Holiday Music—Neither Trite Nor Cliché

Of course you’re going to play your Tony Bennett, Mahalia Jackson, and whichever upgraded version of Elvis Presley’s Christmas albums (there’s just shy of a zillion of them out now) you have. And various Messiahs and Nutcrackers (for the latter, Duke Ellington’s is highly recommended and I believe that Brian Setzer did a big-ass guitar version of some of Ellington’s on his album a few years ago). But sanity requires that you find new, innovative, unfamiliar stuff every year. Otherwise the hard-wiring in your neural networks will play “Chestnuts Roasting” by Nat King Cole over and over and over. And that would not be a good thing. Here’s a further selection from this penultimate holiday season (pending The End O’ The World™ due winter solstice 2012).

Let’s start here. I know I told you in the prior edition that the Twisted Sister album was the best all time. But I forgot

about this one. Here you get not one but two songs about spending Christmas standing by the barbecue, one about being

in Maui on Christmas Day because “the only thing colder than that weather back

there is you, Mama”, and awesome sax tone on a pounding rock version of

“Good King Wenceslas”. Hard to believe

anything could make Twisted Sister

sound “traditional”. But this does it.

Let’s split the difference. Dee and the boys

get the points in the “Traditional Carols”

category, these blues guys (with a wacky

country closer) take the overall grand

prize.

Now, here’s a question. When you hear the phrase “Hawaiian slack key guitar”, what do you think of? Unless you’re a deep guitar geek and probably one who’s lived in the Islands, you probably think of trebly pedal steel over massively over produced string orchestras. And you’d be wrong. “Slack key” just means the guitars have some of the strings downtuned, and never an EADGBE tuning darkens the innovation.

This one’s a really slick acoustic guitar holiday album. Nice mix of

familiar songs with cool arrangements and complementary regional and

cultural addenda. Oh, and for unclear reasons, the producers  throw in one forlorn cut of “traditional” pedal steel

and orchestral backing.

And while we’re thinking about guitars,John Fahey recorded the mother of all holiday guitar albums, all touch and technique of addictive quality. This Rhino remaster combines almost all

of Fahey’s first two holiday albums.

Annoyingly, they had to leave off most of his stunning Russian music medley for lack of space. Oh, because these albums were basically the only albums

Fahey did that made any money at all, he kept recording Christmas albums over

the rest of his far-to-short career hoping to strike gold again. Some of those later disks are pretty good. But this is the best

by light years.

Oh, what the hell. Since we’re riding this guitar horse, let’s saddle up one more time. These are the guitar-geekiest

Christmas albums ever. Mostly metalheads, but builds in jazz (Al DiMeola), pop (Brian Setzer), and just plain hard

smegging rock (Jeff Beck)  intervals. Highlight is Joe Satriani’s set-piece Silent

Night. Joe plays a couple choruses upfront and then launches into an awesome,

but completely unrelated, improvisation. Revisits the theme once more as an outro. No household should be without!

Besides guitar, the other theme of this entry is production. Or the relative lack of same. In general, I’m a fan of under-

vs. over-. And that means that this Odetta album picks up massive

points. It’s mostly just her and a

bass player. Sweet mix of hymns,

carols, and traditional spirituals.

Let’s wrap this up with some serious, serious Goth. The Projekt label is laborof love for guy who devotes himself

to finding, recording, and selling

up-to-date ethereal-but-not-ambient Goth. Fabulous harmonies, innovative

and effective arrangements. 

In the best tradition of John Fahey, Projekt hit it big with their first holiday album. And has been attempting ever since

to replicate that success. 

In this case, though, everything from all 3 primary albums and the single disk “best of” 

are fabulous. No loss of quality with time.

So with that said, this will shut down the holiday music reviews for the year. Not sure where we’ll go next here. But I do hope you’ll surf on over to http://docviper.livejournal.com/ and

http://theresaturtleinmysoup.com/ when time permits. Both will be updated in the next day or so. Thanks for stopping by!

