Mike Oldham's Virtual Pen

Beatles vs Jesus: Lennon was right

    Let's set the record (if you will) straight, since the Vatican has chosen to re-open this tempest in a chalice.
    When John Lennon remarked in March, 1966, about The Beatles that "...we're more popular than Jesus now..." he was right.
    At the time The Beatles were more popular than anything, as far as anyone could tell. But there was more to it than that. In fact, the period marked a distinct turn toward secularism. People were increasingly skeptical of organized religion. Church attendance was down.
    The prevalent mood was caught in a Time magazine cover that April - after Lennon made his remark but before it had turned into a controversy - posing the question: "Is God Dead?".
    Yes, at that point, at least, The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
    Lennon made the comment to Maureen Cleave in an interview for the London Evening Standard. It was one of many observations in the wide-ranging chat and no one in Britain paid it any attention. Cleave was later to say that they were used to the Beatles - Lennon especially - making deliberately pointed statements.
    It wasn't until the comment was lifted from that interview and featured in an American teen publication called Datebook that the backlash started. But even then, it was pretty much confined to the American bible belt of the south. Conservative/religious disc jockeys and newspapers started calling for boycotts and burnings of Beatle products. Overnight, teenaged Beatle fans in states like Georgia turned out to smash records and throw their Beatle paraphernalia on bonfires. These gatherings resembled nothing less than Nazi book burnings. The Bible-thumping teens who eagerly turned out to toss their Fab Four fuel onto the flames looked to the rest of us like yokels from another planet.
    There's speculation that in pronouncing its forgiveness of The Beatles, the Vatican is making a feeble attempt to lighten its image. Ringo Starr, in the only official Beatle reaction so far, observes that the Vatican has a lot more to talk about than his former band: namely, the scandal over sexually predatory priests.
    Still, maybe the Vatican's learned something over the centuries. Some wags have observed that it took a lot less time to absolve The Beatles than Galileo (note to Pope Urban VIII, wherever you are: he was right).
    As for me, I'll wager that The Beatles are still more popular than Jesus.
   
Maureen Cleave's original interview:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/carousel/pob/pob24.html


Lennon's response:



Time magazine's article:
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835309,00.html

The Bad Plus

    When I first heard of this group I thought they were a hip-hop or rap outfit. That was based on their name and the fact that they were opening for Roy Hargrove, whose concert I was going to see. Hargrove is a jazz trumpeter who has played with hip-hop and rap in one of his bands, RH Factor. So it wasn't unreasonable to make this link to something called "The Bad Plus".
    I couldn't have been more wrong. This trio is as jazz as it gets, but with their own unique twist. That concert was the first time I'd heard their music and I couldn't have been more enthralled. Their music is both intellectually challenging and full of humour.
    The three musicians (Ethan Iverson, piano; Reid Anderson, bass; Dave King, drums) write their own intriguing material. But it's when they cover other people's stuff that things can get downright funny. The repertoire can be wildly eclectic. Who would think you could turn country, experimental or heavy metal into jazz? But they do it, and very convincingly.
    So when you buy a Bad Plus album, or see one of their shows, you usually get a mix of original compositions and re-imaginings of pieces you might be quite familiar with from your other musical lives. But their most recent album, For All I Care, is different in that it consists entirely of covers.
    Now, I use that last word very loosely. These guys don't "cover" other people's work so much as deconstruct it. The pieces are pared down, taken apart and put back together again, like a Mechano set, in a way that is both still familiar and yet radically new. These reworkings are often quite striking. If you know the original piece, your reaction is often: "Who would have imagined?"
    The diversity of the material on For All I Care is whimsical, quizzical, even breathtaking. The tunes given the full Bad Plus treatment this time out range from Nirvana to the Bee Gees, from Pink Floyd to Roger Miller, from Yes to Heart, from Wilco to Milton Babbitt (not to leave out Gyorgy Ligeti, the Flaming Lips and Igor Stravinsky).
    It is cavalier in its disregard for genre, and refreshingly so.
    But perhaps the biggest surprise is the inclusion of a vocalist this time out. I have to admit this made me wary at first. Haven't traditionally been a big fan of instrumental jazz groups bringing vocalists into the mix. Yet (and I should have known) in this case it works brilliantly. In fact, it's a plus (if you'll pardon me). Wendy Lewis' style suits the trio so well that they become a fully integrated quartet. Lewis is from Minneapolis' indie-rock scene. A quick listen to her own music shows that it shares a kind of off-kilter similarity with the Bad Plus. She fits right in.
    There's another advantage to her presence, though. By singing the lyrics and melody of the rock and pop songs on the album, she provides a point of reference the listener can relate to while the trio runs riot (in a controlled way) behind her with the instrumental foundations of the pieces. You hear both the familiar and the innovative at once (things get really weird, appropriately enough, on Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb when the trio starts distorting the time and pitch of the instrumental while she stalwartly continues with the familiar melody; it's as if the song has entered some sort of temporal rift controlled by the White Rabbit using a Dali watch).
    This is one of the best albums out of a fine collection by a group with an invigorating musical vision, never afraid to experiment. I would never have thought this group would meld with a singer.
    The Bad Plus Plus.

