Donovan, in Her Majesty's Service

Following on the trail of recent posts about the songs of Donovan Leitch by my pal Relative Esoterica I I want to urge listeners to check out one of his lesser known, though one of my personal favorite, recordings - HMS Donovan. This was recorded after the birth of his first child in 1970, and like "For little Ones" is simultaneously for children but also should appeal to any adult with an ear attuned to poetry set to exquisite melodies and guitar playing with Donovan's particular twist on the folk tradition.

The record is lesser known than most of his others and had poor sales, despite one song that got a good deal of airplay "Celia of the Seals". This has some to do with a change in management and lack of promotion but also with the fact that it does not fit neatly into a "package" theme as some of his records. I personally think that Donovan's pop records at the time were not up to his usual snuff and the "people" were out of phase with him.
For the sake of brevity I include here a summary review of the record I posted in amazon back in 2000 - apologies in advance for my usual overflowery writing;

"While 'For Little Ones' is an intimate journey through the child-like looking glass of Donovan's Scottish Isles, 'HMS' is painted with a broader brush. This is more the loving stumble into childhood via an attic of musicboxes and half-crumbled story books with turn-o'-the-century color leafs. Some things we've outgrown and some things we should never forget.

Some unparalleled, great stuff here: 'Seller of Stars', 'Queen Mab", and 'Henry Martin' - lovely melodies w/ haunting guitar accompaniment somewhere between Bert Jansch and Ramblin' Jack.

The guitar throughout this recording is particularly crystalline and as full as harps in ancient halls. 'The Voyage of the Moon' - who else, I ask you, possesses the musical legerdemain to make you feel the slight pause of the moon with her sail of gauze? 'Song of the Wandering Aengus' - an ending that fades seamlessly into Yeats' celtic Twilight and your heart skips a beat. After hearing Donovan's version it will probably remain the only famous poem I can recite at will. Donovan is the undisputed master when it comes to reviving the vague stirring children have that there IS another world just past the trees and under the hills. (Am I completely nuts on this?) I respectfully differ with Markmatts [here i'm referring to another review] opinion of 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'. For those uninclined towards "folk"-type material, I play this cut first as bait by establishing our man as a visionary in sound. The response is invariably amazement. I find it endearingly Felliniesque - the song of the oysters is a gem and you'll not forget their little legs trotting on..."


"Henry Martin" is a traditional English song about one of Donovan's favorite themes,
piracy, and he employs a wonderful rolling - like the sea - modal pattern on guitar while using his voice to imitate a jew's harp or a hurdy-gurdy; much as one might hear on a sailing vessel of the 18th or 19th century or in some seedy port-of-call. The effect is trance-like and somewhat East Indian.

Here I include his version of the The Song of the Wandering Aengus, the famous Yeats poem set to words that is featured on HMS. In a past post "Hazel Wands, Wells, Wise Fish and Other Irish Fancies" from March 16th of 2006, I wrote a bit about the poem itself which might be of interest.

Many of the songs Donovan plays here are children's poems set to his own, or traditional melodies; here is the Thora Stowell poem, The Seller of Stars

Thanks again to Elizabeth for her fine posts on Donovan!

From Coleman to Cantors

Sometimes a confluence of events in our lives is like a prophetic dream, preparing us for a new revelation or a forgotten treasure newly revealed. Or, maybe it's just like seeing a color in someones hair and then noticing it everywhere.


I had been reading a biography of the composer Harold Arlen and noted with some interest that his father was a cantor; dictionarily defined as, applicable in this case, "in a synagogue, the person who chants the liturgy and leads the congregation in prayer" - really a "singer" of Jewish liturgical song. I had a strong emotional pull towards this type of song, and a vague memory of it stirred inside of me, filed within as "things I've got to look deeper into one of these days".

The night after I had read that passage about Arlen's father, I was having a break at the bar of a restaurant where a group of us play a kind of experimental jazz, not so much songs as "happenings into song" or "sound evolvements" or, (as it may appear to some) how about "mindless doodlings"?

Steve Jansen, one of my musical cohorts, who creates "soundscapes" from odd items, is also a journalist who has interviewed a fair number of jazz artists. We got to chatting about Ornette Coleman, whom we both dig musically, and the absolutely unfathomably perplexing explanations and declarations that come out of his mouth. I remarked that it would be interesting to "loop" some of these statements into a creative musical patchwork as they stand alone as wondrous ciphers. I mean, what does one make of;
"It's impossible for you never to have existed at all, because when you didn't know that you existed, you did exist." ? And so forth...
Ornette

At work in the library the following day I happened upon a book by Ben Ratliff called "The Jazz Ear" , a series of his ruminations and interviews with jazz players and composers. This book was of particular interest because Ratliff asks the artist to choose some recordings - not their own work - to play and discuss at the interviews.