Holiday Music 2010

Senior year, when the Pompton Lakes High School Concert Band fired up the holiday music medley for the Winter Concert, my shorter, more slender friend Dan and I slipped backstage, pulled on white long underwear tops and bottoms, and did a dainty pirouette across the stage just as music teacher Carl Howard hit the downbeat to “Frosty”.

And I’ve never looked back. I love Christmas music.  Or, as I would call it if I could possibly piss off Fox “News”, “holiday” music.

Speaking of which. Yesterday Gretchen Carlson was assigned to beat up the guy who organizes the Tulsa, Oklahoma holiday parade. Which last year changed its name from “Christmas” parade. She tried a couple different lines of attack, none of them working very well. Then she pulled out the big gun. “Larry, do you know that some people are refusing to participate in the parade because it no longer is called “Christmas”?” Larry looks at her. She rambles on: “And the Acres of Love Alpaca Ranch is refusing to participate because of the name change. Did you know that?!” Ah, at this point, you need to dig into this yourself. The look on the poor guy’s face as he tries not to crack up when she says “Acres of Love Alpaca Ranch” is beyond priceless. Start your research here:

http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/12/07/tulsa-council-votes-on-parade/?test=latestnews

Anyway. Here’s a nifty selection of “holiday” slash “Christmas” music for your 2010 delectation. I kicked ass in the used CD shops this year, including earlier tonight when I found a seriously cool stack of holiday stuff at the CDepot in College Park. Check back before the end of the year. Possible I’ll install another…uh…installment…of the holiday slash Christmas music recommendations before we close out the holidays.

Let’s start here. The best Christmas album there has ever been, and likely ever will be (especially given that the End O’ The World ™ is just a few short months away on 21 December 2012. Unless the translation of the Maya Long Count Calendar is off by 50 years. In which case it is just about…uh…52 years away). Anyway. Twisted Sister, who labored for years and years in the bars of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, put together what is by far the most creative, humorous and hard-rocking holiday album ever. Hell, it’s not just the best holiday album ever. It’s damn close to the best metal album ever. No household should be without.

At sort of the other extreme of guitar albums there’s this guy—Thom Rotella. His web site here:  

http://www.thomrotella.com/

emphasizes his jazz chops, and on the basis of the clips, he’s got good ones. On this album, he’s layered guitars into a gorgeous, and non-cliché, non-been-there-done-that, excellent CD.

Big bands. I’m not usually a huge fan. Nothing wrong with it, and you have to have as much Ellington and Billie Holiday as your hard drives will hold. It’s just that moments of true rock and roll are few and far between. That’s not a problem with this Stan Kenton disk. Kicks rockin’ ass. Cover to cover. Killer. No household should be without.

Then there’s the Bucharest Madrigal Choir, doing a whole album of “Christmas in Eastern Europe”. Very cool. Comfortably recognizable chorus work, with a twist of odd scales and unfamiliar voicings. Complex enough to be listenable multiple times in any one holiday year.

Finally, there’s this WOW Gospel Christmas album. There are zillions of WOW Gospel albums available. This double disk of holiday stuff is as close to Twisted Sister as you get without distorted metal guitars and pounding double-bass drum sets. It’s rock and roll, pure and simple. Surprisingly so. No household should be without.

The Answer is “Guernica”. And also “Andy Warhol”.

Today is 4 July. My Mom died early in the morning on the 4th a few years ago. Dad died a couple years prior on the Summer Solstice. I toast my Dad when I can with a shot of Scotch. He drank “King William”, a low-price brand recommended by that paragon of fine food and beverages, Consumer Reports. I usually try for a snifter of Laiphroig with just a few mils of water to release the nonpolar aromatics. Dad was Dad. And good Scotch is good Scotch.

Mom drank chardonnay, better chardonnay after Dad quit drinking (total alcohol budget then going into decent wine). For a while as she aged she stretched her tolerance with spritzers, cutting the wine with seltzer and spicing it with a sliver of lemon. In her last years she turned back to full-strength chardonnay. Not much of it, but it didn’t take much by then.

