Soundtrack to the Snowpacalypse: Wild Belle's "Isles"

This whole “snowpacalypse” thing has gotten a bit out of hand here in Austin. The first time, it was fun. I went on a foot trek to get some coffee on streets that were noticeably free of ice, snow, or danger. The second time, it was embarrassing. It seemed as if someone had merely looked at the thermometer and decided it was just too cold to go to school. It might have been understandable if there was a reasonable expectation of rain, but the chances were at around 15% - hardly enough to justify a delay.

This was starting to get frustrating. These repeated closings were starting to threaten our summer break. I have no desire to celebrate the 4th of July in the band hall. More immediately, UIL Concert and Sightreading Contest is happening at the beginning of March, and no amount of added days is going to make up for the rehearsal time that I am losing due to shutdowns and mock STARR testing. The culture of fear that we live in is going to have a direct effect on my student’s success, a fact that I find almost intolerable.

Make no mistake, however - it is nice to have unexpected family time. I have really enjoyed spending some time with the Little One and the wife. We’ve all been in close quarters, which means that my listening habits have veered towards the accessible. Fortunately, I received the absolutely stellar Isles from Wild Belle in a pretty robust stack of birthday CDs, and this album has emerged as the "Soundtrack to the Snowpacalypse."



Wild Belle obviously defers to reggae and other afro-Caribbean music. The sunny, beachside association that I often associate with reggae styles, however, is absent on Isles. Instead, the throaty, sultry voice of lead singer Natalie Bergman and the distorted bari sax of her brother Elliot perfectly complimented the lone cup of coffee I had in the house that I was using to beat back the bright, cold day outside.

There are a whole range of interesting issues that can be addressed anytime there is a cultural schism between a music’s point of origin and its current form. No, they are not from Jamaica. Yes, they are white. No, they have probably never lived in a shanty, but they can refer to them out of respect for the style. None of this is really weird in today’s musical landscape. There are no record bins anymore, so it doesn’t matter if you call them “reggae” or “alternative.” They cross over, and in the process, write excellent, catchy tunes with a distinctive, consistent vibe that permeates the entire album.



I was listening to Isles last night as I was driving home from the dojo on a completely clear road when I heard that the school districts were closing today for the third time in two weeks. I refused to believe they would do such a thing until I started fielding calls from my CrossFit crew, asking if 5 am session was still on. I dismissed their fears, and told them that if they slipped on the sidewalk on the way to their car, not to come. I did not expect anything to actually happen, and sure enough, nothing happened. It was cold, of course, but there was not even any water on the ground outside, much less ice. We knocked out that WOD and I went back to sleep, to be met by unsettling dreams of embarrassing scores at UIL.

The Superhero Theme Project Part 3: Green Lantern

Green Lantern is hard to easily characterize because he’s not just “strong” or “fast.” He is a member of a space police force and uses a cosmically powered ring to create anything imaginable by the sheer power of his will. It’s pretty hard to boil that down to a 2 year old. He has long been one of my favorite DC superheroes, however, partially because his universe is so complex. It's even more complicated because there have also been many people to wear the costume. I was raised with Hal Jordan, who is, like most of the superheroes that taught me to read, white and male.  The Little One, living in a world that fortunately recognizes diversity more readily than the one I was born into, usually sees the black John Stewart as Green Lantern. There are also others, and each one is a distinct character with a unique contribution to the canon.

Although I was still figuring out how to easily describe to her what Green Lantern does, It was not a stretch for me to decide the musical genre I was going to delve into to find his theme. His setting is the vast cosmos as realized by the DC universe, and, looking at some of my past posts, it’s probably not a secret that I am something of a sci-fi fanboy. I went right to space opera, which, thanks to John Williams iconic work in Star Wars, sets a pretty high standard. The problem was trying to figure out which one. My first choices were from Star Trek.

