Lady G and John Jacob Niles

Lady G
11.375" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010


Every one of my Top 100 years have started on February 23rd. On that day in 1983 I made my very first top 10. I now have less than four months left to make 54 more paintings. In this blog it is my aim is to show all hundred paintings from the Top 100 series using precisely one hundred posts. In order to accomplish this I'll have to double up a bunch of paintings as I blogged 59 times already. The pairings will be presented in order of who I paint but the order is random if it comes to topics. The first pairing is that of Jamaican dancehall singer and deejay Lady G with John Jacob Niles from Kentucky, USA. An odd couple indeed, the former a woman with a deep macho voice and ditto songs, the latter a man with a falsetto and sensitive themes. Hey Gal is the song -right out of the heart of the contemporary urban jungle that is Kingston- by Lady G and I already (see Top 10 #42) spoke about Maid Freed from the Gallows Pole, a story from a time long passed, by John Jacob Niles. Niles is after Beth Orton, Nina Simone, and Ornette Coleman, the fourth performer with two tracks in the list and two paintings completed. The fifth will be Roberto Carlos Lange; I'm in the middle of painting that painting which you'll see in a few days. The first public showing of paintings from the new series has already started: the Edward Kamau Brathwaite painting (see the entry called September!) is on view as part of the Visiting Lecturers exhibition in the corridor of Hopkins Hall Gallery at the Ohio State University. It will be up until the 16th of November. Then several paintings will travel with New York's White Columns to the NADA Art Fair in Miami Beach, held Dec 2–5 at the Deauville Beach Resort. One of ten paintings I selected for that occasion is the following of John Jacob Niles.

John Jacob Niles
11.25" x 8"

oil on wood, 2010

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell                                      Joni Mitchell
  10.25" x 8"                                            10.5" x 9"
oil on wood, 2009                               oil on wood, 2010

In the Top 100 2009 the painting of Joni Mitchell was the favorite among the visitors to that exhibition. Surely Joni Mitchell, as a performer, holds high esteem by my audience (who tend to be a little older) but there was also something about that painting that would draw the viewer in. At the exhibition at Skylab in Columbus in March 2010, the painting itself was not there, a color copy hung on the wall as a substitute for the painting that had already sold before all 100 paintings were completed. When the show traveled to Cincinnati for a second life I decided to paint a new version for the Joni Mitchell entry, just to have an original painting showing, knowing too it could double as the Joni Mitchell for the current Top 100. Comparing the two paintings the similarities as well as the differences are pretty obvious. The second version is closer to the original (black and white) photo I painted it from but I think anyone would agree that the first one is better. It has that sparkle to it, a liveliness that affects the viewer. The Cincinnati show at Country Club Projects ended today, the official end to last year's Top 100. Today the second Joni Mitchell painting officially promoted from 2009's second version to the Top 100 2010. The song is the same: All I Want from the record Blue. I, for one, am not only a fan of Mitchell's music but I like her paintings a lot too. Most of her records have her art on the cover, that alone is worth collecting her records. Blue is an exception.

p.s. There will be another little tail end to the Top 100 2009 when, on November 4th, I will present a talk about the catalog for the Top 100 2009. The event, part of the ongoing Topics Table series, will take place at Hopkins Hall Gallery, the Art Department gallery at the Ohio State University, from 11:30 to 12:30 that day. The book will be for sale there by Iconoclast Editions. Come y'all!