Hope for Haiti Now

Hope for Haiti Now
Various Artists

    This album, which was officially released today, is the recording of the musical performances from George Clooney's telethon of last Friday to raise money for earthquake relief in Haiti.
    Anyone who saw the show knows it was a restrained and dignified fundraiser. It almost set a new tone for telethons. It would have been singular enough in having blockbuster celebrities taking pledge calls. But the glue in the production was the almost uniformly phenomenal music. Many of the performances were so superb that I felt a near sense of relief when it was announced about halfway through the show that they were being compiled on an album to be sold through iTunes.
    So here they are, presented in the same order as they appeared on the TV show, with a bonus track added.
    It's hard to overstate the quality of the performances, though I have a couple of reservations, and I'll get to those. Overall, the songs chosen by the performers relate directly in sentiment, through their lyrics, to the situation in Haiti. Each one is appropriate to the suffering and devastation caused by the quake. In that sense, there is not a superfluous number among the 20 tracks.
    The other overall impression is the strong Spirituals/Gospel tradition that imbues this album. The majority of numbers - even those originally by artists such as The Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel - are cast in that style, often by singers who came out of that tradition, and the tone amply suits the occasion.
    What wasn't as clear in the broadcast, but came through on first listening to the album, is that this recording has a kind of split personality. It's divided between the male and female performers, so instead of running down each song in order, I'm going to discuss the two groups separately.
    There are two things that distinguish the female musicians from the males on this record. With only a few exception they embody the Spiritual/Gospel sound (though a couple of the male singers do as well). The other is the richness, texture and range of their voices. There is superb singing here.
    The proceedings get underway with Alicia Keys' Send Me An Angel. It starts off so softly that you'll be tempted to jack the volume up (or you may think there's something wrong with the recording). Don't. She builds this number into an impressive display of power, at times pushing her vocal to a point that reminded of John Lennon in The Beatles' rendition of Twist and Shout, in which he almost stripped his voice. Keys isn't as raw throughout this song, but she touches those limits.
    The beauty of Shakira's voice comes through in a version of The Pretenders' I'll Stand By You. She preserves the anthemic power of the original but overlays it with soulful feeling.
    Mary J. Blige burns up Hard Times Come Again No More with one of the most genuine fusions of blues and Gospel I've ever heard. A tour de force performance and a candidate for performance of the album (though the competition for that distinction is so close I don't think it can be called).
    Beyoncé displays impressive range on Halo.
    Early in The Beatles' Let It Be, when Paul McCartney does the first run-through of the chorus, the back-up vocals are introduced behind him in such a way that they evoke a sort of ghostly choir The whole thing resonates with so much reverb that it sounds like it was recorded in a big church anyway. Jennifer Hudson employs a choir in her version of this song, giving it the full Gospel treatment in a rendition that would be worthy of Mahalia Jackson or Aretha Franklin. A show-stopping piece of work.
    One of the songs I had reservations about during the TV broadcast was Many Rivers to Cross by Haiti's Emeline Michel. It seemed somewhat overwrought. Here on the album, it works. It seems to cap off the album's Gospel influence with an almost religiously fervent performance that conveys a true understanding of suffering. She is backed by a very effective organ accompaniment.
     Even Madonna gets in on the act on this album. Like A Prayer has apparently become her default contribution to aid benefits. She did a stirring version at the Live 8 show. Here, through its rhythm and use of hand clapping, she turns it into a revival meeting.
    The other female performers make excellent contributions but outside the Spiritual/Gospel mold, not surprisingly in the case of Taylor Swift since she doesn't come out of that background. She tends more toward MOR pop with a country tinge. Here she offers a pleasing rendition of Breathless. Christina Aguilera showcases the power of her voice with an impassioned version of Lift Me Up, accompanied by piano and strings.
    Sheryl Crow provides a kind of bridge between the female and male singers on this album, partnering with Kid Rock and Keith Urban (Mr. Nicole Kidman) on Bill Withers' Lean On Me. Their voices blend very well on this song.
    Stevie Wonder gives the most Gospel-soaked performance among the male vocalists. When I was watching the TV show I thought if I was a musician who had been asked to perform on the telethon, the song I'd pick would have been Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water. A beautiful piece of music and perfect for the occasion. Then along came Stevie Wonder doing just that. He loads the song with bent, blue and gospel-tinged vocal inflections, backed by a choir with whom his timing is at once out of synch and immaculate. It's a brilliant performance.
    John Legend is another one who perpetuates a quasi-religious feel with such a heartfelt rendering of Motherless Child that his voice almost cries at times.
    At the other end of the spectrum we get an assortment of approaches. Bruce Springsteen offers a sincere, pared down version of We Shall Overcome, reprising his popular Seeger Sessions album of a few years ago.
    Coldplay contributes one of their straight-ahead pop efforts with A Message 2010 very much in keeping with their style. Sting does an effective jazz-tinged version of Driven to Tears. "Too many cameras and not enough food", he sings, perhaps in reference to the swarm of media covering the events in Haiti.
    The most idiosyncratic song on the record is Alone and Forsaken by Dave Matthews and Neil Young. It is effective but oddly brooding. It sounds and feels like something from the soundtrack to a film that might have combined the elements of "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" and "Cold Mountain" with some backwoods paranormal activity thrown in for good measure.
    Unquestionably one of the standouts of this excellent record comes from Justin Timberlake. I know Leonard Cohen appealed for a moratorium on covers of his anthem Hallelujah, but we'll gladly make an exception in this case. Timberlake delivers a stunning version, backed by Charlie Sexton. Pretty much worth the price of the album on its own.
    Now the two songs that don't quite work for me on this album. One, surprisingly, is by the Haitian Wyclef Jean. Primarily it's the lyrics. He rather unnecessarily, in my view, makes reference to the telethon and twice invokes the name of CNN's Anderson Cooper (he appeared in various clips from Haiti during the broadcast). That makes the song topical for the show, I guess, but hinders its value for posterity outside the telethon.
    The other number that failed to impress me during the show was one that received a lot of advance publicity - a collaboration by Bono, The Edge, Jay Z and Rhianna. It was a let down. It seemed the song took a back seat to the celebrity involved. Jay Z's rap lyricis ("The sky falls, The earth quakes, We gonna put this back together so it don't break") seemed rather lame, as did the performance. We get not one, but two versions of this number on the album. But the second version, called Stranded (Haiti mon amour Version 1.0) gets the full studio treatment with a professional mix. There's a noticeable improvement. Personally, I think I'll delete the live version from my iTunes album (oh, the joys of digital).
    Hope for Haiti Now is an amazing record. I have to confess that at a couple of points during the album I was almost moved to tears (an admission that will no doubt surprise all my friends), so compelling are some of the performances.
   Buy this album. The proceeds go toward the relief effort, the album actually costs less than the iTunes average and you will have for your collection a compilation of gripping, brilliant music.