I was apprehensive, though, because these themes are really close to my heart. There was a time in my life that the escapism of the 90’s Star Trek universe was the high point of my week. I was not sure that I could, or even wanted to, attach either of these songs to Green Lantern. I also admit that I secretly hope that she will one day become a Trek fan. I wanted choose a tune that might inform her future appreciation of these compositions rather than prematurely and perhaps artificially pilfer them.

Looking back now, I sort of regret not using these themes. As much as I have listened to them in their respective shows, their majesty still moves me. At the suggestion of a reader, however, I decided to go back a bit further. I was a fan of the original Battlestar Galactica when I was very young, but unfortunately, the show really doesn't hold up well, especially in the light of its reboot.  She will probably never go back and see it.  The original theme song, however, is the granddad of both of great Star Trek themes. It’s grandiose and powerful, and at the same time contrasts the other pieces that she has heard so far. I can easily imagine the Green Lantern Corps gliding through space as it plays on. (we have an extended version, but I could not pass up on indulging in the intro as it was seen back then).



Once the Little One started to realize that there were themes for other heroes beyond Superman and Batman, she started making some inquiries. Just to be prepared, I put the Battlestar Galactica theme on the playlist at the same time as Anvil of Crom. Sure enough, the morning that she discovered Wonder Woman, she requested Green Lantern, and I was ready.  Wonder Woman won her attention that morning, but she requests Green Lantern regularly, as well as several subsequent replays.

In the midst of this, I decided on a the character's one-word descriptor. As a prerequisite for being given a power ring, a Green Lantern is supposedly “born without fear.” When the Little One and I talk about him, then, his power is that he is “brave.” While the comic purist would probably balk at this, I think it’s not a bad start, and certainly a trait that I would like for my Little One to aspire to.

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Brubeck's "Time Out:" Acadacemicizing Jazz

This month, the world lost two incredible and historically important musicians. Doubtlessly, I have nothing but love and respect for the music and life of Ravi Shankar, but Dave Brubeck was an important personal influence. By extension, Brubeck influenced virtually every student to whom I have had the pleasure of teaching jazz.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s unlikely hit Take 5 (written by saxophonist Paul Desmond) from their 1959 album Time Out is a rare beast in the jazz realm. Its infectious melody, which effortlessly flowed over a seemingly un-swingable time signature, allowed the tune to cross over into mainstream popularity. Hiding complexity within accessibility is a surefire way for a song to earn my adoration, so Take 5 had huge appeal.



Dave Wolpe’s big band arrangement of this standard became a regular presence in my jazz pedagogy for years. Of course, putting it in the set list meant that I had to teach drummers to swing in 5/4, which was a long-term goal often wrought with frustration. Almost always, however, the song’s appeal won out. In retrospect, Take 5 doesn’t remind me of specific students I have taught as much as the whole experience of teaching big band to high schoolers for over a decade.

Looking back on that experience, I see now that in my early years I taught the song with a relatively superficial understanding. When I added Time Out to my jazz collection for the sake of study, I gained a much deeper appreciation for the song and the statement it was trying to make. As a whole, the album a historical step towards academicizing jazz. Jazz's improvisational conventions were developed in the loosely structured jams of the after-hours Dixieland and dance bands. The angular, through-composed, odd-timed experiments of Time Out would most likely not be found popping up at 3am in a New Orleans club. The harmonic structures of the pieces, however, along with the melodic vocabulary of their improvisational aspects, certainly place the album firmly within the jazz tradition.

Take 5 was the initial hook for me, but when I listened to the album in full, I became fascinated by many of the songs, not the least of which was the album’s Turkish-inspired opener Blue Rondo a la Turk. Calvin Custer released a big band arrangement of this tune and I added its kaleidoscopic duple and triple rhythmic structure to my 4 year pedagogic cycle. This one also became a band favorite.



Brubeck stood at the nexus of a variety of cultural forces. As a white musician applying intellectual and multicultral concepts to an African-American art form forged in practical settings, it seems like another example of dominant cultural ideology appropriating a subcultural style for profit. I think that there were certainly cases in the history of jazz where this happened, which was a justifiable source of racial tension. There were also many white musicians, however, that had the utmost respect for jazz tradition, and their interest in contributing to that tradition was generated by a genuine love of the style. Dave Brubeck, I think, fell into this category.

