally Kelly Street” and Counting Crows “Accidentally In Love”
I also found an essay by Wynton Marsalis from 1990 Ebony – it’s archived on his site — and captured the closing two paragraphs:
The initial list is from the Gunn Oracle. I have an ad — for Charlie Hunter 12/3/21 at The Mitch by Earthwise — in the same issue. I listened to most of the song samples they listed. One of the more curious elements is that “shanty” is a genre – -it became campy slash hip on TikTok — so I think it says something about the role of new media influencing music standards as much as the issue of genre per se. De Gustibus non est disputandum – there is no disputing matters of taste – but I’d like to see The Oracle do a music issue and expand on some of the points they made here. Charlie Hunter makes jazz but it is nothing like the three samples the writer mentioned. She mentions improvisation as a feature of jazz but I don’t think those big band arrangements she mentions — some of which are nearly 100 years old – feature improvised solos. When Charlie and Scott Amendola do a version of Lorde “Royals” the audience does it call iand response and provide the hooks at the write places, with little prompting; I think its a combination of being campy and being superior. It’s a guilty pleasure. The shanty thing on TikTok might be similiar. Its retro. And Llewyn Davis has “Shoals of Herring” of something. Someone said Nathan Evans song is actually a sea ballad not a sea shanty. And Tim Bluhm of the Mother Hips has a shanty album from a couple years ago, I think before TikTok. I’ve got Darlene Love on “the Kate” on Channel 9 KQED competing with Taylor Swift on SNL. And two of the three “indie” songs highlighted were actually on major labels. Maybe indie means they put out a set on their own before being discovered. Billboard reported aproposo of Ableton that analysts are calculating its value in context to there being 20 million bands and artists now posting music to the internet. So there’s Top 40 and now Bottom 20 (Million — acts — songs would be pushing a billion). Jensen McRae I found on the tip about Phoebe Bridgers in that it says she posted to her social media stream what she imagines a Phoebe Bridgers song might sound like, which people took as a take down whether it was or not. If I was thorough I’d go back and update the chart with label affiliation, agent, manager, year started, where they tour. Someone from that list was coming to the Warfield this spring.
How is Taylor Swift still country? Something about autumn and leaves falling. Dancing around the kitchen in the refridgerator light. There we are again. Remember it all too well. Its not clear if she is playing along to tracks. Lost in translation. This thing was a masterpiece so you tore it all up. Who wrote this? All’s well that ends well but I’m in a new hell. (He’s an 0lder man?) Turn 21.
fifty six million views – all this year I think, a fifteen minute short film. Its a 2012 song that she rerecorded and rereleased on her own lable. Co-written by Liz Rose. And the SNL is from November. They jump from Taylor to a bit at Weekend Update about Brittney Spears being released from her conservatorship. And at the end of the bit – which featured a video behind them and four other musicians and two singers – -she appears to take a bow with the two singers: both lightskinned older Black women. See also Sanneh’s discussion of what Black music is.
She also does a version on NPR tiny desk for 9 m views in fall, 2019, on piano.
Musically, JoJo is considered to be primarily a pop and R&B artist;[112] however, the majority of her singles tend to lean more towards the former as a marketing tool.[113]Prefix‘s Norman Meyers observed that “As an adolescent white girl singing mainstream R&B, her singles have leaned toward pop to snag sales … But the list of producers on The High Road … shows that Jojo is more concerned with harder beats and soulful sounds.”[113] JoJo is a mezzo-soprano and her singing voice has been widely acclaimed by music critics, one of whom ranked it among “the best in the game”,[114][115] while her R&B recordings have been compared to the likes of R&B singers Brandy and Monica.[116][117]Describing her as a “vocal phenom”, Entertainment Weekly‘s Leah Greenblatt enthused that JoJo is “capable of Mariah Carey-style upper-register flourishes”.[118] Vocally, critics frequently draw comparisons between JoJo and singers Kelly Clarkson and Beyoncé,[119][120] while Slant Magazine‘s Sal Cinquemani remarked that the singer “could very well be the next Teena Marie“.[121]
At times some of her material and use of melismahas been criticized for being overproduced and overused, respectively
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 