In the book I found an interview with Ornette Coleman. Curious about the records Ornette would choose, I was pleasantly surprised that he had asked Ratliff to bring something by Cantor Joseph "Yossele" Rosenblatt. Ratliff brought a 1916 recording of Rosenblatt singing "Tikanto Shabbas" a psalm put to song. Also, what Ornette had to say was, for him, very direct.
Ornette on Rosenblatt;
"I was once in Chicago, about twenty-some years ago. A young man said, 'I'd like you to come by so I can play something for you.' I went down to his basement and he put on Joseph Rosenblatt and I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing, praying, all in the same breath. And none of it was crossing each other. It was all separate. I said, 'Wait a minute. You can't find those notes. Those are not "notes" They don't exist." Yossele Rosenblatt

As I listened to Rosenblatt myself, (this recording and others are available on youtube and elsewhere), I remembered where I had heard a cantor's song that moved me to tears and had sown the seed of curiosity about this music; it was in the Italian movie The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, based on a novel by Giorgio Bassano, and brought to fruition on film by Vittorio De Sica in 1970.
The story centers on the story of two Jewish families in Ferrara (the movie was filmed on location), Italy who have very different views on the events surrounding the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and the fate that awaited them with the advent of war.
It was De Sica's last major film. Having been lauded early on for the "neo-realism" of The Bicycle Thief, and Umberto D he subsequently had fallen out of grace with critics for his "lighter" work and, after almost 15 years, The Garden was agreed to be a fine, though different, return to his former glory.

Unavailable from any existing cd recording, on youtube I was able to find on a trailer clip (?) for "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" the beautiful, incomparable recording of Cantor Sholom Katz singing "El Male Rahimim" or "Keil Molei Rachamim" It comes in about 52 seconds into the clip and should not be missed!

From SaveTheMusic.com I did find this bit about Sholom Katz, acknowledged as one of the greatest recorded cantors;

"Sholom Katz was born in Grosswardein, Hungary. At an early age he was already displaying his unique ability before vast audiences. When he was only twenty years old, he won the post of cantor at the famed Kishinever Shul, with a three year contract. His next position was in the Hecker Shul where the renowned Shlomoh Zalmon Razomne once officiated as Cantor.
In 1942 in a Nazi concentration camp, Sholom was among 1600 Jews scheduled for mass execution. He received permission to sing the Keil Molei Rachamim (Prayer for the Dead) while the prisoners were digging their graves. The Nazi commandant, impressed with his voice, spared him to sing for the officers, and the next day he was allowed to escape, the only one of 1600 spared a brutal death."(italics are mine)

What can one say after that?



* The picture at the top of the page is of the Synagogue in Ferrara, Italy.

I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues

Billie's version * of I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues was waxed on April 20,1939 for Commodore Records.

Billie's singing here typifies all that I love about the early years of her recording career; when speaking of her voice/tone as a trumpet this is not to take away from her humanity - she conveys the lyric sentiment perfectly but she brings to it the beauty of something purely musical. You can feel the blues for her but you can enjoy the ride as you accept that certain things in life are a given.
Where most singers would have "torched it up" with Billie you've got a subtler resignation that doesn't deny the pain - as if to say, "Life is a bitch - so, what else is new? I gotta find a way to live with it."
While the rhythm section lays down the beat in Basie style, heart-beat SOLID (one can imagine the strums of guitarist Jimmy McLin springing OFF the beat, buoyant, like Freddie Greene) Billie floats over it all like a golden cloud.
To quote drummer Specs Powell;
"She was one of the first singers that did not emote, no bouncing around, sang very quietly, snapped right hand, holding it close to her side. Snapped her fingers and tapped her feet very quietly, head tilted slightly to one side. The opposite to most jazz singers [of that time], who seemed to be choreographed. Her whole attitude was very cool."

The song has a wonderful stoptime bit at the end of a verse; she sings on beats 1 and three with band answering on 2 and 4 "All I SEE...FOR...ME...IS...MIS...ER...Ree-EEE!" and when they all lock back in to the solid time it's total swinging joy.

Frankie Newton with Billie at the session



A fine addition the record is Tab Smith's wail of a solo on alto sax; I would have personally preferred someone like Lester Young or even Kermit Scott on tenor or Irving Fazola on clarinet, but I must admit that Smith's rather ornate 20's style glide upward gives a nice contrast to Billie's even swing.
To my ears, the high point of the record is Frankie Newton's muted trumpet obbligato
entwining Billies vocal. The more I hear it the more I'm amazed at the choice of notes that seemed to push Billie's phrases to the fore rather than merely ornament.
Newton was an anomaly, more of a Miles Davis for the swing era, with minimal lyric solos.
"Frank" as he preferred to be called, made an auspicious debut with Bessie Smith in the early 30's but virtually dropped out of the recording scene by the mid 40's; apparently his independent spirit was at odds with the music business. An avid reader, and painter who loved to play tennis he nevertheless continued to play the odd gig in Boston and remained a legend to those who recalled him. Jazz writer Nat Hentoff befriended Newton in his youth and relates how the older, athletic, father-figure walked protectively behind him and his girfriend through a dicey neighborhood to make sure he wasn't "jumped".


Frankie Newton with Sidney Bechet


The band for the session was the house band for the newly opened Cafe Society Uptown club on 58th Street between Park and Lexington in Manhattan. Barney Josephson, a jazz lover, was the son of Latvian immigrants, and had witnessed better treatment of black performers in Europe. He opened the club, partly to provide an integrated environment and also to showcase black performers as well as cabaret and comedy. It was Josephson who introduced Billie to her most famous song "Strange Fruit" - the thinly veiled portrayal of racist lynching in the south. The irony is that it was recorded at the very-same session as "I Gotta Right..." and would lead Billie down a very different road.
I would agree she became typecast in the following years as a "hard-luck" tragic chanteuse as much for this song as for the sordid details of her growing addiction to heroin and abusive men. Ironically (a situation much like Lester Young's), as her voice deteriorated, she was able to make more records under her own name - it always saddens me that so many listeners are ONLY familiar with the latter-day (of the 50's and late 40's) recordings and have no inkling of the golden-toned Billie.