I bring this up because in the course of my ritual remembrance, I recalled an argument I had with my father when I was in high school. I was addicted to the first Velvet Underground album, the one with the Warhol “peel and see” banana skin on the cover. There was some glitch in the distribution, and I had to bug the guys in the Sam Goody at the Willowbrook Mall for weeks to get a copy.

One night, Dad stayed up a little too late and walked into the communal living room in the middle of the instrumental breakdown on European Son.

Pretty much freaked him out. Got into a long, Lewis Black-style rant about “music”, and “art”, and “beauty”. “Art” was only “art” when it aspired to beauty, “music” was only “music” when it aspired to same, ergo European Son, and by extension the entire album, was neither “music” nor “art”. Dammit. “Art” is beautiful. If it’s not beautiful it’s not “art”. Dammit.

Now. My parents did a pretty good job of giving us a well-rounded education, taking advantage of proximity to New York City to get us to museums, theaters, etc. At some point when I was younger, Picasso’s Guernica--or maybe it was one of the preliminary studies--was in the Museum of Modern Art. We made a special trip to see it, and on the way received a brief parental introduction to the Spanish Civil War, the fact that Nazi Germany got to try out their newly rebuilt avian technology, and the growth of fascism in the decades between World War 1 and World War 2 as plinth on which the devastation of the latter was constructed.

Guernica.







So, while Dad ranted and raged, I knew I had the argument won. He paused for breath. I said “Guernica”. He said “what?” “Guernica. It’s a horrific vision of hell on earth under bombardment. On canvas. As in “art”” Dad’s rant was derailed momentarily until he found himself a sliver of daylight. Guernica wasn’t “art”, it was “reporting”. When reality is so ugly, “artists” become “journalists”.

Even as a dim high school student I knew this was complete bullshit and even better I knew that Dad knew it was complete bullshit. As he stomped back to his room, I left him with a parting blast. I said “Oh, and don’t forget Heironymus Bosch”. I could hear him muttering as he headed down the hall.

Example of Hieronymus Bosch
in action. They get way less
“beautiful” than this, depending
on how deep you dig into his oeuvre
(as we art Qurittiques like to
think of it).










The next day, Mom made Dad apologize and acknowledge that I was right and that “art” didn’t have to deal with “beauty” to be “art”. I think she hit him with “The Dying Gaul” and Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, which had also recently toured (the Met this time, I think) and which we had also seen. I could see Dad wasn’t really convinced, but he couldn’t find a way out of the conceptual Hav-a-Hart trap he’d set for himself.

The Dying Gaul.

Michelangelo’s Pieta.















I recalled all this because I’ve been studying the conceptual foundations of piano tuning. A number of interesting and not-too-technical books on this subject are available.

Selection of books presenting
the problems and solutions of
western musical tuning.












Oddly, the physics and mathematics of the western system of music (which is generally restricted to certain whole and half tones repeated over octaves) do not allow simple, proportional tuning of fixed-note keyboards. Specifically, by the time you tune from middle C to the highest C (which is not the highest note, for no very good reason that I can discern a couple of notes above C end the customary keyboard configuration), you end up with an error of about a quarter of a minor second (i.e. a quarter of a half tone). Which is not much, but it’s plenty for trained musicians to hear, and even, if they are paying attention, people with good hearing even if not musically inclined.

In her book The Seventh Dragon: The Riddle of Equal Temperament, Anita T. Sullivan discusses various approaches to dealing with the mathematical overrun in piano tuning. When I read this passage: “Art has to do with beauty”, I could feel myself starting to yell “Guernica!” “Heironymous Bosch!”  “The Dying Gaul!” “The Pieta!”

Oh well. Maybe Sullivan has a kid who will sort her out at some point.

And, come to think of it, if “art” is about “beauty”, what are we to make of Warhol’s work, including my favorite, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips (which is usually on display at the Hirschorn in D.C.)? Take this, Dad--”Marilyn Monroe’s Lips!”

Marilyn Monroe’s Lips.