The Golden Voice of Mandarin Pop

Zhou Xuan
16" x 8.5"
oil on wood, 2010

From Hong Kong to Shanghai, from Cantonese Opera to Cantopop to Mandarin Pop, I'm traveling fast and I'm traveling light. Today I went to a lecture by this photographer, Fred Marsh, who spent time in Guangzhou (which is Canton, I didn't know that. It's a city, and a huge one too –I didn't know that either). Afterwards I approached Mr. Marsh and told him I was crazy about Cantonese opera, he told me he was crazy about opera too, just yesterday he went to see a four hour Boris Godounov production and had tears in his eyes. In his lecture he told us that he was not a tourist, his art is not travel photography or documentary or journalism. And I respect him for that, he and his work are too sensitive to be considered as such. Me, on the other hand... I am a tourist, I don't live, feel, think, experience like the people I paint, I hardly interact, I barely get out of my home (save for going to work). Post-Modernism smells like tourism these days, globalization is tourism, and I'm no better, I'm a musical tourist and it is my goal to hear as much as I can from places as remote as possible, and I travel fast, I travel light. 
Zhou Xuan, the name starts where Guangzhou ends, is from Shanghai. She was the biggest star in Mandarin Pop, nicknamed the Golden Voice. The picture suggests an adorable, lovely, and happy person but her life was far from that. Zhou Xuan was born in 1918 as Su Pu, kidnapped by an opium using uncle when she was three, adopted by two sets of parents (the last with the family name Zhou), not enjoying a happy love life, and prone to mental breakdowns, she died at the tender age of 39. Zhou Xuan started working on the stage at age 17, had a major breakthrough two years later with the film Street Angel (1937) from which Song of the Seasons originates that's in this year's 100. Zhou Xuan spent her life searching for her biological parents but, unlike you and me, she never knew she was born as Su Pu.

Top 10 #42

Top 100 2010, top 10 #42, 10/24/10, 10:06 PM, Columbus, OH.

1. Zhou Xuan – Song of the Seasons    -––I'm into listening to everything labeled traditional Chinese since I saw this wonderful concert in a park in Chinatown this summer. My latest focus is Cantonese Opera. The interest brought me to the blog: Soft Film (see link below). It is amazing to me that whatever subcategory of music I fancy at a particular moment there is an accompanying website with tons of historical facts and films and sound, and any sort of background you can wish for. Hail to the makers of Soft Film.
2. Marion Brown – Centering (w/Leo Smith)   -––In my last blog entry I wrote about finding Marion Brown's LP Duets in a thrift store. I was only vaguely familiar with the saxophonist but now he scores his first points to go into the Top 100 archive. When somebody new enters into that archive I add biographical data and when I did so for Marion Brown I found out he had died just a few days ago, the exact day I bought Duets!
3. Elfrieda Haese and Heidi Schlei - Steierischen Jodler   -––When German music comes into a top 10 it's usually somewhere between Ludwig van Beethoven and Einsturzende Neubauten but not the hoom-pah-pah, yodeling, beer drinking schlager parade. Until now! Ach Ya! Traditional German-American Music from Wisconsin is the name of the double album to add to the ever growing sub-collection of American immigrant music. I've got a ton: Norwegian, Ukrainian, Cuban, Mexican, Slovenian, Irish, you name it.
4. Chun Siu-lei – The New Lady Tan Kei   ––-The painting below actually meant to accompany an old Cantonese Opera from the Sprigs of Time: 78s From The EMI Archive record but since I've found on softfilm.blogspot.com the model for it singing and dancing in Hong Kong made films, the painting can now represent the one portrayed, and I have to find something else to paint for the Cantonese Opera tune.
5. Time and Temperature – I Know the Caves are Deep   ––-A new EP is out by Val Glen's project Time and Temperature. It's called Cream of the Low Tide and it's good. Listen to it and/or buy it at: timeandtemperature.bandcamp.com  Read more about her in an entry on this blog from April or in Top 100 2009, available at Iconoclast http://www.iconoclasteditions.com/
   
6. Devil Music Ensemble – Red Heroine   -––This one I found at the blog Soft Film as well. The musicians are Americans though from Boston who recorded a soundtrack for a Chinese silent film.  Red Heroine from 1929 is the oldest known full length Kong Fu movie.
7. Neila Miller – Mean Old World   -––After the initial thrill of discovering the roots of a well loved song (Hey Joe) it was due time to listen to the rest of the album Songs of Leaving. It is really beautiful, her voice reminds me a little of John Jacob Niles'.
8. John Jacob Niles – The Maid Freed from the Gallows Pole   -––As with Neila Miller: After the excitement of hearing the original to Go 'Way from My Window, due time to listen to some of his other works.
9. Aster Aweke –Track 8   -––After a while I also started to listen to the rest of the Aster Aweke cassette (see blog entry, Oct. 22: Aster Aweke). Track 8 (titles are in Arabic script) is a beautiful mixture of the vocals of track 1 and the rhythm (like Egyptian Reggae) of track 4.
10. Gopal Chunder Singh Roy – Beggar Song   -––Access to older and older recordings! 1910, India, from the album Sprigs of Time, a new chapter in compilations of old 78s that started with the amazing series The Secret History of Mankind: Ethnic Music Classics, 1925-1948.

