Bella Ciao

Bella Ciao is a widely know partisan song of the Italian left wing resistance during World War II. The history of the song is complicated and goes back many years in many different directions. In stead of giving you a synopsis of this history I'd like to refer you to: riowang.blogspot.com/2008/12/bella-ciao.html
Tracing the history of a well known song belongs to the realm of musicology and it is my favorite branch of it. I like the intrigue and conspiracy theories that always seem to come along with it. Somehow it always turns out that the origin of a tune belongs to a universally shared consciousness dating back to origin of our species. The further a tune is traced back the more interesting it becomes for me. As a tourist I travel with the musicologists from a riff in a Hip-Hop tune, to a folk song of the 60s, to a blues song of the 30s, which then splits up into an Irish sea shanty of the 19th Century and centuries old rhythmic traditions of East Africa. The 19th Century sea shanty is then traced back to a Norwegian murder balled of the 9th Century while the East African rhythmic traditions are traced back to Assyria long before Christ was born, and then it turns out that the murder ballad's roots come from an epic poetry also from Assyrian origin. Clearly, the cavemen long before these Assyrian balladeers were humming the same tunes. The fiftieth top 10 this year revolves around Bella Ciao:

1. Anonymous group of women from Ferroletto (South Italy) singing Alla Campagnolo. This song instigated my search into wonderful world of Bella Ciao.
2. Mishka Ziganoff - Koilen. A Gypsy/Yiddish tune from Odessa recorded in New York City in 1919 carries the exact same melody as the famous partisan song Bella Ciao.
3. Márta Sebestyén with the Muzikas - The Rooster is Crowing. These Hungarian folk musicians reconstructed Central European music of a much older origin  yet. This song also carries the same melodic theme as Bella Ciao's.
4. Giovanna Daffini - Bella Ciao (Pianura Padana). I've had this record Le Canzoni di Bella Ciao for many years. Recorded in the early 60s the song clearly hints at its Italian roots well before the second World War and possibly into the 19th Century.
5. Alfredo Durante and his wife (from Latium) - Saltarello. The record Music and Song of Italy (#1 as well) collected by Alan Lomax (the original edition, on vinyl, 1958) has been the find of the year. My only regret is that Lomax talks about keening in "South of Rome" in the liner notes but there is no audio to prove his claims. I collect recordings of keening (or wailing, or weep-singing) but they're very hard to come by. I have eleven.
6. Stanley Buetens Lute Ensemble - In seculum artifex (anon. 13th Century). Save for the Latin language, this tune is not so much related anymore to the Bella Ciao history. I have tons of recordings of interpretations of old-old music. You can find them at thrift stores among any place that sells old records. Cheap!
7. The Petar Krstich Choir - Oce Nas. Another thrift store purchase. It's local from Steubenville, Ohio, but the vocal orthodox tradition of this Serbian church goes back as far as the 4th Century.
8. Xiang Yu, the Conqueror Removing His Armour. I keep finding all these Chinese records lately. The astral plane must have picked up the information that there is so much Chinese music in my Top 100 this year. This one's origin is ancient and is a Pipa Music Cycle.
9. Lou Prohut and the Polka Rounders - Ach Du Lieber Augustine. When you see a four-record set of old timey polka music by the original artists for 75 cents (precisely one cent per song!) you should not pass it up. I didn't!
10.  "Ninna Nanna, a lullabye song in the high lonesome style by a woman from one of the villages near Naples where strong traces of Moorish culture are still eveident."    —Alan Lomax
    

Images relating to Bella Ciao will follow as soon as I can produce them. For now... Bella Ciao! 

Hurdy-Gurdy

(RE: Hungary —October)
HU is following me around. The sad refrain from a pathetic little song is haunting me. Early in the year I told myself I would try to write poetry again. I've not had the inspiration yet this year but now I think that a list of words starting with HU could make a good poem.  Hundred—Hungary—Hun—Hungry—Hug—Humble—Humor—Human—Huge—
Hurt—Hunt—Hut—Hunch—Hulk—Hunk—Hump—Hurry—Hush—
It's not a poem yet, but I'm inspired, I just have to work the order and word choices a bit. I could try to make sentences from it, make it into little riddley ditties: Hundred hungry Hungarians hunting Huns.
My Top 100 archive is poetry too —too many HUs to list 'em all but this the bulk of it.
Pastorita Huaracina/Jilguero Huascaran/Hattie Hudson/Huggy Bear/Humanoid/Ray Humble/Pawla Humeniuk/The Hunches/Prince Albert Hunt/Alberta Hunter/Ivory Joe Hunter/Michael Hurley/Kenny Hurst/Mississippi John Hurt/Maestro Demosdenes Hurtas/Hüsker Dü/Frank Hutchingson/Ina Rae Hutton.
(Indeed, Engelbert Humperdinck is not in it, neither is Les Humphries, but I did list the sounds of humpback whales once, there is hula music in it, and music from the Hunan province in China.)