Finally a word of praise should go out to the composer/melodist Harold Arlen and lyricist Ted Koehler who wrote "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues". The stunning array of melodies written by Arlen include Over the Rainbow, Let's Fall In Love, Stormy Weather, Get Happy, I've Got the World On a String, One For My Baby, Come Rain or Come Shine among others!
No accident that Arlen was the son of a Jewish cantor who also loved secular music; especially operatic singers like Enrico Caruso and John McCormack. Harold Arlen stepped beyond his family phonograph and enveloped himself in the sounds of ragtime, jazz and the powerful blues of Bessie Smith - Billie Holiday's prime influence along with Louis Armstrong.

Harold Arlen >




For a fascinating in-depth comparison of Billie's "I Gotta Right..." with Louis Armstrong's equally wonderful take from 1934, see Lori Burns' Feeling the Style: Vocal Gesture and Musical Expression in Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong.

* Billies "I Gotta Right .." can be found by scrolling down to the bottom of the link page - next to The Complete Commodore recordings.

The Best Things In Life Are Free

"The moon belongs to everyone
The best things in life they're free
Stars belong to everyone
They cling there for you and for me

Flowers in spring
The robins that sing
The sunbeams that shine
They're yours and they're mine
Love can come to everyone
The best things in life
Are free."



Times being what they are, it's only fitting to pull out an old nugget that has been given fine, if very differing, treatments by two of my favorite musicians, singer Jo Stafford and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley; The Best Things in Life are Free. Of course, the sentiment of the lyric is timeless in hard times or good times. Furthermore, one can drop the lyric - though the sentiment bleeds through - and just enjoy the music.



This tune was penned by Bud De Sylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson (who also composed the melody for Bye bye Blackbird) for the musical Good News back in 1927 when Babe Ruth was slamming 60 home runs on a moderate regimen of beer and hot-dogs and without steroids, flappers were flapping, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson opened at the movies, bootleg whiskey fueled the Jazz Age parties, and Bix Beiderbecke was in full swing with his golden toned cornet recording Singin the Blues and Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.
Either side of the road was the Sunny Side of the Street.

Jo's version from 1948:
Jo always stays close to the melody and lets the band swing it behind her but each phrase is HER phrase and is, when she's got a good song, almost always THE phrase that fits the song.

From Chris Albertson's interview with Lester Young, the poet of the tenor saxophone who spent the bulk of his listening time digging singers.

ALBERTSON Jo Stafford is your favorite singer?
YOUNG Yeah, and Lady Day [Billie Holiday]. And I'm through.
ALBERTSON But Jo Stafford does not sing jazz, does she?
YOUNG No, but I hear her voice and the sound and the way she puts things on.
Enough said.


Hank's version - 1961
Hank has always taken a backseat to Coltrane, Rollins, Getz and the other great tenor players of his generation..... and yet -
When the song was right (and he was right) he does something else, a certain flow and a subtle warm tone that no one can touch. Along with This I Dig of You and Remember I think of this solo, especially the first chorus, as a prime example of what he was all about; the way he rolls off of the the intro break unfolding in a gentle bop wave to come out like Errol Flynn, sword in hand down the staircase, cutting and jabbing, eliminating all obstacles to deliver the beautiful line and win Olivia de Havilland's hand; or at least secure some bread for the Merry Men.

Alone Together, Dancing In the Dark

Arthur Schwartz, self taught on piano, was encouraged by Larry Hart and George Gershwin, to ease out of a career in law, follow his passion, and become one of the greatest "Broadway" composers - these days lesser known than Porter, Kern, Rodgers and Gershwin etal; well loved, nevertheless, by singers and jazz instrumentalist artists alike.
Schwartz created elegant song melodies in minor keys that also intimated sunlight and exuberance, and melodies in major keys that allowed more than a few rainclouds over head and reveries of loss.

William Zinsser (who wrote On Writing Well, a wonderful book extolling direct, uncluttered writing that I obviously had more fun reading than ingesting!) gets almost rhapsodic on Schwartz in his book Easy To Remember The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs:
"Nobody wrote melodies as sensuous as 'Alone Together' and 'You and the Night and the Music', with their rich minor-key coloring, or 'Dancing in the Dark' and 'I See Your Face Before Me'. They are grandly constructed songs, soaring at exactly the moment when they need to take flight and then returning to earth, all musical issues resolved."

Appropos of flight-taking, soaring, and returning (serenely) to earth - in this case to a horse drawn cab of Central Park - is this famous scene from The Bandwagon where Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse provide lyric flight to the orchestrated Dancing in the Dark"
Again, seductive shifts of major and minor move under the basic motif.