 
Chun Siu-lei
10" x 8"
oil and acrylic enamel on wood, 2010

Thrift Stores

The Joyfulairs - In the Valley
record cover (detail), 12" x 12"

Frequently I visit the 2 or 3 thrift stores near to where I live, always looking for records. I hardly ever find anything ‘good’ but usually buy 1 or 2 anyways, they usually cost 50 cents or one dollar. There are always a few records that’ll fit right in to my collection although I probably only play it once when I get it, and then never again. Records like Julian Braem playing Segovia, a signed record by the Lord Saints, a calypso group from the Virgin Islands residing in Miami, FL, hired to perform on Cruise ships in the 1960s, or Blue Öyster Cult’s Secret Treaties, to name a few, are all right but hardly a ‘find’. Certain records or artists can always be found at the thrift stores of Ohio; I never counted but these are, I think, the Top 3 representatives: 1. Andy Williams, 2. Barbara Streisand, 3. Ferrante and Teicher. The only musician that can be found almost always that I’m interested in is Joni Mitchell. I have ten of her records but I have no ambition in collecting all. So even on Joni Mitchell’s records I pass. There are always tons of religious records to be found and occasionally I try my hand to some of those. They usually don’t disappoint me but it is for the sake of novelty, hardly ever a contender to this oh-so-serious list o’mine. Once I picked up a Meditation Singers record produced by Rock ‘n’ Roll history’s cult hero Andre Williams, probably the best thrift store find ever. (That and an original Lomax field recording of blues on a 78.)
Following is a top 10 from thrift store records I bought recently:

1. Les Clarinetes de Linares – El Gallito Giro (Mexico—almost all records in my very large Mexican/Latin American popular music category come from thrift stores)
2. Antoñita Romero – El Berebito (ditto for popular records from other parts of the world, this one a single from Spain)
3. The Joyfulaires – (In the Valley) He Restoreth My Soul (remember the Shaggs)
4. Maurice Ravel plays Ravel (one of my sub-collections are recordings of classical composers playing their own music solo on piano, I have Stravinsky, Grieg, Debussy, and a handful of others) 
5. Marion Brown – Duets (occasionally a record shows up  that doesn’t belong to the thrift store category, a Madlib record, the Circle Jerks, or this free jazz improvisation doulble record in mint condition) 
6. Hudci a speváci zo zemplína (a collection slovenian folk songs: Ohio thrift stores house a large depository of Eastern Eropean records, dumped by immigrants—buy 20 and end up with one great record, such is the ratio) 
7. Farewell Flower to Remember Her Youth is the title of an LP printed in Hong Kong (problem with records dumped by Asian immigrants is that the names and titles are often in Asian characters—this one was so special that I brought it in to work for a co-worker to translate the Chinese characters)
8. Cris Williamson – The Changer and the Changed (turns out this one is a historically significant record as it originates (early, 1973) from the feminist/lesbian community, there is no male involvement in the whole process—that is until I picked up a copy at the thrift store, it contains some cool songs)
9. George Benson – The Other Side of Abbey Road (I don’t like Smooth Jazz, but this may be from the time it wasn’t called smooth yet—this remake of the Beatles’ Abbey Road gets better with every turn table turn)
10. Dolly Parton – Rocky Top, Tennessee (I didn’t mention yet that there is a whole lot of popular country music to be found in thrift stores)

Aster Aweke

 











Aster Aweke 
14" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010


I've already told you about the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa, and I say again: It is awesome. Their second to last entry was once again a gem: Aster Aweke's very first tape from the late 1970s recorded in Addis Ababa. I had never heard of Aster Aweke (b. 1961, Ethiopia) but she is apparently well known in the US, to which country she moved in 1981. As I do once in a blue monday, I ran a tape deck along with the digital sounds of the blog, clicked on the image of the cover for the original tape cassette, set my printer to 66%, print, and I have a home made replica of the original tape. Surely many have done this before me but I should ask the blog's proprietor, Brian Shimkovitz if this is ethical or not, one day I will...  And thanks to Phil Briggs for his informative comment regarding Aweke on the Awesome Tapes' site, and to Wikipedia for that matter for additional information. I'm really into thanking people right now so here's to Ross Simonini of Believer magazine who lead me to Awesome Tapes from Africa back in 2008.

