Local Talent

We enjoyed an upbeat hour of music at our local library with with song writer/blues guitarist,  Oscar Butler.

oscarbutlermusic.com/

Classical

 I was pleased to see that today's Daily Kos features one of my favorite musical groups, The String Queens.

Singing the Blues

 I've read two books recently on the subject of music, but I still don't have any sense of rhythm. I can't say I''m surprised at that outcome.  However, there are dimensions to music beyond the tap - tap - tap.  I feel I have at least made some gains in historical perspective about blues and jazz traditions thanks to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis.

"Ma" Rainey

Davis goes near to the beginnings of the Blues story in the 1920s with Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and shortly afterward as the torch is passed on to Bessie Smith.  Davis provides a very thorough account of how the themes and forms of the Blues developed out of the daily life struggles of those performers, including the challenges of segregation and racism.  Davis' book provides a context for the period that I had not seen anywhere before.  The quality of the early recordings is not always the best, but the last half of the book contains the complete lyrics of all the songs.

 

Billie Holiday - Wikipedia

 A couple of the last chapters in Davis' book are devoted to the career of one of my long-time favorites, Billie Holiday.  While the earlier Blues performers are lauded in the book for their expressions of Black culture, language and experience, Holiday's contribution - as portrayed by Davis - was primarily a combination of courage and political conviction.  What Davis was talking about, of course, was the creation of a song from the poem by Abel Meeropol, Strange Fruit. To champion and perform a popular song about lynching was quite a gamble in 1939, but it is hard to imagine any work of art in any genre ultimately  having more social and political impact.

When I actually got around to listening to some of the early recorded performances by "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith I was delighted to realize that I already knew some of their songs.  It turns out that quite a few of those early Blues tunes were picked up and performed by another great favorite closer to my time, Nina Simone. There is also a clear parallel from Holiday to Simone in the latter's 1964 composition and recording of Mississippi Goddam.  (Picture of Nina Simone by By Gerrit de Bruin - in Wikipedia)

Levi Platero

I caught the Levi Platero blues/rock group playing at the Gazebo in Old Town.

They will be in Phoenix on Monday, the 10th of October.

Looks like the Balloon Fiesta will be grounded by the weather for the rest of the week.  Hopefully, the afternoon entertainment in the Plaza Vieja will make all those $500 nightly hotel bills seem worth the price.

Rising Star

 I was pleased recently to find this video interview of guitarist and composer, Gwenifer Raymond, which includes snippets of some of her performances.

(trans) 894 views May 24, 2022 On this muggy Thursday evening we were guests in Bernd Mair's loft for the first time. The relaxed and intimate atmosphere reminded some of the visitors of the legendary Tiny Desk Concerts from the USA.

Our first musician in this exclusive setting was Gwenifer Raymond, a guitarist originally from Wales who now lives in Brighton, England. She calls her style of playing the guitar Welsh Primitive, based on American Primitive and Blues music. Live, however, it quickly became clear that Gwen's music also lives from her energetic and passionate style, which is deeply rooted in punk.

Schnittraum Tirol produced the interviews and the live recording. Enjoy!

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Gwenifer Raymond has done a lot of pre-performance interviews since I first came across her a couple years ago, but they are mostly boilerplate endlessly repeated -- so read one and you've seen them all. There is an enthusiastic review of her history and style by Kitty Empire on The Guardian.

Words can't do justice to Raymond's performance on the guitar (or banjo).  Be sure to watch some of the full performance videos available on Youtube.  I think the first one I found was Sometimes There's Blood.

Good Times

 No one in my immediate family had any talent for making music. I recall a record player in a big blond cabinet, a Motorola I think, and a small collection of 78 rpm records.  So there was some music in hearing distance from that as well from the radio and tv. There was some mandatory musical exposure in school, but can I only really remember enjoying a few elementary school folk songs. One of my worst memories from my junior high school days was being required to stand up in front of the class and sing something. I would have gladly traded that experience for a bout of corporal punishment.

Over the years my musical indifference and illiteracy was punctured occasionally by largely accidental encounters with musical expression which I found pleasing. I eventually developed a liking for classical guitar and even took a few guitar lessons. That went nowhere due to a lack of any sense of rhythm. Later, I found some affinity with some of the great jazz vocalists, mostly from '30s and '40s, and I also liked most chamber music I came across.

Luckily, music seems to have a genetic component which makes musical enjoyment accessible to even someone like me with a tin ear, and there were even a few instances in which musical performances became associated with life changing events. One such experience was the result of my immersion in the developing world of personal computers in the early 1990s.

We were living in southern New Mexico by then and I worked in a series of jobs in several social services agencies.  While working for a newly established guardianship group I developed a Foxpro/dBase program for recording visit notes along with billing information.  I got some free surplus computers from White Sands which I set up for our Las Cruces office and trained the staff in their use, and I also did some consulting and training with other social service agencies around the state.

The database application I developed relied on the text-based MS-DOS operating system, but it had easily maneuvered menus which made it quick to learn and easy to use.  I tried MicroSoft's early Windows system which was trying to compete with Apple's graphical user interface, but it just seemed awkward and ugly and did not tempt me at all to move my database programing in that direction.

What took me in a completely new direction in social services computer applications was the appearance of Windows 95.  I was working at that point in staff training in a agency providing services for mentally disabled adults. We used personal computers extensively in preparing training materials and I was often called on to do hardware and software trouble shooting.  I think most of the agency's computers were still stuck in Windows 3.1 at the time.

Windows 95 and its graphical user interface was a huge improvement over Windows 3, not only in speed and ease of use, but also in its networking capabilities which meshed nicely with the availability of a whole new world of information through the World Wide Web.  What really got my attention on the Windows 95 installation disk, though,  was a short music video which featured Edie Brickell singing Good Times.

There was no novelty in music videos in general by 1995; they were inescapable on tv. Somehow, though, being able to summon up a fully animated musical performance on a computer screen seemed revolutionary.  I recall inserting the Win 95 disk in a computer in our little three person office and seeing my coworkers' eyes light up as they watched Good Times. It was a short step from there to installing network adapters and wiring our computers together for file sharing and telephone line access to the World Wide Web.

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There is a nicely produced YouTube emulation of playing the Good Times video on the Win 95 screen.

  I still like Edie Brikell's performance a lot.