Favourite albums from 2009

    Not all of these albums were released this year. Several came out in '08 and a couple in '07. However, they were all new to me in 2009 and are among the best of the albums I purchased over the last 12 months. With five days to go until Christmas, you might find some inspiration here if last-minute shopping is in order.

The Bird and The Bee
Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future

    From the duo of Inara George (the bird) and Greg Kurstin (the bee), this has become one of my favourite new acquisitions. Well-crafted songs displaying an imaginative use of instrumentation and percussion that blend power pop, dance beats, Flaming Lips-like instrumental effects and musical references that will remind you of all sorts of antecedents without lifting directly from any of them. George's Feist-like voice floats through this tapestry.
    After a short opening fanfare, the first song ("My Love") begins with bells, gongs, handclaps and bass drum beats that give it a Tibetan air, as well as polyrhythmic complexity. "Strawberry Fields Forever"-style woodwinds later form an instrumental bridge.
    "You're A Cad" has a Roaring '20s beat. "Witch" is reminiscent of a James Bond theme song in both melodic structure and vocal delivery. "Love Letter to Japan" plays on oriental-style power pop. "Ray Gun" resurrects the harpsichord sound that was popular for a while in '60s pop. "Everything is Ending" utilizes a Burt Bacharach-style '60s horn sound and for some reason reminds me of Sly and the Family Stone's "Hot Fun in the Summertime". Yet George and Kurstin work all these elements into a fresh sound.
    A very clever little pop album indeed.

Patrick Watson
Wooden Arms

    I bought this after seeing Watson perform on an episode of TV's Live At the Rehearsal Hall, where his band's musical imagination and humour were quite evident. They have an imaginative approach to instrumentation. For example, on the song "Beijing", a bicycle is played to create rhythmic percussion. A guitar is played with spoons (they're used to tap the strings) on the opening of "Man Like You", creating a zither-like effect. On "Machinery of the Heavens", the album's longest song, plucked strings sound like ticking clocks.
    Watson was born in California, but grew up in Hudson, Quebec. He's played with the Cinematic Orchestra. He affects a largely falsetto vocal which is sometimes very Broken Social Scene-ish. This floats over instrumentation that forms an orchestral, percussive dreamscape. At times it's almost classical but use is also made of instrumental sound effects and distortion
    An inventive album full of interesting textures.

Andrew Bird
Noble Beast

    Another very interesting record melodically and percussively. Bird is a multi-instrumentalist, though his weapon of choice is a violin and he's a superb player, using it often in novel ways. It's used for melody, percussion and sometimes played like a guitar. Bird is also, anachronistically, an extremely accomplished whistler, a talent used to augment this album's sound (sometimes giving it the air of an Italian western soundtrack). He also has a pleasant voice. His lyrics are idiosyncratic to say the least.
    A well-produced album with a lush sound.

TriBeCaStan
Strange Cousin

    TriBeCaStan is the brainchild of John Kruth and Jeff Greene, supplemented by a quintet of other musicians. This is one of the most unusual albums you'll hear in some time. They play a grab bag of esoteric world instruments: bendir (a North African frame drum), Moldavian kaval (a type of herder's flute), yayli tambur (a Turkish stringed instrument) and nyckelharpa (a 16-stringed Swedish concoction that looks like a violin-accordion hybrid; it's played with both bow and keys) among many others, as well as more familiar instruments like banjo, bass and mandolin.
    The result is an understandably other-worldly selection of tunes not unlike something you'd hear from the Silk Road Ensemble. The most intriguing piece, though, is "Tribecastani Traffic Jam" in which the instruments are used to create the sounds of a New York tarffic jam (the band's name is taken from TriBeCa, the neighbourhood comprising the triangle below Canal St. in Manhattan).
    Fascinating stuff.

