Noted

Ever had one of those "****, I haven't heard that song in ******* decades!" moments?  If you're of a certain age, you probably have, even if, like me, your connections to pop music are tenuous.  Anyway, I had such a moment this afternoon, when this
came on at the end of Fresh Air.  (The occasion was the death of Billy Paul, who sang it.)  I could do without all the strings in the recorded version, but it's a sufficiently good song that no orchestration can spoil it.

Frank Wess 1922-2013

The great jazz saxophonist and flutist Frank Wess has died (h/t HC). The WaPo obit mentions that Wess's first flute solos in the Basie band, before the flute was a widely used instrument in jazz, caused the flute's use in jazz to shoot up; everywhere you looked, "here come the flutes," said Basie.

Also, this interesting tidbit from the Post obituary:

Mr. Wess was an Army musician during World War II and, at age 20, was leading a 17-piece band. "We were sent to Africa in 1942," he recalled in a 2005 interview with the All About Jazz Web site. "When we got down there, the first gig we played was for the Americans, the Germans and the English. Can you believe that? They were all dancing together."

That Wess had a gorgeous sound on both sax and flute was confirmed for me last night, hearing some of his tracks on the radio. I saw him play in person once, many years ago. RIP.

And this is...

esp. for TBA, who I think will find it amusing, though others may too -- "it" being an opera called 'Scalia/Ginsburg'. An echo of 'Marat/Sade', perhaps? (Though which is which?)

Noted

I get FP's AfPak Daily Brief but I don't always read it and/or sometimes put off reading it, depending on what else is on the plate (such as wasting time writing comments at CT, an activity of vital importance [cough]).

Anyway I just now got around to reading the July 1 edition of the Brief. It contains descriptions of bombings in Quetta (30 members of the Hazara group killed), Peshawar (17 civilians killed in an attack aimed at a Pakistani mil. convoy), and North Waziristan (several members of a local anti-Taliban militia killed by a roadside bomb). Then there is more Pakistan news (Cameron's visit, etc.) and some material on Afghanistan.

Finally, at the end, a note about a classical music concert in Karachi at which a performer demonstrated 100 ways of playing the drum and tabla. It's as if the editors just couldn't bear to leave readers with an unrelieved picture of bombings, deaths, etc.

Sea of fire, ring of fire, and jumping into water

I did say "light posting" a while back, remember? Well, this is what counts as light posting here (with a play on the word "light," get it? [Reader to me: shut up and proceed].)

OK. Kim Jong Un has annulled the armistice and threatened to engulf various places, or at least Seoul and the District of Columbia, in a "sea of fire." Several serious comments on this can be found attached to this post at the blog Political Violence@A Glance.

I must confess what came almost instantly to my mind upon hearing "sea of fire" (a threat that the DPRK has apparently issued before) was Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" (dated version here).

And after "Ring of Fire" I somehow found myself watching a YouTube video featuring someone named James Blunt. I had never heard of James Blunt because the sum total of what I know about contemporary pop music can be written on a postage stamp and I don't typically watch pop music videos. (I have seen the "Call Me Maybe" video. That's about it.) Anyway, here Blunt sings, in a high, almost falsetto voice (perhaps strike "almost"), about a girl he saw on the subway who is beautiful but he realizes he will never be with her so he takes off his shirt and his watch and his shoes and he jumps into a body of water from a substantial height.

This video has something on the order of 32,000,000 views.

Whatever turns you on, people.

At any rate this much is clear: no one is watching James Blunt videos in North Korea, except possibly Kim Jong Un and a few others who presumably can watch whatever they want, whenever they want.

You thought I was going to do something really clever in this post with fire and water, didn't you? Sorry.

Update: And while Kim does whatever Kim does, S. Korean generals play golf.

No sense of occasion

Like most cities of some size, Washington, D.C. (or the District of Columbia, to use the more formal name currently favored, I gather, by various local officials) has a 'classical' radio station. To say that its programming is timid and unimaginative would be an understatement. It shuns most twentieth-century music like the plague and -- oddly, perhaps, for a station located in the country's capital -- it slights American composers. (In years of listening I have yet to hear so much as a single note by one of the great American composers, Charles Ives.)

However, one might have thought that even this radio station would have bestirred itself this evening to play a Van Cliburn recording or two. But no, as far as I could tell it was business as usual. (Luckily, I have the CD of Cliburn's 1958 performance in Carnegie Hall of the Tchaikovsky with Kiril Kondrashin, who was the conductor at the Moscow competition, and the RCA Symphony Orchestra.)

P.s. Actually I think the recording I just mentioned was done in a studio. (Doesn't especially matter.)

Van Cliburn

A long-ish, interesting, somewhat blunt, i.e. not especially charitable obituary by Tim Page.

The Kennedy administration and the arts

This Jan. 18 Wash. Post article details the many events that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is staging to celebrate the arts legacy of the Kennedy administration. On Jan. 20 there was a star-studded concert to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK's inauguration. On Jan. 25, Yo-Yo Ma recreates the famous Pablo Casals concert given in the White House in November 1961. That concert is, of course, sold out (I just checked).

