They’re dancing a bit better in heaven this morning. RIP.
Tag: Music (Page 1 of 3)
“I hope this Acadian music and language too doesn’t ever die out because it’s too beautiful. People think that just because America is mainly English speaking that everything should be English speaking but I think that we’d lose something if we lost this.”
I gotta admit, I know next to nothing about Pete Seeger and I’m really not fond of the whole “now that he’s just died, lets all suddenly be his biggest fans” thing. However, I think it’s pretty great that he was not only aware of the culture of southern Louisiana even back in ’60s but that he enjoyed the music enough to put it on TV.
We were protesting against a noise ordinance which led us right into city hall and then into the council chamber where the musicians played a funeral dirge then The Tremé Song by John Boutté. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to save that video.)
This is an important issue for the people of New Orleans. If you want to learn more, visit maccno.com.
Because he/they keep putting out things like this:
I normally listen to music while studying but I always skip Why? because I constantly become distracted by the poetry of the lyrics. So deadpan that it’s easy to overlook the depth of what he’s saying. I might have to do some lengthy posts about what’s going on here linguistically someday, maybe when time expands to allow for extracurricular activities.
“… to expose to the world, insofar as it is given me to do so in the profession of music, the vain error of men who esteem themselves such masters of high intellectual gifts that they think women cannot share them too.” –Maddalena Casulana, 1568
I found the above quote, a portion of the dedication in Casulana’s First Book of Madrigals, in J. Peter Burkholder’s A History of Western Music. Sometimes I’m not sure if I should be thrilled that there have always been women willing and able to prove that they’re equal to men or if I should be sad that they’ve felt the need to prove this again and again for hundreds of years. Hell, in the 12th century, Hildegard von Bingen invented a language while also finding time to make breakthroughs in science and music and yet over 300 years later Casulana was still like, “Ok, this will be the one that finally convinces y’all not to denigrate women!”
I’m not exactly sure what the hell happened here, but The Lost Bayou Ramblers did not sound anything like this a couple years ago. Their last album was essentially traditional song and songs that sound like traditional songs. But this is a great example of modernizing the sound of Cajun music without losing the roots of the genre and I think it has a lot to do with Louis Michot’s vocals. He often wails in a way reminiscent of Iry Lejeune:
And even further back to Amédé Ardoin:
Of course, the language helps maintain the connection as well but I’m not really able to discern Louisiana French by ear yet. He clearly has some notable features like the tapped /ɾ/, though. Either way, I kinda just wanted to share this album because it’s pretty amazing.
There’s something mesmerizing about this woman. The look in her eyes, the story that she tells, the way that she plays and sings, makes it seem as if she’s simply bursting with confidence and determination despite her clearly frail 92 year old body. When she states that she knew how to work that stove, it’s as if what she’s really saying is: “I knew how to get what I wanted in life against odds you can’t even imagine.”
Mais j’aime encore cette chanson.
I was gonna do some translations of it until I realized that it’s widely recorded as a jazz number. Now I just wanna know if Cléoma Breaux was listening to jazz or vice versa.
*I’m kinda indulging in the parentheses so feel free to skip those parts. You’ll still get the point.
That right there is Allen Toussaint, who has only recently been brought to my attention as a New Orleans legend. I’m disappointed that I didn’t know of him until now. There’s something really great about the sounds that come out of New Orleans, and my hunch is it’s the blending of cultures, but it doesn’t seem to travel very far past the boundaries.
The reason I’m really posting is because this is because it’s a good example of the life of a song. This is actually a Jelly Roll Morton composition yet it sounds incredibly fresh, even when being played by a 71 year old. He doesn’t actually change all that much, either. It’s still clearly a blues. He adds some runs that you’d sooner hear Chick Corea play or a classical pianist, but they work. He throws in some minor 2nds, like the ones around 4:57, but sparingly, and those have always been pretty acceptable in blues, at least melodically. There might be some perfect fourths in the lower two voices at times, too, but that’s enough technical jargon.
The point is, he’s playing with 70-80 years of history between himself and Jelly Roll. Because others between the two kept the song going, kept making it fresh, it gave him a chance to continue it with all the influences he’s accrued in his own lifetime. It’s another version of folk music traditions, where the song doesn’t even belong to the composer because no one can remember who the composer was. It simply is.
(This is sort of echoed by other people. Kurt Cobain once said something like a song is never as good/the same as the 1st time it’s played. Kaija Saariaho–and Nico Muhly, too, I believe–once said she just composed her music, then it belonged to whoever was performing it. [Sorry, can’t find links, let me know if you can, or can correct me.] A pretty diverse crowd. It’s a good reminder that, really, music is a temporal experience that exists as something new with each repetition, even if the repetitions are reminders of earlier experiences.)
The title is a reference to the Jelly Roll version, which included words:
(Honestly, I like the lyrics a lot. Just remember, he came up in Storyville.)
(And for those interested in the technical stuff, there are definitely some strong impressionist influences in Toussaint’s playing. He often uses a 3 against 4 run that sounds straight out of the 1st part of Debussy’s Deux Arabesques and employs pentatonic scales that aren’t exactly the blues scales. The latter is something Debussy got from Asian music–or Russian music which got it from Asian music?–so Toussaint is sorta bringing the whole world together here.)
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