Mihaly Barsoni (w/Hurdy-Gurdy)
16" x 11.5"
oil on wood, 2010

Thanksgiving!

Gamelan Gong Kebyar                 The Art Ensemble of Chicago
19" x 26"                                                18" x 26"
ink on paper, 2010                              ink on paper, 2010

Thanksgiving turned out to be a dreary stay at home day. I had just recovered from a long frustrating week at work while Maria slept all day to recover from days without sleep to make her deadlines. Needless to say I could focus once again on this passion of mine. I cleared off the table in the nice, warm, cozy living room (in stead of my cold studio) and lined the surface of it with drawing paper. The result, featured above, are two large scale ink drawings depicting the two newest entries in the list. First I drew an impression from a vintage photograph depicting the Gamelan Gong Kebyar orchestra then I drew the five members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago with their characteristic face paint. The Gamelan Gong Kebyar depicts a track called Lagu Kebiar, recorded in 1928 Bali. It's the second gamelan tune in the list and a third from the new old-music compilation Sprigs of Time: 78s from the EMI Archive. The Art Ensemble's tune with a title Thème de l’Amour Universal was an appropriate choice for thanksgiving. Their face paint unlike the likes of Blooddawn, Vampyre Corpse, Trelldom, and Tsjuder (idealizing the Walpurgisnight, a different holiday all together, with its plunder, rape, and burning) is to represent everyone, all makes. all types, all races. The spiritual aspect of the Ensemble is an echo from ceremonial music of past worlds. Gamelan music being one of those. In my youth I was exposed to this kind of music and it rang magical and mysterious. My upbringing was devoid of spirituality and my introduction to at least the idea of it comes from Indonesian lore. Stories in the 1980s from second generation Indonesian immigrants in the Netherlands contained spirits and ghosts inspiring fear and awe (and respect) in this pliable, susceptible, teenage brain of mine.

Beth Orton and the Animals

Beth Orton
10.5" x 10.25"
oil on wood, 2010

If Beth Orton would be asked what kind of animal she'd be, what would she answer? I asked myself that question the other day. And why you might think? Because earlier on in these pages (see Varg and Vark, April) I declared this the year of the aardvark. I may have to reconsider this now Beth Orton has three songs already in the Top 100 2010. The answer would definitely not be an aardvark (or would it?), and neither a chicken nor a worm. The latter two figure in the song Worms from the CD Comfort of Strangers, while she drew a butterfly to go along with it. But she'd be the opposite, she'd be a fox, or a crow, or a weasel. Suggestions? I am a chicken, remember? (see Varg and Vark again), I don't have what it takes to knock on her door, "Chickens don't fly but they've got the wings/no matter how hard they try/they bump into things/they're all running around/with their heads on the ground/They got a wish bone where their neck bone should've grown".

I wait for your comments before I once and for good establish the animal of the year. If I should stick with the aardvark or not. Aardvarks in the meantime, live in South Africa, and it couldn't be the year of the aardvark without music from South Africa. To follow up on the last post; here's the painting representing South Africa's Miss Smodern as I had promised.

Africa Jazz 1959
(after a photograph by Gunther Komnick)
6.5" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010


p.s. —It dawned on me that the answer to the question posted above (what kind of animal Beth Orton would be) had to be a crow.

'Tis the Season

Odetta
11" x 8.5"
pen and ink on paper, 2010

'Tis the season for thrift stores to organize their records. Once a year the Christmas records are separated from the secular records. I enjoy this, it makes it easy, I only need to browse through a considerable smaller selection to try to find something I like than I do the rest of the year. So why did I browse through the Christmas bin the other day? God only knows but there she was, the embodiment of the Afro-American presence in the 60s folk scene in America: Odetta. A Christmas record indeed, the songs are all 'Negro-Spirituals' and most songs are about the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus. The song Virgin Mary Had One Son may very well end up in the Top 100 and become the first ever Christmas song in the Top 100 history. God bless Odetta. The album is called Odetta: Christmas Spirituals and was released by Vanguard.

