March 5, 2018

Still from Phantom Thread.

Not often does a film score stand out as a work of art independent of the movie it embellishes, but there are the rare exceptions. Everyone remembers the zither tune in The Third Man, Howard Shore’s ominous counterpoint clocks in After Hours, or Stanley Kubrick’s counterintuitive needle drops in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Other scores meet the film on a plane in which the photography and music cannot be disentangled: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s title cue for The Last Emperor; Jerry Goldsmith’s recurring, melancholy muted-trumpet line in Chinatown; Philip Glass’s winding synth fractals heard over a time-lapsed New York City in Koyaanisqatsi.

Jonny Greenwood’s score to Phantom Thread—Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie about a maniacally fussy dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock—is of the latter type. The music has a sinewy, ductile curvature that folds itself into the piles of fabric, weaving its way into the lining as the cloth becomes a dress. The main theme is a tense piece played by a string section in its upper register, where things cease to sound sweet and become eerie and diaphanous. Other cues are full of wide, warm major-ninth chords that flutter around like pastel ribbons. There are voicings that remind one of Bill Evans at his most fragile; instrumental color that brings to mind the Ballet Russes; airy chromaticism à la Miles Davis circa Nefertiti. Solo piano lines pick out patterns in the music like animate glowing lace. All of it is impeccably recorded. It is perverse that it didn’t win the Oscar for best score this year. Read More

On Music

The Agony and the XTC

By David Yaffe

On Andy Partridge, punk, beauty, madness, and our secret sounds.

There was a time when you thought you could bury your secrets in a music collection. You were young, you were sensitive to judgment, and you weren’t sure how all of it would stack up in the eyes of a potential romantic partner or in the eyes of the mature, sophisticated self you aspired to become. Were you really that needy? That desperate? And would you be crushed if someone else didn’t get it? Music got to places that were so private and strange, it was hard to put them into words, at least until you got older. You supposedly now live in a less lonely world. Now you could find refuge in social media, on a fan site, and discover that your little aural secret belongs to other people too. And if the repressed is returned and you reexamine where those sounds came from, you could find that some of those grown-ups who made the music you hoarded were even less stable and sure of themselves than you were. The band I am speaking of is XTC, who are now, despite their general absence from the conversation, the subject of the recently aired Showtime documentary XTC: This Is Pop. They were perhaps best known for their accidental 1986 hit, “Dear God,” a manifesto of unbelief initially buried on a B side before disc jockeys at college radio stations flipped the record and discovered something that hit a nerve among the young. And yet what was truly terrifying about the song was its harmonic beauty, the way those descending notes and glorious extended vocal lines followed the chords and made its blasphemy somehow numinous and sublime. By the time the record came out, those of us who were following its singer and author, Andy Partridge, knew that while he sounded invincible on the record, he had in fact stopped performing a few years earlier, in 1982, due to a kind of incurable stage fright. This was long before the Internet, and we had to search hard for the information. That voice, filled with angst or tenderness or both, just couldn’t make it to the concert stage anymore. The music that was the most precious to Partridge was also somehow unbearable. A few years ago, he appeared on a BBC documentary singing the praises of another head case, the mighty Judee Sill. But when he began to play her song, “The Kiss,” he had to stop it. “Those notes climbing under her voice … Sorry; I can’t do it … It’s just too beautiful.” Read More

On Music

When Jazz Was Dangerous

By Nathaniel Rich

“Robinson’s Band Plays Anything,” F. Bildestein, 1890. From the cover of the New Orleans newspaper the Mascot (November 15, 1890).

Musical forms have the life cycle of carnivorous beasts: clumsy in infancy, terrifying in adolescence, fearsome in maturity, fangless in old age, and pitiful in senescence, before the inevitable silent death. Their life spans tend to be longer than ours, so it can be difficult to recall that some of the more geriatric genres were once vital and fierce. But even Baroque music had a caddish streak—“a most dangerous reef,” in the words of a prominent seventeenth-century German rector, “along which many a young soul, as if called by Sirens … falls into dissoluteness”—and polka, in the 1840s, was a venal Bohemian menace (in 1844, the Illustrated London News wrote that polka “needs only to be seen once to be avoided forever!”). Jazz, now well advanced into its second century, had an especially violent youth. It was more than merely dangerous—it was homicidal.

Jazz, to be precise, was never extraordinarily ferocious. “Jass” was. The soft sibilant turned heavy at around the same time—a century ago—that the music crossed over in the national consciousness, rumbling north on steamboats up the Mississippi and on the northbound Illinois Central to Chicago, then to New York and California, where it swiftly gained popularity, social acceptance, critical esteem. To do so, it had to leave New Orleans, its native home, behind. This was understandable, given the treatment it had received. Read More

January 17, 2018

On Music

Don’t You Weep: The Bruce Springsteen Cure for Despair

By Tom Piazza

Bruce Springsteen

One year down, three to go.

Season one of the Trump unreality show was a fire that wouldn’t stop burning, set against the apocalyptic backdrop of real California wildfires that consumed over a million acres in the fall. Huge tracts of psychic energy, funds of hope and goodwill, were consumed by the effort to make sense of what was happening to the nation, to respond meaningfully, and to maintain sanity. Millions ranted about the “arsonist in chief,” yelled at their televisions, at their laptops, yelled on Facebook and Twitter or at protests in the street. Some, it is true, retreated into permanent Cat Video Land. But almost everyone was looking for evidence of hope.

