Alba's Edge Finds Connections between Celtic, Latin, and Jazz

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ALBA'S EDGE

Run to Fly

Paddledoo

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Celtic music fans certainly know the name Aidan O'Rourke. His latest project, though, found him twiddling dials in the studio rather than rosining up his bow. He has produced Alba's Edge, a young band that explores the connections between Celtic music, jazz, and Latin music. Please emphasize the word connections. Far too many contemporary mash-up efforts are force-fits instead of retrofits. A listen to Run to Fly finds Alba's Edge looking for logical affinity, not simply engaging in cultural splicing for the sheer sake of novelty. While I wouldn't say that every track works, I give these youngsters high marks for thoughtfulness.

Siblings Lilly and Neil Pearlman, she a Celtic-style fiddler and he a jazz pianist, anchor the quartet. They grew up in a Maine household filled with Cape Breton, Scottish, Brazilian, and Cuban music. The Pearlmans generally drive each composition, but solid cross rhythms from percussionist Jacob Cole and the versatile bass lines of Doug Berns texture the music. Don't expect cheesy cha-cha-chas appended to jigs. Alba's Edge sets the tone on the first track, "Rising," which strikes an ambient mood with its cascades of piano notes. In fact, quite a few tracks evoke high-end New Age jazz. This is certainly true of "Willard State Park," in which Neil Pearlman's keyboarding is reminiscent of that of jazz legend Vince Guaraldi, who was known for his work on Peanuts TV specials. "Willard State Park" has similar joyous piano runs, but the overlay with backswing fiddle produces a more complex result.

We don't really notice overt Latin influences until track four, the title track, which opens forlorn and foreboding, but is lightened by soft fiddle notes and keyboard chording that eases the piece into a swaying, playful bridge that allows the band to shift into a joyous higher gear. "General Jinjur/NOLA Chili" is also an interesting mix. It has decided Latin cross beats and Brazilian jazz piano running through, but the bass lines evoke some of Robby Krieger's work with The Doors, especially on Morrison Hotel. Another solid effort is "Summer Scraps," a giddy little tune that will make you grab your dance shoes. There's also a nice cover of "The Diamond," a famed whaling song popularized by Ewan MacColl. The deliberately scratchy fiddle on this one exudes bluegrass influence.

To my ear there are a few missteps. "HRK: Strength in Recovery" could use more structure and seems more like a forum for cool riffs than a cohesive piece. Ditto "The Sordid Life of Scientists," which has slices of soca, gypsy fiddling, and Latin cool jazz, but a helter-skelter binding that comes apart in places. But as I hope comes across, these folks are serious and skillful musicians. Even their not-quite-realized pieces are interesting ideas. Rob Weir

Samples found here. 

Hear My Sad Story--The History Behind the Songs

Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales That Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional American Folksongs. By Richard Polenberg. Cornell University Press, 2015.

A version of this review originally ran on nepca.wordpress.com 

In 1966 Phil Ochs remarked, “Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music…. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.” Long before and after Ochs' remark, commentators have applied the term "musical newspapers" in reference to folk songs. Call it all the news that's fit to sing. For every folk song that springs from a writer’s fertile imagination, there is at least one that’s inspired by real events and commemorated in ballads, broadsides, song-poems, slogans, and twice-told tales. Those events are the subject of a new book by Cornell history professor emeritus Richard Polenberg, who adds a twist: the way in which folk songs “improve” upon reality and help construct legends that may or may not be close to what actually happened.

Legends are not the same as myths; they occupy a middle position on a scale with verifiable history at one pole and belief-based mythology at the other. Often, legends become so well known that a work such as Polenberg’s is necessary to replant tales in factual soil. Polenberg begins with the news—the actual Lee Shelton (“Stack Lee”), Naomi (“Omie”) Wise, Morris Slater (“Railroad Bill”), and other such characters—and links what history says of them to the songs and legends they inspired. Sometimes they match pretty well, like Vernon Dalhart’s famed “Wreck of the Old 97,” which some scholars call the first true country music recording; other times great liberties are taken­—some of the musical tales about John Hardy, for instance, could be viewed as singing with an expired poetic license. But whether the songs hew close to the truth or spin yarns of gossamer-fragile veracity, Ochs was ultimately right: those songs became traveling newspapers. They’re more than songs; they helped write history as it is perceived, whether it actually happened that way or not. In short, music is part of how legends emerge, spread, and ingrain themselves in American culture.

