What could be more wholesome and all-American than a backyard barbecue? Unless, of course, the backyard in question belongs to David Lynch.
Lynch has long-since established himself as a sort of anti-Norman Rockwell. This week, with the release of a new video to go with his debut music album, Crazy Clown Time, Lynch stays true to form. As he explained to Entertainment Weekly when the video was still in production, “A ‘Crazy Clown Time’ should have an intense psychotic backyard craziness, fueled by beer.” Yesterday Lynch offered further explanation when he sent a message on Twitter announcing the release: “Be the 1st on your block to see the Advancement of the Race which Conway Twitty spoke so clearly.”
The video lasts seven minutes and might be considered NSFW, depending on your office’s policy on nudity, demonic wailing and depictions of people pouring lighter fluid on their spiked mohawk hairdo and setting it afire.
When David Byrne began riding a bicycle in late-seventies and early-eighties New York, he drew funny looks on the street. But the convenience of rolling from neighborhood to neighborhood, party to party, and gallery to gallery on two wheels couldn’t be denied, and now, over three decades later, we find Byrne has evolved to occupy a unique set of parallel careers: singer-songwriter, artist of many media (including but not limited to Microsoft PowerPoint), and urban cycling advocate. Over the past few years, what with sharply rising gas prices and a reinvigorated public interest in how better to use our cities, the world has paid especially close attention to the latter third of Byrne’s work. He’s responded by writing, touring, lecturing, and even industrial-designing (bike racks, that is) in support of the humble bicycle, if not as humanity’s only hope, then at least as a pretty darn personally and socially effective way of getting from point A to point B.
“You don’t really need the spandex,” Byrne writes in his book Bicycle Diaries, whose publication occasioned the above New York Times video profile. He advocates cycling neither as a hard-charging sport nor as an atavistic hit of childhood whimsy, but as a full-fledged means of daily transportation. Not only does he wear regular clothes doing it, but in this video he actually goes helmetless, albeit on the car-free Hudson River Greenway. As expressed in both book and video, Byrne’s thoughts on the exhilaration of cycling through cities — “there’s a sense of floating through the landscape, watching it as it goes by, but you can stop at any moment if something catches your eye” — have kept me on my own bike. I ride it in Los Angeles, a city of clear weather and flat terrain that sometimes strikes me as an ideal cycling environment — until Byrne or someone else bring up European towns, like Copenhagen or Modena, through which tykes, octogenarians, and everyone in between ride regularly and fearlessly. Even North America’s most bike-friendly cities haven’t reached that level yet, but with advocates as creative and unbureaucratic as David Byrne advising them (though sometimes with suggestions as grand as “bury the West Side Highway”), surely it’s only a matter of time.
The great bluegrass banjo player Earl Scruggs died Wednesday at the age of 88. Shortly afterward, Steve Martin sent out a tweet calling Scruggs the most important banjo player who ever lived. “Few players have changed the way we hear an instrument the way Earl has,” wrote Martin earlier this year in The New Yorker, “putting him in a category with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix.”
Martin writes of Scruggs:
Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried. In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and played banjo the way no one had heard before, the audience responded with shouts, whoops, and ovations. He performed tunes he wrote as well as songs they knew, with clarity and speed like no one could imagine, except him. When the singer came to the end of a phrase, he filled the theatre with sparkling runs of notes that became a signature for all bluegrass music since. He wore a suit and a Stetson hat, and when he played he smiled at the audience like what he was doing was effortless. There aren’t many earthquakes in Tennessee, but that night there was.
In November of 2001 Martin had the opportunity to play the banjo alongside his hero on the David Letterman show. (See above.) They played Scruggs’s classic, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” with Scruggs’s sons Randy on acoustic guitar and Gary on Harmonica, and a stellar group that included Vince Gill and Albert lee on electric guitar, Marty Stewart on mandolin, Glen Duncan on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Glenn Wolf on bass, Harry Stinson on drums, Leon Russell on organ and Paul Shaffer on piano.
A huge treasure trove of songs and interviews recorded by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s have been digitized and made available online for free listening. The Association for Cultural Equity, a nonprofit organization founded by Lomax in the 1980s, has posted some 17,000 recordings.
“For the first time,” Cultural Equity Executive Director Don Fleming told NPR’s Joel Rose, “everything that we’ve digitized of Alan’s field recording trips are online, on our Web site. It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, interviews, music.”
It’s an amazing resource. For a quick taste, here are a few examples from one of the best-known areas of Lomax’s research, his recordings of traditional African American culture:
“John Henry” sung by prisoners at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Parchman Farm, in 1947.
