AMAZING SONGWRITERS

 

I've been watching and listening to the BBC Songwriters Circle concert, in parts, on You Tube over the last few weeks. The concert was recorded in 1999 I think.

It is excellent, showing the songwriting and performing talents of Neil Finn (Crowded House, Split Enz etc), Graham Gouldman (10 CC) and Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera).

The performers talk a little bit about their song (each of them perform several of their own compositions) before doing an acoustic guitar version, sometimes supported by the other two. This is impressive stuff which I'm sure you will enjoy.

I've hooked out three videos showing each performer doing one of their songs.

HEART FULL OF SOUL - GRAEME GOULDMAN

 KILLERMONT STREET - RODDY FRAME

FALL AT YOUR FEET - NEIL FINN

I recommend finding this on YouTube  and watching these very talented people perform other songs.

Amazing!

HIGH AS A BIRD

Why do birds sing? Because they’re all on drugs

The dawn chorus is created by birds chasing their next hit of opioid, according to a US biologist. Which explains why it’s so much like free-form jazz

Starlings practising the high notes? Photograph: bazilfoto/Getty Images/iStockphoto


Name: Jazz.

Age: Much older than you think.

Appearance: Small, feathery, fond of worms.

Sorry, I’m not good at jazz lingo. What does “feathery” mean? It means “covered in feathers, like a bird”.

Oh, it’s a metaphor. No, it’s a real-life description. Jazz is feathery like a bird, because birds invented jazz.

That sounds incorrect. Tell that to the biologist Lauren Riters from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has determined that birds have two types of song, purposeful ones, such as those designed to attract a mate, and those they sing for pleasure. And when they sing for pleasure, it sounds like jazz.

No it doesn’t. 

Yes it does. “When they’re practising, they try out different songs,” says Riters. “They order and reorder and repeat song sequences, they add and drop notes. It sounds a bit like free-form jazz.”

But free-form jazz is horrible. 

Guess what? Birdsong is also horrible. 

What Riters is describing is basically the dawn chorus. You know, the thing that has woken you up before sunrise every morning since about April.

Actually, what has woken me before sunrise every morning since about April is a crushing sense of uncertainty about the future of humanity. Suit yourself.

So why do birds make those noises? The same reason humans make those noises: opioids!

Really? 

Yes really. Singing for the fun of it produces an opioid in the birds’ brains, and the opioid makes the birds feel good. Humans are capable of producing their own endogenous opioids, too.

How exactly did the scientists figure this out? 

They gave fentanyl to some starlings.

Fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that’s a hundred times more powerful than morphine? That’s right. And guess what? As soon as they were given it, the starlings started to sing their beaks off.

You don’t say. 

And don’t forget that several jazz big-hitters were also addicted to heroin. Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Fats Navarro, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Billie Holiday. All were unknowingly chasing the same high as birds.

This is fascinating. Isn’t it? It is just lucky that birds don’t produce an opioid that makes them sound like James Blunt.

Just think, if birds ordered their songs differently, there might be no jazz. I know. And if there wasn’t any jazz, there wouldn’t be any La La Land. Another solid gold reason to hate all birds.

I wonder if any other animals like jazz. Do horses neigh in the style of jazz? No, horses only like Reggaeton. Everybody knows that.

Do say: “Opioids make people and birds enjoy jazz music.”

Don’t say: “And this is exactly why drugs are bad.”

- The Guardian: Wed 26 Aug 2020

"MAYBE I'M AMAZED" ....

...... at the good music that's coming out nowadays - particularly New Zealand music.

After decades of crap, mass produced and formulaic music made by the industry for young teen girls and tweenies we are now seeing singer/songwriters coming out with seriously good stuff. With the way that the recording industry has gone these people are very unlikely to make much money out of this quality art - maybe that's the point. If an industry isn't throttling musical output, and allowing at long last artists to do their own stuff then art is the winner.

I was listening to Reb Fountain on the radio yesterday with her WOMAD performances. Great.

DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM - REB FOUNTAIN

Fountain joins my list of newish New Zealand performers who are putting out some seriously good music - Aldous Harding, Marlon Williams, Lawrence Arabia, Nadia Reid - along with the tried and true Gin Wigmore, Neil Finn, Emma Paki, Hollie Smith and others including members of the talented Prowse clan.

