I’m going to get back to my little series featuring Black Music From The 1970s soon, but this song has been living rent-free in my head of late, so that means it’s time to feature it here. It’s by Canadian singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., and it was featured in the final episode of the first season of the amazing show Shoresy. The song seems to me to be about two people who are accepting of their own limitations and each others, and they love each other anyway. I love the delicate piano-and-voice minimalism of the song. Enjoy!
I’m a week late on getting my newest issue of Dispatches From the Forgotten Stars out, but out it is! I’m writing about another Album Of My Life, the soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally. Go read it! Now! Do it now!
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means I’m going to take a quick break from American Black composers. (Sadly, a brief attempt to locate Irish Black composers did not turn up much of anything at all. I did not dig super-deeply, though.) We’re going to dig back to the music of one Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo-Irish composer whose music has been overshadowed since his lifetime (1852-1924) by the likes of Edward Elgar and the British masters who followed. Stanford’s music is lyrical and Romantic, and it’s always pleasing. Not necessarily pleasant, as he brings a lot of good Romantic fire to his work, but pleasing. I’ve never heard a work of Stanford’s that left me thinking anything other than, “I’m glad I heard that.” This work is a good example. Stanford wrote six tone poems that he called “Irish Rhapsodies”, and this is the fourth of those. It is subtitled “The Fisherman of Lough Neagh”, and what a wonderful work it is–brooding and melodic and, in the end, just wonderfully triumphant.
As I was listening to this work, I read that George Bernard Shaw criticized Stanford’s music as lacking passion. I’m not sure what Shaw was listening to when he said that, because it sure as hell wasn’t this.
We’ve all known someone who had one significant accomplishment, and then on the basis of that one achievement they enjoyed notoriety and reputation based on that one achievement, though they never managed to come close to achieving anything on that scale again, right?
Yes, I’m talking about the Ides of March.
The Death of Julius Caesar (1806), by Vincenzo Camuccini (1771-1844)
Continuing an exploration of Black Music of the 1970s, we have Minnie Riperton today.
Riperton was a native of Chicago who tragically hit it big with her soprano voice, enormous range, and an airy tone that gave her songs an ethereal tone and then died of breast cancer when she was just 31. Her legacy endures, not just because of her music, but because of her influence on artists after her like Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur. Her legacy also endures because her daughter is famed actress and comedian Maya Rudolph.
Maya Rudolph, daughter of Minnie Riperton, in a SNL portrait. Apparently Ms. Rudolph looks amazing in overalls.
Here is Minnie Riperton’s biggest hit, “Loving You”.
Jonathan Bailey Holland is a composer originally from Flint, MI who is currently the Dean of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. According to his bio, he has had music performed by ensembles all over the world, and he has taught at a number of universities as well as at many music festivals and arts schools. And like many of the other composers in this ongoing mini-series of mine, I never heard of him until now. I have thus far only heard the work presented below, so I can’t discuss Dr. Holland’s general approach, but this work is minimalistic and haunting in its evocative use of a very small ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion) and its use of moody dissonances throughout. The work is chillingly meditative, befitting its title: The Clarity of Cold Air. This work does seem to me to fit the mood of the streetscape photo I posted the other day….
I’m long on record as not liking this time of year in my neck of the woods, but even this dreary time of year yields some good photographic opportunities.
I’ve been featuring Donna Summer the last few weeks, and then the other day The Wife and I were driving around doing errands and we were listening to 70s On 7 on SiriusXM, where a string of selections made me decide to expand the Donna Summer focus (and I’ll be back to Donna Summer!) to Black Singers of the 1970s. Why? Because a whole damn lot of really good music falls under that description.
We’ll start with a one-hit wonder that’s so infectiously good, and sung so well, that every time I hear it, I wonder why this guy–a singer from Jamaica–only had the one big hit. I’m talking about Carl Douglas, whose song “Kung Fu Fighting” is one of the great disco hits of the 1970s. Sure, the lyrics may be a bit…well…but between the melody and the beat and Douglas’s vocals, it’s one of those songs that makes it impossible to maintain a bad mood while listening to it.
I couldn’t decide which of three pieces to feature today, so I said to myself, “Why limit myself to one?” That’s right, you get all three.
Composer and flautist Valerie Coleman has had a deeply impressive career already. A native of Louisville, KY, Coleman was steeped in music from an early age, and her trajectory seems to have mainly pointed in one direction her entire life, as far as I can tell: up. She has been an accomplished performing flautist as well as a highly-regarded composer; her work Umoja–which began as a work for woodwind quintet but then was re-arranged by the composer for many varying ensembles–eventually became the first work performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra by a living Black woman composer. Honestly, I’m not even going to try to sum up Coleman’s life; for more on her, I highly encourage visiting her official website. I’m just going to feature some music.
First, we have a work for an ensemble I’ve never encountered before: the flute choir. The piece is called Juba, and according to Coleman’s site, “JUBA for flute choir gives homage to its namesake: a rhythmic dance found in the origins of both African-American and West African cultures.” It is certainly rhythmic and dancelike…and the melding of various tonal colors of different kinds of flutes creates a unique kind of magic here.
Next is a work that is obviously inspired, at least in part, by the example set by Aaron Copland. Coleman provides a fanfare for brass and percussion, called Fanfare for Uncommon Times. That certainly captures the era in which we live, doesn’t it? Also from her site:
It begins not with a typical fanfare salute, but a quizzical, searching line for solo trombone that soon is cushioned by pungent, soft-spoken brass chords. Unrest amid determination stirs as the music shifts into agitated episodes for percussion. The mood seems at once reflective and restless, uplifting and ominous. The elements of the Black experience during a challenging time that Coleman described come through during a passage alive with riffs for mallet percussion instruments, hints of dance and bursts of anxious frenzy. By the end, with spurts of four-note brass motifs, echoes of Coplandesque affirmation arise, but also a breathless flurry that feels bracing yet challenging.
Finally, what is likely Coleman’s most well-known and performed work to date, the afore-mentioned Umoja. Subtitled “Anthem of Unity”, I found this work challenging and contemplative and moving as I listened to it several times in the last few days alone. The notes on Coleman’s site are well-worth reading:
In its original form, Umoja, the Swahili word for Unity and the first principle of the African Dispora holiday Kwanzaa, was compose a simple song for women’s choir. It embodied a sense of ‘tribal unity’, through the feel of a drum circle, the sharing of history through traditional “call and response” form and the repetition of a memorable sing-song melody. It was rearranged into woodwind quintet form during the genesis of Coleman’s chamber music ensemble, Imani Winds, with the intent of providing an anthem that celebrated the diverse heritages of the ensemble itself.
Almost two decades later from the original, the orchestral version brings an expansion and sophistication to the short and sweet melody, beginning with sustained ethereal passages that float and shift from a bowed vibraphone, supporting the introduction of the melody by solo violin.
There’s more there, go read it…but listen to Umoja. This is music as balm for the soul.
