Don’t know how I missed this back when the old man was with us and singing it. Amy Goodman played it today on her Democracy Now one-year review of the Gulf Oil disaster.
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Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Don’t Go Near the Water — Johnny Cash
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011New Orleans: A Film
Sunday, June 13th, 2010
Drawn by the promise of seeing a young Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday on film, doing what they were best known for, we watched New Orleans last night, a 1947 film directed by Arthur Lubin. According to an essay included on the CD, it was the result of an Orson Welles initiative, though it morphed through several stages before the final cut. What great music! And to see both Holiday and Armstrong in speaking roles –Louis acting as cupid near the end– was a real treat.
The generous helpings of music were wrapped in a story, of course, but one set up in support of the essential message: jazz can sell itself if released from prejudice and allowed to swing.
It’s easy enough to roll our eyes today at the story. A stunning white debutante, classical singer, Dorothy Patrick as Marilee Smith, comes to New Orleans to make her musical debut. She hears her mother’s maid, Billie Holiday (Endie) sneaking in some time at the piano and singing and is immediately struck by the music. Resisting her mother’s disapproval she makes Endie take her to Basin Street where she joins her fiance, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, for a night of singing. And do they sing! Merilee is captivated by the music, and nonplussed to find her very correct classical conductor there, digging it as well. In short order she falls in love with the owner of the club, Mexican film star Arturo De Cordova as Nick Duquesne.
The club is a double stand-in for society at large. Dark, down at the heels and candle lit the jazz club is for people of color. A car ride through Story Town shows elegantly dressed street corner hookers and drunken WW I sailors and soldiers enjoying the offerings. But through a door is an extravagant, high-rolling casino blazing with lights, where the wealthy and well placed of New Orleans come for an evening’s dissipation — including Merilee’s millionaire mom, and the local newspaper scold.
Mrs. Smith is so determined to keep her daughter away from the clutches of jazz and the gambler Duquesne she tries to buy him off. Failing that — Duquesne is the most stand-up gambling impresario ever seen on film – a scandal and a drunken death to bad girl Marjorie Lord as Grace Voiselle gets Story Town closed down. Duquesne and all the musicians scatter far and wide, after a marvelous, mournful march led by Armstrong and his whole band as the lights go out on Basin Street. Marilee, convinced that Duquesne has sold her out, and her mother sail to Europe and a great classical vocal career.
The years go by and Duquesne leaves the gambling life and finds his new role in Chicago as a jazz producer. Armstrong and all the jazz greats eventually find their way there. Under Duquesne’s benevolent business sense they set about capturing the American ear and loosening up the pre-war Victorian stiffness. Music is to dance to! Woody Herman takes the country by storm. [There is a funny send up of Duquesne's not so bright competitor with Herman himself riffing on the clarinet.] Before you know it, Marilee and Nick are reunited. Her mother has been won over to the joys of jazz and Woody Herman is playing at Carnegie Hall.
It’s all typically starry eyed Hollywood stuff and might make us squirm a bit in 2010. We don’t like to see Billie Holiday portrayed as a maid and being ordered around by an imperious grand dame. But in fact the movie was created and distributed in 1947. President Truman’s order to desegregate the military was a year away. Billie may not have been a maid but thousands of talented black women were. It may make us uneasy to see a white man (even if Mexican) as the owner of a club where blacks were the patrons, entertainers, cooks and waiters but that was most often the case in the big cities around the country of the time. The famed Cotton Club in Harlem [closed in 1940] was owned and run by whites for a whites only crowd to see the top negro performers of the day. It may seem odd to make a movie big deal about whites being necessary to bring jazz into the mainstream — but so it was. It may have been because a growing cadre of promoters saw profits in the “new” music as the economy and culture picked up speed after the war; they weren’t all big hearted soulful cats like Duquesne. Nevertheless, it was as it was. And it took women like Merilee Smith, rebellious enough to push against family and tradition, to walk into the forbidden and appreciate “the other,” to help make the case for the music and the people who created it. The spread of jazz was one of the many changes that made possible the more tolerant and wide open world we live in today.
I say, cast aside your modern eyes and ears. Don’t be deaf because of what we now disapprove. Step back to 1947 and enjoy New Orleans for what it brings — a far too scarce look at some musical greats and a pivot point in American life.
Ai Yi Yi Yiiii!
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Great music, new to my ears, brought by a nice opinion article in the NY times. Los Cenzontles — the Mockingbirds– from San Pablo, California. Do Not Miss hearing them!
The song, “La Luna,” is sung in Spanish by, of all people, Taj Mahal, the African-American blues master. Though not a native speaker, he cradles the words in his gravel voice, and when he sings of the moonlight as “muy sensual,” and of this “baile celestial,” this heavenly dance, he clearly knows what he’s talking about, and so do you.
That’s the strange beauty of “American Horizon,” by a little-known Mexican-American folk-roots group, Los Cenzontles, with guest appearances by Taj Mahal and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. It both honors and upends traditional Mexican music, tapping deep roots as it flowers into something completely new, and distinctly American.
What may be more remarkable is that Los Cenzontles — The Mockingbirds — is not the creation of some music label’s cross-marketing department, but a tiny storefront nonprofit organization for young people in San Pablo, Calif., a heavily immigrant and Hispanic neighborhood outside Oakland.
Several of the tunes are to the left of the Times article. Or you could go to their website, www.mockingbirds.com and listen till you get up and DANCE! or to their Facebook page.