“Come Up Horsey,” a children’s lullaby sung in 1948 by Vera Hall, whose mother was a slave.
But that’s just scratching the surface of what’s inside the enormous archive. Lomax’s work extended far beyond the Deep South, into other areas and cultures of America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. “He believed that all cultures should be looked at on an even playing field,” his daughter Anna Lomax Wood told NPR. “Not that they’re all alike. But they should be given the same dignity, or they had the same dignity and worth as any other.”
Depending on which circles you run in, you might have first spotted singer-songwriter-actor Glen Hansard as the leader of the rock band The Frames, as an actor in Alan Parker’s film The Commitments, or, more recently, as one half of the folk-rock duo The Swell Season. But if the success of John Carney’s movie Once is anything to go by, you may well have become aware of Glen Hansard while watching it. Carney, The Frames’ former bassist, knew that Hansard had accumulated just the kind stories in his youth spent busking around Dublin to shape his film’s down-and-out musician protagonist. By shooting time, Hansard had taken on the role himself, ensuring that a whole new, large audience would soon learn of a second inimitable Irish voice to put on their playlists.
The first, of course, would have to be Van Morrison, whose artistic captivation of generations of listeners extends to Hansard himself. Invited to Morrison’s birthday party by a Guinness heiress whom he befriended while busking, Hansard seized the chance to get near his favorite singer. Like some brave fans, he found a way to approach the reputedly brusque and temperamental Morrison. Unlike most of those fans, Hansard’s experience turned into a uniquely close and personal one. Watch the clip from Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show below and hear him tell the story of how he inadvertently parlayed a brushed-off song request (“You don’t know me!” was Morrison’s devastating dismissal) into an entire night spent exchanging songs alone with his musical idol.
Hansard likens this memory to one of “jamming with a Beatle,” before correcting himself: “No, better than a Beatle — it’s Van Morrison!” Though Hansard hails from Dublin and Morrison from Belfast — the root of such innate difference, Hansard explains, that he can’t even imitate Morrison’s accent — it seems only to make good sense that the two artists could engage in such a brief yet intense connection. Despite coming from separate generations and subcultures, these two immediately recognizable Irish musicians sound possessed of, or possessed by, something unusual. In both cases, their peculiarly expressive vocal and rhythmic energies defy easy description. In his book When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, critic Greil Marcus describes this quality in Morrison as “the yarragh.” Listen to the cover of Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” above and wonder: what to call it in Hansard? H/T Metafilter
A music scholar made an astounding discovery recently while going through the personal belongings from the attic of a recently deceased church musician and band leader in the Lech Valley of the Austrian Tyrol.
Combing through the dead man’s collection of old music manuscripts, Hildegard Herrmann-Schneider of the Institute for Tyrolean Music Research noticed a hand-written book with the date “1780” on the cover. On pages 12 to 14 she found an unidentified sonata movement with the tempo mark “allegro molto,” Italian for “very quickly.” On the upper right-hand side of page 12 was written “Del Signore Giovane Wolfgango Mozart,” or “The young Wolfgango Mozart.”
“Wolfgango” was a name Mozart’s father, Leopold, called him when he was a boy. Looking further into the manuscript, Herrmann-Schneider found several pieces that were already known to have been written by Leopold Mozart. Those compositions were respectfully marked “Signore Mozart,” or “Lord Mozart.”
Although the writing was clearly not in the hand of either the elder or the younger Mozart, the meticulousness of the transcriptions, along with the accuracy of every verifiable detail throughout the 160-page book, led Herrmann-Schneider to suspect that the composition by “The Young Wolfgango Mozart” was an authentic, previously unknown piece.
On the back of the manuscript was the copyist’s name: Johannes Reiserer. After an extensive investigation, Herrmann-Schneider was able to learn that Reiserer was born in 1765 and had gone to gymnasium, or high school, in Salzburg, where he was a member of the cathedral choir from 1778 to 1780. That would have placed him in close proximity to Leopold Mozart. “Researchers have thus concluded,” writes The History Blog, “that Johannes Reiserer used the notebook to copy compositions as part of a rigorous program of music instruction by Kapellhaus music masters, perhaps Leopold himself.”