Hear My Sad Song consists of twenty-one mini narratives that focus on individuals, four that deal with occupations (cotton mill workers, chain gangs, miners, and New Orleans prostitutes), and two that probe disasters (the Titanic and the boll weevil infestation of the 1920s). Folk songs share an affinity with the tabloid press in the sense that neither can resist a good murder, hence sixteen of Polenberg’s chapters deal with sensational homicide cases, sanguinary rogues, and those who may or may not have been killers (such as Joe Hill and Sacco and Vanzetti). Polenberg bookends his twenty-seven chapters with a prologue and epilogue featuring cowboy poet/songwriter Frank Maynard (“The Dying Cowboy”) as foil.

Polenberg loves folk music, but this is primarily a work of history and legends. If you do the math, you can infer that he has bitten off quite a lot for 304 pages. Each chapter is self-contained, hence Hear My Sad Story is actually a series of short stories (8 to 11 pages each) loosely held together by his musings on Maynard. It’s the kind of book that’s best read one tale at a time, preferably with a soundtrack cued. The short chapters tend to be heavy on names, investigations, and court proceedings, with music appearing as annotation rather than discussed in great depth. The book could benefit from both pruning and lengthening. There is a stylistic and organizational disconnection between his discussions of individuals and those dealing with occupational groups and disasters. Excising a few chapters would have provided more space to tell stories in more leisurely detail, a tact that would improve the book’s flow by sharpening narratives and lessening the need for chronicling. Although most of this book is illuminating, there are other things that could be cut. We don’t know, for instance, if “House of the Rising Sun” had anything at all to do with New Orleans’ Storyville red light district, thus Polenberg’s chapter, though fascinating, tells us nothing about the song. On a personal note, I’m more skeptical of Joe Hill’s innocence than Polenberg, yet way more convinced of the validity of Scott Nelson’s research into the "real" John Henry.

Book critiques have a way, though, of reflecting a reviewer’s biases just as the actual book reflects those of the author. If you’re a longtime folk music fan, you probably already know the stories behind the Tom Dula/Dooley and the Casey Jones legends. It's important, though, to imagine readers for whom the history/music/legend nexus is a recent revelation. Polenberg’s book is fine reading on its own, but it may prove invaluable for undergraduates. Check back with me; I’ll be test-driving it in my spring seminar on American folk legends.

Rob Weir

      

Anomalisa is Dreck Pretending to be Art

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ANOMALISA (2015)

Directed by Charlie Kauffman and Duke Johnson

Paramount, 90minutes, R (Language and graphic cartoon sex, really!)

*

It would unfair to call Anomalisa a bad film. Stronger terms are needed: animated atrocity, digital dreck, feculent film…. Or maybe we should use a line from The Goodbye Girl: "capital P, capital U, capital TRID."

I have adored past Charlie Kaufman efforts, even to the point of declaring his 2008 Synecdoche, New York a certified masterpiece, but Anomalisa is a one-trick pony whose singular subterfuge is stretched to 90 minutes. It feels much, much longer–as if you are plopped into a theater seat and told to stare into the sky until the sun supernovas. Here's the trick: Kauffman and 35-year-old-not-ready-for-prime-time co-director Duke Johnson use stop action technology on three live actors (David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan) and then animate them. The characters move in jerky, floppy, puppet-like ways, and their faces have scored parts like hinged puppets. That's because they are, in fact, puppets. Right away a problem emerges: Kauffman is paying homage to himself! Remember Being John Malkovich (1999)?

