Cigdem Aslan Explores the Rough Rebitiko World with Grace

-->

-->

ÇIĞDEM ASLAN

Mortissa

Asphalt Tango Records 4313

* * * *

Culture is a funny thing–if something sticks around long enough, a musical style for instance, it acquires an air of respectability that’s far removed from its original stench. Who today remembers that tango, merengue, the blues, and fado were once sung in brothels, gin joints, and dive bars. Add to that list the Greek style known as rebetiko, which older non-Greeks first encountered partially scrubbed in the movie Never On a Sunday (1960). There were some good rebetiko recordings in the 1980s, and then passed from popularity. Guess it’s time for them to cycle again and who better to sing it than Turkish-born, London-based Çiğdem Aslan?

If you’re wondering how a Turkish woman ends up doing Greek music sung by women in rough fishermen bars (and supplementing their vocalist’s income with causal participation in the world’s oldest trade), history provides an answer. Until independence in 1830, Greece was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire. Moreover, as a land tied to the sea, it has since antiquity been an economic and cultural crossroads. When you hear Aslan sing rebetiko it will sound like a mash-up of Greek, Turkish, Balkan, North African, and klezmer music.  That’s because it is! Trading outposts are generally cosmopolitan places and Greece was once a land in which Christians, Jews, and Muslims came together (often in the same brothels).

Mortissa translates “strong woman,” and Aslan may be a tad romantic in her view of rebetiko singers, though one certainly had to have chutzpah to survive in some of the places it was originally sung. Then again, she’s not aiming for folklore or fieldwork–she’s trying to show the fire, the sorrow, the laughter, and the pluck within the tradition and enfold it into well-crafted modern arrangements. To that end, she has accumulated superb London-based Greek and Turkish musicians. The songs are also culled from both the public domain and from composers such as Vangelis Papazoglu. There’s also a song famed it Turkey about the outlaw Çakici. Aslan sings each in an easy voice that’s full of ornamentation and emotion, but has hints of pop modernity. Call it the past meets the present.

Rob Weir

Hula Honeys Take Hawaii to the Mainland

-->

HULA HONEYS

A Hui Hou

Community Music

* * *

If the Andrews Sisters had gone to Hawaii and added a few island tunes to their repertoire, they would have sounded a bit like the Hula Honeys. This frothy collection of jazz standards and Hapa Haole tunes (island tunes sung in English) sports tight harmonies, swingy beats, a sunny disposition, and some songs that are not in English. The Hula Honeys are Robyn Kneubuhl and Ginger Johnson who are that most rare of things–women singing songs from the South Pacific who are actually from Hawaii. Johnson's case is even rarer; she's a Haole (white) who is musically conversant in native languages. These ukulele and guitar-rooted songs sound easy and natural. They also sound vintage and it’s not because the Hula Honeys supplement their island set list with pieces such as Johnny Mercer’s “Too Marvelous for Words” or the Bill Loughborough/David Wheat classic “Better Than Anything.” Take “Girl in the Coconut Hat,” which sounds like it may have come from a 1940s movie soundtrack but is actually a Johnson original. The Hula Honeys do a lot of that. Their cover of Mel Peterson’s “You’re at a Lu’au Now” makes you feel like you’re contemplating Hawaii as it appears on a sepia-tinted pre-World War II postcard. In 2010, Kneubuhl and Johnson won an award for the best Hawaiian jazz album (Girl Talk). A Hui Hou (Until We Meet Again) is slightly folkier, though guest steel guitar, saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet assure that the music always sways and that it remains true to the template of classic Hawaiian female ensembles. Those of us who live thousands of miles to the east, which is most of us, may find the idea of “hula” music a bit odd. I say, give it a try–you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

You can hear two tracks on the Hula Honeys website.

Rob Weir 

Beautiful Ruins a Lovely Novel

-->

Beautiful Ruins (2013)

Jess Walter

Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780061928178

* * * * *

No one who has visited Cinque Terre can forget it. Five towns separated by rocky mountain ridges hug the Ligurian coast and spill their bright pastels down the rock cleft toward the sea. One of them, Vernazza, features a peninsula jutting into the ocean that is crowned with the remains of a 15^th century castle. When viewed from the hiking trail high above, it is a beautiful ruin. It is child’s play to imagine romance in such a setting.

For all of that, Italy’s west coast is also a hard place. Opulent, fat-walleted jet setters frolic on beaches and self-lubricate in pricy bars in one village, while just miles away fishermen mend their nets, their sails, and their clothing–destitution just one bad haul away. It’s also child’s play to imagine broken dreams in such places.

