Classical (3): No theme, just a few favorites

 

                                                Frederic Chopin                      Valentina Lisitsa

 

 

Franz Liszt led quite a life.  He was a prodigy and a polymath who became so wealthy touring and giving concerts that for the latter half of his life he donated all his earnings to charity, and taught and mentored hundreds of musicians for free.  Despite coming from humble origins, he was pursued romantically by various princesses and countesses.  His proficiency on the piano caused some to accuse him of being possessed by the devil. 

 

Valentina Lisitsa is the first Classical youtube star—she built her career almost entirely on youtube, leading to performances at Carnegie Hall among other top venues. She may be a Savant—she was performing publicly at the age of four, and as a child considered chess her primary interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdH1hSWGFGU

 

 

The most challenging thing our high-school choir ever did was “The Path of the Just” by Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt.  I still find parts of it running through my head at odd moments.  I could not find a good clip of it on youtube, but I found another by him, in a high-quality recording. I think if we could hear the music of the spheres, it might sound like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-GhX2jG_Q4

 

 

“The Last Rose of Summer”

Another from Patricia Janečková. To have a voice this rich and mature at the age of 21 is remarkable. She is likely to become the great soprano of her generation.  Not much more to say.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkDQDoPCnC0

 

 

Set aside around 40 minutes for this

My mom considered the Piano Trio in B-flat Major the most beautiful piece of music in the world. As she was dying, she said she wanted it to be the last thing she heard. “Don’t bother playing it at my funeral, that would be stupid!” is how she put it. The last couple of days, as she sank out of reach, we played all of her favorite music, and put this piece in, as they say, “heavy rotation”. I hope it eased her way. This is not the same version, but a higher-quality recording,  featuring three legends performing together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BCcJIxiFX0

 

 

Anastasia Huppmann plays Chopin

Frederic Chopin wrote mostly for the piano. Building on the Classical era, he brought emotionality to the fore, making him one of the iconic Romantic era composers.  Like Liszt, he was regarded as almost supernaturally gifted, and his compositions are technically challenging. Today, because of his lyrical and melodic style, he is a frequent inspiration for composers seeking classical themes for pop and rock music.

 

Anastasia Huppmann is a Russian-born Austrian pianist who transitioned from prodigy to serious interpreter of Classical and Romantic-era music.  She tours widely but is also a denizen of the internet, where she has a big following.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6cbCWzHXkg

 

 

 

Guitar Magic (2): Underrated greats

 

What was the most important innovation in popular music in the last century?  I would say it was the use of the electric guitar as a lead instrument (ie., not just an accompaniment to singing).  Great blues artists like Albert, BB and Freddie King started it, and then it exploded into the mainstream in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, with the Yardbirds, Cream, Hendrix, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin, among others.    

This post mostly features guitarists who are/were the leaders of their bands.  What they have in common is that their peers frequently cite them as the best, but they didn't achieve the same commercial success as those peers.  Too many of them are now gone from the house, so we just have the recordings they left behind.

 

Best of the Kings?

Albert King didn’t achieve the huge success of his fellow King, BB, but I would argue he was a more fluid, expressive and lyrical guitarist, and as you will see in this clip, he could bring it vocally too.  He played a conventional guitar left-handed, and was completely self-taught.  Clapton, Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughan all considered him one of their most important mentors.  I saw him live in a small café in Mountain View, California around 1985.    I don’t think I fully understood then what a big deal that was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKY8KIt9kqc

 

 

A guitarist for guitarists

Robert Cray plays something that sounds like blues, jazz, rock and soul, all swirled around together.  He’s led his own band much of his life, and has also collaborated with the likes of Albert Collins, BB King, Eric Clapton and more.  He did win four Grammies, but some critics say that if he had focused on a particular genre or style he would have been even more famous.  He cares more about exploring than about milking one formula (in that, he is a bit like Robert Fripp and Jeff Beck).  He is one of the names mentioned most often by other guitarists when asked who influenced them.  This clip has a nice introduction by John Mayer (see my earlier post, Guitar Magic (1) for something by Mayer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h53va2AIuYU

 

 

