LION TAMER?

I was listening to Dire Strait's Wild West End today (again). God I love this song - it's so evocative.

 WILD WEST END

The lyrics are spot-on and this bit always 'gets' me: 

And my conductress on the number nineteen

She was a honey

Pink toenails and hands all dirty with money

Greasy hair easy smile

Made me feel nineteen for a while

Devotees of this blog -  and I can assure you that they have reached single figures already - will remember that I wrote about this song about 6 years ago: CONNECTIONS #1

I had noticed a connection between it and an old Hancock's Half Hour programme from the 1960s.

Excuse me - I'm off to YouTube to see if I can find that old programme.

FUNNY FACE

 

OK, I was trawling through YouTube this morning (it is a rainy day) and discovered this clip:

SWINGING WITH THE BOW

It made me laugh and also got me thinking - "why do double bass players pull such funny faces when playing?".

The only double bass player I know, Richard (of RBB) does this:

SMD

That was with bowing.

AUT L

In case you didn't know, that was without bowing. I apologise for any confusion this might cause if you are unfamiliar with technical music terms.

Well, that's all really. It didn't answer my question "why do double bass players pull such funny faces when playing?" but I'll leave you with this filler article from INVERSE by Mark Kauffman:

When the great B.B. King bent a nasty blues note on his guitar, it looked like someone was twisting his leg off.

There is a nebulous place where music collides with emotion, and for many musicians, this meeting of the mind’s sensory neurons, motor function, and cognition proves combustible, and whatever wells up is commonly manifested in a musician’s most noticeable feature: their face. Etta James, Neil Young, and Eddie Vedder all prove the case, and on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, Este Haim of the pop band Haim gave a truly impressive facial performance, alternating between grimaces and unfettered, wide-mouthed bewilderment. However neuro-complex the phenomenon may be, it’s likely rooted in our evolutionary past.

“Music in its history – the big, long history – never focused exclusively on the auditory component,” says Bill Thompson, who researches music and emotion at Macquarie University.

Millennia before the invention of the gramophone, back when music was never recorded and was always a live, intentional event, “music traditionally involved seeing and hearing and moving,” says Thompson.

Whether in the bowels of European cave or inside a raucous medieval tavern, music was wedded to expression, so it’s logical that our emotions are still inherently linked to our behaviors (sic) and actions.

“People are compelled by their own emotional response to their music, and that emotion is going to affect you much more than if you’re just merely listening,” Thompson says.

When one is performing, perhaps on a historic stage in front of a national audience — like Este Haim Saturday night — “it becomes a much more intense musical experience that will affect movement and facial expressions,” he says.

Darwin devoted six pages to human music in The Descent of Man, where he described an evolutionary basis for the human propensity for song, specifically as a courtship display to attract mates. 150 years later, The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger might agree, but modern neuroscientists think that music serves as much more than a wooing technique.

In the present day, we know that music powerfully activates our motor cortex – the part of the brain responsible for every movement we make – as we move our fingers, limbs, and mouths. Taken with a strong dose of emotional response to a meaningful tune, “this motor activity in the brain permeates your behavior (sic) and has kind of a cascade effect,” says Thompson. It’s little surprise, then, that Este Haim, while playing bass and singing her own music, is involuntarily overcome by the experience, and in her own, distinctive way, expresses it in seemingly exaggerated, though involuntarily facial expressions.

And this is precisely what we, the viewers, want to experience. “People flood to concerts, and they don’t want to close their eyes,” says Thompson. “They want to see how music affects the performer.”

TINY DESK

This is good:

ROBET PLANT AND ALYSON KRAUSS

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss collaborated on an excellent album about 15 years ago titled Raising Sand. It was very successful and won lots of awards but best was that it was great to listen to. One of my favourite musicians and producers, T-Bone Burnett produced that.

The pair were often slated as being an unlikely combination given their difference in age and and musical background but just have a listen to how their voices combine and I'm sure you will see that they were made to be a duo.

They have just released a new album, Raise The Roof, again produced by Burnett.  Once again the voices meld perfectly with the songs and Burnett gets the best performance from them along with an absolutely complementary band.

I hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

 

YOU CAN GO BACK

 I just finished watching the three part 'documentary' GET BACK as remastered and brilliantly edited by Peter Jackson. Old Pete likes to do things in three parts and it works well for him.

The material he used was nearly a hundred hours of film footage and 150 hours of audio recording from the LET IT BE film exercise and he deconstructed, edited and reconstructed it over four years to create a great piece of work.

I never watched the original LET IT BE film and, by all accounts it was dire and, although using actual footage and recordings  never managed to capture the spirit of the LET IT BE project.