Jess Walter’s brilliant new novel uses these physical and metaphorical settings to probe what we do with the ruins we encounter and make in our lives. Porto Vergogna (Port of Shame) is a ruin of sorts–a town blessed with beautiful coast line and cursed by inaccessibility and poverty, unlike nearby Portovenere, which is dotted with nightclubs, glitzy hotels, and cash-rich tourists. The former is home to Paquale Tursi, a child of poverty with a spattering of English, regret for a love gone wrong, dreams of converting his down-market Hotel Adequate View into a luxury destination, and one semi-regular American visitor, Alvis Bender, a writer who drinks more than he types. Pasquale’s world is about to be transformed in ways he can’t imagine when an American starlet, Dee Moray, inexplicably checks into his hotel, not one in Portovenere. It is 1962, and Dee is fresh from the set of Cleopatra, a big-budget bomb starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that is better known for scandal than fine acting.

I hesitate to say more because this is a book of external and interior discoveries. Suffice it to say that it goes back and forth between 1962 and now, and that Burton is indeed a character, though a relatively minor one. Actually, it’s hard to say who the main character is, though the book’s central mystery centers on Dee, and some heavy-duty soul-searching befalls Pasquale. The book is really about the aforementioned ruins, including a literal one visited by Dee and Pasquale. Just to tantalize, among the other ruins is the botched plastic surgery of Hollywood director Michael Deane; a ruinous relationship maintained for no good reason by his assistant, Claire Silver; the doomed script of Shane Wheeler, whose Italian is little better than Pasquale’s English; and Bender, the writer who doesn’t write. The central question is how we confront ruins–our disappointments, sins, inappropriate desires, personal limitations, and the ensnaring lies we tell. Can anyone find love among those ruins? Or redemption?

This is a beautifully written book that contains passages you feel compelled to read aloud. Walter’s skill is also displayed in the ease with which he moves us between numerous characters without confusing the reader, or breaking the pace appropriate for each scene. I marveled over the transitions, as some of the pacing is as languid as a daydream above Vernazza, and others as frenetic as a speedboat coursing the Ligurian Sea. My second metaphor will likely describe the pace at which you will rip through this novel. For lovers of irony, it’s almost inevitable that this book will be optioned for a movie. But you’ll have to read it to understand why that’s ironic.

Rob Weir     

New CD from Sean Tyrrell One of Many Moods

-->

SEÁN TYRRELL

Walker of the Snow

The Vital Record 003

* * * 

To get a sense of Seán Tyrrell’s latest, think Woody Guthrie rated R. Like Guthrie, Tyrrell’s voice will never invoke adjectives such as “mellifluous,” but it’s choked full of emotional honesty. Unlike Guthrie, Tyrrell is far more direct and dark in discussing the seamier side of life. His musical treatment of the Oscar Wilde poem “Reading Gaol” is so downright creepy that when he sings, “each man slays the thing he loves” you envision Tyrrell hovering in the shadows with a knife. There are lots of sanitized versions of “Ringsend,” but Tyrrell unabashedly opens with the original words: “I will live in Ringsend with a red-headed whore.” Then there are the songs that quake with righteous anger, like his cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” and “Black Hole,” Tyrrell’s take down of phonies. Yet, there are also moments of unexpected tenderness–a delicate instrumental of “The Derry Air” (“Danny Boy”), his clipped brogue rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” and the title track, originally a late Victorian poem from Charles Dawson Shanly and one Tyrrell picked up form his collaborations with Davy Spillane. Walker of the Snow is an album of many moods and much of it–including a rendition of “On Top of Old Smokey”– feels like a throwback to the days of the Folk Revival. One wonders, in fact, if eighteen tracks aren’t too many in an age in which music is often purchased a la carte rather than by the platter, but at least there’s something for everybody.  Rob Weir

Rusty Belle Not Steely Enough for Me

RUSTY BELLE

Common Courtesy

Self-Produced

* *

Confession time. I want to love Rusty Belle. Really. They’re local. I hear flashes of promise. Occasionally they lay down catchy riffs. The harmonies are sweet. Chris Smither likes them. I want to love them. I don’t. I listen to two or three tracks and need to find something else to do. When a tune named “I’m Alive” makes you check your own pulse to make sure something in the room is animated, that’s not a good sign.