Since I have been teaching middle school, I have not had the regular opportunity to teach high concept songs like the ones found on Time Out. For young jazz musicians, learning to hold a blues form is difficult enough without having to deal with weird time signatures. Right before Brubeck's passing, however, my piano player, without any prompting from me, sat down at his piano and knocked out Take Five’s familiar rhythmic introduction. Inspiring - now to start in on that drummer…..

Knives Out: Grizzly Bear's "Shields" and Reinvention

In 2001, on an uninhabited stretch of road between Denton and Allen, I decided that Amnesiac was a bust. Radiohead had presented rewarding challenges with every album up to that point, but after struggling with it for quite awhile, I could not convince myself that the jarring differences between its burbling sound experiments and jagged songwriting would have a payoff like Kid A did. I shelved it and forgot about it. 

Several months later, however, during a rather innocuous set of standards, a UNT graduate jazz combo slipped in a genuinely moving rendition of Knives Out. It brought to my attention the song’s unsettling harmonic dissonance and challenged me to reconsider the original recording. Retrospectively, my opinion of Amnesiac is a bit higher (even though it’s still still one of Radiohead’s patchiest albums) but I view Knives Out as one of the finest songs in their oeuvre.



The combo that reframed the song for me earned my respect for focusing their intellectual and artistic energy on a song so obviously against the grain of jazz tradition. You don't often find that kind of idealistic innovation outside of the academic setting. Certainly, the audience for that sort of thing is quite limited and difficult to engage, especially back in the pre-YouTube era of the early 00s. These days, however, virtual music performances can sometimes serve as a creative venue for encounters like this.  One such performance played a role that led me to Grizzly Bear's most recent release.

Ever since I got Veckatimist last year, I have pondered Grizzly Bear’s deeper musical potentials. That album exhibited a level of musicianship that might indicate that there was more to them than meets the ear, but they are also indie darlings right now. Very often, indie sites have their own agendas that are not too dissimilar from the ones that guided record company promotional practices in the past. I have been very cautious about jumping on board the Grizzly Bear bandwagon simply because I want to make sure that I’m engaged by the band's musicality and not the hype that surrounds them. Therefore, when news of Shields started trickling through the feed, I was carefully interested. One night at Aikido Summer Camp, however, this video came up through my feed as I was getting ready to crash for the night.



Keep in mind, this guy isn’t even in the band, and he's not playing jazz.  Still, the amount of respect that this creative and skilled percussionist paid to Grizzly Bear in arranging an orchestrally-styled part to Sleeping Ute, a song that had not even been officially released yet, is a tribute to his belief in its broader intellectual potential.  For me, Shields went from being a curious interest to a must-have.

When it was finally released months later, it made an incredible first impression on me, so much so that I was afraid that it would burn brightly and proceed to collect dust. After being with it for awhile, however, I think that Grizzly Bear’s praise is mostly well-deserved. In addition to Sleeping Ute, I also connected almost immediately to Yet Again.



The production on this track, and on the album as a whole, captures an ambience that recalls Radiohead back in their early days when they were more like a band and less like a project (an identity shift that I think they were struggling with on Amnesiac). Listening to the laid-back, Keith Richards-esque strumming in this song, there is no question that Grizzly Bear’s music is generated by human hands. Additionally, their brilliant melodicism makes their work more inviting than that of Radiohead, sometimes reminiscent of Lindsey Buckingham’s quirky approach to pop songwriting. Lyrically and musically, however, they paint abstract, impressionistic pictures with the potential for multiple interpretations.



