The Last Pint

One my favorite Irish hornpipes is The Last Pint, a guitar piece composed by the French-Algerian-Jewish maestro of the instrument, Pierre Bensusan.
Here is the recording off of his record, Spices.

It is a rare tribute to a "non-irish" composer of an irish-style instrumental
to have that tune covered by a top-notch hard-core (but innovative) traditional group out of Ireland; in this case, Lunasa. They have recorded a version, much slower than the original but with the same lilt, on their eponymously titled album from 1996. Here is a live version off of youtube not quite as clear, soundwise, as the album but well worth the listen. The harmonizing of the low whistles is out of this world.

I happened to see Lunasa performing this piece at the Ulysses Pub at Pearl St. and Stone in the "old" Wall Street area of Manhattan in 2004 (?).

-Stone Street, in front of the Ulysses Pub

Pierre Bensusan - a great admirer of the Bothy Band (pictured above having a pint), Planxty, and others of that ilk - has truly absorbed the Irish feel and transmitted it through many of his guitar selections like no other solo player I know.
Here he plays a medley of the traditional tunes The Pure Drop and The Flax in Bloom

myself in front of the Ulysses Pub-

* one more youtube post I missed Here Pierre, playing live, two jigs: Merrily Kiss the Quaker's Wife and Cunla (also known as Frieze Britches)

Freewheelin

The cover for the Freewheelin Bob Dylan record, released in 1963, was not the typically posed affair of the era. The snow on the ground of Jones St. near West Fourth in the Village that wintry day and the tightly bundled pair holding one another close depicts an urgency of the moment familiar to those on foot who know they've got to get somewhere - it doesn't matter much where - to get warm.
Suze Rotolo, girlfriend of Dylan in those early years, and an artist herself, describes the events surrounding the album photo in her book A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties.
Columbia records had arranged a photo session ostensibly for publicity and possibly for the upcoming record.

"Bob chose his rumpled clothes carefully. I put on a sweater and on top of that sweater was a bulky knit belonging to Bob. As usual, the apartment was cold. It had snowed a few days earlier and it was one of those damp New York City winter days that chill to the bone."

Initially, the photographers, Don Hunstein and Billy James, snapped some shots in the young couples apartment; first with Bob alone and later playing guitar with Suze at his side.

"We were all having a good time, and after a bit Don suggested we go outside. Bob put on his suede jacket. It was an "image" choice because that jacket was not remotely suited for the weather. I don't care if he was from the cold North Country - he was bound to freeze going out in that - but maybe we wouldn't be outside for very long. When I was in Italy I had bought a loden green coat that I loved dearly, even though I knew it wasn't suited for a New york winter. I put it on over the big bulky sweater and tightly tied the belt of the coat around me for warmth. I felt like an Italian sausage. Out we all went."

"I huddled next to Bob as we walked up and down Jones Street per instructions from Don and encouraging smiles from Billy. Bob stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and leaned into me.

'We walked the length of Jones Street facing West Fourth with Bleecker Street at our backs. The snow on the streets was slushy and filthy from the traffic. The sidewalks were icy and slippery, but at least there wasn't much wind blowing. To keep warm we started horsing around. Don kept clicking away. A delivery truck pulled up and parked, so we turned on to West Fourth Street. In some of the outtakes, it is obvious that by then we were freezing; certainly Bob was, in that thin jacket. But image was all."

The album turned out to be a remarkable one in many respects. Unlike his first record, Freewheelin was mostly originals. Girl From the North Country, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Blowin in the Wind, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, and Masters of War for starters.
it was a prolific time for Dylan and the tunes that didn't make it to the final pressing were enough to have a full an entire worthy record; Talking John Birch Society Blues and Let Me Die In My Footsteps, among them. He was also working on Tomorrow Is a Long Time (I love Sandy Denny's cover of that one) but didn't record it. Though it didn't get much in the way of "pop" airplay, the reputation he made from other people's covers of the tunes, his subsequent appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, and the buzz off of the folk-world grapevine soon made it a timeless classic.


locale of Suze and Bob's pad in the Village...