Lisa Hannigan
Sea Sew

    I discovered Hannigan when she was the musical guest on an episode of The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert had heard her on the Internet, bought the album and invited her on. A lovely voice, again, as with many of these albums, interesting instrumentation and arrangements, more of a singer/songwriter folky sound. Hannigan is an excellent lyricist (as in "I Don't Know"). There are some terrific melodies on this album, the first by the Irish singer.

Maria Schneider Orchestra
Sky Blue 

This is a jazz outfit not, in its way, unlike Carla Bley's. There are some achingly beautiful solos on here combined with more dissonant avant-garde bits. The mix creates the tension and release that often contributes to great jazz records. The track "Cerulean Skies" won a Grammy last year for best instrumental composition.
   The album's not to be confused with Passport's Sky Blue or Wilco's Sky Blue Sky.

Holly Cole

    I think this self-titled album is the Canadian singer's best. I always regarded Cole, from Halifax, as a quirky vocalist. This past fall I saw her on Live At the Rehearsal Hall and was so taken with her version of "Sunny Side of the Street" that I had to get it. I found it on this version of the album which was on iTunes (it's the bonus track and was not on the CD release).
    Upon listening to the album (released in 2007) I found that Cole had progressed remarkably as a singer, developing a Frank Sinatra level facility with phrasing and a delightfully playful and creative delivery. Her version of "Alley Cat Song" is a masterpiece and a brilliant lesson in how to wrap a voice around words to set mood and implication.
    She plays here, as usual, with her long-time musical collaborator, the pianist Aaron Davis (who also has solo albums to his credit and was the keyboardist and leading composer for years with the Canadian latin jazz outfit Manteca).

Danny Michel
Loving the Alien

    This album, which came out last year, is Michel's tribute to David Bowie. Here he brilliantly reworks 11 Bowie songs, not just doing covers but making them stylistically his own, in some cases improving them, though my least favourites are the two selections from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. However, his renditions of "Young Americans" and "Ashes to Ashes" are simply brilliant (and he renders the lyrics to the former fully understandable, which they aren't in the rush of Bowie's original).
    Michel was born, his Wkipedia entry informs us, in Kitchener, Ontario, "close to the Smiles 'n Chuckles chocolate factory". Maybe that explains his musical joie de vivre.

The Lost Fingers
Lost in the '80s

    Another album that came out last year, this is a hilarious romp through a dozen 1980s rock and pop classics like "Pump Up the Jam", "You Shook Me All Night Long", "Part-Time Lover" and "Tainted Love". What makes this album distinctive is the complete re-working of all these tunes as Django Reinhardt inspired gypsy bistro jazz tunes.
    It's an album full of energy and great acoustic guitar work that will have you tapping your feet, singing along and laughing simultaneously.

Bob Dylan
Christmas in the Heart

    We'll end with the funniest and, in its way, the most entertaining Christmas album of the season. Certainly the oddest. Dylan croaks his way through a range of Yule standards, sounding like a combination of Jimmy Durante, Louis Armstrong and Tom Waits. It may take some getting used to - some of his missed notes elicited grimaces from my partner - yet the album grows on you with successive listenings.
    Given Dylan's history, one could be forgiven for suspecting a cynical take on the whole Christmas thing (actually, it's a charitable undertaking - proceeds from the album are going to Feeding America to provide meals for the poor). Dylan he approaches it with a sense of good-natured fun. Clearly the best song here is his version of "Must Be Santa", written by Mitch Miller and once famously recorded by the children's singer Raffi. Here, Dylan does it as a zydeco polka, inspired by a version that was made by the band Brave Combo. Dylan's version intersperses the names of Santa's reindeer with those of American presidents:

"Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen
Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton"

Definitely a hoot.The video's a riot too.

   

Les Paul (refiled, with an addition)

    Without Les Paul our musical landscape would be vastly different.
    His contribution designing the Les Paul model guitar for Gibson (used by a litany of rock and jazz players) would have been enough to secure his place in musical history. But he achieved much more than that. He came up with so many electronic and recording breakthroughs it just isn't possible to imagine modern music without him. Even if he had not designed his venerated guitar, the world would still owe him a big debt.
    You see, Paul was a guy who just couldn't help fiddling with things. For example, when he was 10 he fashioned a harmonica holder from a coat hanger. Also at a young age, he figured out how to give an acoustic guitar electronic amplification by hooking it up to the pickup of an old record player. When he turned the player on, he'd get an electric guitar effect. He also played with varispeed (varying pitch and tempo by speeding up or slowing down recording and playback), and experimented with reverb, microphones and multitrack recording.
    But most people remember him for his guitar breakthrough. In 1940 or '41 he came up with the first solid-body electric guitar by fastening a guitar neck, strings and pickups to a board. Paul wanted not just the tones and extra volume of amplified guitars, but an instrument that would sustain notes (he famously remarked of his invention that he could pluck a string, go out to eat and when he came back, the note would still be playing).
    That was the breakthrough. Rock music would not have been possible without it. The invention was also a boon to jazz and blues musicians.
    Don't know a Gibson Les Paul from a Fender Stratocaster? Well, here's a partial list of musicians who used the former. Maybe it will jog your memory:

Jeff Beck
Randy Bachman (Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive)
Al diMeola
Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters)
Steve Howe (Yes)
Alex Lifeson (Rush)
Muddy Waters
The Edge (U2)
Duane Allman
Robert Fripp (King Crimson)
John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
David Gilmour (Pink Floyd)
Dave Davies (The Kinks)
Eddie van Halen
Neil Young
Frank Zappa
Joe Walsh
Mike Oldfield
John McLaughlin
Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin)
Pete Townshend (The Who)

...you get the picture.
    Paul was a player too. He even had some hits in the early 1950s with the singer Mary Ford, whom he married. The most iconic, perhaps, was "How High the Moon":

Somewhere there's music
How faint the tune
Somewhere there's heaven
How high the moon

    But even though he was a good player and some of the songs were catchy, his technical contributions overshadow his musical ones.
    Paul was also spry. He kept playing and performing into his 90s. He was 94 when he died. He recorded his last album only four years ago, a tribute which had him playing with a variety of rock legends (it won two Grammy awards).
    Somewhere there's music. That would be wherever Les Paul is.
 

    I have added to this post, these comments from my good friend Jim Elder, a former musician and technical producer in the broadcast industry, who disagreed with my suggestion that Les Paul was more accomplished as an inventor than musician:

    " I think his creativity as a guitar player was every bit as important. The fact that as a young player he was able to sit in with the likes of Nat "King" Cole and Art Tatum suggests that he knew what he was doing musically. But it was especially his attention to new and specifically electronic sounds from the guitar that piqued the ears of aspiring rock players. Placed in the historical context of the '40s and early '50s, his sounds were as otherworldly and inventive as Hendrix. Page et. al. would be 20 or 25 years later. Because of Paul's work, sound became an important (perhaps basic) component of modern guitar playing technique. Some cite his solo on Bing Crosby's 1945 Number 1 hit "It's Been A Long, Long Time" as one of the finest examples of how to compose and incorporate a modern electric guitar solo into a pop song. It may also have been an important reason for the success of the record. His melodic sense, lightning-fast chromatic runs, experimentation with country, jazz, blues, pop, with sounds and recording techniques are all percursors to the players who followed in the classic rock eras. It was a musician's attempt to expand the possibilities of the guitar, and record the sounds he heard in his head, that spurred him on to experiment with the recording techniques for which he became famous. Not, I believe, the other way around. Outside the recording industry he was (until fairly recently) known primarily as an extraordinary guitar player and maker of hit records."

    Thank you, Jim.

Alice Russell, Dave Brubeck & Al DiMeola

REVIEW: ALICE RUSSELL, DAVE BRUBECK QUARTET, AL DIMEOLA WORLD SINFONIA
JUNE 30, JULY 1 & 2
TORONTO JAZZ FESTIVAL

    Alice Russell is a cheerful blonde imp with a powerhouse voice that belies her physical stature. It can growl, soar and be intimate equally.
    I discovered her on a compilation of new music (A New Groove) released a couple of years ago by the excellent world music label Putumayo (Canada was represented by K-Os). Russell's contribution, High Up on the Hook, was one of the best out of a very strong selection of material and it led me to her first album, My Favourite Letters. But hearing her on disc did not prepare me for her live performances.
    Russell is a superb performer, and she and her extremely tight band radiate energy. They smoked the club where they appeared both last year and this, though the shows were different.
    Last year's concert was split into two sets (sold as separate shows, but in fact audience members who had bought tickets to the first set were allowed to stay through the second). Russell had only one album out then, so there was repetition between the sets, her songs augmented by tunes from the Quantic Soul Orchestra, a group with which Russell has also done occasional vocal duties.
    This year, with two albums to her credit, there was one solid set, obviously with a wider range of material to draw on. Unfortunately, the sound system seemed worse this year, with the club speakers distorting, but the band's enthusiasm was so infectious it didn't seem to matter.
     Russell and her violin player, Mike Simmonds, are British and speak like Jamie Oliver. Two other band members were Americans and the keyboardist was a Canadian. Russell's producer, TM Juke, who was in the lineup last year, was missing from this year's group.
    Stylistically, the second album, Pot of Gold, has more of a throbbing dance beat than the first, though still shot through with very deep soul roots. Simmonds told me after the show that the finishing touches are being put on a third album next month.
    The highlight for me, both years, was the song Munkaroo from the first album. "Soft as the tail of a Munkaroo", Russell sings and I once e-mailed her agent. I'd looked on the Internet, in dictionaries and encyclopedias and could find no reference to such a thing. What the heck is a Munkaroo anyway, I asked.
    He forwarded the following reply from Alice: "Some people just want to live in a world of facts. I will put him straight - or wonky. A Munkaroo is a mythical animal...not many have seen him...and he has a tail. That's all Mike needs to know (as Munkaroos are also shy)."
    Interestingly perceptive. Since I spent my career as a journalist, which Alice didn't know, I did live in a world of facts.