The Greatest

The most famous name on this list, but should be even bigger. He may be the greatest electric guitarist ever (in my opinion, his only rival for that title is Jimi Hendrix), but he is far less famous than Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Eddie van Halen or Stevie Ray Vaughan, to name a few. Beck not only mastered, but shaped, blues, rock, jazz, fusion, heavy metal and even movie sound track writing.  Early in his career, he largely stopped using a pick, giving him a unique sound and incredible agility.  He can shred with anyone, but has always focused on innovative composition and technique.  Here is one of his most soulful, emotional compositions. Side note: the bassist is 20-year-old Tal Wilkenfeld, the Australian prodigy, on her inaugural professional tour.  She turns in a wonderful bass solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC02wGj5gPw

 

 

Eric Johnson: Melody and tone

Like many of the guitarists on this list, Eric is known as a “guitarist’s guitarist”.  He is often grouped with Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Joe Bonamassa, but he is less self-absorbed and flashy, which may explain why he is less well known.  In my opinion, he is the best composer of the bunch, and his playing has a uniquely rich and resonant tone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nd7EZ3k39s

 

 

 

“The Greatest Unknown Guitarist”

Roy Buchanan could play anything and could play fast, but he is most remembered for the intensely emotional sound of his playing.  In a poll of guitarists, he was named as having the best tone. He was an innovator—he perfected the “pinch harmonic”, which allows a player to coax notes in multiple octaves from one string.  (This is how rock and metal guitarists get that high squeal or “ping” that adds anguish or menace to a run of notes.  It is now almost a required skill for any top-level electric guitarist.)  Roy achieved modest success, but personal problems including bouts of heavy drinking kept him from making the most of his talents. He died in a jail cell under suspicious circumstances, but the case has never been solved.  Here is his most famous instrumental, “Sweet Dreams”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swX9oq6TVAU

 

 

“The Humbler”

Top guitarists called Danny Gatton the Humbler, because none of them could match him in “cutting” contests—where guitarists take turns showing off their best stuff, usually in a small venue with other musicians as the audience.  His fear of traveling stopped him from becoming a bigger star, and his other demons came to get him when he was just 49.  

 

Here he is, doing an almost hallucinatory take on the old noir classic, Harlem Nocturne.  He always had a big, resonant tone, but in this piece, he takes it to another level, and makes the guitar cry and moan like a living thing. He produces so many different voices that some people assume there are two or three guitarists playing.  It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_jmeU505GI

 

 

Eddie Hazel: Maggot Brain

Eddie had two strikes against him: 1) He was Black, and rock guitar was always considered a white man’s domain; and 2) he was associated with Funkadelic, at a time when funk and soul were not about individual virtuosity.  To George Clinton’s credit, he was willing to take Funkadelic in a variety of directions, and he understood Hazel was special. This piece, however, is really out there.  It isn’t remotely funk, it’s raw, throwback psychedelic acid rock.  The whole thing is essentially an Eddie Hazel solo.  It’s one of the greatest, most intense things of its kind. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOKn33-q4Ao

 

Rock (3): When rock collides with classical

 

The fondest memories of my youth are of singing in our choir. Händel and Brahms? It didn't get better than that.  My listening tastes, by contrast, leaned to 60’s rock and early heavy metal, though I lost interest in metal as it devolved into a contest to be loud and abrasive.  

 

Decades later, I found a whole universe of music that combines classical structures and harmonies, with rock instrumentation.  Call it rock opera, or symphonic rock: you get the grandeur and intricacy of classical music, with the energy and drive, and the electric sound, of rock and roll.  It gets little exposure in the U.S., but is mainstream in Europe, Latin America and Japan. In the 1970s, people referred to Godspell, Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar as rock operas, but they pale in comparison to modern symphonic rock.  What they do have in common is frequent evocation of overtly political or spiritual elements.

 

This post contains only five songs.  The reason is that they are longer than standard pop songs. I hope you’ll make time for them.  If you have to pick two, I suggest Nos. 3 and 5.

 

 

Hymn to Common Sense

This piece, by a Dutch group, is heavily influenced by Händel’s Messiah, with a pointedly ironic twist: It is a criticism of religious hypocrisy, and specifically of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. The Church tried to have this song banned (it didn’t succeed). The lead vocalist is 18-year-old Simone Simons. Her voice is still developing, and she doesn’t yet have the operatic throw-weight she will have later, but you can hear where things are headed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_3k-DD6Op4

No time for navel-gazing

To be taken seriously in American popular music, a song has to be about baring your soul and picking at your emotional scabs. Appreciating art is all about seeing yourself in it, about feeling that the artist somehow “got” you. Really? Since when is narcissism the point of art or music?  If that had always been the case, Rembrandt and Beethoven wouldn’t be a thing;  Shakespeare would only work if you identify with pre-medieval despots (in which case you have other issues).