Notable quotes about Freewheelin -
From George Harrison;
"We just played it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude — it was incredibly original and wonderful."
Van Morrison said:
"I think I heard it in a record shop in Smith Street. And I just thought it was incredible that this guy's not singing about 'moon in June' and he's getting away with it. That's what I thought at the time. The subject matter wasn't pop songs, ya know, and I thought this kind of opens the whole thing up...Dylan put it into the mainstream that this could be done."
Suze herself says it plain and direct in her book;
"The album spoke the time-honoured language of youth and rebellion against the status quo, and the cover embodied the image. It was folk music, but it was really rock and roll."

Suze Rotolo held me captive with her book and I recommend it, not only for the Dylan connection but for a look at the Village scene in the 60's as well as her own unusual background; an interesting counterpoint to the hobo-genius-kid from Hibbing.

Jesse Colin Young: Rye Whiskey

Here
is one of my all-time favorite performances:
Jesse Colin Young singing the traditional song, Rye Whiskey.


Jesse was born Perry Miller in Queens, NY, November 11, 1941. He sang in Greenwich Village in the 60's and upon being discovered, wisely (in the recording studio?) tossed Jesse James and Cole Younger into the blender to come up with his new moniker.

I love The Soul of A City Boy, his first solo record and also a great deal of his work with the Youngbloods. I had the good fortune to see them play for free one fine breezy afternoon long ago in the green tree-swaying shade of Griffith Park, Los Angeles.

Roundabout 1969-70, my friend Bill and I used to play, and improvise on, his song Sunlight as we were beginning to take guitar-playing seriously and take a fledgling dip into jazz with a latin tint.
We both owe much to the smooth but soulful voice of Jesse and those first Major7/9 and Minor 7 chords.....
Here is Jesse's Sunlight. It's cut # 17 on the Youngbloods page.

*Postscript/footnotes concerning Jesse's discovery in the Village at Folk City:
It was jazz pianist and composer Bobby Scott who discovered Jesse, got him into the studio to record Soul of a City Boy with help from his friend and employer with Capitol Records, Bobby Darin (who also had big ears for a variety of music beyond his "niche" and recorded "If I was a Carpenter" by another Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Tim Hardin).

I had heard of Scott via his elegiac reminiscence of his friendship with Lester Young, The Heart Is a Home, which was included in Lewis Porter's A Lester Young Reader.
Prez called Bobby "Socks", a typical Lestorian poetic flip derived from "bobby-socks".
Bobby composed "A Taste of Honey".

Here is a link to an article detailing Bobby Scott's colorful career; it includes an interesting comment/reply from a musician friend who illuminates Bobby's collaboration and friendship with Brazilian guitarist/composer Luiz Bonfa (Manha de Carnaval, Gentle Rain, and Samba de Orfeu etc.)

Mary Magdalene Altarpiece

In 2006 while walking through the Accademia Gallery in Florence, I slipped away from a guided tour I surreptitiously joined in front of Michaelangelo's David, and upon entering into an adjoining room, was drawn to a medieval altarpiece.

It was a tallish panel painted in vibrant, meticulous detail presenting a tall and slender woman in what appeared to be a simple long brown gown standing in front of a series of boxed story "scenes". Only after standing there transfixed for minutes did I realize it was not a gown but the actual hair of the woman which flowed down to cover her entire body; save for her face, feet and ankles, and the place that parted to let her hands come forward. The hands held a flowing parchment in gothic letters. The wall inscription described the painting as the "Penitent Magdalene", and the artist, the anonymous "Magdalene Master".
Naught but her own hair would have been the garment she wore as penitence during her supposed sojourn as an ascetic in the wilderness.


