A Small Experiment

Who knows what will go here

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I know this makes me new, but this Tumblr is 8 years old today. There is really only one way to celebrate appropriately.

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I discovered this maybe a month ago and it's another one of those where I get more taken by it the more I listen to it. It's very faithful to the original, but is jammier and more playful, which somehow makes it very different. I don't even know that I have my arms around all the ways it's different, but there's a really impressive combination of the fidelity and the personal expression in this version.

Martin Miller's band is really good. If you have spent even a little time listening to them, they are able to do an impressive range of things artistically and technically. Ben Jud has a nice, clean delivery. He's not emptying every chamber like Seal does, and on a song like that, which is not especially dynamic in its architecture, you need something to carry it along and Seal carries a lot of that freight. I feel like Jud is leaving a little more room for everyone else, but you don't get to the jam until 4:15, so it has to work as an actual song before then and it does.

Jud's bass playing is chunky. The thumb picking thing drives me a little bit nuts, since it's the thing you do with the bass for the first 15 minutes before someone shows you that you can play fingerstyle or use the thumb to slap or maybe play with a pick. Like most of the bassists on the planet, I really only pick with the thumb when I want a really round sound, probably in conjunction with some muting. Jud, on the other hand, also has an interesting double-thumbing thing that isn't much like Victor Wooten's, but is sort of like that Geddy does (and I do!) with the picking fingers, using them more or less like you would double picking with a plectrum. Jud also plays conventional fingerstyle, but seems to favor it when he's using a rounder, less trebly sound, oddly enough.

Both Nico Schliemann and Marius Leicht have that talent of stepping into spaces to be the star of the show for a couple of seconds and then letting someone else shine through. As a bassist, I can appreciate the virtues of that. Felix Lehrmann is a first-class builder with his drum parts. The thing you hear here, where he takes more liberties as the song goes on (as Joe Satriani once noted about Simon Phillips' performance on MSG's "Lost Horizons"), is a first-class version of the trait.

Speaking of Satriani, Lari Basilio has very clearly been influenced by Satch, switching back and forth between bluesy and modal playing in her solo. I love that she has completely absorbed the 90s guitar heroes (the 7-string Ibanez she sometimes uses is a clear Vai nod and the first/last picture from this article looks like she raided Eric Johnson's wardrobe--and she sort of sounds like him at times, too), but still sounds original. It's funny, because Martin Miller has a lot of commonality with her in that respect, but he plays a much more overtly bluesy solo, albeit with a little run out of the John Petrucci showroom at 6:07).

The back half of the song does show the value of being able to play interestingly through simple changes. As great as the the original is in terms of production and performance, I feel like I discovered a lot about a song that I never really gave a lot of thought until now.

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I reviewed Beyond The Missouri Sky back when it came out. I had shopped a few of them to the old Bassics magazine, but they passed on this one. It was a little weird and, as short as it was, probably a little too long for purpose.

I have always loved this song. I heard it for the first time in a while--and for the first time in the wild in a very, very long time. And had a realization about the song that I didn't even realize when putting together the short review back in'96.

Charlie Haden has never played an extra note in his life. As a guy who's a big Geddy/Steve Harris/Jaco/Stanley/Jack Bruce/Chris Squire kind of bassist, I am 100% the opposite. But there is also still a part of me that loves economy, conceptually--and really loves Charlie Haden, in particular.

This song might be the best example of that I can think of. Despite playing in the duo setting, when Charlie passes the melody over to Metheny, he literally starts playing whole notes. In the later build, he outlines some chord tones, but there are big parts of the song where he is literally just saying "this is the root of the chord for this measure." But he's Charlie Haden, just a guy who wants to play what you need him to and not more.

That thought I had that was new to me...it isn't just that when Charlie has the (unadorned) melody off the top that he plays it straight, but that he plays it in a way that is very naive, tonally. Roughly the equivalent of someone singing in their unadorned head voice. It's not that Haden can't play it another way, but that he chooses to give you this sound. Given the lyrical content, which is somewhere in between hymn and folkier church song, makes perfect sense. If go you back and listen to Haden in other contexts, especially the Liberation Orchestra, I think I would argue that he perhaps makes those decisions more conspicuously than almost anyone in the history of the instrument.

Oh: Pat Metheny is great, too.

