AAJ : Charlie Haden returns to his roots for his latest album

Ecco :

Now, in 2008, Charlie Haden has fulfilled his dream to play the Haden Family songs with his wife, children, and close friends in the worlds of both country and jazz. The result is 'Ocean of Diamonds,' due out via Decca Records on September 23. The album includes 19 songs ranging from traditional country to contemporary Americana.

Along with jazz partner Pat Metheny, Charlie's friends making an appearance include such luminaries as Vince Gill, Bruce Hornsby, Ricky Skaggs, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Dan Tyminski, Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush and many more.

Charlie's family is the main focus of the album, with his wife Ruth Cameron and all four of his children and son-in-law making an appearance. Charlie's son Josh, a former Restless Records Artist with his band Spain, lends his voice to his mellow ballad Spiritual," which Johnny Cash also recorded. His wife Ruth, a former Verve recording artist, sings the Irish ballad Down by the Salley Gardens." His triplet daughters Petra, Tanya, and Rachel are featured on several tracks as well as lend their impeccable harmonies behind Ricky Skaggs and Dan Tymknski. Petra is a former member of the Decemberists and has been performing with Sean Lennon, Ricky Lee Jones and the Foo Fighters of late; Rachel was a founding member of indie-rock pioneers The Rentals and is currently on tour with Todd Rundgren; Tanya plays in several independent bands around Los Angeles and is married to actor/musician Jack Black, who gives a stirring rendition of Old Joe Clark".

Lucille Lisack : L'espace de l'écoute

Revue de Antoine Hennion, La Passion musicale (Métailié), à nonfiction.fr (26.06.2008) :

Après cette histoire des rapports entre la sociologie et l’art, Antoine Hennion met en œuvre sa théorie de la médiation à partir de plusieurs exemples. Cette deuxième partie s’appuie surtout sur l’analyse du renouveau baroque et de la querelle entre "baroqueux" et modernistes, analyse qui figurait au début de l’ouvrage dans sa première édition. La réinterprétation baroque est pour le sociologue une véritable "expérience de laboratoire en vraie grandeur". Il y voit le "repeuplement du monde de la musique" par l’ensemble des médiations musicales : sensibilité, gestes, son, interprètes, goût du public. Au lieu d’interpréter en termes de vérité et d’erreur la résistance des modernistes qui préfèrent "jouer ce qu’ils veulent entendre" contre l’évidence des recherches musicologiques, l’auteur prend leur "mauvaise foi", en insistant plus sur "foi" que sur "mauvaise", comme témoin d’un processus de fabrication du goût – et, dans le cas du baroque, de déconstruction d’un goût remplacé par un autre. Antoine Hennion insère ici une "ethnographie d’une classe de solfège" absente de la première édition. On change d’échelle, pour s’intéresser non plus à la construction historique d’un goût, mais à l’éducation des enfants à l’écoute via une foule de médiateurs, détours nécessaires de l’enseignement.

Toute la fin de la deuxième partie est principalement consacrée à trois médiums : les instruments, les partitions et les disques. En scrutant le rôle des médiateurs, l’auteur défait l’évidence d’une musique-objet visible, tangible, pour analyser les mécanismes de cette "transformation d’un courant d’air en statue". À partir de ces trois médiums et des querelles entre partisans des uns et partisans des autres, Hennion reconsidère les oppositions entre les différentes musiques, en s’attachant plus particulièrement à la musique contemporaine, à la musique populaire commerciale, au rock et à la musique classique. Il dégage ainsi des continuités et redéfinit les différences en se fondant sur les médiums privilégiés par chaque musique. Il s’agit de "montrer qu’on peut parler des musiques, non pas directement à travers une essence esthétique ou une authenticité sociale, mais à travers la façon dont elles dénoncent certains intermédiaires et en promeuvent d’autres". L’opposition entre variétés et classique est remplacée par deux "axes" au sens mathématique, définissant un espace où l’on peut placer les éléments réels des diverses musiques : l’axe de la "musique objet" ou "musique-pour-la-musique" et celui de la "musique-relation" ou "musique-pour-le-public". Mais à ce modèle statique des deux axes est préféré le modèle dynamique d’une oscillation entre "un modèle où les éléments, les points à relier [la musique et le public] sont premiers, et leurs relations secondes, et un modèle où au contraire les relations font les éléments qu’elles relient. […] Le même espace est vu tantôt comme un ensemble de points, tantôt comme un ensemble de relations."

