Eva Cassidy: “Over the Rainbow”
(Esther introduced me to Eva Cassidy, among many singers.)
I thought I was done with this blog (Music and Me dallysound.wordpress.com) but I wasn’t.
With Esther’s death (September 28, three months before our 54thwedding anniversary), I’m thrown back on memory again and like other times in my/our lives, music has become paramount.
So I want to add two segments to the blog.
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The first –this one- is a reflection: Where did I find the music I listened to and grew to appreciate as my musical tastes spread? Who introduced me to what?
Because I wasn’t entirely home grown.
Secondly, as I listen to CD after CD I burnt for Esther and gave her for her birthday or Christmas or to play on a road trip we were taking, what patterns and preferences do they show? Because they do show something about our shared tastes, neither entirely hers or mine. Live with someone for fifty-four years and tastes rub off and blend.
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My mother influenced me early just by caring about music. She’d get excited by tunes she liked, so I did too. She made me think music was important, it made it to the discussion table. So I too thought about what I liked, with not terribly well founded but passionately held opinions on particular performers and pieces and styles. I owe my mother for many things but this is one of the key ones, because music has been a constant in my life, both listening to it and performing it.
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No one introduced me to jazz, my great musical love, but my parents did listen to a lot of white big band swing –Glen Miller above all, and Artie Shaw (Begin the Beguine)– and I dug it. Ditto swing novelty tunes like Tiny Grimes’s and Slam Stewart’s “Flat Foot Floogy,” Woody Herman’s version of “Caledonia,” and the very very white Pied Pipers’ version of “Mairzy Doats.” It wasn’t earthshaking music but it instilled in me a liking of beat and glide, which paid off later in my love of Ellington, Basie and Lunceford.
I owe my mother for having heard music like this at all. (My father liked it too but he was utterly tone deaf.)
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My high school music teacher, choir director, and general doyen on how not to bow down to conformity, Mabledean Shook, didn’t introduce me to anything startling in music but she just taught me to love doing it. Music became part of my life because of her.
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My first year in college, I became friends with a student from Ethiopia named Eustace Smith. We called him Cool Breeze. We overlapped one year and then he left. But before he left, I bought some of his records, among them a composite of early Parker-Gillespie recordings. The piece I remember most is “Congo Blues,” which mixed bop and swing –Gillespie and Parker on the bop side, with bop drummer J. C. Heard, and swing musicians pianist Teddy Wilson, tenor sax player Flip Phillips, vibist Red Norvo (it was his group), and bassist Slam Stewart. I didn’t know how to assimilate this music into my (slowly) maturing appreciation of jazz but fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about that. I just listened and somewhere along other way, it assimilated.
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I had a big bump in musical preferences my senior year when I went into a music shop in Garretsville, OH, one town over from Hiram, and ended up listening to Sonny Rollins, Blue Note vol. 2, with its harsh, harsh horns (Rollins and J. J. Johnson), phenomenal and almost endless soloing, and Art Blakey’s slashing drumming beneath, and the two pianists who represented the emerging trends in bop piano playing –funk meister Horace Silver and uncategorizable Thelonious Monk. I moved beyond West Coast cool without even knowing it and within months was buying Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, even Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor (although it would take me years to appreciate Cecil).
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My next musical jump was on my own. I decided I needed to listen more to classical music. I’ve written about it earlier: I started with Bartok’s violin concerto –a weird choice to begin with– but within two years was listening to whatever hit my fancy –Bach, Sibelius, Brahms, Beethoven, a lot (I mean a lot!) of Haydn, and, on the front edge, Orff and Prokofiev.
Then I met Esther. We met in the summer of 1963 and were married the day after Christmas in 1964. She’d had an introduction to classical music through her brother-in-law Emil Palik and when we became a Thing, I inherited her record collection and she inherited mine.
What did that mean to me? She owned mostly LPs of the Romantic warhorses –Beethoven Brahms., etc. I don’t remember any Baroque or early music.
Jean Martinon: St.-Saens: Organ Symphony no. 3, finale
Through Esther, I first heard the pieces we would use for our wedding. Her processional was the grand march from St-Saens’s Organ Symphony no. 3 and the recessional Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary. (We thought it was by Purcell but it was actually by Clarke.)
By then, music flowed in because we both responded to it. When our friends Brian Coyne and Fumiko Hoshida married in a Quaker meeting house, I remember the music they played for the recessional was one of the movements of the Schubert Trout Quartet.
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I was becoming a kind of musical sponge. When I heard something, it remained fixed in my memory.
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I loved jazz and Esther loved vocalists so together we explored jazz vocalists. She led me to appreciate singers around the edge of jazz, cabaret performers like Mabel Mercer. We heard such glorious singers in the decades to follow! Shirley Horn. Abbey Lincoln. Rosemary Clooney, Karin Allyson. Dee Dee Bridgewater. Weslya Whitfield and Maureen McGovern. Even Ashla Bhosle in Dubai. We attended the one-time West Coast cabaret festival, where we saw twenty-one performers and groups in two nights.
One Christmas –2010? 2011?- when we were in Syracuse, NY, with our son and his then wife, I surprised Esther with tickets to a limited engagement run of Mandy Patinkin and Patti Lupone in New York.
I experienced non-viewer envy when Esther heard Blossom Dearie live, one of our favorite fringe-edge jazz/cabaret singers, and I wasn’t with her.