Painting that lovely image from that cassette, I again, as with the previous pipe player, went into naive mode: I painted like a beginner:: I painted like I painted Asta and Boris when I was sixteen::: A small brush, hardly any medium, no vision or plan besides to paint that lovely image. Asta and Boris , by the way, were my brother's first two dogs (he's had a bunch now, and names them following the alphabet, just like the hurricanes, I can't remember his C, but then he had Daisy, then Ezra, now his dog's name starts with a G I believe). It was my painting debut with the set of oils I had just received for Christmas (actually Sinterklaas, Dec. 5th) from him. Those paintings were quite nice, the dogs were Danes, and I really captured their eyes' sad goofy look. Painting the painting opened up the opportunity to make it into a psychedelic painting, but I refrained. I think that one can still sense the psychedelic possibility even without the purple and orange mushroom shapes and the stairs going all spirally into the sky. Then listen to the tape and get all orange and purple and mushroomy. And if you keep listening, you come to track 4, and you'll hear the spirally stairs. The stairs FYI are pretty much the same as Jonathan Richman's stairs in Egyptian Reggae from about the same time. Don't get any wrong ideas: I swear I wasn't intoxicated when I wrote this... promise (this is not the 1970s!)

Hungary again and fingernails

Hungarian bagpipe player (possibly Imre Jankovics)
10" x 7.5"
pen on paper

So there's two now in the 100, tracks from the cd Hongrie: Musiques populaires. My favorite so far is Hárnas táncdal, a bagpipe tune by piper Imre Jankovics recorded in the early sixties. Another tune by him on the cd is also a beauty; Rab vagyok, rab vagyok, played on an obsolete pipe instrument that, according to the booklet, is only found in the Ethnographical Museum. Time to start working on some images then. And what a start it was; against all classical drawing wisdom I started with a detailed rendition of the piper's left index finger's nail and continued detail by detail until all the parts were on the paper. I never payed attention to the whole, only to detail. I certainly would tell all my students they do it wrong if they approached a drawing this way, but there is that tendency with inexperienced drafts people to do it just like that (and that's how I felt myself when I started). I've heard about a teacher of portraiture who'd swear by starting with the left eye, and commanded all his students to do just that as well. What it does is to establish a scale. An eye is, as a focal point, an obvious choice for the establishment of a portrait. A fingernail less so when drawing a figure but then again a fingernail is about the same size as the iris of the eye (in the picture the fingernail also happened to be precisely in the center). The figure is measured by fingernails as it were. A nail is about half an inch and when a person is six feet, the measurement would be the magical number 144 (12 dozen). Amazingly or not, scale and proportions worked out perfectly in my drawing, as if I intuited precisely how big that fingernail needed to be. After about half an hour scribbling marks on my paper I proudly showed the drawing to my wife, who then commented that one day I would be sued for stealing a photographer's image. I took the commentary to heart and scribbled a hundred and forty four stars all over the picture: now it was my own. Photo credits on the cd go to D.R. by the way.

Blues!

A month ago, after Ornette Coleman became the first jazz musician in this Top 100 list, I asked myself who the first blues musician would be. That there has to be blues in the Top 100 is a given, there has not been a Top 100 without it. The answer came to me after a night of playing records with some friends, selecting some highlights from my collection. Blue as a Man Can Be by Robert Pete Williams is certainly one of those highlights, and the key track, Grown So Ugly, a classic. Fans of Captain Beefheart, who covered the song, certainly will appreciate the original by Robert Pete Williams. Williams is not that well known a blues singer but points for Grown So Ugly as well as Prisoner's Talking Blues, a most desperate song in the blues idiom, catapulted him into the top 50 of musicians over 28 years of counting, and as blues goes, second to only John Lee Hooker. In another list kept over 28 years, Prisoner's Talking Blues entered the top 50 of songs, and as blues goes, second only to R.L. Burnside's Going Down South. The painting, unlike my recent laboring with the oils, got done in just a bit over half an hour. It's from an image in Blue's Who's Who, that I also used when I first started illustrating the Top 100 back in 1989.