Here's half of the Top 10 that featured the song:

1. Odetta - Virgin Mary Had One Son
2. Art Ensemble of Chicago -Thème de l’Amour Universal    —Who would have known that the Art Ensemble of Chicago would be such great driving music. I drove a truck this weekend and got really stoked on the CD Les Stances the Sophie.
3. Beth Orton - Worms    —I already knew Beth Orton made great driving music. The lyrics of this song are brilliant: "They got a wish bone where a back bone should have grown" is the last sentence of a verse about chickens ('tis the season).
4. Bai Guang - Hypocrite    —According to Ling, the host of Antique Mandarin Pop Music, the singer chants (in Chinese) the words embarrassed. I'm keen on that because it is my philosophy that one's memory, and therefore one's entire being, is made up from series of embarrassments. My oldest and most vivid memories are all embarrassing situations. Not many songs actually sing that word, but a few years ago I had two in a Top 100: Odyshape by the Raincoats and No Sense by Cat Power.
5. Dan the Automator - A Better T     —It took a while before the first Jazz tune entered the list, even longer for a blues song, and I still don't have a Hip-Hop track yet. Dan the Automator could be the one, he is a Japanese-American DJ who once was in the 100 with his band Hansome Boy Modeling School. 

Miss Smodern

Half the fun of painting the 100 paintings each year is to find the images to paint from. In the early days this used to be a lot of work, often with hours spent at libraries, but now with a Google Image search it's hardly a challenge anymore; images are plentiful. Criteria for which images to use are elusive, a spark in someone's eye, a smile, or a tear could do it for me. Sometimes the image is already an artwork, it could be the cover of a record or a shot by a famous photographer, in which case I already have a good composition and I usually don't add too much to it. In cases like that I'd like to credit the original but usually I stay away from these sources. In my archive (a giant archive, as you could imagine!) I keep copies of the original images neatly tucked in binders, one for each year. I haven't shown these collections in public yet, but I don't keep it a secret either. In my wildest dreams there would be one day a Top 100 museum and library in which all these binders would be available for viewing. It would also have all the hand written top 10s as well as, of course, house the thousands of paintings produced over the years.
Still, despite Wikipedia and Google Images, there always are recordings to be illustrated that have no visual counterpart. One of these is a tune called  Smodern (from the South African catchphrase it's modern) by a combo listed on the record sleeve of Africa Dance as Miss Smodern. The song is going to end up quite high in the rankings this year but none of the Web search engines recognizes neither song nor band. I've been deliberating for weeks now what to paint and today I made up my mind: searching under keywords "South African Jazz" I found this cutest image of youthful South Africans playing their home-made instruments. Alternatives I had plenty, I have quite a few records dedicated to South African Jazz, and the genre has been represented within this Top 100 format quite a few times —I've made a number of paintings of Miss Smoderns' contemporaries, but did not want to substitute Miss Smodern with an image of their better know peers such as The Broadway Boys, the African Swingsters, The Manhattan Brothers, or even Miriam Makeba. So here's that picture before the painting's even started. At first glance it looks like a snapshot of four guys showing off but upon closer inspection it could also be that it is tampered with collage style, but than at third glance I'm not sure anymore, it probably is just a photograph. Here's is where I found it: http://www.aafnyc.com/exhibitors/waterkant-gallery/gunther-komnick/

p.s. -Upon looking up Gunther Komnick, I know now that this is an original photograph, Komnick is an established professional photographer, born in 1929 into a cultured East Prussian family of artists who moved to South Africa in 1956. So there I go: from thinking to use an anonymous web image to actually use (appropriate?) an important historical artistic photograph. My bad... The painting will be done in the next few days... So check back to find out what I made of it.