Emma Brookes : Love at First Touch

Review of Katie Hafner, A Romance on Three Legs : Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (Bloomsbury), at The NY Times (15.06.2008) :

Verne Edquist was born in 1931 to impoverished Swedish immigrants in rural Saskatchewan and was discovered at 6 years of age to have congenital cataracts, which surgery didn’t mend. At 8 he was put on a train bound for the Ontario School for the Blind, where poor students were taught a variety of trades: shoe repair, the proverbial basket weaving and piano tuning. Edquist, who Hafner says had an ear so fine “he could tell the make and model of a car by the sound of its engine,” chose to specialize in tuning. When he left school at 19, he got a job as an apprentice tuner at a Toronto piano factory, which divided its many visually impaired staff members into two groups, “gawkers” (who had less than 10 percent sight) and “gropers” (who were totally blind). Technically, Edquist was a gawker, but he found it easier to tune by feel alone, and so became a groper by choice.

By the time he met Gould he had risen to the position of chief concert tuner at the T. Eaton Company in Toronto, where CD 318 had awaited the pianist’s discovery. CD 318 was the Seabiscuit of the piano world, battered and marked for the glue factory when Gould discovered it in 1960. It was instantly familiar to him; the piano, made during the war, was one he had probably played as a child. And it had the sound he said he desired: “a little like an emasculated harpsichord” — perfect for Bach. The pianist and the tuner had first met when Edquist was called to Gould’s house to do a patch-up job on another piano, which, to Gould’s astonishment, Edquist refused to do. Professionalism compelled him to recommend that the piano be taken in for full service, and in that moment a respect was forged between the two awkward men. Thereafter, Gould always requested that Edquist work on CD 318, and he was present at the marathon overnight recording sessions, when Gould would send him out to fetch what he called his “double doubles” — coffee with two sugars and extra cream, which Edquist gently suggested might not be good for him.

And an excerpt.

Michael Church : Paul Roberts, Claude Debussy

Review of Paul Roberts, Claude Debussy (Phaidon), at The Independent (03.06.2008) :

"Charming child, true artist's temperament; will become a distinguished musician; great future." Noting these qualities in the awkward 12-year-old loner who became his pupil, Debussy's tutor Antoine Marmontel was prophetic. As expressed through what one critic described as his unforgettable voice – "strange, slightly veiled, articulated with a light staccato" – and a gaze described by another as "caressing and inclined to mockery, sad and full of languor, passionate and thoughtful", charm was Debussy's weapon. Though he was no virtuoso, his touch on the piano bewitched. To the composer Alfredo Casella, "he gave the impression of playing directly on the strings... the effect was a miracle of poetry".

Roberts adroitly chronicles the way Debussy took up with wives and lovers, and then discarded them in his uneasy social climb. If he found relative happiness with Emma Bardac and her children (to whom he became a devoted step-father), one senses that no sexual relationship touched his curiously aloof core. His passion for the Oriental prints and "objets" he collected – and which served as inspiration – was deeper and more constant. It's interesting to see a picture of "Arkel", the Japanese porcelain toad named after the king in his opera Pélleas et Mélisande, which he carried everywhere.

Alan Light : Lone Star Superstar

Review of Joe Nick Patoski, Willie Nelson : An Epic Life (Little, Brown, & Co.), at The NY Times (01.06.2008) :

On April 30, Nelson turned 75. The event was marked by the publication of Joe Nick Patoski’s much-needed, well-told biography, “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life”; a comprehensive four-CD box set, “One Hell of a Ride” (with extensive liner notes, also by Patoski); and this summer, the latest addition to Nelson’s seemingly infinite discography, a typically atypical collaboration with Wynton Marsalis titled “Two Men With the Blues.” Nelson himself honored the occasion by taking a rare day off from his never ending world tour, between stops in Copenhagen and Oslo.

Patoski, a veteran Texas music writer, has previously written books about two other Lone Star legends, Selena and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He has now turned his attention to the ultimate Texas artist. Patoski has been thorough, conducting more than a hundred interviews and drawing on extensive historical research and an impressive familiarity with the 300-plus albums that form Nelson’s oeuvre. Nelson has long seemed the personification of “laid back,” but it is his quiet determination and unwavering focus that shine through the pages of this admirable biography.

Colin Maunoury : La chute en avant

Revue de James Gavin, La longue nuit de Chet Baker (trad. Franck Médion, Denoël), à nonfiction.fr (20.05.2008) :

Chet Baker est un refuge. Sa vie semble être une chute que tout le monde aime contempler ; suscitant à la fois envie et soulagement. Assister à la chute des autres rassure ; si l’on est en position de voir les autres tomber, c’est qu’on ne tombe pas soi-même.

La Longue Nuit de Chet Baker raconte en détail cette chute, ces minuscules plates-formes de vide auxquelles Baker tenta de s’accrocher, tout en étant toujours conscient qu’il était immanquablement attiré vers le bas. Parce qu’on lui a promis trop vite les sommets, Baker n’a pu que souffrir d’un vertige génial, qui est devenu de moins en moins présent sous le regard attristé puis atterré des témoins de sa vie, à mesure que le drogué prenait le pas sur le musicien.

The English original, The Deep in a Dream, was published by Knopf, 2002.

