Vintage Blasts from the Past

 

These clips have two main things in common: They all happened a long time ago (in media years); and I think each is one of the best things of its kind.  In roughly chronological order:

 

Billie Holiday: “I’ll be seeing You”

Like almost everything Holiday did, this will rip your heart out.  But why did this song suddenly find itself back on the charts in 2019?  NASA played it as the final sign-off to Opportunity.  The rover went silent on Mars after exceeding its original 90-day mission by 14 years.  They say many on the team reacted as though they had lost a child. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDlKb2cBAqU

Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins

This is one of the cooler artifacts of the Golden Age of jazz.  The two great tenor saxes, book-ending an ebullient jam session.  It’s an all-star band and almost everyone gets a solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DmtPvFa_W8

 

Santo and Johnny:  Sleep Walk

You’ve heard this a thousand times, in soundtracks and in the background of various movie scenes, usually set in exotic locales.  Imagine, though, how unusual this TV spot was at a time when Italians were still a suspect minority.  What a bittersweet experience it must have been. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rwfqsjimRM

 

 

Noir Classic:  Harlem Nocturne

This was originally a big-band standard, written by Earle Hagen in 1939.  The Viscounts slowed it down, put the saxophone front and center, added reverb, and ended up with a masterpiece.   Rainy nights, dark alleys, femmes fatales, Guy Noir, all that.  You’ve probably heard it a million times, and may have wondered what it was.  Well, now you know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR9sekKfXLw

 

What makes a movie score great?  Is it there to support the rest of the movie, without being obtrusive?  Or does it take on a life of its own?  Ennio Morricone’s score for “Once Upon a Time in the West” (which I think is even better than his score for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) manages to do both, because it is actually a major character  in the film.

 

Morricone gives each actor a musical theme that plays when they are on screen.  The soundtrack weaves together these individual themes, with variations that convey the characters’ emotional states, creating a mood for the scene.  (My guess is Morricone was inspired by Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf - does anyone know?)  Even when you are not conscious of it, the music is an integral part of the scene, not just an accompaniment.

 

The movie has got everything:  A classic plot; Henry Fonda cast against type as the villain; Charles Bronson, also cast against type, as the good guy; Claudia Cardinale as the widow trying to make a new start; Jason Robards as the bandit.  The loving portraits and profiles of the actors’ faces, especially Bronson’s and Cardinale’s, are some of the best ever filmed, IMHO.  As a bonus, the movie portrays Native Americans and Mexicans in a sympathetic light, which was unusual, to say the least.

 

The clip itself is a montage of scenes from the ending, set to Edda dell’Orso’s immortal rendition of the main theme song.  I’m also attaching a clip of the penultimate scene, the gunfight between Bronson and Fonda, which has engendered reams of scholarly analysis for its staging and pacing.

 

What is your favorite movie score?  Leave a comment!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mMd6D1Gw1g

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdK0jaLuJL8

 

Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin: “Je T'aime,...Moi Non Plus”

Serge Gainsbourg was a chain-smoker and looked like a large bug, but he numbered Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot among his lovers.  This song, featuring Birkin (she couldn’t actually sing, but do you care?) was banned in many places including several entire countries.  The best comment:  “This would not work in English.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Fa4lOQfbA

 

 

International Women's Week, postscript: Some thoughts on WAP

Some thoughts on WAP

(I'm not going to include a link because I only link to music I think worth listening to more than once.  I have seen WAP and have no intention of watching it again.  But if you don't know what it is, and are wondering what the fuss is about, you will have no trouble finding it on youtube.)

My generation grew up alongside feminism, and many of us absorbed its messages.  We know that women suffer asymmetric threats of violence, that many women live under brutal restrictions on their behavior, that our society imposes double standards on women, that women are treated unfairly in the academic and business worlds, and that commodification of women’s bodies damages them and exacerbates all of these other ills.  Many people, women and men alike, want to see change -- and we have been getting change.  Slow, uneven, but change nonetheless.  Today, a majority of Americans would agree that prurient objectification of women is bad, even if conservatives and liberals have different reasons for feeling that way.

 

When it comes to media depictions of women, there is a strain of thought in feminism that the key issue is not whether certain kinds of images are good or bad, but symmetry: If men and women have different rules for what they are allowed to do, that is bad; if the rules are the same, that is good.  In this view, liberation does not come from censorship or suppression, but from equal treatment.  It is a reasonable argument, and probably the only one that is not going to get bogged down in arguments about particulars.  I'd say it comes close to my own views on the subject.  This brings me to WAP.