Schwartz' perfectly matched lyricist partner, Howard Dietz, sets the layered emotions of the song in the first lines:


Dancing in the dark Till the tune ends,
We're dancing in the dark and it soon ends,
We're waltzing in the wonder of why we're here,
Time hurries by, we're here and gone;


"Haunted Heart" is another gem from Schwartz. Closing my eyes to listen I climb up through mountain paths, through trees covered in mists that open out finally into a clearing looking west over the ocean where a woman gazes out, singing as the sun begins to set (whaddya mean, I'm living in a musical?); once again subtle shifts laid out by the chord changes. Here sung by the immaculate, subtle and warm Jo Stafford (that must be her singing to the setting sun) - someone said she was Lester Young's favorite singer and that says much considering how he felt about Billie Holiday. Many thanks to Elizabeth of
Relative Esoterica for introducing Jo to me via her informed and passionate litanies!













"You and the Night and the Music" has been a longtime favorite of jazz musicians. Here is a great hard-swinging jazz version of the song by Anita O'Day. I completely flip hearing Anita, in the song's final go-round, taking a complete downward dive off the melody path and climbing back up singing a walking bassline in the final verses. Utterly Anita-esque devil-may-care drop-dead swinging.

Bill Evans does another great version of this tune on "Interplay" with Freddie Hubbard, Jim Hall, and Percy Heath, capped off with the wonderful drive of Philly Joe Jones on drums.

There is one "kick" Philly Joe delivers on the head statement that I always anticipate with delight. One of those definitive moments in jazz history!








Last but not least I offer you guitarist Pat Martino's take on "Alone Together" from The Visit, re-issued as Footprints.

Martino gives a hint here of the formative influences of Johnny Smith, Wes Montgomery, but soon enough, hold on to your hats and hear a true original. He starts off the melody statement with a loping swing enhanced by Billy Higgins and Richard Davis and then the tsoulful, tentative descending line
in the pick-up break and he's off and running. With Martino, no matter what the speed here, every line is a pearl.




In his book Singers and the Song Gene Lees offers this reminiscence;

"One day I was descending from the ASCAP New York office in an elevator. A tall, dark-haired, and strikingly handsome man in - I later realized - his seventies struck up a conversation with me. We got on to the subject of songs, and as we left the building found we were both walking north. The conversation continued. The man was elegant, poised, vigorous, articulate, and spoke with a voice of such gorgeous baritone resonance that I can still hear it in my head.
Finally, as we waited for a stoplight to change, he asked my name and i told him. He put out his hand and said, "I'm Arthur Schwartz."

John Martyn - "Every Bird that Sings is Born to Fly"

One Day Without You
I was saddened to hear of John's passing yesterday - but even then the thought of him brought a smile and "for-the-life-of-god!" shake of the head. I was glad to know he'd made it this far and hope he was content with his legacy; he certainly he lived wild and hard and brought some great music into the world.

I first saw John Martyn perform at the Troubadour in LA back in the 70's. My friend Alan and I had come to see the featured act -Incredible String Band - whom we had long admired and seen previous but they were in the midst of personnel and style change; Martyn however was an unexpected delight and, for me, a life-changing influence.
May You Never


It was the perfect intimate venue for him to play, accompanied by only his (predominately) acoustic guitar and warm smokey voice. It took about 20 minutes to comprehend what he was singing about, and chattering on exuberantly about through the thick lilt of a Glaswegian accent. The paradox of him was that most of his songs were unchecked soulful and emotional outpourings, in that sense very much like Van Morrison, and his music layered with gorgeous altered minor ninth chords and lovely intricacies but his in-between chatter was hilarious, self-deprecating, and bubbled forth with spontaneity. I think most of us were savvy enough to know exactly what he was singing about whether or not a few decipherable words swam their way to the surface.

A live rendition of You Can Discover on John Peel's BBC show. One of my favorites in the sweet melancholy twilight that John dished out.
Here another later live, less nuanced, version of the same tune but entered here for a taste of John's between-song rambles.
John would often cap off a set encore with one of these snippets of classic old-time American popular song:
Singin in the Rain
and Glory of Love

Though his major influences were recognizable - Davy Graham, and Skip James amongst others - John had a unique guitar style. He had a popping, slapping/dampening technique that he would often lay down on beats 2 and 4 that gave his tunes a jazz-like lift. He chose a variety of tunings but never played with the droney cliches many oft settle for but he also equally held forth expressively in standard tuning - it was all about the song.
One more I always loved - live with Danny Thompson;
Sweet little Mystery

Whenever and wherever I went out to see him I managed to say hello and he always had a humble but eager thanks to offer in return. He is still transmitting through the ether!

The following clip has John paired together with his friend and collaborator, the double-bassist Danny Thompson. The two were, seemingly, not always the models of sobriety; once they dared one another to do a concert set in the buff and followed through. Another tale of the road has Thompson, after a night of inebriation, nailing a hotel rug over Martyn while he snoozed oblivious on the floor. I'm sure John awakened thinking he was either buried alive or had finally met his Judgement.

John, we Couldn't Love You More

I can't resist one more simple favorite, as a goodbye. I like to blow some floating tenor sax lines over this one....
All For the Love of You

"You Must Remember This"

Some nights ago I was out in my capacity as Volunteer Luminaria-lighter for my block, finally getting the knack of lighting the tips of little candlewicks ensconced in the sand at the bottom of the white paper bags. As I glanced back at the neat rows of light trailing off into the distance I recalled reading from Jeff Kisseloff's marvelous oral history of Manhattan, "You Must Remember This" an old woman's childhood recollection of watching the lamplighter come down her street to illuminate the evening on the Upper West Side of Manhattan circa 1899.
Olga Marx was born in 1894 and would have been roundabout 90 when Kisseloff interviewed her in the mid-1980's:

"When the lamplighter came in the summer, that usually meant it was bedtime. I loved to wait for him on the stoop (of her home on 77th St. and Columbus Ave.) On mild evenings you'd bring down a chair and sit out there, although my mother thought it a little vulgar to visit back and forth between neighbors.
One mild evening she said to me, 'Instead of just sitting on the stoop before you go to bed, I want to show you something.' She told me to look up and there was a sky full of stars. It was the first time I had consciously seen just a lot of wonderful stars."