As an example, my first impression of Sun in Your Eyes, with its asymmetrical time signatures, rolling drumming, and desolate lyrics, was programmatic: a metaphor for a lonely, tumultuous sea voyage. I was a little disappointed to discover that there was scant lyric reference to support this imagery, but also impressed that this notion came entirely from the musical content.  My musical impression seemed quite clear, but the song's text pointed in a different direction.  Multimodal layers like this one can frequently be found in Grizzly Bear’s music, and the most interesting ones don’t always neatly coincide. Like Radiohead, they have ruptures between abstraction and clarity that leave lots of room for subjective interpretation, and therefore, creative reinvention.

Necessary Evils? Throatsinging Remixes and Shamu

A part of being a band director is organizing and executing the annual field trip.  I usually refer to it as “the carrot,” because all year long, we dangle this event in front of the students to keep them motivated and participating when morale is low.  Although there is usually a band festival involved where the students participate in a judged performance, it is the express goal of the students to reap the benefits of a year’s worth of hard work and dedication and just have fun as a group.  This went down yesterday when the band went to Sea World in San Antonio.  The whole thing came off pretty well - nobody did anything too dumb (at least that I knew about) and we got everywhere we needed to be within a fifteen minute margin of error.

As we rode to San Antonio, I was finally taking the opportunity to finish Theodore Levin’s book Where Rivers and Mountains Sing.  The final chapter addressed the regularity with which Tuvan musicians are invited to engage in cross-cultural encounters.  In one such encounter, the group Huun-Huur-Tu actually gained a huge amount of visibility and popularity in Greece when a traditional Tuvan song was remixed by a group called Malerija.

The resulting unexpected popularity for this track apparently caused Huun-Huur-Tu's brief, low-key tour to become a consistent sell-out event with enthusiastic responses – sometimes even mobs!  Despite the visibility that this recording brought them, however, the group's members remained ambivalent about the actual aesthetic value of the remix itself, but they did feel that it was a positive thing because it served to raise public awareness of Tuvan music, if in a general way.  The end, as they say, justified the means. 

I will admit to being a little conflicted: the part of me that kind of likes the remix is the same part that listened to early 90s music appropriators Enigma, whose 1991 release MCMCX AD brought Gregorian Chant into the American popular music sphere.




That same part of grew to like chant on its own basis, though, and although today I still appreciate Enigma’s brash creativity, the end result seems at least a little corny, if not presumptuous.  To me, the remix of Love Ride seems similarly hackneyed because I have some familiarity and connection with the source material.  Still, both Enigma and Malerija are overall much more engaging than the soulless drivel that is pumped through the speakers all over Sea World.  I escaped that ordeal by checking out the Beastie Boys’ new album The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 on headphones, an experience I will recount on a later post.

Keeping the tension between Tuvan traditionalism and contemporary studio practices in mind, I noticed that I also have bit of cognitive dissonance with Sea World in a way that extends beyond the musical environment they create.  Sea World San Antonio is primarily a large-scale interactive aquatic zoo.  Their shows feature various animals as "actors" and my cynical side constantly grapples with the morality of exploiting such amazing creatures in this way.  When I watched the killer whale show, I found the melodramatic presentation ridiculously inadequate as these astonishing behemoths did tricks for the crowd’s benefit.

It was hard to ignore, however, the enthusiasm of the audience’s younger contingent.  As hundreds of kids chanted “Shamu” over and over again to be gleefully soaked by the animal’s immense splashing, I had to wonder if any of them would one day become marine biologists because of this highly visceral close encounter.  Perhaps Sea World’s shows raise awareness in a way that allows the ends, again, to justify the means.

It’s beyond the scope of a mere blog post to decide whether this perpetual motion machine of appropriation, exploitation, education, and justification within which we seem to function, both musically and educationally, is inherently good or bad.  I certainly would question my authority on such matters.  Despite my reservations, though, I acknowledge the role that I played in this paradigm by bringing the band to the park.  My underlying agenda is to get the students to develop their own musical voice and appreciate the place it has in a world of sound.  I genuinely believe, however, that the students deserved a chance to cultivate a feeling of solidarity so that their continued interest allows them to one day see that the opportunity to enjoy music with their peers was the real goal.  In this particular case, I think, the end does justify the means.