Looking at the picture prior to this post, revived my former interest in the matter - initially inspired by the rather incredulous but thought-provoking Holy Blood, Holy Grail - and I've been reading a scholarly work, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor, by Susan Haskins. The book is slow going if you need to be tantalized at every turn of the page but well worth the trouble if you are interested in history and want to get an unbiased view free of New Age buzz-words, ultra-feminist dogma, crackpot conspiracy theories, or, on the other side, ultra-conservative church ideas. Though Haskins points out the obvious suppression of the role of Mary Magdalene by the male-centered apostles (notably Peter) she is also ready to admit that the Gnostics - who, debatably, were the initial purveyors of the "lost" Gospel of Mary - also thought less of womanly participation in spiritual affairs.

Haskins stresses that Mary Magdalene became a "catch all" figure that reflected the myths and prejudices of different eras. There is a case to be made that the obsessive collecting of saintly "relics" by churches to foster their own prestige ("you may have the fingerprint but we actually have the finger!") directly promoted the unlikely mythologies surrounding the Magdalene. Her own character and life story became a blend of various other Mary's; ie. Mary of Bethany, the Virgin Mary, and Mary of Egypt, a 5th century repentant prostitute who lived as a desert ascetic and was clad in nothing but her own long hair.

I think her mystery will continue to remain just that. Like the myths of King Arthur, we have little historical fact (in his case, next to nothing) to go on but much to improvise off of.

I have a postcard of the Penitent Mary Magdalene altarpiece that I got from the Accademia but I prefer the photo of it above; the shadowiness underlines the feeling of mystery I get from the Magdalene story.

Serge Chaloff's Body and Soul Follow-up

I made a previous post back in August of 2006 that details my admiration for jazz baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff's version of Body and Soul. Finally here is a link to the actual recording (it's cut #7 on the Boston Blow-up album) via myspace - an example of one reason I still hang on to my account with it.
Here is the former post for any interested.
I hope you all are enjoying your Memorial Day and have a few moments of peace.

Skip James Returns

Out of the many hours of film compiled by Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, and others for the documentary The Blues, the sequences featuring live footage of Skip James in particular are the most compelling to me.

Skip James was an articulate, but inward man who perfected an unusual style of guitar-playing and singing and was fully aware of his worth. Blues writer Dick Waterman describes a scene wherein a fan came into Skip's dressing room late in his career:
"[he]picked up Skip's guitar and played a Skip James guitar run. He then asked Skip if he'd ever be able to play the guitar as he did. Skip looked at him for a long moment and slowly replied, 'Skip has been and gone from places that you will never get to.'"

Growing up on a plantation in the South, Nehemiah "Skip" James received an early education on the piano, and some tutoring from local musicians. He graduated from high school and would've been eligible to teach but, besides blues piano and guitar, much of his youth was spent upon the wayward path; bootlegging, pimping, and gambling. He had some violent tendencies and was rumored to have killed a man. His father had some trouble with the law, left the home when Skip was a child but, oddly enough, resurfaced when Skip had grown up, as a very religious, apparently charismatic man who was well known minister in the Baptist church. As for Skip, by this time he'd already honed a repertoire of highly idiosyncratic blues tunes with very "secular" lyrics.

Disappointed by lack of compensation for his legendary recordings for Paramount in the 1930's Skip virtually abandoned his blues playing and rode out the Depression lost in obscurity - working in his father's church as a preacher (having embraced the Bible, at least outwardly, and turned away from the Devil's pursuits) gospel choir leader, then rambling on throughout the South as farmer, and miner - until blues revival enthusiasts (Bill Barth, John Fahey, and Henry Vestine - later of Canned Heat) fired by his reputation found him recovering from surgery in a small town hospital in Mississippi in 1963.
Unaware that he was a legend among blues collectors he nevertheless agreed to be whisked off to Rhode island where he stayed in a house with other rediscovered bluesmen. With guitar in hand, he resurrected his blues tunes of yore for an upcoming appearance at the Newport Blues Festival. In his wonderful book Feel Like Going Home Peter Guralnick vividly described what then ensued:


"For anyone who was at Newport in 1964 it was an unforgettable experience. After an afternoon of legendary blues performers -SleepyJohn Estes, Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi John Hurt, and the Reverend Robert Wilkins- Skip James appeared, looking a little gaunt and a little hesitant, his eyes unfocused and wearing a black suit and wide-brimmed flat-topped preacher's hat that gave him as unearthly an appearance as his records had led us to suspect he would have. There seemed some doubt about whether or not he would actually perform, but then he was introduced and after some fumbling and retuning of his guitar he launched into what must be his considered greatest composition and one of the most affecting blues ever recorded, "Devil Got My Woman".