 

The liberal/cultural media are celebrating WAP as some kind of feminist triumph.  They seem to be giddy over how much it upsets conservatives (this looks similar to the way conservatives tell racist jokes just to “own the libs”.)  I have seen serious commentators argue that because these women had total artistic control over the project, and because they are expressing their sexuality as freely as men are supposedly allowed to, this is an exercise in leveling the playing field, in putting women on the same footing as men.  Really?

 

What does it look like when men make photos or videos that sexually exploit women?  Well, there is a lot of female flesh on display, being shaken, spanked, oiled up, tied down, pushed up, and more.  It seems pretty obvious that the symmetric exercise would be for female producers to make videos that exploit male bodies the same way. (Do two wrongs make a right? That's where the symmetry argument is problematic.)  So what do we see in WAP?  Female bodies, being shaken, spanked, oiled up, tied down, and pushed up.  No men to be seen.  The conceit that this is an exercise in liberation is risible.  A group of women have completely internalized the pornified expectations of the “male gaze” and projected it right back, in technicolor. 

 

I grew up with a feminist mom, and was exposed to the various permutations of feminism as it evolved.  I was familiar with Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, and my mom got one of the first subscriptions to Ms. magazine.  I knew that feminism was not monolithic—some feminists aligned themselves with the censors on the right, condemning public displays of sex as inherently exploitative.  Others, exemplified by Greer, wanted women to be liberated to be fully sexual beings. 

 

What all of them agreed on was that commodifying women’s bodies, putting women on display just to titillate, is a bad idea.  As a cultural liberal myself, I see liberals’ celebration of WAP as a nauseating exercise in denialism and hypocrisy. By supporting this, we pull the rug out from any credibility we may have had to lecture society about the evils of objectifying women. There is plenty of feminist pornography for those who want it.  WAP is porn, but there is nothing feminist about it.

 

International Women’s Week (3)

 

 

My last two posts featured bands that are exclusively women—in addition to singing, they play all the instruments and write most of the music.  However, I don't want to overlook mixed-gender bands with women in lead roles.  The early prototypes are Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Suzie Quatro, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Heart, and the Pretenders, led by Chrissie Hynde (see my previous post on women rock pioneers https://zapatosjam.blogspot.com/2020/07/girls-rock-1-pioneers-leslie-gore-suzi.html).  Despite their success, in mainstream rock and pop women are still expected to stay in the singer/songwriter lane, and leave all the instruments to the boys.  But this is not like weightlifting - there is no inherent reason women can’t play guitar as well as, or better than, the guys.  And there is certainly no reason women can’t rock as hard, or harder. 

 

 

 

Lzzy Hale, Halestorm:  Freak Like Me

This is the only totally American band on the list.  Lzzy Hale was impatient, so she founded her band when she was 14.  She writes most of their stuff, and there’s nothing demure about her subject matter.  As the rest of American rock has sunk into a sort of hibernation, Lzzy just turns up the heat.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sXoA7B5yJo

 

 

Melody Cristea, Liliac:  Paranoid

Take the Partridge Family, add mountains of actual talent, stir in some metal, and top it with one of the craziest voices since Janis Joplin, and you have Liliac.  This is a band of five siblings, children of Romanian immigrants, led by their middle child, the aptly named Melody, who channels Janis and Ronnie James Dio.  She also plays bass, and her older sister Abby plays the drums.  They are all still teenagers, so there’s no telling what they’re capable of. This cover of an old Black Sabbath hit gives a hint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjF-TRyM8qU

 

 

Tatiana Shmailyuk, Jinjer:  Pisces

I bent the rules for this one.  Tatiana is a singer songwriter, but that doesn’t really capture what she does.  It’s sort of like calling Hurricane Katrina a "tropical weather event". There is no way to describe it, so just watch this.  The entire band are special—you’ll hear a lot of classical and jazz elements in their playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQNtGoM3FVU

 

 

Haruka Noma, Asterism:  Rising Moon

Haruka is not only a jedi-level guitarist, she writes most of their music.  I included their live performance of “Dawn” in my last post on Guitar Magic (if you didn’t check it out, you should—the last two minutes are the most intense, layered piece of guitar soloing I’ve ever heard.)  Here are Asterism in their first professionally shot video, doing straight-up rock, with an extra dose of attitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfxMi0Bx4x0

 

 

Orianthi: “Highly Strung” (with Steve Vai)