Robert Pete Williams
7.5" x 7.5"
oil on wood, 2010

Niela Miller

 Niela Miller
16" x 12.5"
oil on wood, 2005

Last week I had just mentioned my song Hungary in the post with the same name. The song didn't cross my mind in 25 years but now it did, not just once but twice. I bought a record this week with recordings by Niela Miller and the last song of the album Jenny Gal begins with the same dissonant guitar chord as my Hungary. Miller's then weaves into song while mine drones into oblivion. Of course similarities between songs is not so uncommon even when the sources are as disparate as they could be. It's in the nature of music. Even if I incessantly search for new and different tunes I delight in that moment of recognition. In When I Was in Colon by Valerie Colon I hear My Bonnie is Over the Ocean, in a 1950s recording of Cantonese opera (The Moon/Two Green Lotus Bitterly Imprisoned, also in this Top 100—post and painting will follow soon) I hear the iconic organ opening of Iron Butterfly's In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, and so on and so forth. Sometimes the similarities are pure coincidence, sometimes willingly plagiarism. Back to Niela Miller's album Songs for Leaving it's easy to hear Hey Joe in her Baby Don't Go to Town. There's no 'Joe' in the song neither do we have Jimi's majestic guitar solo, but there is no coincidence in the similarities. As history will have it Niela Miller had a boyfriend named Billy Roberts, indeed the Roberts found as the song's authorship credit for the Jimi Hendrix monster hit. Before Hendrix in 1967 it was already a hit for Love (whose Arthur Lee was a friend of Hendrix'), Tim Rose, and for the Leaves in 1963. Apparently Roberts had started playing it in 1961 fusing Miller's song with Carl Smith's country hit Hey Joe! Niela Miller's Baby Don't Go to Town is few years older than Billy Roberts' Hey Joe. I'm sure Niela Miller had her sources too. Hey Joe has 'traditional' written all over it.

Hungary

Michael Hurley
10" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010

There's only a handful of dreams in one's life of which the memory stays with you forever . One of those dreams for me occurred more than twenty years ago. In the dream my father, on a train in Hungary, morphed into me. The dream was given with so much detail that I ended up researching those details' (political) history. Little did I find, even a coin, of which I could read its inscription, didn't give any real context. At the time I believed it was a reincarnation dream,  but now I don't believe in that anymore. A little later, during a few months when I had the ambition to become a singer songwriter, I wrote a song about that dream called Hungary. It was recorded on the roof of the building I was living in at the time with the sounds of the city in the background. God knows what happened to the tape. My friend Oebele, who recorded it, may have it, I don't know. It was quite a pathetic song (in retrospect) so it's probably a good thing it's lost (I will never attempt a do-over). Apart from the dream I have very little affinity with Hungary or Hungarians. I have one friend, Bela Koe-Krompecher, an American with Hungarian roots, who, as fate will have it, married a Dutch woman, (Merijn van der Heijden, who is one of the few people around my home town of Columbus I can talk Dutch to -and still be understood). The Top 100 also has very little affinity with the country; once a Hungarian Gypsy combo led by Pali Gesztros had a song in it and Bela Bartok has been in the list a few times but that's all I recall.  Stat maniac as I am, I noticed this very blog spot hasn't had one single hit out of Hungary yet. This of course needs to change. So I go to the library, go to the world section, go to European section, go to the letter H (split only with Herzegovina), pull out the cd Hongrie: Musiques Populaires, and it's awesome! This year's Top 100 will have music from Hungary! Here's my top 10 from the cd:

