Archives : all posts by Jordan

Stella Chiweshe - "Kasawha"

I spoke to the bell tower master at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Anglican diocese in Quebec City recently. In a few weeks, with the help of a team of expert bell ringers from the UK and the US, he will attempt the second full peal of his bell-ringing career. (Ringers will never promise a full peal, only an attempt.) If successful, the peal will last three hours; all of the eight bells, which were built in London in the 1830s, will be rung 5,030 times, one at a time, without repeating any sequence twice. With enthusiasm, the man described the peal's complexity of sound and execution, the ringers' "three mesmerizing hours of total concentration." While he seemed reluctant to speak about the musical element of the peal, preferring to treat ringing from the practical hobbyist's perspective, his portrayal of the process and its effect on listeners reminded me of the power of the particularly dense finger-picking part or, especially, the musical math of a well played mbira/kalimba, to coax a listener astray, into the maze of its patterns and permutations - like a stargazer lost in the night sky - looking ever closer, seeing ever less.

Laura Barrett - "Deception Island Optimists Club"

[Buy Chiweshe, Barrett]

Yellow Jacket Avenger - "The Special Fate"

Behind all of the well-manipulated old machines, the austere perfection of synthesized sound, is a tender-hearted creature with a penchant for touching melody. The backing track could be Bjork's and the bridge's vocal David Byrne's, but there's also Peter Gabriel here - an unabashed, if otherworldly, sap. "In summer with my old friends/we swam by the moon/Through the grass we'd creep/on the shore we'd leave our shoes," Yellow Jacket Avenger reminisces over the wheezy, unnatural sounds of his dance music nearly too slow to dance to.

[Buy YJA's lovely and unusual new album, Double Nature]

Dee Dee Sharp - "Nobody But You"

Designed to be liked and designed well, this perfect piece of pop is unsubtle in its charm. Swirling organ, crooning horns and that majestic, wordless chorus - why should I write it, when you can simply listen. Still, I would like to direct your attention to that Smokey Robinson-style lead guitar line, which might so easily be overlooked amidst its grander accompaniments, but which, in all of its modesty and sparsity, its warmth and its roundness, is the song's only manifestation of the vulnerability that must necessarily come with the determination that "I don't want nobody else but you."

[Buy]

Gregg Porter - "Good God to Gerty"

The internal monologue of a man who's let his life spiral out of control. As questions of mortality come to occupy his every waking thought, the quotidian recedes into the background. He lives in a pigsty, he hasn't seen his friends in months, his body is profoundly unclean, not to mention malodourous. "Why bother?" he asks. "This could be your last day." Fittingly, the narrator's thoughts are set to a music - stately country, replete with horns and strings - that moves at the languid pace of a funeral procession. [Out soon from Broken Sparrow.]

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Randy Burns - "Girl from England"

Get over it: A man called Randy Burns made a pretty song. It's not so hard to believe, is it? Sure, the name evokes an embarrassing family friend who gets awkwardly drunk at lunchtime barbecues; but who's to say that, at home, alone, after a cold, possibly tearful shower and a cup of coffee, that guy doesn't get contemplative and write tender love songs to imaginary British girls. Who's to say that Randy Burns - with his white pants and batik shirts, his panama hats and American beers - who's to say that he's incapable of composing this patient finger-picking pattern, this golden lead guitar line - as casual and warm in its execution as Randy is, disconcertingly, with your mother. [Buy]

Willie Nelson - "Marie"

Not being an idiot or insane, I do realize that leather can't sing. That's obvious. It's like how a future collaboration between the dead John Steinbeck and the dead John Fante is an impossibility. The likelihood of one is the same as the other, which is to say: zero. Still, I can't help but feel that this version of "Marie" sounds more or less exactly like leather singing the words of Johns Steinbeck, Fante. A narrator not unlike Fante's Arturo Bandini - impoverished, self-destructive, immature, an artist of sorts - sings of hope and survival (or not) in the unadorned language of Steinbeck, in a voice soft and cracked like an old tanned hide.

[Buy]

Odetta - "Sail Away Ladies"

If I could do it over again, I'd have my life start in precisely the way that "Sail Away Ladies" does - with a contrabass riff. After all, "Sail Away Ladies" turned out alright - it doesn't eat too much candy, drink too much Diet Pepsi, swear like a sailor, sail like Norman Mailor (i.e. badly), or suffer, really, from any of the myriad inadequacies that make me an unsuitable suitor, among other unfortunate things. It's easy to think of that bass riff as a source of life, too, since "SAL" sprouts from it like a plant from the earth, Odetta's voice a sturdy, striving stock, and the guitar parts, emerging at intervals, intricate and intertwining leaves. And like the earth, the riff is a cool cat; even as a song bursts forth from its very being, the stalwart bass riff remains aloof and unchanged, rising up out of the din and diving back down into it.

[Buy]

To Whom It May Concern,

In anticipation of your complaints - that this song is overly repetitive, that it's problematically undynamic - I would like to make two points:

1) The simple, repetitious melodic structure of the music is meant as nothing more than a showcase for my words, my "plain and straightforward message," which, you not being Ibo Yoruba or a speaker of our particular pidgin, you probably can't understand, anyway, fool. And, more importantly,
2) What I do in the first twenty-two seconds - during which I call to mind a hot, late night spent sitting on a porch amid the sweet smell of grass and the sound of a syncopated sprinkler - is quite enough accomplishment for a whole career, thank you, and whatever I choose to do afterward, therefore, is merely gravy, anyway, you foolish, foolish man or woman.

All the best,
Tunji Oyelana and The Benders

[Buy]