Orianthi has been touring with her own band on and off since she was 15. She is best known, however, for her gigs with Steve Vai, Carlos Santana, Michael Jackson (who tapped her to be his lead guitarist) and Carrie Underwood (also as lead guitarist).  She is a featured artist on Guitar Hero and has headlined at the Crossroads Guitar Festival.  She plays a gold custom PRS guitar, which is about as bad-ass as it gets.  Here she is in 2009 with Steve Vai:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7b-_YcACuQ

 

 

Gail Ann Dorsey (with David Bowie): “Under Pressure”

Dorsey has never led her own band, but has played bass for dozens of headliners, and spent 21 years as the anchor of David Bowie’s group. She also has a remarkable voice, and shows it off here, stepping into Freddie Mercury’s shoes for a duet with Bowie.

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

 

 

 

International Women’s Week (2)

 

The would-be golden age of female rockers stalled out in the U.S. after the early 1980’s, but that doesn't mean women stopped rocking.  It’s just that not many broke through commercially.  Those that did mostly made it with vocal-focused, romantic ballads, or fizzy pop, the stuff women were expected to do.  A lot of that is down to both music industry sexism and audience sexism.  Some bands started off doing punk and stuck to their guns, and they were every bit as good as the male punk and thrash bands that actually made it big.  Change is happening, but it's slow, and it's particularly slow in the U.S. Women are still fighting for the right to express rage and lust without being judged.  

(Note: I focused here on bands in which women play the instruments. There are a lot of bands fronted by female lead vocalists.   Several such bands are featured in my posts on New Wave, Rock meets Opera, and Symphonic Rock.  Check them out!) 

 

The Go-Go’s:  “Our Lips are Sealed”

Founded in 1978, the Go-go’s merged bubble-gum pop, rock and a bit of the emerging New Wave esthetic into something uniquely their own. The second all-female rock band to play all of their own instruments and to chart (the first were the Runaways).  They remain the most successful such act to come out of the U.S.  This is from 1981, at the beginning of the New Wave era. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3kQlzOi27M

 

 

The Bangles:  “Hero Takes a Fall”

One of the first all-female rock bands to break through, after the Go-Gos, their biggest hits were not rock songs, but ballads, because the market still treated rock as a male thing.  This is a rock song, and in my opinion is better than their best-known work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAbYsxd3ADg

 

 

Bikini Kill:  “Rebel Girl”

The definitive Riot Grrl band, their thing was straight-ahead hard-core punk. They were politically radical, and had to cope with people who came to their concerts to assault them.  The lead singer sometimes took it upon herself to act as bouncer in the middle of their sets, throwing out some of the trouble-makers. This video is delicious, setting their biggest hit to a propaganda video from Mao-era China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZxxhxjgnC0

 

 

Seven Year Bitch:  “Hip Like Junk”

Founded in 1990, they were a punk band with a distinct 60’s throwback vibe.  They were influenced by the Riot Grrl movement, and were overtly political, with songs like “Dead Men Don’t Rape”. 

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

 

 

Hole:  “Violet”

Courtney Love pushed the envelope harder than just about anyone.  Her band went through a lot of instability and lineup changes, but one thing stayed constant: almost all the instrumentalists were women.  Her relationship with Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) is of course legend.  He may have been more commercially successful, but I think her best stuff is better than anything Nirvana did. 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

International Women’s Week

 

 

A lot of American rock fans of my generation complain that rock is dead. I can understand where they are coming from, but they’re wrong. Rock isn’t dead. It just packed up and moved. And, in the process, something else happened: rock was saved by women.

I posted earlier about the pioneers of women’s rock (https://zapatosjam.blogspot.com/2020/07/girls-rock-1-pioneers-leslie-gore-suzi.html).  Suzi Quatro, Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, Lita Forde, Patti Smith, the Wilson Sisters…rock was on the brink of a golden age for women.  And then it didn't happen, at least not in the U.S.  But the world is much bigger, and while we've been arguing over what it is to be "woke", women all over the world picked up guitars never looked back.

 

Here is proof.  Even if hard rock is not your thing, show this to your daughters.

 

 

Crucified Barbara

The band is Swedish, but the words are in English. “No time for painting our nails…” They happen to be great at what they do—not just at “sounding good for a girl”. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVU_8D1aJoU

 

The Warning

This group consists of three sisters from Mexico who posted a Metallica cover when the youngest was 8 years old, and it went viral, leading to offers of record contracts.  They have opened for Aerosmith, Alice Cooper and Def Leppard, and were about to tour the U.S. when Covid-19 stopped everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1X3BxxUOBk

 

Bridear:  Ignite

This is not the typical ballad lamenting a broken heart.  These women are in charge of their own hearts, and they're daring you to handle that.