Reading the article, it occurred to me that the promotion of the arts by the Kennedys (JFK and Jacqueline) may stand as one of the most important accomplishments, if not the most important accomplishment, of that administration. Partly because it was cut short and partly because of Kennedy's own caution, the administration did not have many notable achievements in domestic policy. In foreign affairs, the avoidance of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis was of course a major achievement, but it was something bad avoided rather than something good brought into being. So the legacy of the Kennedy administration is mostly the aura, the myth of Camelot, the remembrances of what David Rubenstein, chairman of the Kennedy Center's board, calls "happy days" in a quote in the article. Those "happy days" were a subjective phenomenon rooted less in the existential reality of the U.S. in the early 1960s and more in the minds of those having the experience. At least that is my impression at two removes, as I was a young child in the early 60's and was living outside the U.S. for most of that period.

Caroline Kennedy is quoted in the article as saying she does not remember those famous White House musical evenings but remembers hearing about them "all my life, especially from my mother. For me, these concerts are reconnecting to those memories with her...." It's nice that the Kennedy Center is allowing those memories to be revivified and recognizing the Kennedys' contribution to the arts. It emphasizes a side of the late president and first lady that coexisted with the hard-nosed, occasionally ruthless politician that JFK also was. If the razor-thin election of 1960 had gone the other way, Richard Nixon would have been inaugurated in January 1961 and the world might have been incinerated in a nuclear war in October 1962. And Pablo Casals would not have played in the White House and Yo-Yo Ma would not be playing on Tuesday. Change a few votes in Chicago and one or two other places, and a lot of things would have been different.

P.S. Apart from the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the setting up of the Peace Corps, JFK's foreign policy was nothing to celebrate. But that would have to be the subject of another post.

A post about music (mostly pianists)

I don't write much about music here, but it's a new year and I've just quickly read R.P. Wolff's reminiscing post about music and its pleasures, so I figure: why not? But this is not going to be a comparable "the role music has played in my life" post, just a few stray thoughts/reactions.

I heard/watched (on PBS) some of the NY Philharmonic's New Year's concert last night. I tuned in during the middle of the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto, with Lang Lang. I generally like Tchaikovsky, but this piece is not one of my particular favorites; and the performance left me underwhelmed, to put it politely. I'm sure Lang Lang deserves his reputation but this didn't do a whole lot for me, and the orchestra didn't help by sounding rather sloppy and perfunctory. However, the music from the second act of The Nutcracker, performed after the intermission, was much better. This sounded like the NY Philharmonic is supposed to sound, with excellent wind and brass work.

Two other notes about pianists: I saw the new (or new-ish) movie about Glenn Gould (PBS again) not too long ago. It was interesting, as I didn't know all that much about Gould's life and don't own any of his work in my admittedly small CD collection. I knew nothing, for example, about the 1962 concert Gould played with Leonard Bernstein at which Bernstein -- yes, this actually happened -- addressed the audience with a disclaimer before conducting one of the Brahms piano concertos (I can't remember now whether it was the first or the second), dissociating himself from Gould's interpretation (which apparently took it at half the usual tempo).

Gould didn't care all that much for a lot of the Late Classical/Romantic repertoire and specifically didn't like Schumann. This may partly explain why I never have warmed up to Gould, since I like Schumann and the Romantics generally. Which leads to the last note: I recently bought a CD of Dinu Lipatti (1917-1950) playing the Schumann Concerto and Mozart No.21 (EMI Classics). The Schumann was recorded in 1948 in a studio in London with the Philharmonia Orchestra and von Karajan. The Mozart was recorded live in Switzerland in 1950. Both performances are very good.

An artifact from the early 1960s: The Duke's Men of Yale on the New Frontier

Some time ago, a friend who is an alumnus of two Yale a capella groups, the Duke’s Men and the Whiffenpoofs, gave me a multi-CD compilation that he had produced of recordings by “Da Doox” going back to the early 1950s. One of the songs on the first disc is “New Frontier,” which pokes fun at JFK, Camelot, and (of course) Harvard, and which the Duke’s Men first recorded in 1963. The song is interrupted by a monologue in which one member of the group does a more-than-passable Kennedy imitation. Although the flavor of the song cannot be captured entirely by the lyrics alone -- indeed, the music and the lyrics are very well matched -- I thought the lyrics in themselves were clever and evocative of the period. And in light of what happened in November 1963, the last lines take on a certain poignancy. So here are the lyrics.

New Frontier
First recorded by the Duke’s Men of Yale in 1963
Music and lyrics by
Carl Kaestle and Gurney Williams
(Lyrics reproduced by permission)

We sing of the pioneers of old
Who ventured forth so brave and bold
Far from their rightful homes so dear
They slept beneath the stars on the old frontier
And the rocky campground’s peaceful glow
Cheered the hearts and souls of the men below.

But the old frontier is dying
The old frontier is gone.
Yet behold the low clouds passing
To hail another dawn.
Yes it’s a new frontier
Put your money on the sunny boy from Hyannis
Hail to the sod where Kennedy trod
A hunter on the new frontier.

Oh we love the walls of ivy
That surround the new frontier
[JFK monologue]
Jack is the king of the new frontier
Jack is the fellow who makes folks cheer
Massachusetts' favorite son
Hah-vad moved to Wa-shing-ton.
And though he began as the un-der-dog
Now he's considered a vi-tal cog.
Let John Harvard fade a-way
Jack Harvard's here to stay.
It’s young Jack Harvard so shout hoo-ray Hooray-hoo_eee.

Bach's birthday

Listening to the radio in the car just now, I was reminded by the announcer that J.S. Bach "was born on this day in 1685. Perhaps" -- the announcer added (gratuitously?) -- "the greatest genius in Western music."

I like Bach, but there are moods and times when only Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky (or perhaps Dvorák) will do.