[randgugotur-6]

Diamonds And Rust - Judas Priest

from the Compilation Album 

“Hero Hero” 

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Having talked about the new Priest last night, I wanted to go back in time a bit. This song was itself considered pretty poppy at the time it came out, but I think if you don't know it's a Joan Baez song, it fits squarely within the Priest oeuvre. It even has the metal gallop, which, yes, is more a Maiden thing (a Steve Harris thing!) than a Priest thing. But still--metal.

That they are doing a Joan Baez cover shouldn't be that surprising for a band that took its name from a Dylan song and is of a certain generation. I do get that "metal" might not be the first think you would think of for the original, but it, at minimum, rocks. I do like the way they played it circa 2004, but I wanted to make the point about the gallop and the get into double-bass-drum mode pretty quickly once they kick in to heavy mode.

In any event, it's a fun thing to compared against the rest of their catalog, including "Crown of Horns."

[dodinaslesavage]

Judas Priest - Crown Of Horns (2024)

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So...there's a thing about Judas Priest. They're just old enough that they probably don't belong to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, but if you're trying to think about prominent British metal bands in the early 80s, it's them and Maiden. Def Leppard, too, but they were clearly on a different path by Pyromania. But Priest is also not exactly a metal band; Rob Halford is fond of referring to them as a Rock and Roll band and I think that's right. Yes, "Painkiller" is absolutely metal, but "Heading Out To The Highway" and "Living After Midnight" are quintessential rock songs in structure and attitude. Rocka Rolla, of course. "Turbo Lover" (which I like!) is controversially poppy and "Blood Red Skies"...Mike McGarvey, your current proprietor of the Doll Hut once said that it sounded like it belonged on the Rocky IV soundtrack (which I had borrowed from him at one point) and it's hard to say he's wrong--but I like it even better than "Turbo Lover."

I really like this song, but if you're asking if this is a Metal song or a Rock and Roll song, the answer is clearly "yes." It's got that cool, 100% indulgent late 80s guitar intro and the hook is snagged from "Two Tickets To Paradise," so: Rock and Roll. But the lyrics are classic metal, the bridge gets very aggressive, and the song ends a lot louder than it begins, so: Metal.

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Cliff Spohn art for the Atari 2600 game “Surround,“ 1977.

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Love this. The game is old enough that the Atari VCS wasn't really even the 2600 yet.

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This is the new (old) song I have been enamored with the last few weeks. It's one of those songs that has aged particularly well, or, at least, has emerged as a song that is being seen as a classic--in the moment (30 years ago), it was probably something like the fourth or fifth biggest track on the album. Now it's on the very short list of Petty's best-regarded songs.

To my ears, it also sounds like a brother to Pete Droge's "Straylin Street," which is apparently tied for my 205th most-listened to song of the last 18 years (alongside Nina's "Strange Fruit," "Stairway to Heaven," "In My Life," and "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo"). Lyrically and thematically, the two songs are brothers in inverse. The desire, resignation, and outlook on life are both there in equal measure, but the worlds of the songs are as different from one another as they can be.

Miley Cyrus did a very credible cover of the song on Jimmy Fallon with her father several years ago. That said, I have no idea what Billy Ray is even doing during the performance having listened to it a few times.

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My sense is that The Bad Plus is probably most famous for its odd covers (let's just call The Rite of Spring a "cover" for the sake of this point). That said, I think this is my favorite Bad Plus track. It's one of those songs that immediately grabs you and shakes you to make sure you're paying attention.

It's a Reid Anderson composition--and it sounds like it. He is busy throughout the whole track; Anderson and David King (on drums) are subdividing all over the place in a way that makes it all hugely propulsive. The interesting thing about that is that Ethan Iverson lays back more than on the studio version for the first half of the song. When we get to his solo, though, the energy comes through a little more clearly as he hops in and out of what Anderson and King are doing rhythmically, which carries through for the rest of this performance.

When I get to the end of the song, I am always stunned that it's only been just over four minutes. It feels like so much more and I love it.

Also: Iverson's newsletter, Transitional Technology, is great if you are at all interested in Jazz and Jazz-adjacent music.

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Brian Ibbott (of Coverville fame) talked about this song a couple of times on The Morning Stream, which made me want to come back and spend a little more time with it.

It was a good idea. It's an amazing song. Insofar as I'd had any real sense of the song before last week, it was simply of it as part of the post-9/11 New York song canon. Osborne is famously one of the more embedded transplants to the city and the press she gave at the time suggested that it was at least in part based on that love for a city that was still healing. Even if Rome gets coequal billing in the song, though--particularly notable for an artist most famous for a song about God and other one that is named for Teresa of Ávila.