 

Fortunately for art’s sake (maybe not so much for the people living there), there are parts of the world where people don’t have the luxury of being so spoiled and self-involved. They have other things to worry about.  Here is a band from Ukraine, singing about defending their homeland from invaders (guess who).  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KOXbzMRQHs

Nightwish:  Ghost Love Score

This is one of the most complete things I’ve ever seen or heard.  Think of a cross between a symphony and a movie score.  It has been compared to Bohemian Rhapsody, and Floor Jansen’s performance to Freddie Mercury’s.  Like Bohemian Rhapsody, it is true rock opera, but even professional opera singers don't have the range of vocal qualities called for in "Ghost Love Score".  Freddie was one of a kind, but there is no vocalist I can think of besides Jansen who could have pulled this off.  Side notes: The classical backing track was recorded by the London Philharmonic. The audience shots are eerily similar to the shots from Queen’s epic Live Aid performance at Wembley.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjIlHWBAVo

Honor long overdue:

This song honors Eugene Shoemaker, the geologist and astronomer. He discovered several families of asteroids and comets (you may remember Shoemaker-Levy, whose collision with Jupiter got global coverage here on Earth).  He showed that craters on the Earth and Moon were caused by meteor impacts. He ran the Geoscience program at NASA, and was himself slated for an Apollo Moon mission. He was disqualified for medical reasons, which he admitted was the greatest disappointment of his life. After his death, his ashes were taken to the Moon on a NASA probe and laid to rest in a crater named after him—the only person to date interred on another planetary body. The capsule holding his ashes is inscribed with a passage from Romeo and Juliet, which you will hear in voice-over in this song.

My hat’s off to Nightwish for celebrating a scientist. It happens too seldom, and seems especially apt at a time when our leaders are waging a war on science. If you are not familiar with the group, I urge you to give this a listen, and play it all the way through—the ending is stunning.  “Human. :||: Nature" is already my pick for 2020 Album of the Year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjp_DfvJimg

 

 

 

Is Classical music just an early form of metal?

Miyako Watanabe studied classical piano from the age of three.  At 20, she picked up a guitar for the first time, found a book of hard-rock guitar riffs, and taught herself to play.  She composes rock music using motifs from some of the great classical composers.  This song uses passages from Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude as an overture, and a theme adapted from Dvořák as the outro.  In between is something that incorporates elements of both, and could be the theme song of a romantic superhero movie.  The entire band are Jedi-level musicians.  I’ve watched this many times and never get tired of it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gs89jkv411ssbhz/%2ALOVEBITES___Chopin%20etude%20%2B%20Swan%20Song.mp4?dl=0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jazz (3): Jazz collides with rock-- Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock and more...

"Fusion" refers to the merging of jazz and rock that happened in the mid-1970's through mid 1980's.  It produced some of the most exciting music I am aware of, and a lasting impact on both jazz and rock.  Rock and Jazz purists didn't like it, but that's often a sign that you're doing something right...

Setting the stage

Even if you are not a jazz fan, you have probably heard this.  It’s the opening number from Miles Davis’ 1959 album “Kind of Blue”.  Music theorists consider it an academic tour-de-force, but it broke through to the wider public in a way few jazz recordings had before.  I think the reason is simple:  “Kind of Blue” is filled with beautiful melodies and harmonies.  You don’t have to be a theorist to “get” it.

 

This recording featured what some people call the “Mount Rushmore” of jazz: Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmie Cobb, all of whom were major figures in their own right, and most of whom went on to lead their own bands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylXk1LBvIqU

Miles Davis:  Bitches Brew

The first Miles Davis album I purchased, as a teenager, was In a Silent Way, which I later learned was an inflection point for him.  It led me to his earlier work including Kind of Blue.  With In a Silent Way, he began diverging radically from mainstream jazz, introducing electric instrumentation and rock percussion, but with a restrained, almost ambient texture (musicians, please chime in, I’m probably way oversimplifying this!)  His next album, Bitches Brew, was more radical, and more aggressive.