An oral history of Manhattan is going to be singular because so much change would have been witnessed by those around long enough to have seen it and yet enough of the old buildings, streets, parks and so forth remain to aid the imagination in transporting us back in time.


Following the "sky" thread somewhat, here another recollection from Olga:

"We also loved to play on the meteors which were then out in front of the Museum of Natural History (on the edge of Central Park)
I remember saying to my fraulein, (her German nanny) 'Look, I'm standing on a star.' But she was so prissy, and she said, 'Get down immediately. I can see your panties.'"

Olga Marx, who later graduated from Barnard and became a poet and writer, was obviously from the "better-offs" but Kisseloff also interviewed Bullets Brennan who, though he also lived on the Upper West Side not too far off from Olga, came from from a poorer Italian immigrant family and lived out much of his childhood on the streets.
"In the summertime, we never wore shoes, Most times we went barefoot. We'd be jumpin' around the rocks near the river in bare feet. When there wasn't any work (school not being an option), so many kids just hung around the corners or in the park, or went swimming off the dock at 75th Street, Bare-Ass Beach."
Like many kids on the street Bullets became adept at stickball - baseball's street-worthy cousin.
"A guy like Howard Cook, who was a big gambler, he'd buy the balls, and he'd watch. They all went for that. Sometimes they'd bet cash on the games. They might play for a barrel of beer."

Kisseloff (the full title of his book is "You Must Remember This: An oral history of Manhattan from the 1890's to World War II") covers all of the major neighborhoods of Manhattan in his interviews from the Lower East Side and Chelsea up to Harlem and points north.
He manages to find surviving witnesses to the Triangle Fire, sheep meadows in Central Park, the old New York Giant baseball games at the Polo Grounds, and Fats Waller at the piano in Harlem.
I found the reminiscences of the Dakota Apartments on the West Side intriguing. Bullets Brennan recalls his ragamuffin pals serenading the high class occupants at Thanksgiving. The Dakota was home to well-to-do music publishers like the Schirmers and parties were held there with literary guests like Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane as well as musical luminaries from Tchaikovsky, to -later on-
Gershwin gazing out at Central Park.
By the way, my friend Steve Hinders notifies me that our modern-day luminary, John Lennon, chose residence at the Dakota because the architecture reminded him of places in Liverpool.


Skating in Central Park with the Dakota as background circa 1890's

Anyway, I highly recommend "You Must Remember This" by Jeff Kisseloff for those who admire oral histories. It is on a par with Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times" and any number of the Studs Terkel books.

* a note on the meteors Olga Marx played on in front of the Museum of Natural History.
Quite possibly, one of these was the famous 15.5 ton Willamette meteor (from the Willamette Valley in Oregon) purchased by heiress Mrs. William Dodge for a tidy sum around 1904 from it's owners and turned over to the Museum. The meteor was held to be sacred by the Clackamas Indians of Oregon who referred to the meteor as a "being" called Tomanowos who arrived from the moon. I'm sure that little Olga would've loved to know that.

Davy Graham: Nov. 22, 1940 - Dec. 15, 2008

"A traveling man who made the journey down to Tangiers when the rest of us had our sights on Brighton Pier" - John Renbourn

Guitarist Davy Graham grew up in an immigrant section of London, with a Scottish father and a Guyanese mother. His skin-tone had a tinge of color from his mother which reminded him of his "otherness", and he was blind in one eye...

In the laissez-faire bohemian world of beatnik moving into hippie, Davy was an immaculate dresser sporting tight-cropped short hair, who early on made a conscious decision to be a heroin addict, and originally chose to feature a large block of Moroccan hashish as the centerpiece of his "Folk, Blues, and Beyond" album cover.
His version of Good Morning Blues here
He played jazz in London supper clubs and busked on the streets of Paris, studied the Koran, the musical forms Southern India and Western Ireland. He brought the crowd to it's feet with his version of Muddy Waters' "Im Ready" when I saw him at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1974....

His original guitar tune "Anji", has a simple lilt and swing that the more well-known, virtuosic versions by both Bert Jansch and Paul Simon do not.
I would have loved to have sat down and had tea in an English garden with him...
She Moved Through the Fair

de Nuncques: Unseen in the Seen

"What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies."-Jean Cocteau

"To make a painting, all you need to do is to take some paints, draw some lines, and fill the rest up with feelings." -William Degouve DeNuncques

Being a musician who uses up any "remains of the day" at home in the creating and practicing of music, in my spare time at my day-job I am lately driven onto a differing but somehow parallel path - drawing and pastel work. Or, at the least, thinking about it! Oil painting would be my first choice but requires more set-up and a larger space to make a larger mess. So, circumstances encourage me take the path of the "smaller mess" - pastels.

