Something for the weekend

Just heard this online at KCSM, the Bay Area Jazz Station. It's 2.30 a.m. over there, but I often find their lazy late-night moods match mine on a slow Saturday morning. Lots of wonderful things about this - the Hoagy Carmichael tune, Oscar Peterson on piano, Satchmo's growl. But just marvel at the purity of Ella's voice...

The days grow short...

My favourite recording of this classic Sarah Vaughan number:

Go Fourth

Happy Independence day to all my American readers.

Something for Sunday morning

Some Vassilis Tsabropoulos (on piano, expertly accompanied by Arild Andersen on double bass and John Marshall on drums) to chase away those wet weekend blues:

Something for the weekend

In January, Newsweek included Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a list of America's 'dying cities'. This beautifully filmed and expertly choreographed community video, featuring 3,000 local residents, was the city's response (via Roland):

Something for the weekend

Some gentle jazz to wake up to (very slowly), on this overcast Bank Holiday Saturday. A beautiful version of Caetano Veloso's 'Dom de iludir', by Stefano Bollani (piano), Jesper Bodilsen (double bass) and Morten Lund (drums).

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Something for the weekend

What else, on this day of days?

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Mind you, the problem with these fundamentalists is not that they know the Bible too well - it's that they don't know it well enough. Haven't they read Matthew 24.36? 'But of that day and hour no one knoweth, not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone.' (Douay-Rheims translation)

Some Saturday morning glee

A footnote to my Bruno Mars post the other day. You know you've arrived when two of your songs get featured in the same episode of 'Glee' (note to US readers: we're quite a few episodes behind you over here). OK, it's camp and kitsch as hell, but it certainly cheers up my Monday nights. Let's hope it does the same for this rather grey Saturday morning (hey - the sun just came out...).

Life on Mars

Time for a musical interlude.

One of the great things about having teenagers in the house (and yes, there are some) is their determination to remind you that pop music did not, after all, come to an abrupt end in 1979. No car journey with my son or daughter is complete without an insistence that we listen to a sample of their latest musical discoveries on the omnipresent iPod. I suppose we should be flattered that they don’t consider our musical tastes completely beyond redemption. Cultural curmudgeon that I am, though, I mostly remain doggedly unimpressed, wearily commenting that so-and-so was doing the same kind of thing thirty years ago, only better...

But just occasionally, something will stand out and I’ll have to admit that the rumours of pop music's death may have been premature. So it is with Bruno Mars, whom my offspring claim to have discovered on Youtube long before his current rise to fame. The guy certainly can sing and he’s a hugely versatile songwriter, as his recent album demonstrates. If I had to pick a favourite track, it would be the perfectly- crafted ‘Somewhere in Brooklyn’ which, as I never tire of telling my son and daughter, is in the great tradition of romantic railway songs. Although the two are very different musically, it always makes me think of Tom Waits’ ‘Downtown Train’. Looking up the video for the latter reminded me that he, too, name-checks Brooklyn. And both Waits and Mars share a penchant for old-fashioned men's hats. A little bit of unconscious imitation going on there?

On a more kitsch and cutesy note, the other evening my son turned up this video of a 4-year-old Bruno Mars doing a stunning Elvis impersonation, and being interviewed by Jonathan Ross into the bargain. Love that lip curl.

In memoriam

Polish composer Henryk Gorecki has died, aged 76. His most popular work, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, was inspired by the graffiti carved on the wall of a Gestapo prison by an 18 year old girl: 'Mamma do not cry. Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always'.

This video, which superimposes images of those murdered by the Nazis, seems appropriate on this day of Remembrance. I'm posting it in honour of all victims of fascism, and of all those who fought and died to defeat it.

Sanctified sounds

There's enough of the residual Catholic in me to note that today is the feast of St. Martin de Porres, one of the cooler saints in the calendar. The illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and an ex-slave, Juan Martin de Porres was born in Lima, Peru, in 1579, and spent his life in the service of the poor. He was the first black saint from the Americas and is the patron of people of 'mixed race'. (Celebrating him seems particularly pertinent under this disappointingly Eurocentric papacy, which has seen Benedict XVI appoint a disproportionate number of European cardinals to oversee a church 40% of whose members live in Latin America and 25% in Africa and Asia.)