Walter Reed Disinvites Baez
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
I’ll bet the soldiers would have liked to hear her sing, do some impressions, crack a joke or two….
John Mellencamp, who had invited her to join him last Friday, ….told RollingStone.com: “They didn’t give me a reason why she couldn’t come. We asked why and they said, ‘She can’t fit here, period.’”
Movie: Story of the Weeping Camel
Saturday, December 9th, 2006In my new zeal to see all the movies I’ve ever missed I saw The Story of the Weeping Camel via Netfix last night.
As most of the reviewers say, it was slow to the point of mesmerization, an anthropology film in many ways, in which the more manic side of the brain pops up from time to time to ask “ok, where are we going here?” From grandmother ladeling out another form of milk to the young mother brushing dust off the yurt after the howling windstorm we are curious and comfortable watching daily lives unfold.
The drama, such as it is, is that a mother camel, after a difficult (and first) birth — assisted by human beings before your very eyes– rejects the brute (literally, a big and white colt.) The camel is wealth, of course, though it’s clear by the human actions that much more and deeper is involved in the care and worry; it will die unless the mother bonds with it. Though the young woman of the film does do some hand milking and feeding through a nipple-ended horn that is not enough –probably not in food, and certainly not in bonding, leading and companionship. As the colt grows weaker and all efforts to bring the two together fail the family turns to an old tradition: a ritual with a two stringed instrument called a morin khuur.
What isn’t commented on much in the reviews I’ve read is the mysterious power of music even as it is so central to the story. The tribes in southern Mongolia apparently have a long tradition of using a certain set of ritual song and music to break the spell of rejection between mother and child, more typically sheep than camels. Initially the morin khuur is slung by a tie over the mother camel’s hump. Either from the wind or from resonance with the camel’s lowing, the strings begin to vibrate. Or perhaps, in response to the strings’ vibration the camel begins to low.
We had seen the mother camel just before snapping, spitting and growling — even to stop the offending instrument from being placed upon her; and then, in the space of minutes, we see her calm down. The morin khuur is removed and the player begins to stroke a familiar tune, to which the young woman of the family begins to sing, sweetly and clearly, her hands stroking the long fur of the camel, soothing with voice and hand. The camel seems to listen, to dwell, and to vocalize in return. The expressive eyes, which according to legend, are always looking at the horizon for the return of the antlers it was due from the gods, are a wonder to watch.
As the music and the human and the camel voices went on, as emotions and connections began to fill, I began to think about the origins of speech, how closely bound such meaning-filled sound was to the later (as I think) syllabetical morphemes of meaning; how song may well have risen as intelligence-driven imitation of the natural world, and how language might have come out of song.
As the camel calmed, the white furred colt was brought closer and finally led to suckle, from which it had been dislodged so often before by a sharp jolt to the jaw of the mother’s thigh bone, or by her simply wandering away in disinterest. And the mother stood still. The colt looked around, and suckled again. The mother encouraged it with her nose pushing at its hindquarters. The watching humans see that it is time to go. They move to the yurt for some milk and more song. The mother and child camel are left, standing and moving together, the mother camel with water spurting from her eye.
It is truly an amazing film, especially, as I understand it, that the film makers did not know what would have at the end when they began. Although I will think about the camels, and recall the temptations of modernity and TV for the youngest boy in the film, it is the power of the music I will recall most often, especially when I hear myself humming, wordlessly, in response to memories of where I’ve been or of the pleasure of friends, of work well done, of love.
Film: Shut Up and Sing
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006A couple of us went to see Shut Up and Sing over the weekend. The short recommendation is: Go See it. This is another fine Barbara Kopple documentary (Winter Soldier, and Harlan County among many), this time about the country music trio the Dixie Chicks. The Chicks were a hardworking, just-getting-there band when the lead singer, Natalie Maines, let loose with a wisecrack at a London concert in 2003 to the effect that she was ashamed that George Bush was from Texas. The sentence got picked up by London tabloids, then the raging rightwing weblog Powerline in the US and country western radio stations began refusing to play the Chicks’ records (many of the refusals ordered by corporate bosses.) Festive record crushings and death threats followed.
The film gives the whole run-down which alone is worth going to see. But beyond the politics (and there is plenty of that) it’s a great documentary of what goes into a high-powered road show; what is done to drive a group’s career — how many people are involved, what the tasks are. These three young women are the pay-masters for several hundred it seems. There are great sequences of how songs are built, from an idea, or a line, to the complete finished product we hear — and it sure is a product. We see the women with their babies and families, on the road and off. (You think your life is hectic!) Tying all of this together is the sheer, raw energy of the young (just over 30 years old) and very talented musicians. It is amazing to watch, and hear, them perform. Finally, it is a story of growing into a sense of self, of love and mutual aid. The original wisecrack, at first dismissed and tip-toed around, is defended and Maines and the others learn that freedom isn’t always free. Go, even if you are not a country music fan. You could wait for the DVD but you’ll miss out of the fierce anger of the latest album as Maines rips into Not Ready to Make Nice. [ I'm not ready to make nice, I'm not ready to back down, I'm still mad as hell and, I don't have time to go round and round and round ...] I’d go again just to hear her do it.
Music: Mali
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006Last week at the Human Rights Watch dinner in Santa Barbara a band of African musicians brought together by the Malian, Mamadou Diabate, played at intervals in the program. Since then I’ve listened to his latest CD with great pleasure. I think you would like it too. Here’s a couple of links. Listen especially to African Orphans….
Mamadou Diabate Ensemble
Mamadou Diabate, Kora