Curious to know what other artists have done with pastels - particularly those who, like Degas, also worked in oils - I came across someone unknown to me, the Belgian painter-pastellist, William Degouve de Nuncques. His pastel of a city park with lanterns as pictured above is hardly distinguishable from his paintings in oil. Our man Nuncques (as i'll call him!) is thrown in with that odd sliver of turn-of-the-century-and-beyond artists, The Symbolists.
It happened that the young Nuncques married another painter, Juliette Massin, and was introduced by his wife to Symbolists - both poets and painters. My guess, based on the scarce available biographical material, is that Nuncques was more of a "natural" Symbolist, and no follower of doctrine. His scenes, to me, derive more from a feeling than conveyance of a thought or principle.




Seeing Nuncques' pastels and paintings I immediately felt a thread connecting them. His style is simple and almost book-illustrative and not so boldly individual at first glance as, say, that other noted Symbolist, Redon. However, there seems to me something very strongly "internal" about them. An unlikely light is often juxtaposed against darkness and at times even a brightly lit daytime scene glows from within. Here the internal light of the unseen worlds seap through the seen; a ghost figure lingering as if to say "well, I'm going to take you part way there, and if you're drawn inside you'll find your way to the rest." Ultimately, the witness to this art is the invisible strand of light that seals the delicate haunting by his own intimations.



I introduced my lengthy Cocteau quote at the top of the page to these slender notes, not to call attention to the linear style of Nuncques' paintings, which are not particularly linear (in the way of Ingres or Picasso) but because I'm taking Cocteau's "line' to be something closer to the sense of it as a thread - something essential woven through an individuals work that connects it all with a subtle signature; not always overtly a "style".

The painting at the right is called the "Pink House" and was an influence on another Belgian, Rene Magritte, whose "L'Empire De Lumieres" takes similar delight in lights emitting mysteriously through the darkness.

Nuncques spent a great deal of the early 1900's traveling with his wife Juliette and painting in various locales. They settled for some years in the Balearic Islands off Spain where he painted the picture at the very top as well as the grotto scene. When she died in 1919 Nuncques was devastated and lost the use of his right hand for almost a decade. When, in the last years of his life, he remarried a woman who helped through his crisis, his facility was born again and he turned out a number of snow scenes from Stavelot, Belgium where they lived. His touch of the "unseen" remained.
The photograph of William Degouve de Nuncques seems to reveal someone, perhaps with a touch of madness, who has endured much and remained steadfast in his art. Interesting that his sometime roommate and fellow-painter, Henri De Greux, used him as a model for a painting of Christ. The photo of Nuncques suggests a Dostoeyevskian take on a Christ-like character.

Paul Caponigro: Hearing Through the Eyes

"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
- Frederic Chopin


Paul Caponigro is my favorite photographer. I know little about the analysis and technical aspects by which great photos are judged but I am always compelled to linger over his images. There is a stillness and mystery simply portrayed in his photos, which are largely black and white (silver tones) and devoted to landscapes, arrangements of natural objects, or ancient remnants of man now subsumed into landscape.

Caponigro was born in Boston and was strongly affected by jaunts with his family to the woods and shores of New England. He later traveled and absorbed the particular
landscapes of California, Arizona, Ireland, Britain and Japan. In the 40's and 50's he received formative, personal instruction from Ansel Adams and, especially, Minor White; retaining aspects of their approach in his own work but forging a different style.

He was also a musician; well-trained as a classical pianist since early youth who chose not to follow the rigors of classical performance and training which were not aligned to the intuitive and mystical bent of chance-taking that photography provided him with. However, music remains a parallel love that would seem to permeate his work.
The musical thread surfaces in many of his own thoughts regarding his work: for example, "At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'."

Caponigro cites a lesson from his piano teacher that guided him in his art, "...that the effort, diligence, and care required in practicing must be quickly suspended when pressure coming from anxiety or a desire for fast results causes them to degenerate."



Paul Caponigro describes photos as "dreams locked in silver.", that grant us admission "if only for brief moments, to sense the thread which holds all things together."


To enclose the circle and exit the proceedings with gentle flourish, I offer up (courtesy of myspace) a recital of Chopin's Grande Polonaise Opus 22 A

*I am much indebted to the fine photography site, Soul Catcher Studio for quotes and a wonderful selection of his pictures.
* Please note that Paul Caponigro is not to be confused with his son John Paul Caponigro, who is also a talented photographer working in digital-based color imagery.

Whiskey Before Breakfast

Noticing lists of summer listenings by some of my fellow blogposters, I can't help but indulge myself in the same.
What I have here is a list (with a bit of rumination) of 7 songs that I keep playing OVER AND OVER again.

Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams, Lady In Red - Stan Getz (April 14, 1950 NYC)

Getz (tenor sax) Tony Aless (piano) Percy Heath (bass) Don Lamond (drums)

The 23 year old Stan Getz was already nicknamed "the Sound" for his incomparable tone. Getz was a tempestuous personality who ironically, at the time of this recording, oft played with a gently diaphanous, high-register, detached sound, like an angel flitting about on Cloud 9 removed from worldly cares. On these two tunes he introduces a more varied, full-bodied, though still light-in-weight, sound, that dips more frequently than usual into the lower registers.

More importantly these cuts have a quality of utter effortlessness and swing. The beginning of "Wrap" has Stan floating right in on Cloud 9 with a round fogtone reminiscent particular recordings his his idol Lester Young did on one of his brief reunion sessions with Basie, in 1944, that featured Lester Leaps Again and After Theatre Jump.