    1959 was a watershed year for jazz, with the release of five now-legendary albums: Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus (which contains his iconic Goodbye Pork Pie Hat), John Coltrane's Giant Steps, and Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It was the first album I ever bought (though not in 1959 - I was too young).
    Brubeck's brain-teasingly exotic time signatures gave his music a cerebral quality but also a distinct hipness which makes this album sound modern even now. I always thought Time Out and Antonio Carlos Jobim's Brazilian jazz were the musical epitome of cool.
    At that time, though, Brubeck and his group looked like university professors. Today, the members of the quartet have changed and the sound of the band is quite different, largely due to the change in texture of one of its leading voices, the saxophone. The sax sound now is harder than the ethereal lilt of Paul Desmond's instrument.
    It's amazing that Brubeck is still performing. At 89, he's tall, thin, looking and sounding somewhat frail. He was helped up to and off the stage, yet he kept getting up from the piano between numbers to regale us with witty stories and observations. His playing is as assured as ever. There was never a moment's hesitation in anything he did, his inprovisation was masterful, he playfully threw bits of other songs into numbers, and he slid around among those complex time signatures with an ease that had the other members of the group shaking their heads and smiling in admiration.
    The concert started off with several slow, almost dirge-like numbers. But the tempo picked up and about half-way through, Brubeck brought out one of his sons, Matt, a cellist who quit touring, Brubeck told us, because he's 6' 8" tall and found it was just getting too tiresome trying to sleep on tour buses. He's teaching jazz improvisation for stringed instruments at Toronto's York University. Then, displaying he's lost none of his cool, Brubeck introduced the next number in which Matt would start out playing the melody. "Then, he's going to improvise and that will set him free", said the old man with a chuckle.
    This concert was not by any means a greatest hits recital. Only the last two numbers were from that landmark recording of 50 years ago: Three to Get Ready and the finale, Take Five, the first jazz tune ever to sell a million copies. The audience erupted as soon as it heard the instantly recognizable piano opening but that was as far as familiarity went. In good jazz tradition, the song is a framework for improvisation, so on Wednesday night, we all ended up hearing essentially a new piece.

    The local connection continued the next evening when Al DiMeola got up on stage and introduced his first number - written for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra which, he said, finally really meant something now that he was saying it in Toronto (the band is on a world tour).
    DiMeola was a 19-year-old whiz kid guitarist when he joined Chick Corea's Return to Forever in the '70s. He's since become a guitar god to a lot of people, mainly guys, who idolize him for the electronic fusion jazz of the period. He has since moved on, but it's a phenomenon he acknowledged in an interview in the Toronto Star, saying fusion was primarily a male head-banger thing that women had difficulty getting into. From my own observations over the decades, I'd have to concur.
    That demographic made up a substantial - and the most vocal -  part of the audience. Now middle-aged men who discovered DiMeola in university and were hungry for those blindingly fast, searing electric guitar runs. They wolf-whistled and hooted like they were at a sporting event. Some called out the titles of cherished past hits. A lot of the time, audiences don't seem content to hear what a musician is doing now. They want it to be 35 years ago.
    DiMeola was having none of it (until the very end). This tour was all about Argentinian tango- infused jazz, the latest incarnation of his World Sinfonia group. The inspiration for this music is the deceased Argentinian accordian player, Astor Piazzolla, whom DiMeola credits with changing the course of his musical life. When he explained this mid-show to the audience, there was a roar of approval and DiMeola expressed his admiration for our musical knowledge. "I'm impressed," he said. "In the States, they wouldn't know [who Piazzolla was]." I suspect, though that those audience members knew about Piazzolla from DiMeola's first World Sinfonia, and not because their music collections are respositories of the Argentinian's own albums.
    DiMeola has created a Latin-infused, feiry, comlex jazz worlds away from the rocking fusion of his past. He played mainly acoustic guitar and he has lost none of his dazzling technical viruosity. In fact, I think he's got better.
    He was also visibly impressed when he launched into the show's closer, Mediterranean Sundance. The crowd leapt to its feet and stood for the entire number, DiMeola beaming at the recognition. He went away, I think, with the impression that Toronto audiences are not only enthusiastic and appreciative (a feeling that seems to be shared by most musicians who play this city) but also knowledgable.