Common Courtesy opens with “Sad Little Boys” and it’s emblematic of most of the CD’s ten tracks. It has a little shuffle based on repeated notes that finds a groove and stays in it. The title aside, it feels more like an old man making his way down the sidewalk on a hot, humid day and trying not to sweat. Another tune, “Anything,” begs to be torchy, but never sparks a flame; “When We Were Older” takes us on a 6:13 journey that’s like a caterpillar’s meander. I found a few things I liked–the dangerous-sounding “Devil In Your Smile” is memorable, and “Light at the End of the Tunnel” is an intriguing rockabilly/gospel mash. Even these, however, could benefit from better studio engineering as the vocals bleed into fuzzed out instrumentation in ways that create a unified sound, but do little to highlight the lyrics. (And don’t look to two-point, single-spaced, no-breaks liner notes for help!)

Rusty Belle began life as an offbeat folk trio, morphed into glam-rock, and then turned to pop. They now fancy themselves a rock band, though they really fall into an emerging genre that’s faintly bluegrass, kind of country, and very atmospheric. I want to love them. But if I’m honest, I see Rusty Belle as a trio with unrealized potential and no clear identity. When I want torrid, they give me torpor; when it feels like it’s time to rock, they mellow out.

As always, though, I appreciate that music strikes people in different ways. You might want to check them out for yourself. There’s an entire concert on YouTube, so if you like what you hear, Vermonters can see them in Burlington Radio Bean) on September 27 or Ludlow (Town Hall) on October 12. Those in my area can catch them in Northampton, MA (Parlor Room) on September 28. Feel free to tell me I’m nuts.

Rob Weir

Life After Life: Over Hyped and Under Realized

-->

Life After Life (2013)

Kate Atkinson

Reagan Arthur Books # 9780316176484

* *

Ursula Todd was born in 1909, but then “darkness fell” and she was gone before she ever lived. Ursula Todd was born in 1909 and was pronounced stillborn, until the umbilical cord was removed from her neck and breath was blown into her tiny lungs. To borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut: and so it goes.

What if we could live our lives over (and over and over) again? The assumption that it sometimes happens is at the center of Kate Atkinson’s new novel–one praised by a lot of folks, including some of my favorite authors, like J. Courtney Sullivan. Alas, I found Life After Life a novel more likely to impress writers than readers. I can see why they like it. What novelist hasn’t created a character and wished he or she could play out all the possible scenarios of that character’s life? Atkinson accomplishes that task by constructing parallel universes around her various Ursulas. For one Ursula, darkness falls and she dies; for another, death is cheated and a new narrative emerges. Is this reincarnation, or the butterfly effect? Déjà vu, or paths anew? Each of us makes thousands of choices in our lives, but what if just one would completely alter your trajectory? When, if ever, would you recognize that it was the single moment that altered the future? And what if we could choose again? It’s a promising set up; I wish the execution were better.

These fascinating questions are not original to Atkinson. They are old ideas that even figures such as Donne, Goethe, and Poe considered. Recent works that use the same pivots include Groundhog’s Day, The Cloud Atlas, and The Time Traveler’s Wife. For my money, each of these is superior to Life After Life. Why? Because Ursula is so passive. She is the child of easy-going Hugh and uptight Sylvie, the latter of whom used to be a lot of fun, but has melted into the impressions-obsessed boorishness common among pre-World War I English bourgeois housewives. Sylvie duly had a passel of children, including Ursula and her younger brother, the ne’er do well Teddy, but Sylvie’s only real joy lies in badmouthing Hugh’s bohemian sister, Isabel. “Izzy,” a prototypical 1920s “New Woman,” is easily the most interesting character in the book–sassy, promiscuous, avant-garde, and carefree. Alas, Ursula is the book’s main character, and she’s more like Hugh than Izzy.

The novel is allegedly constructed around Ursula’s “choices,” but she makes few. She is exactly the thing that drives me crazy about characters in novels from the Brontë sisters–you think you see some spunk in her, but she never does much with it. That is to say, she doesn’t make choices; she reacts to circumstances thrust upon her. Although we admire Ursula’s pluck in a World War II scenario in which she becomes a civil defense volunteer during the Blitz, everything that occurs seems happenstance rather than chosen. (In another scenario, a bomb delivers her demise; in still another–the book’s most-contrived and least believable thread–she has a German husband, befriends Eva Braun, and kills Hitler!) But whatever the situation, Izzy makes things happen; Ursula detachedly drifts whichever way the wind takes her.