To my ears, Getz rarely sounded so naturally melodious, spinning continuous, flowing, thread after thread and I can't conceive of ever getting enough of these tunes!

Here is a soundclip of Stan Getz playing There's a Small Hotel from earlier the same year, demonstrating the same qualities as the above tunes. Here he is playing with the rhythm section he was sharing with Charlie Parker at this time; Al Haig on piano, Tommy Potter on bass, and Roy Haynes (still very active today!) on drums.




Dixie Chicken, Fat Man in the Bathtub Little Feat (1973)
Guitarist Lowell George was a gifted slide guitarist and songwriter with a soulful voice, now enshrined as a "rock-star casualty" legend for his early demise. He formed the band Little Feat which was notably off the beaten path, forging a style as portrayed in these particular tunes, that fell somewhere in between New Orleans funk and rhythm and blues, and slide-driven southern roots rock. George was a bit of a Renaissance man of the musical world having early on mastered harmonica, flute, oboe, and baritone sax (he was even in on some Frank Sinatra recordings playing the latter two) before mastering the guitar. The Rolling Stones and Jimmy Page were both ardent admirers and Bonnie Raitt said she moved out to California solely to meet and hang with George, whose slide-guitar work she so admired.
"Dixie Chicken" and "Fatman" are great examples of Lowell's impassioned vocals, songwriting, guitar-playing and - with hats off to his bandmembers including New Orleans percussionist Sam Clayton - infectious New Orleans groove.
Here is Dixie Chicken.


Whiskey Before Breakfast, Under the Double Eagle
Norman Blake (1976)

On a recent visit to NYC I was delighted to find a small record shop in the East Village that had a cd version of one my favorite long lost lps, Norman Blake's Whiskey Before Breakfast.
Blake is one of the premier flatpicking guitarists on the planet. He is the epitome of taste, never resorting to lightning pyrotechnics unless they lend themselves to the musicality of the piece.
Blake, a native Tennesseean, was longtime accompaniest to June Carter and later a longstanding meember of Johnny Cash's touring band. Subsequent to that he drew "mainstream" attention for his work on Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. More recently he caught some attention, not for his flatpicking but for his nofrills vocal rendition of "You Are My Sunshine" featured in the Coen Bros., "O Brother Where Art Thou". He is not an exceptional vocalist but an unaffected and, upon gradual familiarity, pleasing one.
The tune "Whiskey Before Breakfast" has Irish origins (shocking, I know) and Blake delivers it here with Appalachian panache minus the TV hillbilly hokum. Another favorite of mine is his version of "Under the Double Eagle". In fact the whole album is a great listening experience for anyone with a liberal musical ear; no need to be a hardened bluegrass fan.
Here is a youtube clip of Norman playing Under the Double Eagle from Whiskey Before Breakfast



Rain and Snow The Be Good Tanyas Blue Horse(2001)

The Be Good Tanyas are an endearing, engaging, multi-instrumental, multi-vocal trio of gals out of Vancouver who play what i would call for the sake of convenience Old Timey American Root and Original music.
Rain and Snow is an old-time traditional tune that I first encountered as a regular set-piece at the Grateful Dead concerts c. 1969-1972 in Sunny California. Yes, as many of us are tired of repeating and many are tired of hearing, you had to have been there and see them live to know what the fuss was about, (I don't even mention this any more to the uninitiated because, well...); as I believe David Crosby said "there is nothing like the Dead on a good night!" - and, before you roll your eyes, chemical reinforcement was not necessary - trust me!
In any case, here the Tanyas deliver a this tune with their own unique spin and groove. Here is a myspace recording of the Tanyas doing Rain and Snow.
Here is a youtube soundclip of the Be Good Tanyas playing one my favorite of their tunes Ootischenia

Burne-Jones and the Sleeping Princess

A few weeks back I slipped into my local Art Museum, intent on (at the least) seeing the three Edward Burne-Jones paintings that were part of the "Passages To Europe" exhibition passing through.

The Burne-Jones pictures featured in this exhibit were three paintings comprising his 1st series of "Briar Rose" illustrations. They portray 3 stages of the Sleeping Beauty story as inspired by an Alfred Tennyson poem.

Since childhood I'd been drawn to Burne-Jones, having come across his "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in a massive hard-bound book of Art Masterpieces of the World that my father had round the house and that I had been concurrently using as the base for some imagined medieval fortress.

Burne-Jones is a master of exquisite subtle color and flowing line and I don't give a
hang as to whether the pictures are decorative, over-romanticized, dated, over-literary irrelevant Victorian fluff, or whatever epithets (sometimes justifiable) are available for the tossing.
< King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1880-4)


Arthur Ruskin encouraged and, in fact, initially paid for Burne-Jones to journey to Italy in the 1860's to bring back studies and sketches of the masters for him. Burne-Jones gradually became quite smitten with the Italian Renaissance painters - in particular Botticelli - and subsequently made journeys to Italy of his own accord to immerse himself in the art. He would soak up the linear rhythms and coloring of the Botticelli paintings; it was nothing for him to devote a whole session sketching the the flowery patches of ground from the Primavera in the Uffizi gallery. Coincidentally, Burne-Jones' father was a gilder and carver and Botticelli apprenticed with a goldsmith and their attention to textured delicacies of detail may be linked back to the fine craftsmanship they were exposed to in youth.
Burne-Jones himself sheds light on this influence, saying,