Because of Esther, I spread my attention beyond jazz to pop singers like Eva Cassidy, Nancy Lamott, Lionel Ritchie, Stevie Wonder… and to cabaret. In 1993-4, Esther studied cabaret singing in New York. She ended her year there with a one-woman concert at Andy’s Place at the Singer’s Forum and then came back to California to solo with the Stanislaus Symphony in an open air concert in Turlock.
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All though this saga, our son Jeremy was growing up. His musical tastes were on display as early as six. Actually, three. When he was tern or so, he asked me to give him a Blindfold Test –he commented recordings by Rollins and Monk, the Band….
At seventeen, he attended a jazz festival in the Netherlands with avant gardists like Steve Lacy (my favorite ever soprano sax player), Archie Shepp and Han Bennink. Envious is not the word for how I felt.
He influenced us by what he listened to, aided by the friends he made at Yale, especially his best friend Steve Rich who was and is savvy in a variety of musics. One time, J. came home for the holidays with a CD of the Tuvan throat singer group, Huun Hur Tuu. I’d never heard music like that before but once heard, I couldn’t forget it.
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Years before, my painter friend Anton Vizy had introduced me to Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, which he used for background music for his lovely show in Boston in the early eighties. Jeremy loved Steve Reich too, even attended a big musical celebration In Montreal honoring Reich’s eightieth birthday. Jeremy didn’t introduce me to the Kronos Quartet’s album of Astor Piazzolla’s Five Tango Sensations or Reich’s Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint. I came across them on my own, and thus my subsequent craze for tango music, which still grips me. But it was Jeremy who gave me the recording of Reich’s tape loop pieces, Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, an album I’ve since reacquired in CD format because I love it so much.
J’s pop choices kept slipping in like mind worms. Cat Power, Einsturzende Neubaten, Joy Division and Sonic Youth, Iris DeMent, Gillian Welch, Sleater Kinney, Liz Phair, Wilco, P. J. Harvey and Radiohead.
Some performers stuck. (Cat Power, Einsturzende Neubaten, Iris DeMent, Gillian Welch, Liz Phair, P. J. Harvey and Radiohead).
Others didn’t. (Joy Division and Sonic Youth sometimes but not always, Sleaster Kinney, Wilco).
But all affected me.
An example: I’m not crazy about Cat Power but love the first album by St. Vincent, which is a diagonal offshoot of what Cat Power is doing.
I think the biggest difference in Jeremy’s and my tastes is that I have a rooted preference for tight music –the Band, the Chambers Brothers, Credence Clearwater Revival, Bobby Blue Bland, Phil Lee. Jeremy has more room for slippy slide melody, harmonies, rhythms.
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Along the way, I lived for a year with Jack Hanna, who now lives in Houston. He loved C&W music, a music I loathed. But because he played them all the time when he was cooking or cleaning up, I grew used to listening to Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings and it was good. Not throwaway music. Good.
Later, the very first CD I bought was Willie Nelson’s Stardust.
Jack moved to Houston and we to Utica, NY, but he sent me a Care Package of long play records by Lyle Lovett (I have four albums by him now), Nanci Griffith (nine), Marcia Ball (only one, I don’t like her that much) and a collection of Dallas blues groups entitled Deep Elum. I sent him Luciana Souza and the 70th birthday album dedicated to Georgian composer Giya Kanchali.
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One of the side benefits of being the vice president for student affairs at CSU Stanislaus (Turlock, CA) from 1992 on was that I got early notice of the upcoming annual CD sale by the campus radio station. CDs sold for $2 each. The morning of the sale, I made it clear to the office that I wasn’t available for appointment until at least eleven o’clock because I was over at the sale for an hour, sometimes two, sifting through CDs. I bought ten to fifteen a year, hoping that out of what I bought, 2/3s of the CDs would be worth keeping, and that’s what happened because I was a fairly sophisticated buyer.
But because they were cheap, I could take risks. Here are examples of musicians I found whom I might never otherwise have encountered. 1. I picked up my first album (ECM) by clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Giani Coscia, In cerca di cibo. I have three albums by them now and seven more featuring Trovesi with his own group or playing in Renaissance and Middle Eastern ensembles. 2. I came across ethnologist Marlui Miranda’s ‘native’ mass, IHU 2 -Kewere Rezar, which is stunning. 3. I got my first Sleepy LaBeef album, the only basso buffo in rockabilly blues. 4. Lastly, without the opportunity to buy and sample a $2 CD of clarinetist Yvo Papasov, and later one by saxophonistYuri Tunakov, I would never have discovered the raw power of Romanian wedding music.
Yvo Papasov: “Mladeshki Dance”
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Along the way, Mark Lytle (Yale Grad School) introduced me to James Brown. And I fell in love with Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of P ale” because it never stopped playing at Hungry Charley’s, where us Yale history students congregated for our late morning coffee. Cream too. The Chambers Brothers.
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Now, I mostly surf on Amazon. You can play cuts either on Amazon (thirty seconds) or You Tube (the whole piece). By now, my base repertoire is filled, so I experiment. Two years ago, it was Ligeti –I bought eight albums of his music in a two-month rush. Then Poulenc’s bird music. A craze for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Purcell. The Tallis singers, other early music choral groups. This month, three very different versions of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites, one a transposition to viola -Kim Kashkashian playing.
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The point is that music is around you everywhere and other people’s enthusiasms can educate yours.
I would hate to be limited in my musical tastes to simply my home grown tastes because I didn’t grow that many of my tastes on my own.
Gyorgy Ligeti: Musica ricercata [3/11]
MUSIC & ME 