Lyle Mays : Close To Home

I'm dead.

This is the 1982 version (the Montreal Jass Fes), to which I've listened for the first time. Lyle is a genius, indeed, and he's not prolific, unfortunately (?). "Close to Home" is the last song in his first solo album in 1986. I bought that record a few months after I married. Putting aside my wife, I was absorbed in it, I remember. DSL...

Interview with Yano Akiko

Yung-Hsiang Kao's report from The Japan Times (11.04.2008) :

Known mainly for her unique, versatile voice on her renditions of jazz and pop tunes, Yano has been collaborating with Kyoto-based electronic artist and producer Rei Harakami (see side bar) for the last four years in a duo called Yanokami. She first encountered Harakami in 2002.

"There's a Japanese band called Quruli and they have a single arranged by him called 'Bara no Hana,' " Yano says during a brief trip to Tokyo following a Yanokami performance in Singapore. "When I listened to it, I was blown away. So new. Very organic. It was something that I'd never heard of.

"You know, I've been in the music business for over 30 years. It's pretty rare to have an impression like that — to find music that is 'new' in its true sense."

See Yanokami Live "Night Train Home" at YouTube.

Interview with Mikami Kan

David Hickey's nice reportage at The Japan Times (28.03.2008) :

What was the aim for your new album?

I've been playing abroad for the last five or six years. My challenge for this album was to in some way bridge the gap between Japan and Europe, even if I'm singing in a different language. I want to have the same impact on the listener whether they're foreign or Japanese. I don't know if I'll fail or succeed. I'm not singing about God; European music has been drawn from the music of the Church. Even The Sex Pistols played proper chords. They had pretty harmonies, didn't they?

You left your hometown — a fishing village in Aomori Prefecture — for Tokyo in 1968, then made your live debut at the notorious Station 70 bar in Tokyo's Shibuya district in 1971. Tell us about that.

It was Japan's first live venue. The guy who set it up built it with money from his parents. He was the son of someone high up at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. This was the guy who planned the Peace Kanbakudan (homemade explosives) attacks (in the '60s and '70s) and he hid out in the club for sometime after that. He was my friend. During the Vietnam War, which we were all against, he was selling ammunition and planes to the Vietnamese.

What sort of audience did you play to?

Members of the extreme far right and hard left would drop by Station 70 — (author Yukio) Mishima's hangers-on and some of the young members of his private army, the Tatenokai, and members of (anarchist terrorist group) the Japanese Red Army. But they didn't come to propagandize. These groups would hang out together in the music room. I went in there myself, but they didn't talk much. Japan's top student leaders would gather there night after night, but the atmosphere was actually pretty somber. People drank; they took sleeping pills — which was the "in" drug at the time. . . . They were an extreme bunch of people. It didn't really matter if they were "left" or "right."

I think these student leaders had the same impact on society in Japan as the hippie movement in America. At that time, political activism was very popular. It spread likes measles. Everyone was excited to be part of the movement. They were screaming, "What does it mean to be Japanese? Are we the same as America now?" We were longing to know.

See his live and interview at YouTube.

Véronique Mortaigne : Tom Jobim, un des inventeurs de la bossa-nova, inspire les cinéastes

Du Monde (17.03.2008) :

La bossa-nova, dont Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994) est l'une des figures tutélaires, fête ses 50 ans. Elle est reconvoquée à Rio en cet automne austral 2008 pour rafraîchir l'air. Un sens aigu du romantisme, du plaisir, de la sophistication et de la civilisation confère à cette musique d'un modernisme jamais démenti des vertus curatives. L'idée se discute actuellement dans la métropole brésilienne : la musique de Jobim peut-elle servir de rempart à la dégradation des sentiments humains tels qu'ils sont décrits dans les films de Fernando Meirelles (La Cité de Dieu, 2002), ou de José Padilha (Tropa de elite), lauréat du Festival de Berlin avec l'Ours d'or (Le Monde du 19 février) ?

             Ainsi, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, cinéaste emblématique, auteur de Vidas secas (1963) ou de Qu'il était bon mon petit Français (1970), va-t-il tourner d'ici à l'été deux films sur Tom Jobim, grand amateur de whisky qui portait chapeau à larges bords, adorait l'emphase et les noms indigènes. Nelson Pereira dos Santos est un farouche amateur de musique populaire. L'un de ses premiers films, Rio, Zona norte (1957), mettait en scène deux compositeurs de samba confrontés à la vie peu amène des favelas de Rio. L'acteur noir Grande Otelo (mort en 1993) y jouait le rôle d'Espirito da Luz, un musicien qui finissait dans la misère. Nelson Pereira a ensuite conçu des documentaires ou des courts métrages sur des figures à la fois très connues (dans les milieux populaires) et très underground (dans les médias), comme le sambiste Zé Ketti ou le compositeur nordestin Capiba.