It does take a bit of perseverance to get into this series - The Old Girl gave up half way through Part One. There's a lot of silly dialogue (multi-conversations), disjointed singing and playing and the whole thing seems a bit chaotic.

A lot of this was perhaps due to them talking and planning the pending album and concert in the cavernous Twickenham film studio where they were obviously uncomfortable. When they moved to their newly set-up Apple studio things improved considerably.

Even at Twickenham though, halfway through Part One (after The Old Girl gave up on it) something magic happened. The fragments of lyrics, chords and ideas for various songs - sometimes all jumbled together - started to take shape and a hint at the songs that came out on the LET IT BE and ABBEY ROAD albums emerged.

These guys were filmed creating their songs (of course they each would have worked on them individually, at home, overnight) in a pressure cooker environment having set themselves a deadline of 3 or 4 weeks from start to finish. The creative process was very interesting.

Some outtakes for me were:

• The obvious chemistry between Lennon and McCartney as a creative duo.
• The wit and vitality of Lennon as he was seen to be enjoying himself and only closed down when that fucking nut Yoko Ono was close.
• The brilliance of McCartney who had a reasonably clear vision of the songs before they developed and the direction of the albums, the film and the concert they were to go in even though these all developed organically.
• The lack of self-confidence of Harrison who seemed overwhelmed by Lennon and McCartney's creativity and who at times didn't seem to want to be there.
• The lack of contribution by Ringo other than his obvious musical intuition and ability to create the essential rhythms.
• The brilliance of Billy Preston whose contribution - unrehearsed and impromptu was pivotal in gelling a couple of the songs that were stalled - sort of like a catalyst in the same way he did later for The Rolling Stones.

I particularly liked how the rooftop concert was a late idea put forward by one of the production team after other more prosaic concepts were abandoned and the delight that McCartney showed when the idea was first put to him. Lennon also embraced the idea but Harrison was initially against it. Ringo I think didn't care either way. This to me underscored the project which was groundbreaking and the great way that, organically (again - I'm sounding like Robert and his bloody Socrates) the songs, the albums, the rooftop concert and the film 50 years later took shape. Early in Part One, one of them, McCartney or Lennon prophetically mused what people 50 years in the future would think of the project and how would they look. It was certainly groundbreaking and a brave thing to do made all the better by the fact that it wasn't contrived as these things would more cynically be done today. The vitality was captured well on film - and I'm sure that Jackson had a lot to do with this in his selection, editing and remastering.

This is a great bit of musical and cultural history packaged up by a home-grown master.

GET BACK - 2021 mix

PETER'S BLUES*

* Well, Richard's really.

I scribbled down some blues lyrics and Richard used some of them  to make a little blues song.

PETER'S BLUES

I wish I had his talent.

Thanks Richard. 

HELP!

HELP!

I need somebody
(Help!) not just anybody
(Help!) you know I need someone

Help!

I need someone who can write music. You know, that stuff that bends the ears, sometimes favourably and sometimes annoyingly.

I just want someone who can put 'blues' musical notes to my words without getting me into trouble with the estates of famous blues composers (and their lawyers).

I penned this today and would like to perform it soon:

🎶  "I've got the lockdown blue--ee-eeo- blues

Since Covid  came to stay

No-one comes to see me

They're keeping well away

Golf's a distant memor - emor - y

Tennis's a long way away

I can't go for a kayak

Out in my beautiful way

I've had the vaccin - aayo - ations

I do my bit and pray

The little bastards bit me

I was deaf for a day

I've got the lockdown blue--ee-eeo- blues

Since Covid  came to stay

No-one comes to see me

They're keeping well away."  🎶

And there could be some more verses.

Hey! Just ask.

My musical mentor Sue suggested accompanying this on violin but I'm just not sure. She said it would be OK but when I asked her about whether I should use Clara Petacci strings or the Eva Braun ones with the golden edges she seemed a bit confused.

 

AND THEN THERE WERE FOUR

 I did promise to bring you news of important developments in the music world.

I did! Just go back through the posts and check it.

Anyway, I'm sorry but there hasn't been much going on ever since the 1970s but I did get a snippet today of something that might turn out to be momentous.

Or not.

On a very (very) obscure blog titled ROB THE SKINNER (or something like that) I stumbled across this:

Richard (of RBB) that well known paranoiac, having had a history of being sacked from his older brother's bands is obviously concerned that said older brother is starting up the Prowse Brothers band (PBs) and hasn't informed him. I mean, a band like the Prowse Brothers needs a double bass player and a violin player and maybe a trumpet player .....Oh, I see. One of the younger brothers can play all three of those, often at the same time.

Oh well. Maybe Richard can collect the tickets at the door or something.