This is the first of numerous plagiarisms, none of which are a patch on the originals. The thin set up is that self-help customer service guru Michael Stone (Thewlis) flies to Cincinnati to give a conference keynote speech. Within five minutes we see his problem: he's incredibly lonely and perceives himself as the world's only unique being–the rest of the world literally looks like a male or androgynous female version of Tom Noonan and speaks in his voice. Add existential dread to Stone's list of worries, one compounded by a failure to rekindle a long-extinguished flame with former girlfriend Bella. Michael is a severely depressed individual, but neither he nor we are entirely sure what he is: a puppet in a cosmic game, an android in a universe of androids, insane…. Or, cliché of clichés, maybe it's all just a bad dream. Then he meets Lisa Hesselman (Leigh), a clumsy, half-bright, starry-eyed conference attendee with slight facial trauma. She's the only one other than Michael who looks and talks uniquely.  After an evening of–and this is very hard to watch without being creeped out­–rather graphic puppet sex, Michael wonders if maybe Lisa is his ticket out of whatever nightmare he's locked into.

Here's a partial list of sources from which Kauffman and Johnson either borrow or steal: Blade Runner, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Ex Machina, Star Trek, I, Robot, Logorama, and nearly every other film Kauffman has ever made. Is Stone the only sentient being in the universe? Hello, Dwayne Hoover from Vonnegut. Is he an android who wants to feel something? Shake hands with Mr. Data. Is he afraid that he too is a 'droid? You know, like Deckard in Blade Runner. Has the world become so generic that nostrums and consumer goods are the most real thing left? Logorama dealt with that question in a tidy 16 minutes. To quote Vonnegut, so it goes….  The only thing original about this dud is the surface technology and a few reoccurring jokes about Cincinnati. It's too thin—visual interest wears off in about ten minutes and the humor isn't funny enough to sustain us through the remaining 80. Anomalisa is, in turns, sad without being affecting, affected without being sad, pathetic without being sympathetic, and occasionally funny in the service of nothing. As for its ideas, Kauffman and Johnson could have put everything important on a Post-It note.

This movie has won some awards at film festivals and is up for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, but only one who isn't inoculated against buzz, puffery, and surfaces without depth could be impressed. I don't care how many awards this one gets—it's the turkey of the year. Don't get me started as on whether it's a biological or robotic turkey–Blade Runner covered that turf as well.

Rob Weir

Alex Dezen: Album of the Month

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ALEX DEZEN

Alex Dezen

Rock Ridge Music

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The best album I heard in the month of January doesn't officially release until February 12–a self-titled solo affair from Alex Dezen, the lead singer of Brooklyn's The Damnwells. Among the many things I admire about Dezen's solo venture is that he made me like the kind of album that generally annoys me: a let-me-tell-you-about-me collection. An entire album of these usually makes me want to scream, "Dude! Get over yourself; you're not that interesting." It's to Dezen's credit that his self-disclosures feel bigger than that.

Call it the voice of experience; he has already gotten into the heads of others by penning songs for the likes of Justin Bieber, Kelly Clarkson, The Dixie Chicks, Matt Hines, and the Pilobolus dance troupe. His news songs, though, are cut from non-pop cloth. You know you're in for personal stuff when a release kicks off with "Ode to Ex-Girlfriends." It's typical of the album's ten tracks in that Dezen writes in a long prose form that is heavy on narrative and short on poetry. (A lot of the lyrics don't even rhyme, let alone conform to meter or couplets.) It's also typical in that much of the material deals with relationships, usually of the doomed variety. A track titled "If You Can Say 'I Love You' on a Greeting Card, How Can it Be True?" is wordy, but poignant–the tale of a failed marriage. Boiled to its basics it's the classic cycle of abuse: violence/apology, promises/lies, guilt/betrayal, and children caught in the middle. Appropriately, Dezen puts down his acoustic guitar for an electric, as if symbolically allowing tragedy to spark and fritz. Speaking of guitars, "The Last Song I'll Ever Write (on this Guitar)" is a love song to an old D-35 Martin he was forced to sell. "Into the Hands of Hazelden" explores a different kind of regret: Dezen's musing over a college friendship and musical collaboration that fell apart in early adulthood. "I Don't Want to be Alone When I Die" suggests he's not had the best of luck in love.

