I was saddened to read that electric bass player Hugh Hopper died on June 7.
Curiously, I came across his obituary at almost the same time I saw this article about the last Virgin Megastore in the U.S. closing. For it was a Virgin Megastore, in my case the one on Oxford Street, London, that introduced me to Hopper's music and bass playing with a copy of the album, 1984 that I found in a cut-out bin for maybe £1.99 and took a chance on.
I loved and still love this record and it led me back into Hopper's playing with Soft Machine. He became my favorite electric bass player. Here's a nice tribute to the man using the Soft Machine track, Kings & Queens.
Youthful sopranos who can both dance a striptease and sustain a fiendishly difficult vocal performance for the bulk of the 90 minutes of this one-act opera are not that common, but Ms. Kaduce was fabulous in the role. Easily one of the most virtuoso performances I've seen at any opera.
The music is lush, rich, late-Romantic heaven, but the story, based on Oscar Wilde's play, is as warped as they come. Rich in incestuous and necrophilic themes, it summarises a kind of perverse few of sex, death and women that was very much in vogue in artistic circles before the First World War, but today comes across as more than a little weird.
Worthwhile though. The story may be icky, but it has undeniable pyschological power, and the opera had me captivated from beginning to end.
I get an occasional newletter from Captain Oi! records. The latest has this plea for continued business. I thought it explained the current situation rather well!
We're all experiencing tough times at the moment. But the worst thing you can do in a recession is stop spending. Think about it......
If we keep selling CDs it keeps the pressing plant in a job, the artwork guy in a job, the courier with parcels to deliver etc etc. That courier gets his wage. He goes down the pub and has a pint. This keeps the barmaid in a job. She spends her money on getting her hair done, which keeps the local hair dresser in employment. Happy Days! The hairdresser goes out and buys a new TV which keeps the factory guys who make them in a job etc etc etc. So that 1 PUNK CD has now saved the UK's economy! Don't all write into the government at once we're not after any praise!! We would just ask you to do your bit in these hard times and if there's a CD that you haven't got now's the best time to buy it. It keeps the scene ticking over and makes it possible for more releases to come in the future.
Spent a very pleasant evening at the St. Louis Art Museum listening to a soprano and piano song recital by Wendy Bryn Harmer and Christopher Cano. Songs by Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn, Wagner and Irving Berlin. Beautifully sung and played.
I went in the company of some friends from work including my soon-to-be-ex boss. It felt just a little bit strange, but he's a really nice person. I just can't work for him, alas. Had conversations earlier with him and my old boss where I was honest about I could and could not do and what I wanted. Almost anti-interviews; these were a dose of plain speaking and reality that is not that common in my experience of the dance of work.
The outcome was good. Details still need to be finalized but the result is that I will be staying in the same lab doing something else for someone else after a couple of months have elapsed to give my current boss time to find a replacement. I hope he does and it works out for him.
An exhausting week, yes. But a very productive one.
An anti-list for a change. I like an awful lot of music of all kinds, but there is some that simply leaves me cold.
Broadly speaking, it falls into four kinds. There's the genre known as arena-rock, populated by bands such as Journey, Styx, Bad Company and their ilk. There's the jam band, a particular dislike being the Dave Matthews Band, but others such as Phish and much (but not all) of the Grateful Dead's output leave me equally unimpressed. Thirdly, there's easy-listening jazz, most typified by Kenny G. Finally, there's what I call the NPR(National Public Radio)-kind, Sting, Sheryl Crow, Riverdance and Yanni. Ugh.
Note that there is a common thread to much of this music. It tends to be cross-genre and blandly smooth. I prefer my cross-genre jagged and my smooth to be interestingly ambient.
At parties where my pet dislikes are played, I smile, nod, and reach for the bottle when told how wonderful the music is. I can tune it out for a little while. If it's a particularly long exposure, an antidote of something noisy, loud and upsetting (i.e The Velvet Underground's Sister Ray) works wonders once I get home.
With all the excitement - and suspense - both locally (i.e. my job situation) and worldwide (i.e. the economy, politics, etc. etc), I've noticed that these past few months and weeks have gone by very fast.
A bit too fast. I felt a need to slow down creeping up on me and found one by listening to Schubert's fabulous Lieder.
There is something about this music that compels me to fall back into an almost 19th century way of viewing the passage of time, and thus everything around me slows down. My mood mellows with it.
Now, for some reason this mellowing has brought back a memory of a narrow financial escape that I made some years ago.
This was well before the current recession. House prices were still shooting up and money seemed to be falling off trees for certain people. I had decided to have a consultation with the Vanguard Group financial advisors that are offered through my work to discuss and plan our retirement savings
Three individuals, two young and one somewhat older, went over our current finances with me and agreed that all seemed on track for a wealthy retirement. We had recently paid off our house and had finally brought our debt level close to zero.
This puzzled one of the advisors, one of the younger pair. "Why don't you take out a home equity loan and invest it in the stock market?", she postulated. As if this was the most natural thing in the world and everybody did it (and maybe they did, for all I know). I looked at her sideways and upside-down. This was a retirement savings specialist talking? Even then, I sensed that this was a recipe for future trouble and a very risky approach. So I blew off the advice as so much nonsense.