Twelve years ago, New Orleans was still on its knees after Katrina. I remember January 2006 well. Four months after the disaster, vast sections of the city were still mud logged and disfigured; citizens were still being pulled—soaked, bloated, dead, stinking—out of shipwrecked houses. The failure of the federally funded and constructed levee system, the Bush administration’s bungled, ineffectual response, and, in the background, the ongoing disaster in Iraq made it feel as if the country were going off the rails.

That spring, Bruce Springsteen played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. It remains probably the single greatest performance that I’ve ever seen, by anyone. It wasn’t just the music itself but the way Springsteen and the band grasped the moment, understood what the city needed, and delivered it to an audience made up largely of people who had lived through, and were still living through, disaster. For years, I’ve wished for some kind of document of that afternoon, and now there is one. A company called Nugs.net—do you know these guys?—has just issued a two-disc set of the entire concert, Bruce Springsteen, Fair Grounds Race Course, New Orleans, April 30, 2006. Read More

On Music

Liner Notes: A Way into the Invisible

By Renee Gladman

Eric Dolphy in Copenhagen, 1961. Photo courtesy JP Jazz Archive/Redferns.

In the midnineties, I was a jazz head. I was a poet and I was a jazz head. I loved to read and I loved listening to music. I collected vinyl but also CDs. I shopped at Amoeba Records on Haight Street in San Francisco and brought home records by the bandleaders Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, my favorite at the time, and others. And I read the covers of these albums as if they were books, lured in by the various frames commentators employed to situate a given recording, like Leonard Feather opening his notes for Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else with “WHAT manner of album is this?” At the same time, as a graduate student in poetics, I was deeply immersed in the works of Henry James, Nathaniel Mackey, and Leslie Scalapino, and, although I didn’t know this then, or knew it only slightly, converging in the field between these producers and their various disciplines was a way of thinking about “the invisible” that would shape my life in music and language and art for the next two decades. As I think of it now, the invisible refers to all these inner energies, maps, and syntaxes I’m trying to make present in my drawings and in the unfolding of my sentences, but, in 1995, the idea of it had only just landed in me, and I had little language around it. I felt it most present when I witnessed forms crossing into other forms: sound into thought (in the case of jazz) and poetry into prose (in the case of the books I was reading).

I was drawn to jazz because it felt like mind music to me. It was a way to experience thought without thinking (that is, to experience bodily the map of someone else’s thinking without needing to write my own story on top of it to comprehend it). I found atmospheres compelling. Similarly, to read a Henry James novel was to be in an atmosphere of manners, where action and emotional response were embedded in an elaborate orchestration of adjacency: to read was to wander next to. And to listen to jazz was to enter a space inside the space in which I was living, one that lifted the top off the day or stretched the day beyond itself. I wanted to know what was happening—how this was happening—so I often turned to the liner notes of my LPs for answers. I saw them as a sort of foyer to the music: preparatory time for listening, a way of sublimating. You had to drop down into something to hear jazz, to be there for it—not having it as your background music but rather as a force carving lines into your brain. Jazz asked something of me that was like writing. To listen was to write, I had at some point concluded, and for a few years I tried to figure out the nature of that relationship. I wanted to know how listening was like making something, and what that something might look like. Read More

October 19, 2017

On Music

Bing & Ruth and Amy & David

By Sam Stephenson

David Moore of Bing & Ruth.

New York has felt like a second home since my parents first took me there as a teen in the early eighties. I grew up in rural coastal North Carolina, but the Mets became my team in 1979 when we got cable TV, and WOR carried 162 Mets games. On that first trip, I made my way alone to Paragon Sporting Goods in Union Square to buy Mizuno baseball cleats. Over the past twenty years, I’ve made more than 150 trips to the city while researching the photographer W. Eugene Smith. I now know a lot about arcane matters, like the history of Manhattan’s wholesale flower market, Long John Nebel’s overnight radio talk show, and underground angles on the midcentury jazz and drug scenes in places like Staten Island.

The city feels further away from me today, and it’s literally true. I moved earlier this year with my family to Bloomington, Indiana. Our house in Durham was 480 miles from Grand Central; from Bloomington, it’s 760. For nearly three decades I’ve listened to late-night sports radio on fifty-thousand-watt WFAN through a transistor beside my bed. Now I have to use a stream, which doesn’t feel the same; the conversation on WFAN isn’t quite the vernacular it used to be either.

Moreover, the pall of Trump is wide and heavy, even in cities he lost by forty points. In August, I drove four hours, from Bloomington to Chicago, to hear the improvisations of the Eric Revis Quartet, and each time I looked down the Chicago River and saw the six-story letters spelling TRUMP on the side of his building, it felt like Biff’s rule in Back to the Future II. Read More

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The Soundtrack of ‘Phantom Thread’ Will Outlive the Oscars

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When Jazz Was Dangerous

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Don’t You Weep: The Bruce Springsteen Cure for Despair

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Bing & Ruth and Amy & David

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