As I've remarked before, were I ever to resolve my arguments with Christianity, St. Martin de Porres would be a prime candidate for my patron saint, though he'd have to battle it out with St. Martin of Tours, whom I admire for his early advocacy of the separation of church and state (after the execution of a group of heretics, he protested that the church was wrong to use the power of the secular state to enforce matters of belief).

An additional coolnesss factor attaching to St. Martin de Porres is the fact that, to my knowledge, he's the only saint to have had an album dedicated to him by a jazz legend: Black Christ of the Andes by the great Mary Lou Williams. Here's the opening track:

I'd be safe and warm...

The sky may not be grey but all the leaves will soon be brown, and it certainly feels like a winter's day out there. Time for some California dreamin', in honour of our imminent trip to Los Angeles, which will mean things are quiet around here for a week or so.

Love the crazy bath-dancing on this Sixties TV show:

Chile: mine rescue stirs memories

For those of us whose political views began to be formed in the 1970s, watching last week’s coverage of the Chilean mine rescue was a strange experience. On the one hand, it was wonderful to have some good news at last from that benighted corner of Latin America. On the other hand, it was difficult to hear about the part played in the rescue effort by the Chilean military, and to see those familiar helmets and uniforms, without recalling the assault on La Moneda Palace, the torture of prisoners in the Santiago Stadium, and the hundreds who ‘disappeared’ after Pinochet’s brutal coup.

Instinctively, one was suspicious too of the smiling face of Chilean president Sebastian Pinera, used as we are to doubting the democratic credentials of Latin American (and especially Chilean) leaders, particularly when they are also right-wing billionaires. However, it turns out Pinera was elected in a transparently fair election (he even featured a gay couple in one of his election ads), making him the first democratically-elected right-wing Chilean leader in more than half a century. (Which is not to say that he's beyond reproach.)

At the same time, the sight of Bolivian president Evo Morales watching the rescue efforts alongside Pinera was a reminder of the complex and contradictory history of struggles for progressive change in the Americas. On the one hand, the presence of Morales was a sign of hope: here was an elected socialist leader, from an indigenous, working-class background, standing side-by-side with an elected Chilean conservative. On the other hand, it was difficult to forget that this was a man who has allied himself with authoritarian populist Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and who, with Chavez, has cosied up to some of the most reactionary figures in the Middle East and elsewhere.

It seems that Morales regards US capitalism as the ‘worst enemy’ of humanity and the centre of the real 'axis of evil' in the world. Understandable, perhaps, given America's Cold War-era support for right-wing dictators in his part of the world. But this anti-American and anti-imperialist stance has led Morales, like Chavez, into some peculiar political contortions. Only this week, Morales criticised the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, and the Literature Prize to Mario Vargas Llosa. Apparently the Bolivian president believes that both decisions are 'suspect' because the two men are 'imperialist' and have the same 'tendencies' as that other great enemy of the people, Barack Obama.

This attitude of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' - however reactionary and despotic the latter may be - has overtones of 'progressive' apologies for Stalinism in the 1930s. It doesn't matter that both Xiaobo and Vargas Llosa have stood up for progressive values of liberty and human rights: they have dared to criticise actually-existing 'socialism', whether in China or Cuba. So they must be 'anti-imperialist' and therefore anathema.

Of course, this double-think is not a new phenomenon on the Latin American left. After all, some of the great heroes of the Chilean left (and my heroes too, back in the day), such as Pablo Neruda and Victor Jara, regularly visited Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and never uttered a word of criticism of those countries' regimes. The only difference between then and now is that today's Latin American far-leftists line up not with Stalinists but with reactionary Islamists.

Perhaps one day the people of countries like Bolivia, Venezuela and Chile will get the truly democratic and reforming governments they deserve, free from the tyranny of caudillos, whether of left or right.