....As the first notes floated across the field , as the voice soared over us, the piercing falsetto set against the harsh cross-tuning of the guitar, there was a note of almost breathless expectation in the air. It seemed inappropriate somehow that this strange haunting sound which existed till now only as a barely audible dub from a scratched 78 should be reclaimed so casually on an overcast summer's day at Newport. As the song came to an end and Skip, who had gradually been gaining confidence while he played, peered out at his new audience, the field exploded with cheers and whistles and some of the awful tension was dissipated."

Skip playing Devil Got My Woman behind the scenes at Newport
Skip played guitar altering 2 strings from the standard tuning, EADGBE, to create his own tuning, EGEGBE. He called it the "cross-note" tuning because it moved easily between minor and major, which of course lent an air of ambiguity to his blues. Although played completely open the tuning would sound out an E minor chord, Skip habitually would hold the 1st fret down as an "anchor" on the 3rd string; giving him a G# and lending an E major sound as he chose.
Samuel Charters describes Skip's guitar style in The Bluesmen
"He usually played a melodic line in unison with the voice, like most of the other Mississippi blues singers, but he filled the openings between the vocal phrases with rhythmic figures in the guitar that had a distinct complexity."
His vocal style resembled the traditional "field holler", which, in this case was not so much of a loud belting holler but a kind of high whispery moan that "would soothe his mule".

Skip's Crow Jane is a surprisingly exuberant little tune despite the somewhat menacing lyric!
After Newport Skip was able to make some fine records for Vanguard but he never achieved the popularity of his friend Mississippi John Hurt, or Son House. He was not a man to reach out to the audience but left it up to the listener to take or leave what he had to offer. Although he succumbed to cancer by 1969 he was able, due to the royalties received from Cream's version of his I'm So Glad, to pay somewhat for medical treatment that would prolong his life, and at least pay for the funeral.

Pierre and Queen Nefertari

Master guitarist Pierre Bensusan has a lovely, lyric little masterpiece of a tune called Nefertari.

Some of my jazz friends will say, "Oh yeah, you mean Nefertiti (the one Wayne Shorter wrote that he and Miles recorded), that's a hip tune." I'll have to say, "Yeah, Nefertiti is great, but this is a different queen and a different tune."


Nefertari, whose name means, variously. "beautiful companion", or "most beautiful of them", was the favorite queen of Pharaoh Ramses II way back in circa 1290-1250 BC.
She was uniquely loved by her husband, as, at his time, most royal marriages were made and kept solely for political reasons. Nefertari was 13 when she was betrothed to the 15 year old Ramses. From his numerous wives he is said to have fathered 100 children but Nefertari remained the favorite companion. She is oft depicted in paintings of the era as the same height as Ramses which was an unheard of violation of Egyptian representational protocol! Ramses built a temple for her and the god Hathor at Abu Simbel, and she is seen on the walls there as a companion of the goddess Isis.
Nefertari apparently took an active role in negotiating peace between the Hittites and her husband, and there are surviving cuneiform tablets from Turkey that contain correspondence from Nefertari with the king and queen of the Hittites.
Poems written by Ramses to her filled her burial chamber, and in one he says;
"My love is unique—no one can rival her, for she is the most beautiful woman alive. Just by passing, she has stolen away my heart."
She is pictured below playing senet, a boardgame that, when skillfully played, insured smooth transition into the afterworld.