Based on the style and the level of accomplishment in the piece, now known as the “Allegro Molto in C Major,” researchers place the date of composition at around 1767, when Mozart was 11 years old. A press release from the Institute for Tyrolean Music Research describes the piece:
Mozart frequently selected a C‑major key, and the Allegro molto has a sonata form with a length of 84 measures. Its ambitus is tailored to the clavichord. The Allegro molto could be a first major attempt by Wolfgang Amadé to assert himself in the area of the sonata form. This is suggested by the relatively high level of compositional technique.…Throughout the Allegro molto, thematic formation, compositional setting and harmony have a number of components that are found repeated in other Mozart piano works. Hardly a compositional detail points to a contradiction with the general characteristics of Mozart’s comsummate musical composition. According to current scholarly knowledge, it must therefore be regarded as an authentic sonata movement by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Austrian musician Florian Birsak, who specializes in playing early keyboard instruments, gave the premier performance of the piece on Mozart’s own fortepiano last Friday at the Mozart family home in Salzburg, which is now a museum of the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation. You can watch a video, above, which was recorded sometime earlier in the same place and on the same instrument. You can also read a PDF of the score, and download Birsak’s recording at iTunes.
The first page of Mozart’s Allegro Molto in C Major (above) from the 1780 notebook. Credit: Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation.
Sam Zygmuntowicz is a world-renowned luthier, or maker of stringed instruments. Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma play his instruments. In 2003, a violin he made for Isaac Stern sold at auction for $130,000–the highest price ever for an instrument by a living luthier. To sum up Zygmuntowicz’s stature as a builder of fine instruments, Tim J. Ingles, director of musical instruments for Sotheby’s, told Forbes magazine: “There are no more than six people who are at his level.”
The laws that govern the building of this box were decided upon a short time before the laws of gravity were discovered, and they have remained remarkably unchanged since then. It is commonly thought that the violin is the most perfect acoustically of all musical instruments. It is quite uncommon to find someone who can explain exactly why. One physicist who spent decades trying to understand why the violin works so well said that it was the world’s most analyzed musical instrument–and the least understood.
The most famous, and fabled, stringed instruments are those that were made in Cremona, Italy, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries by Antonio Stradivari and a handful of other masters. In Zygmuntowicz’s workshop in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, there is a bumper sticker that says, “My other fiddle is a Strad.” Behind the joke lies a serious point. Zygmuntowicz wants great musicians to use his instruments–not because they are cheaper than a Stradivarius, but because they are better. He’s trying to break a barrier that has been firmly in place for centuries. “I call it the ‘Strad Ceiling,’ ” he told NPR in 2008. “You know, if someone has a Strad in their case, will they play your fiddle?”
Although Joshua Bell owns a Zygmuntowicz, he mostly calls on the luthier to make fine adjustments to his Stradivarius. But Eugene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet told Forbes that he actually prefers his Zygmuntowicz to his 1686 Stradivarius in certain situations. “In a large space like Carnegie Hall,” he said, “the Zygmuntowicz is superior to my Strad. It has more power and punch.” In spite of the mystique that surrounds Stradivari and the other Cremona masters, Zygmuntowicz sees no reason why a modern luthier couldn’t make a better instrument. “There isn’t any ineffable essence,” he told the The New York Times earlier this year, “only a physical object that works better or worse in a variety of circumstances.”
For a quick introduction to Zygmuntowicz’s work, watch a new video, above, by photographer and filmmaker Dustin Cohen, and an earlier piece by Jon Groat of Newsweek, below. And to dive deeper into the science of the violin, be sure to visit the “Strad3D” Web site, which features fascinating excerpts from Eugene Schenkman’s film about Zygmuntowicz’s collaboration with physicist George Bissinger on a project using 3D laser scans, CT scans and other technologies to analyze the acoustical properties of violins by Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri. As Zygmuntowicz told Strings magazine in 2006, “What makes those violins work is more knowable now than it ever was.” H/T Kottke
Eons ago, we brought you Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Laughing Heart” in his ever so distinctive gravelly voice. Today, we’re heading to the other end of the rock audio spectrum. We’re bringing you Bono — short, of course, for the Latin “Bonovox,” or “Good Voice” — reading two poems by Bukowski, the poet once called the “laureate of American lowlife” by Pico Iyer. That’s because Bukowski made the ordinary lives of poor Americans and their many travails the subject of his poetry.
First up comes “Roll the Dice,” a poem from the collection, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999). Next, “The Crunch,” published in Love is a Dog From Hell (1977). Both Bono readings originally appeared in the 2003 Bukowski documentary Born Into This. You can find the film listed in our collection of Free Movies Online (in the Documentary section), and also more Bukowski readings in our big list of Free Audio Books.
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