 

Mahavishnu Orchestra, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report and Chick Corea are widely considered the Big Four of fusion.  All four acts were founded by members of the ensemble that recorded Bitches Brew.  It says something that Miles Davis could pull this off not once, but twice—making a category-defining record with a team of all-stars to be.  This clip is the first third of the title track.  If you like it, it feeds directly into parts 2 and 3. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc7qiosq4m4&list=PL94gOvpr5yt0fSZzCnnYWwUFF3evnG4x4&index=2

Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke founded Return to Forever, and picked up where Miles Davis had left off--expanding the range of sounds and instruments, breaking the concept of genre, merging jazz with rock, throwing in classical influences...Sometimes it didn't work, but when it did it was amazing.  This is one of their best, featuring their "classic" lineup, with Lenny White on drums and Al DiMeola on Guitar. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ehuAnD_kU

After Stanley Clarke left Return to Forever, he released a solo album called School Days, which hit us like a bomb.  I remember heated debates in our dorms over whether this was a revolution or a sellout.  After a career spanning a huge range of styles and collaborators, he reunited with Return to Forever, along with legendary jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, for a series of live concerts.  Here, they play the title track from School Days.  After 35 years, it’s as fresh as the day it was released.  I also love how much fun they are all having with it.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DCahFBMEB8

 

 

What was on your college-age soundtrack?  For many of my friends, it was Disco, Springsteen, and “soft rock” like Jackson Browne and the Eagles.  For me it was Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock, Heart, Black Sabbath, and Blondie.  Beck’s albums Blow by Blow and Wired were not the only fusion albums out there—far from it; but they were among the most influential.  This is from Jeff Beck’s 1975 album Blow By Blow—in this case, the original studio track.  He could have stayed with blues and hard rock, but here he goes off in a new direction, merging rock, jazz, and funk.  More than any of the other early fusion albums, this became part of our college soundtrack.  More important, it was a sign of things to come from Beck, who would go on to cover more ground than any guitarist alive today.  (I’ll be posting several clips of Beck, in different settings and genres.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk_Kb29CgLg

 

 

Here is Jeff Beck, many years later, playing his signature piece from the fusion era.  He is accompanied by longtime partners Vinnie Colaiuta and Jason Rebello, along with 20-year old Aussie prodigy Tal Wilkenfeld on bass.  Wilkenfeld had just made her American debut with them at Crossroads weeks earlier.  I love her giddy delight at playing with these legends (check out the looks she and Beck trade starting at 2:43) and their open admiration of her abilities.  Throughout his career, Beck has opened doors for new talent, and given them room to strut their stuff.  Just another reason he’s my pick as "the greatest".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25q8nWZQGaQ

One of the first fusion groups I heard, before I was aware of Bitches Brew, was Mahavishnu Orchestra.  The most radical thing I had been exposed to until then was Led Zeppelin, but MO quickly became part of my college soundtrack.  Put simply, it bent my universe into a new shape.  John McLaughlin was a disciple of Miles Davis, and in turn assembled a group of musicians who would become stars in their own right.  I think this and his next album remain his best work to date.  Listen for the drumming by Billy Cobham (also a Miles alum) - it’s an incredible blending of polyrhythmic improvisation, delicate fills and sheer power.  I consider Cobham one of the three or four best drummers I’ve ever heard.

 

It was hard to choose a track to post.  This one is long but well worth the time, and captures the bandmembers at the height of their powers, performing live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USGf07Dlq4s

Herbie Hancock was a prodigy who was largely self-taught.  When he was still a teenager, Miles Davis recruited him into one of his ensembles, and Herbie was off and running.  He is one of the most prolific musicians I know of, with credits on hundreds of projects including many of his own, spanning a huge range of genres.  I am sure I have only heard a small fraction of what he has done.  This number is my favorite from Hancock’s 1973 album “Headhunters”, which had a big impact not only on fusion, but on jazz, rock, funk, and even pop music.  It was not without controversy—I remember my jazz purist friends felt he had “sold out”.  By that, I think they meant he had made something accessible and fun, that you could party to. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjPlBC4h_8

I’ll end this section with my favorite single piece by any of the landmark fusion groups.  This is the finale from Weather Report’s second album.  Hard to find words for it, so just hit play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5TCx-wBux0