Pierre Bensusan has long been a favorite guitarist of mine. I discovered his Pres de Paris record in a Santa Cruz shop in the mid-70's and was bowled over by his solo fingerpicked renditions of the Irish jigs Cunla and Merrily Kiss the Quaker's Wife. On those tunes, much like Martin Carthy or the bluesman Mance Lipscomb, Bensusan propels the beat with a dampened, often monotonic bass on the low strings while the intricate melodic line rides on the high strings. He makes liberal use of open strings in the melody and this gives the tunes a harp-like singing, suspended sound. His placement of open string notes is tastefully and expressively executed; without the excessive "open-tuning" drone style of most American "folk-style" players and, on the other hand, it creates a resonance that would would be lost in most "classical" guitar renditions which are stultified with precise clipped notes.


Inspired by Bensusan's example as well as similar ventures by Carthy and John Renbourn I went through 2 years of playing almost exclusively in the tuning DADEAD (sometimes used by the latter two) and concentrating on Irish/Celtic instrumental tunes and my own material before it dawned on me that I was digging myself into a pit of obscurity and would need to return to standard tuning if I wanted to interact at ease with other musicians. Pierre, plays solely in DADGAD - the "Davy Graham" tuning - but has the technique and versatility to, doubtlessly, adapt to any musical situation.




After not having heard much from Pierre in a while I was listening to a jazz station one night and heard an incredible piece: I thought "Who the hell is that? It sounds like Bert Jansch and Baden Powell got fused together!" It turned out to be Bamboule from Bensusan's latest record at the time Solilai.
Although he plays everything in the "modal" DADGAD, Pierre has a fine ear for harmonic change and can carry off some original sounding voicings of "jazz" chords within the tuning.

Nefertari is off of his record Altiplanos. Listening to Nefertari intently in the last few days, I wondered at it's time signature; it sounds completely natural but there was "dancelike" lilt about it like a gavotte - something from a renaissance court, or village courtship ritual. After an exhausting day of work at the library (yes, it can be very physical of late), I was looking online and found that there was a transcription of the piece in the Sept. 2006 issue of Acoustic Guitar. Suddenly, miraculously, I no longer had to take that afternoon nap; I called up the library to make sure they had the issue, then jumped into the car and tore back over there, bounded up the stairs to the 2nd floor Periodicals Dept. and made my copies. Lo and behold - the tune is mostly in 7/8 with some forays into 4/4.
Here's another Bensusan original from Altiplanos, La Dame de Clevedon. Here, as in Nefertari Pierre displays his organic sense of time - it ebbs and flows as a force of nature and it is laughable to think of it ever committed to mere paper!

Krishnamurti Thought

I habitually read a daily "meditation" from J. Krishnamurti's The Book of Life - one can take it or leave it, but I usually take it. He was just the sort to get teed off if you accepted anything he said without question and I greatly admire that.
here's the entry for today, May 14.

Remain with a Feeling and See

What Happens

"You never remain with any feeling, pure and simple, but always surround it with a paraphernalia

of words. The word distorts it; thought, whirling around it, throws it into shadow, overpowers it

with mountainous fears and longings. You never remain with a feeling, and with nothing else: with hate, or with that strange feeling of beauty. When the feeling of hate arises, you say how bad it is; there is the compulsion, the struggle to overcome it, the turmoil of thought about it....

Try remaining with the feeling of hate, with the feeling of envy, jealousy, with the venom of ambition; for after all, that's what you have in daily life, though you may want to live with love or with the word love. Since you have the feeling of hate, of wanting to hurt somebody with a gesture or a burning word, see if you can stay with that feeling. can you? have you ever tried? Try to remain with a feeling , and see what happens. you will find it amazingly difficult. Your mind will not leave the feeling alone; it comes rushing in with its remembrances, its associations, its do's and don'ts, its everlasting chatter.

Pick up a piece of shell.

Can you look at it, wonder at its delicate beauty, without saying how pretty it is, or what animal made it? Can you look without the movement of the mind? Can you live without the feeling that the word builds up? If you can, then you will discover an extraordinary thing, a movement beyond the measure of time; a spring that knows no summer."