I ultimately tired of Atkinson’s start/stop/start again structure. We are supposed to accept Ursula as an “old soul,” but for this to work, she needs to be more like a Star Trek Trill–a joined species whose outward bodies have short lives, but whose internal symbiants have multiple lives and retain the lessons learned from each. There is so little connection between the various Ursulas that they are like free-floating ions disconnected from a nucleic soul. Of Life After Life, one British reader remarked that it is “curiously empty.” Exactly!

Rob Weir

The Company You Keep Worth Inviting Onto Your DVD Player

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP (2012) –Video Review

Directed by Robert Redford

Sony Pictures Classics, 121 minutes, R (language)

* * * *

The Company You Keep won several prizes at the Venice Film Festival and is one of the better films made about post-Sixties radicals. Chances are good you’ve not seen it. It made a paltry $5.1 million at the U.S. box office. Go to Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB and you’ll find middling to low ratings. So let me get this off my chest right away: This superb film was ignored because of its politics, not because of its lack of merit. That is to say, it doesn’t get down on its knees and beg the Right’s forgiveness for Sixties’ idealism.

Quite the opposite. The film opens with the arrest of Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a former member of the Weather Underground who is wanted for murder. She’s been hiding in plain sight for decades–as a housewife in Vermont–and the irony of her arrest is that she was on her way to turn herself in when the FBI finally nabbed her. The film is fictional, but the Solarz character is a mash of two very real former 60s political prisoners: former SDS bomb maker Cathy Wilkerson, who submitted to arrest in 1980; and Kathy Boudin, who went to prison in 1984 for her role in a Brinks truck hijacking in which two cops were killed. (Boudin wasn’t at the site; she was supposed to drive the get-away vehicle once robbers ditched their car.) Both Wilkerson and Boudin admitted they did some ill-considered things and Boudin, who served 20 years in prison, claimed it wasn’t part of the plan to hurt anyone and was torn by grief that it happened. What neither of them did was apologize for opposing the government, their desire to change the system, or the validity of their ideals. Sarandon recreates that sentiment in jail where reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) asks if she’d do it all again. She lectures the too-young Shepard on the evils of Vietnam and the government’s war on civil rights leaders. Then she looks him in the eyes and proclaims, “Yes. If I didn’t have kids, I’d do it again.” Well, we all know only the Tea Party is allowed to say things like this about the government.   

What makes The Company You Keep miles better than schmaltzy claptrap like Taking Woodstock, Forrest Gump, or the gadzillions of 60s-rock star films is that it unabashedly deals with politics and isn’t afraid to show that many people still believe the things they professed five decades ago. Those folks aren’t starry-eyed about any of it, but neither do they seek absolution. (Any remorse they feel is on the personal level, not the ones where political and social power reside.) The movie centers on Shepard and Jim Grant (Redford), a widowed attorney who refuses to take the Solarz case or explain to the nosy Shepard why. Shepard digs and discovers that Grant is actually Nick Sloan, a former Weatherman himself wanted for murder, but presumed dead. This sends Jim/Nick scurrying in a mad dash to clear his name and protect his eleven-year-old daughter, Isabel (Jackie Evancho). Nick must stay one step ahead of both Shepard and FBI agent Cornelius (Terence Howard) by drawing upon an underground network that’s still very much intact.

From here it’s pretty much a standard political thriller insofar as the chase goes, but Redford does a terrific job of probing relationships between people who once so thoroughly bonded through idealism that it’s as if their friendships have merely been on a 40-year hiatus. There are terrific cameo roles for gifted actors such as Richard Jenkins, Nick Nolte, Sam Elliott, and the still-striking-after-all-these-years Julie Christie. Kudos also go to Chris Cooper as Nick’s brother, Stanly Tucci as an exasperated editor, and Brendan Gleeson as Henry Osborne, the retired detective who investigated the murder for which Nick is accused. Okay, so maybe Shepard is a bit too intuitive to be believable (or maybe the FBI really is this dumb). Perhaps LaBeouf, Evancho, and Brit Marling (as Osborne’s daughter) come close to setting off “over-precious” alarms, and maybe the film’s resolution is too pat, but the pacing is taut, the dialogue is earnest, and the suspense palpable. Forget what you’ve heard–or didn’t hear–about this film. It’s an intelligent look at the post-Sixties life of former Weathermen and the sort of mature filmmaking we’ve come to expect of Robert Redford, who long ago proved he’s always been more than just a pretty face.  Rob Weir