1. Mihaly Barsoni and Rokus Papp - Tiszaujfalui tekeromuzika
2. Imre Jankovics - Harnas tancdal
3. Zither Band of Sandorfalva - Kek szivarvany koszoruzza az eget
4. Andras Szim - Bura termett ido
5. Sandor Czako's wife - Szoloorzo dalok
6. Imre Jankovics - Rab vagyok, rab vagyok
7. Erno Kukucska - Aki dudas akar lenni
8. Menyhert Vegh's wife - Harom kivandorlo dal
9. Pal Tendl - Regi dunantuli lakodalmas csardas
10. Mrs. Istvan Nagy - Ne futyoressz, ne csicseressz

Now you're asking: what has the painting of Michael Hurley to do with all this? The answer: I don't have Mihaly Barsoni (the first from the cd to enter the list) painted yet (I probably won't be able to find his picture anywhay), and Michael Hurley's is the newest I finished (while playing the Hongarie cd over and over again). Michael Hurley was in the Top 100 2009 three times, I wrote a lot about him, I met him, and did hang out a with him a little. The real link though is that both Michael Hurley and Hungary are both filed alphabetically under HU: they are next to each other in my archive. My pathetic little song had a refrain that went hu-hu-hu-hu.
Lastly here I want to affirm to my Polish friends (more than 20 visits to this site from that country) that I'm not forgetting about their country. I'm also looking into the first Polish Top 100 entry in ten years (which was an anonymous 'kobza' player'). With Poland I have a little more more affinity than with Hungary as I have met several Poles (one I was French kissing about the same time I had that Hungary dream, I forgot her name –it was a difficult name to spell let alone pronounce). In my record collection I have way more Polish records than Hungarian ones, lots of polka of course, but the first Polish record I ever got was by the singer Ursula Sipinska, a beautiful blonde who's best song on the record is a Polish rendition of Bob Dylan's Be My Baby Tonight.

Facebook

99 fiends I have gathered now, on my Face Book account. It would be nice if Jessica Lea Mayfield could be number100. I met her last year, she was 19 years old then, I was 45. I approached her as a fan, asking her autograph, and acting all fan-like. She, on the other hand, seemed very mature, joking with me and treating me like one of the good old boys. She signed a drawing I did of hers in concert, and in return I gave her one too. The concert was awesome. That she returns in this new Top 100 is because of Face Book; Elizabeth Gerdeman (one of the 99) posted her song Kiss Me Again on her page. Face Book has become a brand new source to pull music from for the Top 100. Now that I'm so close to have my 100th friend I just must take a moment here and celebrate this new source of music. What better format could I use than to compile a top 10 of music my friends have posted on their page in this still running year of 2010.

1. White Noise - Love Without Sound (per Roberto Carlos Lange)
2. Jessica Lea Mayfield - Kiss Me Again (per Elizabeth Gerdeman)
3. Singing Japanese train attendant (per Ennie van Leeuwen)
4. Extreme Animal - Live at the MOMA lobby (per John Also Bennett)
5. impLOG - Holland Tunnel Dive (per Roberto Carlos Lange)
6. Parliament - The Goose (per Roberto Carlos Lange)
7. Daniel Johnston - True Love Will Find You in the End (per Elizabeth Gerdeman)
8. 3XD (Three Times Dope) - Funky Dividents (not sure, I think it was Bela)
9. Jolie Holland - I Want to Die (per Laura Bidwa)
10. Tee Set - Ma Belle Amie (per Maria van Boekel)

Jessica Lea Mayfield
16" x 10"
oil on wood, 2010

I have so much to say about this painting shown here of Jessica Lea Mayfield but I'll keep it short. I've worked on it for a long time (weeks!), just couldn't get it right. Started over three times. Everything about it was a challenge. For  one the striped T-shirt: it represented both Vermeer's tile floor and the clothing worn by inmates on a chain gang. The hardest part was the likeness. I'm almost there but there is still a touch missing. I'll figure it out. Last year the same song was on the list and the drawing of her in concert I used as representation. I had a hard time then too. Even though the drawing was made in only five minutes, I spent long hours retouching it (mostly through practice runs on copies from the original), trying to capture her likeness.

Jessica Lea Mayfield
11" x 8.5"
pen on paper, 2009
signed by Jessica Lea Mayfield