"I love my pictures as a goldsmith does his jewels. I should like every inch of surface to be so fine that if all but a scrap from one of them were burned or lost, the man who found it might say whatever this may have reperesented is a work of art, beautiful in surface and quality of color."

detail from Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat


The Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty painting, seen at the top of the page, is not the one I saw at the exhibit which dates from 1871 but from a later series (completed in 1890) based on the same composition. The earlier version, that I saw - which seems to be unviewable on the net due to copyright issues- is somewhat softer and dreamlike with a twilit blue tone to it (I would liken it more to a blend of Correggio and Fra Lippi) while the later version is more detailed and jewel-like with warmer colors.
Gazing long at the 1871 Sleeping Beauty painting (which was about 1" by 4") in the museum, I marveled at both the precision of the tiniest pink rose set against the cloth folds as much at the perfect balance of the whole scene; the eye following the lines of the the sleeping maids at the foot of the bed flowing into the supine Beauty and then down to the maid sitting at her side, head bowed in sleep, hands resting in fallen and withered petals. In the later, 1890 picture the hands of the maids are more expressively modeled, Botticelli-like, and the eye seems to finally rest on hand of the seated maid on the far right, resting on the ground, palm opened, like a flower awaiting a drop of rain.
I recommend to anyone a close inspection of the details of these paintings. either in person or through a decent reproduction. As David Corbett puts it in his excellent - aptly titled :) - short book, Edward Burne-Jones,

"The paintings use the rich textures generated by combining different media -

gouache, shell gold and platinum paint - to create a scintillating surface that marries

precision, in its description of fabric, flesh, and angel's wings, with an extreme assertion of the capacity of these media themselves to attract and seduce the spectator's eye.

Burne-Jones' works often perform this double process - on the one hand the detailed and evocative description of an imaginary world, and on the other the concrete realisation of imagination itself in the form of pigment, color, and line. "

* Corbett's book features excellent color reproductions of both the earlier and later
Briar Rose Sleeping Beauty paintings.

The Strand: Postscript Word Trip

From the first entry for the word "strand" in the Oxford English Dictionary:

strand (straend) sb [OE. strand = OFris. strond, MLG strant(masc), ON. strond (strand-)fem. border, edge, coast (Sw., Da. strand).]
1.a. The land bordering a sea, lake, or river; in a more restricted sense, that part of a shore which lies between the tide-marks; sometimes use vaguely for coast, shore. Cf. SEA-STRAND. Now poet.., arch.. or dial.

Going back to 1000, the OED then cites various quotes using the word "strand", in the above sense, in English.

For instance, from Chaucer in 1386;
"Thanne longenfolk to goon on pilgrimages. And Palmeres for to seken straunge
strondes."
Then later, a poem of Shelley's in 1817:
"On the bare strand
Upon the sea-mark a small boat did wait."


The love of a person, place or thing is a layering of many parts and threads; when any one of those parts and threads is singled out and examined closely they become less and less significant in isolation, losing the drawing power of the whole, and (to drag out the oft-used physics simile) like subatomic particles under microscopic view, utterly lose materiality, or rather, their materiality appears and disappears in waves. On the other hand, more threads may be revealed; an endless road of them. Knowing this, if only intuitively, my inclination is to lay back with an attitude of acceptance or gratefulness - content not to see or comprehend the whole picture, enjoying the detailed pathways and detours, but accepting the "mountain obscured by mists".

For me merely the sound of "strand" resounds, by a myriad of associations, with a feeling of refuge and repose, stretches of sand and tide to walk along.

In America we generally associate the word "strand" with the condition of being stranded, "he was stranded on a desert isle" or "I was stranded in traffic", and to a lesser degree, strands of hair.
In England up until the 1600's a "strand" usually signified a beach or shore. Those words gradually supplanted "strand" which was retained in placenames and poetic usage.

The shoreline of the Thames lent its name to Londons's Strand Street and district - once the site of vaudeville and "serious" theatres. Sherlock Holmes was first featured in stories published by The Strand Magazine.




In Ireland however, to this day "strand" retains its old meaning and commonly refers to a beach, shore, or a riverbank.
In the case of Ireland the usage of the word is more likely to come directly from the Danish and Norwegian vikings who gained a foothold there beginning in the early 800's. As they took a liking to the estuaries and coastal harbors reminiscent of their Scandinavian homeland the enterprising Norsemen proceeded to found what became the major Irish towns; Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Wexford to name a few. Scandinavian words connecting with sea travel and trade thus entered into the Irish language. Eventually the Norsemen and later the "conquering" Normans (descendants of Danish vikings themselves) were absorbed into the culture and bloodlines of the Irish; leaving not but the towns, castles, surnames (Macmanus and McAuliffe from the Norse; Fitzgerald and Burke from the Normans) and a few words like "strand".

When I hear the word I also think of the lovely irish jig "The Lark On the Strand".


There are many varied samplings of it to be heard on youtube and trad Irish records. My favorite on youtube is this one, a rendition by the young harpist Michelle Mulcahey. The Lark on the Strand is the second tune of the two jigs. This is the clearest and most fluent, affecting version in my mind and I enjoy watching the movement of her hands on each side of the strings, weaving the melodic line.