December 22, 2011 On Music Those Are Marshmallow Clouds Being Friendly By Rachael Maddux My first shift at the candy store was on the first day of October, my last just before New Year’s, but when I talk about it now, what I say is, “Last Christmas, when I worked at the candy store.” In the world of candy stores, and this candy store in particular, Christmas is a perpetual condition that just happens to spike at the end of the year. A red-and-green decorating scheme carried throughout the shop—I could not escape it, even when I retreated, as I sometimes did, to the store’s one bathroom, also tinged with red and green, just to shut out the world for a minute or two. On the sales floor, the shelves were heavy with saltwater taffy and boxes of truffles and delightfully analog toys—balsa gliders, pick-up sticks, chunky wooden puzzles. The general effect was that of being buried inside the holiday stocking of a child who’d been very, very good that year—along with the child himself, and a hoard of his less well-mannered friends and their overstressed, oblivious parents. I took the gig shortly after finding myself laid off from the job I’d had for the last four years as an editor at a music magazine. I felt adrift and thought tending to a candy store, such a bastion of simple pleasures, might anchor me more firmly to the world, and also I thought that money might be a thing I’d might want to have again. But in my vague desperation I had forgotten about humans’ terrific knack for rendering even the most ostensibly pleasant pursuits completely soul crushing, and how that tendency increases as the winter days darken. Read More
December 8, 2011 On Music Branford Marsalis By Sam Stephenson It’s sixty-two degrees and raining in downtown Durham, North Carolina, on a Tuesday in mid-October. At noon members of the Branford Marsalis Quartet gather at the former St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal church, built in 1891, now converted into the Hayti Heritage Center, an arts-and-community nonprofit. Their goal is to record a new album over the next few days. When Marsalis moved his family to Durham from New York a decade ago, the local press assumed he was replacing the retiring director of Duke’s jazz department, saxophonist Paul Jeffrey. But Marsalis, who’d grown up in Louisiana, simply wanted to return to the South and picked Raleigh-Durham because the area had an airport large enough to get him anywhere he needed to go. Later, he began teaching part-time in the noted jazz program at the historically black North Carolina Central University, which is a mile down the road from Hayti. The original St. Joseph’s sanctuary remains intact: a wood-plank stage, hardwood pews, a balcony, chandeliers, and lots of stained glass. Marsalis began recording albums here in 2006 when he noticed that the room had a unique quality: there is no reverb at low decibel levels; it grows gradually with the sound. Read More
November 8, 2011 On Music Lizzi Bougatsos on Gang Gang Dance By Trinie Dalton Lizzi Bougatsos. Photo by Brian De Ran. Gang Gang Dance was founded in Brooklyn in 2001 by Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian Degraw, Tim DeWit, Josh Diamond, and Nathan Maddox. Informed by hip-hop, eighties pop and goth, and a wealth of international traditional musical styles, the band blends disparate sounds into a global amalgam. This collage approach has garnered attention from the art world; the band’s mixed-media work was included, for instance, in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and Bougatsos’s installations and collages have been shown at James Fuentes gallery in New York. Last May, Gang Gang Dance released their sixth album, Eye Contact, a tribute to the many loved ones the band has lost—including Maddox, who died in 2002 when he was struck by lightning on a Chinatown rooftop—and a fusion of large, swaggering beats, polyrhythmic sampling, and Bougatsos’s raw, personal lyrics. “Glass Jar,” on the new album, opens with a sample of a couple phrases that are clearly audible, and then goes through a movement that sounds like it’s contained in glass. The song feels as if it’s hermetically sealed. It is its own ecosystem, a geo-dome. You can create your own world with your surroundings. Does music produce common experiences with others? Music is universal, and extending your music to somebody is about sharing it. But it is also about how they receive it and how a message travels back to you. The best way to receive information about your music is when people talk about it through experience. We have a spiritual adviser named Babylove who travels with the band. And Tony Cox has been documenting our performances for a long time now. When he photographs us, he calls the experience a sphere. Read More