The last of the above finds Dezen at the piano and in Seth-Glier-like sotto voice. He duplicates this effect on "Leonardo," in which he cleverly catalogs a doomed romance—himself presumably in the tragic male lead–by metaphorically casting his beloved as a 19^th century woman like Kate Winslet in Titanic waiting to be swept away by a suave Leonardo Di Caprio: "He was cool, so cool/Like a Dylan/So brave and confident/And I was a short Jewish kid/with long hair and green tint…" But again, Dezen adjusts his musical vibes to the mood of his songs, including an angry dance club throb to "A Little Less Like Hell," in which he refuses to fall in line with self-congratulatory victory parades like the one after Osama bin Laden's death. Instead he notes: "But what I'll never understand is why/Regardless of how hard we try/We need someone on the cross/Just to make up for the things we lost." He sings it with the kind of leave-nothing-behind abandonment of Ellis Paul. "Elephant" is filled with lots of Millennial references, and sung like it might be a Paul Simon song, though the tune was inspired by the mix of structure and looseness of The Beatles' "Blackbird."

I'd be the first to admit that there are lyrical and musical misfires on the album and hints of self-absorption. But there are enough gems on this recording to make it very worth your while. Check out www.alexdezen.com in mid-February and see what you think.

Rob Weir  

Video Review: Circumstance an Idea Only Partially Realized

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CIRCUMSTANCE (2011/12)

Directed by Maryam Keshavarz

Participant Media, 107 minutes, Unrated (sexuality), Farsi with subtitles

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This film from Iranian-American writer/director Maryam Keshavarz made a splash at Sundance back in 2011, but almost nowhere else. Lately it’s gotten a bit of new life courtesy of a DVD re-release. It's probably worth a rental, but it's at best a worthy idea only partially realized.

Circumstance could be called a film about song in a land that has abolished singing. Atafeh Hakimi (Nikohi Boosheri) dreams of becoming a belly dancing chanteuse, not exactly a sanctioned path in an Iran ruled by cheerless post-revolutionary mullahs. Atafeh has other issues as well. Her fate is inextricably linked with that of her orphaned BFF Shireen (Sarah Kazemy). They are typical teens filled with typical teen hormonal surges, desire to experiment, and urges to go wild. One person’s typical is another’s taboo, and virtually everything the two wish to try—listen to hip hop, smoke, dub porno films into Farsi, make out with boys, and make out with each other–is dangerously verboten.

Circumstance is ultimately a film about the gap between freedom and what a small cadre thinks the supernatural demands of them—right down to the point of foisting their values upon others. It’s also about how easy it is to be drawn to absolutism and intolerance and what it’s like to live in a society whose public norms are shrinking. Who can one trust under such conditions? We watch Atafeh’s brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) transform himself from a druggie loser to an increasingly pious young man, but is that a good thing or not? Can Atafeh and Shireen trust him? And what happens if one makes a teenaged mistake in an oppressive society? Even worse, what if one simply cannot tolerate life amidst repression? Can even a hero of the revolution like Hakimi paterfamilias Firouz (Sohei Parsa) protect family members?

We see two Irans on the screen—the one like exists officially and publicly, and the one that exists in the shadows—in private homes, subterranean clubs, and inside outlawed affinity groups. Keshavarz has dared hope that underground copies of her film will make their way into Iran and he aired in that shadow world. Perhaps they will, though I wished it had been a better film that would justify the risks involved in viewing such a film.

I found Circumstance to be too disjointed. Big ideas are waved and dropped more than probed, which makes it ultimately a character study about two teens trying to circumnavigate sharia law. That’s fine, but such a film demands a tighter narrative structure than Keshavarz’s episodic scattershot approach. It also entails tamping down sexual voyeurism that titillates without illuminating, and it requires believable evil, not cardboard cutout bad guys. For Keshavarz, Circumstance was a labor of love and politics, but one too obviously so. I came away fascinated, but convinced that what was needed was a more detached script treatment from a different writer. It’s not a bad film, but it’s not a patch on what it could/should have been.