Of course, with the way things have turned out, I can be very thankful that I ignored that advice. Anyone who took it is liable to have seen their debt increase and their assets, both in real estate and in the market, greatly depreciated. A bad place to be.
I think of this today as perhaps being the worst financial advice I have ever heard, surprising from a company such as Vanguard that - still - has a good reputation overall. It also has left me distrustful of financial advisors. I think recent events have shown that distrust to be valid.
The amazing thing about YouTube is that you can find almost anything, even from times that seem very pre-video. Here's a wholly delightful clip of Roxy Music from 1972, when they were at their glam rockiest and strangest, and this was the band that played my first ever rock concert in that same year. At Reading Town Hall. Truthfully, I clearly remember very little about it except it was very loud and very bright. So it's a treat to find this clip to fill in the gaps that my memory has shaken out. Curiously, my strongest and most visual memory of that night comes from outside the hall and standing in the parking lot, either queueing to get in or waiting afterwards for a ride home.
Such a long time ago. I still love the song though. Imagine, an oboe in a rock song.
I was listening to this beautiful song earlier this morning. It's from the Nonsuch album. That's why I posted the Beach Boys song 'Surf's Up' a little earlier. Listen to the two of of them in succession, and it's clear how much of the sound and feel of the XTC song derives from Surf's Up and other Beach Boys songs of the 'SMiLE' era. The stately piano, melody, chord changes marked by a prominent bass guitar, indeed the whole asymmetric shape of the song took me right back.
XTC remain one of the most overlooked pop bands, still really a cult more than anything else. But for anyone who loves the songcraft of the greatest 1960s' artists, XTC took that and ran with it from the late 1970s onwards. They made a lot of records. They are almost uniformly excellent.
I've not been feeling very inspired recently, and, doing a little self-analysis, it's clear that worries of varying natures from my mother-in-law's health, the topsy-turvy polemics of the Presidential elections and the stomach-churning gyrations and uncertainties of the financial markets are all contributing to this sense of unease.
My mother-in-law? Well, she's been in hospital with back problems and, hopefully, they are on the mend. As to the elections and the markets - well, the election only has a bit more than two weeks to go. I will be glad to see the end of it, not least because it brings out the most absurd over-reactions in people. Your man (or woman) becomes a saint, the opponent the Devil him-(or her)-self. It's all so overblown: none of these black-and-white judgements are true, but it's easy to get caught up in the winner vs. loser gamesmanship. I have to step back from it. I mean, I know who I support - Obama - but I certainly don't think he's going to solve every problem with a wave of a magic wand. Nor do I think, should McCain be elected, that a Reign of Terror will be inflicted on liberals like myself.
Whoever wins is going to find that the world will impose its own order on them. And let's hope they can adapt.
That brings me to the financial woes of the world. To my eyes, this looks like a very large forest fire in a very dry and windy season. You can put out vast swathes of it, but a change in the wind and a spark carried through the air, and off it goes again.
Who knows if the measures taken recently will really help. The fact is that a financial edifice several times larger than this planet and built solely of straw is falling down. Personally, I think those responsible should have their fortunes removed and a few years of their lives devoted to a jail cell, but that's not going to happen. It's a mess, and it's going to be a mess for a long time. I guess we'll get used to it.
Meanwhile, I'll end with the finest musical ode to uncertainty I've ever heard:
I'm a leaf on a windy day Pretty soon I'll be blown away How long will the wind blow? How long will the wind blow?
As I get older and much further removed from the music 'scene' that I immersed myself in when I was a young man, I realise that there are whole swathes of popular music passing me by. Sometimes, playing yet again some song I loved in my youth, I realise that I am becoming fossilized. Stuck. A prisoner of his era.
I don't have the energy or the dedication to really re-engage. Besides, most of what I listen to these days is classical music which is, by its very nature, timeless.
Nonetheless, when something catches my attention - for whatever reason - and I dip into it, I find myself discovering treasures that would have otherwise passed me by.
A roundabout way of introducing the Hed Kandi series of compilations that I began to collect in the early 2000s. These feature club and house music of the late 1980s to the 1990s, music that I had no exposure to whatsoever beforehand. To be truthful, I bought the first one simply because I liked the cover art and CD design, but soon discovered a wealth of soulful music within. A whole world of unknown artists and a style that does not fail to lift me when I listen.
Here's a few songs that Hed Kandi introduced me to directly - and I am very glad it did.
I've been buying discount CDs from the Berkshire Record Outlet for years. If you love classical music, yet can't really afford to pay retail for all you would like, it's the perfect solution.
Anyway, I've picked up a lot of very fine music in my time, including the Hanssler edition of J. S. Bach's complete works (not yet all played yet, I might add - 171 CDs). Tonight I got an e-mail about some Warner box sets and idly followed the link and found, to my delight and astonishment, the Scott Ross' recording of the complete harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.
This is a fabulous undertaking - all 34 CDs, in this case! - a recording of some of the greatest and largely unknown music ever composed by a totally sympathetic performer.
Needless to say, I had an order in within 2 minutes.
Now I just have to wait for it to come. This is going to be good!
I was saddened to read that electric bass player Hugh Hopper died on June 7.
WIDGETIZE