June 8, 2011 On Music The Soloist: Jason Moran Live at A Gathering of Tribes By J. D. Mitchell “It’s actually nice to play on this piano because it’s got the funk,” said the virtuoso jazz pianist Jason Moran. He was seated at an old Kurtzman upright piano and had just finished playing a lush, hard-swinging solo version of “The Sheik of Araby,” a tune he recently learned for his Fats Waller dance party at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. His comment elicited nervous laughter from the crowd of fans who’d crammed themselves into the main room of a suffocatingly hot Lower East Side apartment late last month—some of us seated on fold-out chairs, others on the floor—to hear him play two unaccompanied sets. Moran, one of the most celebrated young jazz artists of the last ten years, seemed right at home in this intimate, makeshift performance space, aptly named A Gathering of Tribes. Although he has been justly praised for his sometimes cerebral approach to jazz, the no-frills atmosphere of the venue, which attracts players of every school and listeners of every stripe, accentuated the earthier side of his style. A Gathering of Tribes is the home of author and educator Steve Cannon, a man the writer Paul Beatty, who dropped by for Moran’s second set, once referred to as “professor emeritus of the Lower East Side.” For the past twenty years Cannon has used his apartment to stage public readings, concerts, and art exhibitions. The venture reflects his devotion to the local community and his desire to preserve its vanishing bohemian character, which he came to know firsthand upon moving there from New Orleans in the 1960s. Cannon has made Tribes a particularly important site for contemporary jazz music. It boasts an impressive roster of past performers, including Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Butch Morris, and Matthew Shipp. Read More
May 27, 2011 On Music Out of the Vinyl Deeps By Marisa Meltzer Ellen Willis in 1981. Photograph by Jade Albert.I have never particularly enjoyed rock criticism. It has a tendency to read bombastic, and the references feel dated almost instantly. None of this is true of Ellen Willis. When I first started reading her a few years ago, I wondered if I liked her writing simply because we share the same gender; now I think I like her because she was right. Willis, who was a native of Queens and a Barnard graduate, was hired by The New Yorker as the magazine’s first pop-music critic in 1968. Her tenure lasted seven years, and her column, Rock, Etc., covered everything from The Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell to the birth of punk and Bette Midler. Her criticism could be feisty (Carly Simon’s “wide-eyes lyrics inevitably aroused my class antagonism”) or dismissive (The Velvet Underground’s eponymous album was “all about death, junkies, Delmore Shwartz—stuff like that”), but it was always sharp (Elvis was “John and Paul in one package”). She understood fandom and feminism equally—something all too rare in the present, where music criticism is still dominated by men. Willis was able to love Patti Smith as a rock-and-roll heroine but criticize her identity. She found Smith’s “androgynous, one-of-the guys image” to be problematic. “Its rebelliousness is seductive, but it plays into a kind of misogyny that consents to distinguish a woman who acts like one of the guys (and is also sexy and conspicuously ‘liberated’) from the general run of stupid girls.” Which is why it’s so unfortunate that she stopped writing about music in the early eighties. She felt like music had lost its edge after punk. She certainly didn’t disappear—she taught at NYU, wrote nonmusic criticism, and occasionally chimed in with a review of a Bob Dylan album when she felt like it—but her legacy became somewhat obscure. Her death from lung cancer in 2006, at the age of sixty-four, only made it worse. Read More
April 28, 2011 On Music One New Wagnerite at a Time By Catherine Steindler The Ride of the Valkyries in Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre. Photograph by Ken Howard, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera. When Mark Twain spent a week attending performances of Richard Wagner’s operas in Bavaria, he complained that “seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.” But by the end of his ordeal, he conceded it to be “one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.” That was in 1891. This year, the Metropolitan Opera is rolling out a new production of Wagner’s famed four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, and I’m here to tell you that whether or not you like opera, this is an experience that is not to be missed. On Friday, I saw Die Walküre, the second of the four operas, and was reminded that the Ring is not only one of the most magnificent achievements of human creativity but also, contrary to reputation, one of the most accessible. I don’t fully understand why the Ring came to be considered impenetrable. It is long, I’ll grant that. In 1853, having completed the libretto for the Ring, Wagner wrote to his friend, Franz Liszt, “Mark my poem well, it holds the world’s beginning and its destruction.” This isn’t just Wagner’s notorious megalomania speaking. The cycle does tell the story of the origin of human conflict, the destruction of the human world, and everything else in between. Perhaps it’s these enormous themes that are responsible for the Ring’s reputation. But still, they’re nothing you don’t find in your standard myth. Perhaps it’s the dead seriousness with which Wagner approaches his ambitious enterprise that makes him a little perplexing, even suspicious, in these times—he hasn’t a trace of cool irony to protect him against mockery. Thank God. Whatever the reason, the Ring appears on the horizon like a monumental citadel, but venture just a little closer and you’ll see that the points of entry are as plentiful as the structure is immense. Indeed, because the Ring contains multitudes, you can use it to think through whatever’s on your mind: the environmental consequences of greed, your ugly competitive streak, why Gadhafi won’t just throw in the towel, your latest breakup—it’s all there. Herewith the half-dozen reasons I’ve been using on my friends to lure them to the Ring … Read More