Whatever it was that ignited interest at Sundance eludes me and seems to have eluded others as well, as the film hasn't caught fire on video either. I admire Ms. Keshavarz’s bravery and values, but good politics just isn’t the same as good filmmaking. Her film is a classic tweener—too good to be a bad film, but not good enough to be a great one. 

Rob Weir

Andrew Greig's Poetic Non-Fiction

AT THE LOCH OF THE GREEN CORRIE (2010)

Andrew Greig

Querus Non-fiction, 324 pages

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I'm about to start Andrew Greig's new novel, but one of his older books, The Green Corrie, inspired musings best phrased as "Whither Non-Fiction?"

As a historian I read lots of non-fiction books. Alas, too many must be labeled occupational hazards. I used to joke that many academics couldn't write "This End Up" on a box and make themselves understood, but now I think the joke is on me because it's more true than I ever imagined. The non-academic world is only marginally better. Non-fiction comes mostly in three forms these days: biography, memoir, and social problem exposés. Some biographies are quite good, but many writers suffer from Robert Caro Disease and can't sift relevant from mere detail, or tell a story in under a thousand pages. For every great memoir there seems to be a dozen penned by people who are legends only in their own mind–especially musicians! Books that probe sociological conundrums, political issues, and challenges economic, social, and cultural tend to have a very short shelf life, even when they are well written. Journalists are generally best at making this type of book readable, but we consume them more to be informed than for the sheer joy of reading. Where are the non-fiction books that make us marvel over the prose, provoke our imaginations, or contemplate our natures? Where, in short, are other books like At the Loch of the Green Corrie?

Green Corrie stands out because it's autobiographical, yet self-effacing; reflective in ways that invite us to probe rather than listen to homilies; and poetic both literally and figuratively. It's short, yet it's also a travelogue, a history and geology lesson, and a meditation upon friendship. It dips into everything from mountain climbing and fishing to questions of land ownership, a sense of self, lessons learned from the departed, and the meaning of life. All of this unfurls from the slimmest of premises: Greig set off with two friends to find, then fish, a remote mountain lake in Assynt, a region in the far north of Scotland. Why? Because Greig's departed mentor, poet Norman MacCaig, spoke fondly of it and Greig hoped to discover more of MacCaig's spirit and nature there. MacCaig's poetry appears throughout, as does some of Greig's own verse.  

No review can do justice to this book, so let me simply offer a few samples that give a sense of the glories of the book's prose and profundities.

On remembering the departed: Our days are numbered and we still don't know what that number is. So let us not sift through the dead who grow more numerous every year. Let the book of homage remain unwritten and unread. Yet there are places and times on this Earth when the ground as it were grows thin, and the dead rise of themselves. Gone days, dead parents, lost friends, old loves, rise round us as an escort, an entourage, to provoke, counsel and console. As we drive, or lie with a book at the day's end, we may glimpse them at the edge of vision. They must be spoken with, if we are to remain honest.

On over-learning about things intrinsically sublime: Sometimes the more you know, the less you see. What you encounter is your knowledge, not the thing itself.

On seeking to be mindful of the now and geologic Deep Time: I ambled back down to the car and drove off into the rest of the day, floating on Deep Time. I sometimes think only the unfolding present moment and Deep Time are good for us, and better not to mess with mister inbetween. As with the bifocal lenses I tried last year – the close-up and the long distance are true, while the middle distance is fuzzy and befuddled. Unfortunately that is where we live most of the time.

On the inevitability of change: World rolls on. This lochan is still here, maybe a degree warmer, though none of the water can be the same as last time we were here. A loch is essentially a bath with the tap running and the plug out. We are not so different. Let me not stand here and deplore. We are in danger of doing what we swore we never would when we were young, saying that the world is all changing for the worse. Dangerous, doomed and horrendous, or beautiful, mysterious and magnificent beyond reason– one's take on the world says more about oneself than the world. Let me not end up ringing my hands over all who have gone. They in their time were doubtless thought not a patch on their predecessors. The past is a bourach*. Let's pay homage, cut off the useful hooks and tie them to a fresh cast.