Michael Jackson

    The media reacted to the news of Michael Jackson's death yesterday with an excess that somehow sadly befitted the pop star.
    I was shocked when I turned on the TV to watch BBC World, as is my custom at 6:00, not by the news but by the newscast. They were in live coverage mode, unusual in itself for the Beeb, in a manner so like CNN that I had to check the logo on the screen several times to assure myself I was watching the right channel.
    CNN pioneered what is now a common 24-hour news channel format: go live with a breaking story (even when it's not even very newsworthy) and stay on hell or high water, regardless of whether you have anything to say or show. Thus, the viewer is treated to, say, an hour's live video of a vehicle parked outside a building or on the side of a road while a news anchor, reporters and analysts tell us they don't really know what's happening but speculate about it anyway.
    I turned the BBC on a bit early yesterday. They were already live, going through the top of the clock when they would normally run the intro to their newscast, meaning they suspended the normal format, something that would ordinarily happen for an event of stupendous magnitude - 9/11, for example. They kept broadcasting the same live helicopter video of Jackson's house and the UCLA Medical Center. There was nothing to be seen around the house. At the medical center the camera kept switching from a shot of two empty rooftop helipads to one of a parked ambulance. Occasionally, a picture of some yellow caution tape strung across a street and a couple of policemen standing by some orange traffic pylons were added. In other words, shots of nothing. Live video of stationary objects (though at one point, as if to imply confirmation of the event, the newscast's host told us there seemed to be a lot of activity around the UCLA Medical Center. I would have assumed that to be a normal state for a major medical facility in a city like Los Angeles).
    All the while, the anchor kept telling us that there were unconfirmed (and he stressed that repeatedly) reports that Jackson had died, likely of a heart attack, and had been taken from his house to the medical center. This packet of information could have easily been handled in a minute. It was repeated over and over for 17 minutes, at which point I turned the TV off.
    After the Beeb masquerading as CNN, later that evening came CBC's The National, which treated us to some more stunning commentary. CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi, appearing as an expert pop culture and music analyst, told us that many people had never known a world without Michael Jackson (my sympathies) and added: "That starts today". You'd think he was talking about the sun becoming permanently obscured by cloud cover due to some twist of global climate change.
    Then there was the Hollywood reporter who was asked to bring us up to date on reaction in Los Angeles. And in all seriousness, she told us the city was reeling after a series of celebrity deaths this week.
    I hope that puts things in perspective for those self-centered protesters in Iran being repressed by their own government, those tens of thousands displaced form Darfur who are living in tents, the people of Gaza and Iraq living with daily power, water, medicinal and food shortages. You think life's tough? Have a go at trying to recover from a series of celebrity deaths and you'll get a real taste of hardship!
    The media devoted to Michael Jackson the breadth and depth of analysis they might bestow on Churchill, Kennedy or Gandhi. For that, I have to bestow on the entire industry a fecetious Excellence in Journalism Award.
    In any event, I was never a Jackson fan. I was listening to music when he started out as a kid. Wasn't taken with the high-pitched, nasal voice, which didn't improve in "adulthood" with the addition of those fake girly squeals.
    The Jackson Five were purveyors of bubble gum, a genre in which they couldn't be rivalled by the Archies, the Ohio Express, Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, or even now, Lady Gaga.
    Michael Jackson's later music simply recast bubble gum pop in techno-synth with a dance beat. His videos generally were well-choreographed, but indivually he appeared to be not so much a dancer as a marionette suffering from myoclonic jerks.
    I think one headline got it right: "Jackson's weirdness eclipsed achievements".
    His bizarreness became the main act, his music the sideshow. But given his life - when you're internationally famous and in the spotlight, completely detached from reality for 45 of your 50 years - how can you not be bizarre?

Recording industry blues

    The case of the music recording industry and its reluctance to come to terms with digital downloading is a fascinating one.
    Apart from, perhaps, American car makers, I can't think of an industry that so resembles a dinosaur trapped in a tar pit of its own making.
    The situation is highlighted by the latest court case involving a woman in the U.S. who shared 24 songs on the file-sharing site Kazaa. A jury has decided she should pay $1.92 million, or about $80,000 per song, in penalties for copyright infringement.
    The ridiculousness of the decision is evident in the defendant's circumstances: Jammie Thomas-Rasset is a 32-year-old single mother of four. Surely no one in their right mind expects that she'll be coughing up almost two-million dollars. As she quite reasonably points out: "There's no way they're ever going to get that". Because there's no way Thomas-Rasset is ever going to have that kind of money, short of winning a Powerball lottery. They could seize everything she has, plus all her future earnings, and still not come close.
    Perhaps the jury and the recording industry thought Thomas-Rasset should be used as an example to warn online music "pirates". But the severity of the penalty is so ludicrous that, given the mentality of the online file sharing community, she's just as likely to be viewed as a cause-celèbre than an example, at least the kind of example the industry has in mind.
    In fact, if she has been targetted as an example, that could work in her favour. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, civil financial penalties can't be used as deterrents or be grossly excessive. That gives her grounds for an appeal.
    But this case speaks to the mentality of the record companies. They certainly never did anything to make it easy for people to buy music digitally. Instead of embracing this new way of marketing music, they hunkered down in their caves like Piltdown Man, club in hand waiting for intruders.
    What the music industry should have done - right off the bat - is created its own Internet retail sites. Each label should have opened its vaults and offered everything for sale as a digital download, and at reasonable prices. Instead, they let iTunes and other enterprises run away with the opportunity.
    They could still do it. A recent perusal of my local HMV headquarters store convinced me there's no point in even going there anymore. Much easier - and less expensive - to sit at the kitchen counter and let the music come to me by purchasing from iTunes. Or, for those albums the iTunes store doesn't carry, ordering CDs from Amazon and having them delivered to my house. Even then, there are recordings that just aren't available online and they require a visit to a good old used record store.
    The recording companies could make all of their new releases and everything in the back catalogues available through their own online retail sites. They could do the iTunes store one better by letting anyone with a credit card in any country buy from them. With iTunes you're restricted to buying from the store in your country of residence, if your country is served by one. And opening their vaults would blow away the other online retailers in terms of selection.
    With no packaging, pressing and delivery costs they could afford to make their digital download offerings affordable.
    The record companies have had years to get used to the idea that downloadable, digital music is here to stay. They missed the boat in the beginning. But surely it's obvious to them by now that they should get in on this directly.