I get a buzz out of hearing a new (to me) artist on National Radio and thinking 'Wow" and then discovering that it is a local.

I like songs that have a bit of an edge to them - that are not schmaltzy, saccharine and computer generated. 

"SHARING THE THINGS WE KNOW AND LOVE"

There are some bands and musicians that I've listened to for many years and never tire of like: Van Morrison, Little Feat, Randy Newman, R.E.M., David Byrne/Talking Heads, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Ry Cooder etc. The music is timeless and, where there's quality it lasts.

One rock/jazz band stands out head and shoulders over many others though and that's Steely Dan. From the first releases right through to the last Steely Dan and Donald Fagan's music has gripped me. The whimsical and cryptic lyrics supported by complicated composition and almost uniquely pure sound is as good today as it was in the 1970s.

I was lucky enough to see Fagan and Becker playing in Auckland a few years before Becker died. It rates to me as one of the best concerts I've been to.

I watched this You Tube clip the other day and, to me, a musical appreciator without much musical knowledge found the discussion of the blues mu major and the construction of Deacon Blues fascinating.

COMPOSING DEACON BLUES

If you don't like it then don't shoot me - I'm only the piano player.*

* Not really. My mother sent me off to piano lessons when I was a kid but I was too lazy to learn properly and then the teacher caught my brother and me pinching apples off her tree.

OH YEAH!

The Curmudgeon said in one of his posts that now that The Old Girl has gone back to Wellington, he can listen to his 60s and 70s music.

Well, tonight I've been listening to just that via youtube on the TV.
Rory Gallagher, Peter Green, Stan Webb, Eric Clapton, Alvin Lee, Jeff beck - and the rest. Lovely.

Now I know that these guys, accomplished as they were, shamelessly stole from underpaid and under-recognised black American musicians. That's a fact but, to me, at the time, I felt that I had more in common with young, white, British musicians than a bunch of old guys from the 40s and 50s.

PRISON BLUES

THINGS AINT WHAT THEY USED TO BE

My local club had a jazz event yesterday - free to members.

The John Leigh Calder jazz quartet played between 4.30 and 7pm.

It was marvellous and such a nice day for it. The group set up on the deck overlooking McLeod Bay, sheltered from the bright sunshine but there was enough sun coming onto the deck to make it warm and lovely. I perched on a barstool by the deck rails and got the best of the view and the music.

I've been a bit disappointed in the club recently as it has changed in character and become like a Cosmopolitan club. It's been a bit boring going there. 

The usual crowd sat inside the bar area probably wishing that it was Barry Manilow playing, not some weird jazz group.

There was plenty of room to sit out on the deck closer to 'the action' but it was mostly visitors to the club that did this.



Oh well. I just hope that we get more of this sort of high quality entertainment.

WHO THE FUCK WAS PEARLY SPENCER?

Remember this?

THE DAYS OF PEARLY SPENCER

David McWilliams recorded this in 1967. It was quirky and the low tech. gave it a bit of mystery.

I didn't hear McWilliams' version until much later having heard The Avengers cover version in 1968. I remember community dances at Brooklyn when I was in the fifth form and The Avengers was one of the bands that played there. See: DANCING

THE AVENGERS - THE DAYS OF PEARLY SPENCER

I thought that this was an original song of theirs - how naive we all were in the pre-Google days.

The Avengers

********************

So, who the fuck was Pearly Spencer?

Wikipedia has some information on McWilliams and the song: HERE


Here's an except if you can't be arsed reading the Wikipedia link:

"The song had, according to Stuart Bailie of Radio Ulster, a "flickering, almost documentary style" in which it took listeners to the more run-down parts of Ballymena where people walked through rubble bare-foot looking old beyond their years. Due to the title of the song, many listeners believed that the song pertained to an individual harrowed by a poor lifestyle and poor-quality alcohol; McWilliams said he had written the song about a homeless man encountered in Ballymena. Some of those close to McWilliams, however, claimed he was writing about two ladies from his hometown."