Orion the Hunter, emerging from behind a tree. Soon the Hunter will have moved beyond my southern horizon, not to be seen again until late next Autumn.
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.