Gunther Komnick
African Jazz
photograph, 1959
JPEG Image, 367x345 pixels

Chun Siu-Lei and Zhou Xuan

 
Zhou Xuan                           Chun Siu-Lei
18.5" x 8"                              7.75" x 15.25"
oil on wood, 2010                  oil on wood, 2010

With a second painting of the 'Golden Voice of Mandarin Pop' Zhou Xuan and the second painting of the 'Burlesque Queen of Cantonese Opera' Chun Siu-Lei, I end my overindulgence with the music and images of my Chinese muses from the silver screen from an era long passed. This will be the last from China this year as I feel the need to travel onwards. Delving deeper into the world of Cantonese Opera and Mandarin Pop I will leave to purists and the fans of those genres; I have found it an exasperating experience. It got me buying tapes in Chinatown for 25 cents apiece —judging the music by its covers, listening to hours of Antique Shanghai Pop Music radio, scrolling through the archives of Soft Film, their history of the Hong Kong entertainment industry, and much more not to mention that it left me painting in a for me a-typical manner.
(I haven't used the word Kitsch for ages when it comes to talking about my work, but there it is capitalized and all. Not that the four Chinese songs in the 100 list are Kitsch; they're too real for that, but I did encounter plenty of other related musics that were. But isn't this the case with so much music, isn't 80% of everything we listen to when we turn on the radio, just plain Kitsch? To answer my own question: it probably isn't but it's a just thought I felt like sharing.)

One more thing: Is there anyone out there who could translate for me the names of the performers and titles of the songs from this lovely record below? Thanks

Bob Dylan and the Democrats

Bob Dylan
5" x 3.5"
oil on wood, 2010

Bob Dylan was in town the other day for a concert but I didn't go. I did go out two weeks ago to see a rally with Barack Obama but that was very disappointing (even up close). I wish I had gone to Dylan and skipped Obama. Still I had hoped the Democratic party had done a little better these midterm elections. I'm not much into politics and I can't vote, but an artist is traditionally a leftist and so I conform. The day after the elections I was listening to the coverage of results and reactions on National Public Radio. At the end of the day NPR gave a sampling of quotes by some of the winners and some of the losers. I'm sorry I don't recall name nor State of one outgoing Democratic governor, but the outtake on the radio from his speech I remembered: "Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast/I'm drowning in the poison, got no future, got no past/But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free/I've got nothing but affection for all those who sailed with me". It's a beautiful poetic way to say goodbye to office and thank your supporters. The quote, of course, is from Dylan. It's from a song called Mississippi from the Love and Theft album. This is how it continues: "Everybody's moving, if they ain't already there/Everybody's got to move somewhere/Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow/Things should start to get interesting right about now". It's a beautiful song and the governor was passionate and I soaked it up. When I got home I played Mississippi by Bob Dylan. He's my favorite song writer and hasn't been in the Top 100 for way too long. The painting is the smallest one so far, a true miniature. The wood it's painted on is smaller but thicker than all the others, a cube almost —a freestanding object.

Another odd couple

The next pairing of paintings (random again, save for the dates of execution) are those of Roberto Carlos Lange and K.R.T. Wasitodipuro, also known as K.P.H. Notoprojo, Tjokrowasito, Wasidoiningrat, among other names. Wasitodipuro was the director of the Pura Paku Alaman, court gamelan orchestra as well as the gamelan for the Radio Republik Indonesia Yogyakarta. He died in 2007 at the age of 98. The many honorary names, so reads his biography, he earned throughout a distinguished career representing gamelan all over the world. The Wasitodipuro painting represents a recording from the court gamelan made in in 1971 on the Indonesian island of Java. The track is called Ketawang: Puspawarna. Even when the Top 100 in the past featured a lot of music from Indonesia, it had never before listed its most emblematic: the gamelan orchestra. One of the singers heard in the orchestra is that of Niken Larasati, who made it into the Top 100 2002 as a solo performer. My enchantment by the music of Indonesia has little to do with my liking of Indonesian food beside maybe a general favoritism towards that country. In Holland I grew up with Indonesian food (in the US I really miss Indonesian food, especially the loempia) but not with Indonesian music (apart from the very few, very commercial, very westernized 'kronjong' records around).
 As the musical tourist that I have become, I keep hopping back and forth, between South East Asia and the east coast of the Americas, the East Indies and the West Indies, between the popular and the traditional, the old and the new, and the painting of Roberto Carlos Lange brings us right back to the here and now again: Brooklyn, New York, 2010. The portrait of Roberto Carlos Lange represents the song Dahum performed by him and his band Helado Negro. Lange was born in 1980 in South Florida of Ecuadorian parents. Back in May I posted on this blog how I met him in Cincinnati. My introduction to his music was this song Dahum that I viewed on YouTube prior to seeing him perform.

Roberto Carlos Lange                                 K.R.T. Wasitodipuro
8" x 5.5"                                                                12.75" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010                                             oil on wood, 2010