I could pull out dozens of poignant quotes like this–phrases that induce wonder, melancholy, and lucidity. The beauty with which Greig wields the English language is a hatchet to the argument that today's 140-character world can be called "communication." Not a chapter flew by without slowing my mind and forcing me to think upon the whys behind a world full of whats. Read any Andrew Greig book upon which you can put your hands.  

Rob Weir

* Bourach (boor-ack) is a Scots dialect word that means a muddled mess. It's also a hill, but an untidy one.

My Brilliant Friend a Poignant Portrait of Postwar Naples

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND (2012/15)

Elena Ferrante

Europe Edition, 331 pages

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Even today Naples is a place where dreams die swift and hard. Is it a municipality of 3.1 million, or 3.1 million anarchists haphazardly thrown into the same 45 square miles? As Western European cities go, Naples–like Marseille, Palermo, or Liverpool–invites adjectives such as "tough" and "gritty." It simultaneously fascinates and horrifies; nothing quite works, yet everyone is cheerfully resigned to muddling through as best they can.

Let's just say that muddling through was considerably harder in the 1950s, a time in which Italy was struggling with its recent fascist past and cleaning up wartime devastation. The Camorra thrived in the vacuum left by effective government and was about the only thing that did thrive. Naples is the setting for Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, a novel that's like a Vittorio De Sica film set to type. The novel was originally published in 2012, but is now in a new edition as Ferrante has just published The Story of the Lost Child, the final book in a tetralogy known as "The Neapolitan Novels." Its glowing reviews have set Ferrante novices such as myself back to book one, My Brilliant Friend.

The book centers on the friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, who grow up in a poor yet lively Naples neighborhood. The expectation for most girls is an elementary school education, then work, early marriage, and motherhood. To get beyond the sixth grade, as Elena manages, involves passing rigorous exams, scrapping together tuition money, borrowing grubby books, and working with tutors to master subjects such as Latin, Greek grammar, English, and philosophy. What are the chances that the daughter of a shoemaker can do this?

My Brilliant Friend is often hailed as a story of female friendship and so it is, but it's far more than this. In the hands of a lesser writer the story might be little more than a hardship versus perseverance tale; in Ferrante's hands the struggle to acquire knowledge is a mere foil for peeling back the layers of a Neapolitan onion for its textures, cadences, smells, and daily struggles for survival. It's also about the randomness of life's chances. As Lila prepares for marriage at age 16, she calls Elena "my brilliant friend," which we recognize as doubly ironic as it is she, not Elena, who should be the scholar. Elena is bright enough, but it's Lila who is her greatest tutor–the one who borrows Latin grammar books from the library to tutor Elena. Lila is stoic on the surface, but is she also vicariously living her first best destiny through Elena? Place our two characters in the insalde miste context of a neighborhood of ex-fascists, pastry chefs, low-level criminals, casual workers, poets, widows, housewives, tinkers, beggars, and ironclad patriarchy and you have a book that feels 'bigger' and more sprawling than its 331 pages. 

It's also as enigmatic as Ferrante, a beloved author whose identity is unknown and might not even be female, though the author claims (on the web) to be a mother.  Ferrante is a heck of a writer, whoever he or she might be. My Brilliant Friend skirts the edges of magical realism without actually going there, a deft bit of writing that bathes characters and circumstances in a glow that's also quite Neapolitan. Imagine growing up in Naples but never visiting the sea until you are well into your teens. Imagine living under skies that dazzle, but knowing more darkness than light. Imagine and dream, but don't trust the latter.

Don't believe any remarks that pigeonhole My Brilliant Friend in that sexist sinkhole labeled "chick lit." It's about humanity and I look forward to wending my way through the three remaining books. From where I now sit, Elena Ferrante feels like an Italian Marcel Pagnol. 

Rob Weir