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

Burning Witches:  Hexenhammer

These women from Switzerland don't have time for dolls and chocolate.  This song is about retribution for the women who were burnt alive at the witch trials not so long ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OCmwMFKDlE

 

 

Band-Maid:  Domination

Another name for this band could be “Cognitive Dissonance”: some of them wear maid outfits while playing, but they rock harder than most male bands.  For music nerds, check out the rhythm section--they may be the best since Neil Peart and Geddy Lee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbyQCJn6rYg

 

Lovebites:  Edge of the World

Starts off as a ballad mourning man’s inhumanity to man, and ends as an anthem of hope and empowerment.  Includes one of the best slow-burn guitar solos I've ever heard, comparable to David Gilmour’s work on "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall".

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

 

 

 

Guitar Magic (3): Young guns

 

In decreasing order of age…

 

Generations

With the passing or retirement of the previous generations of blues guitarists, and most notably the untimely death of Stevie Ray Vaughan, a lot of people in the music business, as well as fans, figured it might be all over for the Blues.  But there are a handful of young stars who love the Blues, foremost among them John Mayer and Derek Trucks.  Like Vaughan before them, they never hesitate to give kudos to the older masters.  The older guys, in turn, have welcomed them into the club with open arms.  Here is Mayer on stage with Eric Clapton, to help celebrate Eric’s 70^th birthday.  Consider it the changing of the guard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8C4wV74vrY

A small rant

Isaac Newton was a genius. He co-invented calculus, came up with the theory of gravity...and then spent the last 20 years of his life trying to calculate the age of the earth based on the generations listed in the Old Testament.  In other words, somewhere along the way, he went off the rails.

 

John Mayer is one of the most talented, versatile guitarists alive today.  Old hands like Eric Clapton have acknowledged his brilliance.  Yet he dedicated much of the past couple of years to a project called Dead and Company, which is basically a rehabilitation of the Greatful Dead.  WTF? 

 

Mayer is 10x the guitarist Jerry Garcia was.  Almost everything he does, including his online guitar lessons, is more interesting than anything the Dead managed after their first year or two of existence.  This project feels like Newton counting generations in the Bible.

 

Thankfully, Mayer still does other stuff, and some of it is insanely good—like this: “Neon”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DfQC5qHhbo

Jack Thammarat: “SRV”

Jack won several international guitar competitions, and is now touring with his own band.  He hasn't broken through as a global star, but he’s got great touch with the guitar and has a dedicated following. Here he does a beautiful cover of Eric Johnson’s tribute to the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, “SRV”.  This is practically a clinic on how to play electric guitar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmoIu-qyNS8

 

Ayla:  Smooth as silk

Canadian prodigy Ayla Tesler-Mabe is still a teenager, but she has two touring bands (one progressive jazz-rock, one straight rock).  She first attracted attention with a series of youtube posts that display masterful technique, amazing use of tone, and most of all, swing.  She has an intuitive feel for the music.  Here she is doing an apartment jam with one of her mentors and another friend, covering Santana.  She sounds better than Carlos--see for yourself:

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

 

 

More Ayla:

Life isn’t fair, and when talent was given out, some people got extra helpings.  Here is Ayla with her jazz-rock trio, which she formed in high school with two friends. She wrote and composed this.  It has a delightful retro feel, with a modern edge and some funk thrown in.  Her voice is still developing but she already has a great timbre for this sort of music. In a world swamped with factory-produced music, it's important that there are young people still interested in doing stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BD39z0Ld7g

Lisa-X and Hazuki

Lisa-X is 15 and is quickly building a reputation as a highly technical guitarist and talented songwriter.  Here she is supported by frequent collaborator Hazuki, herself a young gun who is in the process of breaking through with the thrash-metal band Nemophila.  This is an early pandemic living-room performance of one of Lisa-X's singles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN_oLqTka6M

 

Saving the best for last:  Asterism. 

I included their “Rising Moon” in my post on power trios, because it really showcases all three members.  This clip, “Dawn”, focuses on guitarist Haruka Noma.  You will see why she’s generating buzz as possibly the best electric guitarist in the world today.  Decide for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buQPvINJcA0