Jeff Beck's desert island disc

    I have to confess I don't much like desert island lists. You know the type - you sometimes see them published, or you read a reference in an article naming such-and-such a record as one the author would have to pack if being confined to a desert isle (one presumably equipped with electricity, or at the very least a solar-powered generator; otherwise what would you do after your listening device's batteries ran out?).
    I don't think I could single out five or ten albums to pack in such a scenario. Confined to those, I know I would tire of them and develop a craving for the ones left behind. However, in a theoretical exercise, Jeff Beck's Blow By Blow would pretty much have to be on the list.
    At this juncture, for any younger music fans potentially reading this post, I'll answer the question my son put to me the first couple of times I mentioned Jeff Beck in his presence: no, this is not the same guy as Beck, the creator of Mellow Gold, Mutations, Guero and other albums of the past 15 years. That's Beck Hansen, multi-instrumentalist.
    We're dealing here with Jeff Beck, British guitar whiz, whose tremendous skill first attracted attention when he played for the 1960s rock group The Yardbirds (the same band that also launched the careers of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, the led Zeppelin founder).
    As a guitarist I always preferred Beck to Clapton. To my ears, he always just seemed to be the better guitar player. And I find Blow By Blow his best album.
    This isn't a new recording by any means. It was released in 1975. I'm writing about it now because I only acquired it over the weekend on iTunes, thereby filling a hole in my approximately 1400-album collection. I was always aware of the record, but for some reason it was one of those I'd neglected to buy over the years.
    It's a dazzling album, an inspired mix of rock, funk and jazz. Beck and his group effortlessly blend all three. At times you have Funkadelic-worthy rhythms with Mahavishnu Orchestra-style fusion jazz drumming (interesting since the follow-up album, Wired, including two alumni from that band), and Beck's guitar playfully improsiving over it all. The addition of backing strings at times may seem an incongruous concept but they fit - and for some reason, they bring to my mind the theme from the old TV show Route 66.
    Beck not only displays flash, he makes the guitar speak, coaxing moans and emotive sounds out of it that are at times astounding. You think only someone who has spent almost every waking moment with his instrument since about the age of five could bend it to such a vocabulary.
    This album includes one of the best-known Beck tracks, Cause We've Ended As Lovers, his take on a Stevie Wonder song (with Steview lending keyboard support). I have another version of this, from the soundtrack to The Secret Policeman's Other Ball (part of a series of comedy/musical benefits that was organized by some of the Pythons), Beck doing a live performance with Eric Clapton. But Blow By Blow contains his now-iconic original interpretation, along with eight other equally impressive tracks, not a dud in the whole bunch.
    An aural treat.

Jeff Beck's website

Sashaying down the Silk Road

REVIEW: YO YO MA & THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE
ROY THOMSON HALL, TORONTO, MARCH 20

    It's Chinese, Japanese, Central Asian, Indian, Persian, Arabian. It's jazz, classical, avant-garde, gypsy and "world". And it's definitely exotic.
    The Silk Road Ensemble ended its latest world tour on Friday night with a stunning performance in Toronto.
    This is a band with a wide circle of members - 41 in all - who come from locales as far-flung as Canada, Iran, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Switzerland and places in between. What they bring to the group are their combined cultural and musical influences. You rarely, if ever, see the entire ensemble playing at the same time. In the Toronto show, there were a dozen members.
    The concert opened with a duet of simple beauty involving a shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute played by Kojiro Umezaki, and a bawu, a Chinese reed flute played by the incomparable Wu Tong. They strolled down the aisles from the back of the auditorium trading passages until they reached the stage. Then the ensemble went into a medley of sweeping musical vision comprising pieces by Iranian, Chinese, Lebanese and American composers.
   The renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma is the artistic director of this group. Interestingly, he was about the only musician who did not take a solo, which may have disappointed some. But I saw that as a calculated move. Ma, of all these musicians, is the one true international star. He prevented his stature from overshadowing the others by keeping himself strictly in the role of band member.
    Not that there was any shortage of musical virtuosity on the stage. The two violinists, the viola player and the percussionists (especially Joseph Gramley) delivered brilliant performances.
    The set part of the evening ended with a Persian number. Colin Jacobson, one of the violinists, introduced it by telling the audience that whenever the ensemble plays in the home town of a member, they always go to that person's house. He was lucky enough, he said, to go to Iran recently, so he dropped in on one of the ensemble's Iranian members. They listened "to Bach, Radiohead and traditional Persian folk tunes". Jacobson adapted one of those Persian songs for the group. His anecdote struck me because it illustrated the range of musical interests these players have.
    There followed three encores, of which the last burned down the house. It featured the delightful, impish Wu Tong on the sheng. It consists of a brass blowpipe which curves out of the instrument and up. The rest of the instrument is a vertical stack of at least 17 bamboo or metal pipes emerging from a base. Each pipe has a hole covered by a metal tongue, which interrupts the air flow from the player blowing into the instrument. It sounds like a combination harmonica and accordion.
    Wu's performance was dazzling, ranging from a Chinese musical style, to a jazz-inspired call and response with one of the percussionists, to a rocked-out frenzy that sounded like it was coming from a Louisiana Zydeco road house. The audience can rest content that they witnessed a virtuoso performance by maybe the greatest sheng player in the world.
    This band is not only inventive, it knows how to have fun.
    The Silk Road's recorded albums offer engaging listening but they don't quite communicate the infectious, brilliant, imaginative and exuberant musicianship the band shows live. If you ever have a chance to see them perform, jump at it. You'll never see anything quite like it.
    I feel like I've had my brain washed, aired out and massaged.