One of my favorite James Bond theme songs is Gladys Knight’s title tune for 1989’s Licence to Kill. Both the film and the song tend to be underrated, but I think both are fantastic. The Licence to Kill song starts with the same horn riff that opened the song to Goldfinger, an homage which necessitated royalty payments to that song’s creators. But Gladys Knight’s singing is the real star of the show here. She has one of those big voices that can fill whichever room she’s in, and fill it here she does. This is one of the best of all Bond songs.
Tuesday Tones
Here’s something fascinating: an entire album comprising a ballet written by a prominent rapper!
RZA is the leader of Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop collective that has been around for over thirty years now. That is, I admit openly, the extent of my knowledge of RZA. Hip-hop has never been a musical genre to which I have paid much attention, though not out of dislike in any way. I’ve found, pretty consistently, that when I am exposed to hip-hop in any extended way, I find myself intrigued by it and respecting it. So why haven’t I explored it? Well…time, mainly. I just never find the time for it.
The album featured below is not hip-hop, though. It’s a straight-up classical record: a ballet told through eleven tracks, which tells a story of six youths, each named for a diatonic scale, who “transpose” into their “higher selves”. It’s dramatic, interesting listening that feels like good film music at first blush.
RZA wrote the ballet after he apparently found some old lyrics of his, which he had written in his teenage years, and found the old ideas lodging in his mind as old ideas tend to do. I can relate to this! It’s like the old ideas show up and say, “You weren’t ready for me then, but I’m back.” I found this ballet lyrical and emotionally varied, and dramatic in the best “film music” way.
I hope the embed works, as it’s a playlist. If it doesn’t work (i.e., only the first track plays), go here to get the whole thing. I really enjoyed this work!
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Something for Thursday
Tuesday Tones
An incredibly hectic week is going on! The Wife had carpal tunnel surgery the other day, so I have to pick up the slack and actually do stuff around the house. Do you believe this crap? The horror!!!
Also, at work I’m in the long-delayed, long-planned process of moving my work area from one part of The Store to another. This will be lovely when I’m done, but right now I’m in the “All my crap is where it’s going so now I have to move around piles of my crap while I try to organize it and put it where it goes” stage of moving, which is not a fun part of the moving process to be in. But we’ll get there.
Meanwhile…as is my oft-used practice when I’m too busy to write about music, I drop in an overture by Franz von Suppe. Enjoy!
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Something for Thursday
Does this amazing song need an introduction? No, not really.
I find myself increasingly amazed by the lyrical approach to a lot of the great songs that I’ve never really paid close attention to before. The singer here isn’t the one taking the “Midnight Train to Georgia”…well, she is, actually, but she’s not the one whose turns of life have made taking that train necessary. It’s her man who went to Hollywood with dreams of stardom, dreams that didn’t pan out, and now he has to return home. He can’t even drive himself, having pawned everything–he “pawned his dreams and sold his car”–just to live, and now all he can afford is the one way ticket home.
But at least he has his lover, who is going home with him on that same train. There’s romance, after all, on those midnight trains that cross the nation while the rest of us are sleeping.
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Tuesday Tones
I hope that worked, I’m always a bit nervous about embedding video playlists.
Anyway: Carlos Simon is a composer who originally hails from Atlanta, GA. He completed doctoral work at the University of Michigan and has since enjoyed a varied career of composition and performance; according to his bio he is currently on the faculty at Georgetown University, and he served recently as Composer-in-Residence at what was the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I don’t know what Dr. Simon’s current status is regarding that, since the Kennedy Center has been one of many Grounds Zero for our current President being a complete and utter calamity, but that post was a great honorific at one time. Dr. Simon has had a number of his works recorded, and he has been performed by quite a few of the finest music ensembles in America.
The work featured above, Tales: A Folklore Symphony, is “a four-movement piece for orchestra that explores African American folklore as well as Afrofuturist stories.” Dr. Simon’s website has an entire page devoted to this work, so I recommend going there for more! He even provides a perusal copy of the score which you can explore virtually as you listen. It’s a fascinating, inventive, energetic, and emotional work that plays out fascinatingly over its four movements.
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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!
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Tuesday Tones
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.
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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.
Apparently Ms. Rudolph looks amazing in overalls.
Here is Minnie Riperton’s biggest hit, “Loving You”.
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Tuesday Tones
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….