But that coequal billing gets to it, doesn't it? Jay Clifford (of Jump, Little Children fame) wrote it for an album that came out three years before 9/11. Lyrically, though, those lyrics hit a lot different now than they did in 1998 or 2008.

(While we're doing the YouTube thing, Rick Beato produced JLC's record Between the Dim & the Dark back in 2004)

The performance is very much a 2008 Early Show kind of read, but also deeper than you might expect from someone who often has a kind of nervous energy as a performer. I'm not sure that the funniest thing to me is that the video doesn't even mention Matt Morris and...is he more famous than Joan Osborne is now? He has certainly worked with several of the most famous artists of our time.

Let me also get off my chest: if you have Joan Osborne as a one-hit artist...just buzz off. It's kind of true, in that "One of Us" charted much higher than any song she's ever recorded, but that's awfully hard for my to reconcile with the career she's had. I don't know that I quite want to pitch it there, but she's kind of Johnny Cash, right? She's more an interpreter of other people's music, but when she has a hand in writing a song, it's a real banger. She's also got a voice that can cross over in terms of genre, and has a real sense of authenticity. Even in a case like this, where the performance isn't perfect, it's a beautiful, authentic imperfection.

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I love this video. It's just maximally 90s, from the whole sound to Alanis's look. You may not realize how produced the original is (it's very well done--100% agree with Rick Beato) but you can hear in this that the song works arguably even better as a live, raw performance.

Taylor Hawkins is on drums, and it's just another reason he's missed. Nick Lashley and Jesse Tobias are on guitar, Tobias recreating his RHCP replacement's part on the original. Chris Chaney is holding it down playing Flea's original part, with some bits where he wanders off and does something a little different; those are very good, and while I do miss Flea's pop at 1:53, it's a hell of a performance.

I can't imagine not already having an opinion about Alanis if you're over the age of 30 (35?), but I'm one of those people who loved her combination of pop diva and punky rock star. The song even works a little more downtempo as an even grungier bit of Alt Rock history.

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Where Are You Driving?

I am not especially in the habit of reposting from politicians, but Wyden is way ahead of almost everyone else on these issues. I am less surprised than everyone else seems to be about Tesla, although I share that distaste for Elon. Granting that global supply chains are what they are, it's interesting that the American companies are at least a little ahead of the German nameplates on the privacy front.

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Mdou Moctar - Imouhar (Official Music Video)

Imouhar is the Tuareg equivalent to “brother” or “comrade.” It’s a familial way to say “Tuareg people” that expresses a shared bond. 

Taken from Mdou Moctar’s upcoming album ‘Funeral for Justice’ out on Matador Records, May 3, 2024

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It's only early May and I've hardly spent any time with the record at all, but there's got to be a 50/50 chance that Funeral for Justice will be my album of the year. "Imouhar" is my favorite track on the album so far, but I am looking forward to spending enough time with the rest of them to have a stronger opinion about this soon.

Mahamadou is obviously the star of the show, but the four of them are just unreal. Every track is a jam that feels good and laid back, yet is insanely intense.

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I am fascinated by this, Joshua Redman doing "Streets of Philadelphia."

It's a little bit of an odd duck. Brian Blade is playing this wonderfully limber, very loose, very horizonal part on the drums and when Joe Sanders comes in, he is doing by far the funkiest thing of the five of them, but it's also way more vertical, more bouncing into the beat than Blade, who is just unbelievable smooth.

Aaron Parks, though, is doing something different. The piano is almost all tightly stacked, sometimes cluster-y chords and then he will end his phrases with a bluesy, soulful idea. He never sticks with it, though, and so, even though the arrangement isn't complicated, it's never exactly comfortable. Redman himself does more or less the same thing, where he is often either playing long tones or outlining the main melody, but he doesn't stay there long enough for you to be comfortable.

I am still not sure how I feel about Gabrielle Cavassa's vocals. She's a very good singer and she does lots of things that are stylistically interesting. I do feel a little like she's trying to do pieces of what everyone else is giving her. I am not sure if that adds up to something incoherent or the best part of the arrangement, but I am definitely going to spend more time with it to figure out how I feel.

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Sometimes I wonder what the weirdest thing that has happened in our culture is. I think this might be it.

Either OJ or Mike Dukakis is my most-famous-met-in-person person.

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I love me some Rome, but this is the dead-on truth.

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Poetry.

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Happy Anniversary!

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Would be better if she specifically named just half of the states, preferably randomly, really preferably with using a stratified randomizat

Some of us are just nerdier than others.