Anyway, time for a bit of political and musical nostalgia. Although I'm no longer sympathetic to its anti-Americanism or its idealisation of Castro, Guevera and the Sandinistas, this from the Clash seems appropriate:

Lusolinks

Our imminent departure for a couple of weeks' holiday not far from Lisbon provides me with an excuse to link to some of my past scribblings on things Portuguese:

On Lisbon and Portuguese literary and musical culture

On Lisbon and Portuguese / Cape Verdean / Brazilian music

On a neglected Portuguese hero

On music again, specifically the saudade of Cesaria Evora and Mariza

On my feeble attempts to learn Portuguese

On the death of Jose Saramago.

As they say over there: Adeus, até logo.

Let freedom ring

Happy 4th, from across the pond.

Saturday morning blues

Spot on, Ella...

Alternative footie anthem

This seems timely (via Stephen Fry). Doesn't seem fair, though, that gay men are 'allowed' not to like football, whereas the rest of us have to pretend we do, if we don't, especially over the next four weeks...

Van Morrison: mastery and misanthropy

Added to my Amazon wish list: Greil Marcus' new book, Listening to Van Morrison. In yesterday's Guardian, Marcus described his experience of touring cities in America, reading from the book:

Usually, when a writer shows up at a bookstore and reads from or talks about a book he or she has written, people ask questions: how do you write? Where do you get your ideas? What made you write this book? But not this time. This time, in San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, people weren't necessarily interested in my stories about Morrison. They wanted to tell their own stories.

According to Marcus, many of those stories revolved around a 'fundamental contradiction: that they could be so moved by, so caught up in, something made by someone who seemed to want nothing to do with them'. One example will serve to illustrate the paradox of Van the Man's ability to move audiences - and his notorious misanthropy:

'We went to a show,' a man said in Portland, 'and it was magnificent. It seemed like there was nothing. He was finding songs inside the songs, songs we'd never heard, it was like they were songs he never head. When it was over, we went next door to a bar, a lot of people who'd been to the show were there, and of course that's all we were talking about. How great it was, and did you notice this and did you hear that - and then Van Morrison walked in. He came in, walked to the bar, everyone stood up and applauded, and he just sat down at the bar. Finally I got up the nerve. I went over to him, and I said: "Mr Morrison, your music has meant so much to me. Sometimes it pulled me through, when I didn't think anything would. I couldn't live without it." He waited for me to finish, and he looked at me, and he said: "Why do people feel they have to tell me these things?"

On the other hand, Marcus recounts this gem of a story:

'I was talking to my father today,' a woman in Portland said. 'He asked what I was doing tonight, and I told him I was going to hear someone talk about a book he'd written on Van Morrison. "Oh, Van Morrison!" he said. "You know, I used to work with his father on the docks in Belfast. After work he'd take me to his house to listen to his records. I'd never seen anything like it. Hundred and hundreds of 78s and LPs, jazz, blues, country music, everything. And there'd be the little boy there, dancing around the room, saying play that, Daddy! Play that!'

I came to Van Morrison quite late. I was already in my mid-20s, and living in Manchester, when an older friend introduced me to his music. I'd soon bought all the early albums, and they became part of the soundtrack of my life as I left university, started my first job, got married. H. and the children have never quite shared my enthusiasm for Van, though putting 'Moondance' or 'Caravan' on in the car will usually meet with general approval. For me, it's Astral Weeks that still has a special place in my affections, recalling particular times and places, and I never tire of it.

Here's the title track, perfect for waking up to on this summer Sunday morning:

Indépendance Cha-Cha

Some gentle anti-colonialism for a sunny Sunday morning. I heard this on yesterday's excellent World Routes programme on Radio 3 about the music of post-independence Francophone Africa. I love the way that Latin American beats, which owe so much to African rhythms, have been re-appropriated by African musicians: though apparently this track was recorded in Brussels, of all places.

This is a bad bad hotel

Proving that political protest doesn't have to be po-faced: LGBTQ activists use music, dance and wit to highlight poor pay and unsatisfactory health care provision for hotel workers, in the lobby of the Westin St. Francis, San Francisco. Only in San Francisco could demonstrators sneak the words 'gay ass' into a song about working conditions.

Lovers of historical trivia will know that the Westin, whose rather grim towers loom over one side of Union Square, has been witness to a number of remarkable events, including the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford in 1975. It's also the hotel where Dashiel Hammett wrote (and set) many of his detective stories.

(Via)