Happy New Year

Efé Pygmies
18" x 24"
oil on canvas, 2011

Goodbye to 2011 everybody and a Happy New Year, have a great new musical year and keep in touch. Love you all.

Berry

Chukchi Shaman

Chukchi Shaman
8.5" x 6.5"
oil on wood, 2011

I'm quite pleased with this tiny little painting of a Chukchi shaman playing his drum sitting by some palm trees at Billie's Creek that runs behind my house. It got a spot on my wall directly next to my last Siberian shaman painting that I did precisely ten years ago. Certain genetic theories have it that about 13,000 years ago a group of less than twenty Chukchi crossed what is now the Bering Street into America. They are the ancestors of the native Americans who spread as far south as South America. So this Chukchi shaman of Arctic Siberia may well have a similar genetic code as Billie Bowlegs, the Seminole after whom the creek was named and who might have very well been sitting once at the very spot as where I placed the shaman in the painting. On YouTube there exists a beautiful film of a shamanic Chukchi musical performance. Click on the link below to watch it. If you decide to do so please watch it until the end because the last thirty seconds features a very intriguing type of breathing-singing that made the recording propel into Top 100 land.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJw5bTfUL8

Cantorial records

Cantor Jossele Rosenblatt
12" x 8", oil on wood, 2011

People don't seem to care too much about collecting records down here, I don't have competition. My collection has been really taking off since I got here .  Take cantorial records for example; I had never even seen one up north but down here I find four, by three different cantors, in a two week period, in three different thrift stores. I had always thought of cantorial music as esoteric, that you would only hear in temples, not on vinyl records produced for a mass audience. But I learn that there was a golden age of cantorial music, that the music was played in concert halls for general audiences, and that cantor Jossele Rosenblatt was considered one of the best tenors of his time throughout the world. The title of the Rosenblatt LP I bought says all: Cantor Jossele Rosenblatt Sings His Most Famous Cantorial Compositions, Volume 8. The record is from 1969, Rosenblatt died in 1933, so his fame lasted well beyond his own time.

Reading up on my subject, on the back of the record sleeves, from Wikipedia, as well as from other sources, I got a history lesson beyond the cantorial realm as well. I learned what the restrictions of the sabbath are and when they are observed. I learned about the atrocities against the Jewish people in World War I. My eclectic (I don't really like that word but I can't think of an alternative—it presumes a hierarchical idea of taste) record collection sure makes me a better informed citizen. I needed to read up on the Sabbath topic because of a request on one of the records: "Please do not play this record on the Sabbath".

The Mystery

Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares
24" x 18", oil on canvas, 2011

Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares was one of the first examples of field recordings that found a mainstream audience. I was one of that audience and the Bulgarian recordings were also the first field recordings in my Top 100 lists. Producer Ivo Watts-Russell was responsible for all this by re-releasing the original 1975 album on his intensely popular label 4AD in 1986. Scott, my brother-in-law, forwarded me a link to an interview by Richie Troughton with 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell on The Quietes online music magazine. Watts-Russell elaborates how he was introduced, became entranced, and licensed the music of the Bulgarian choirs. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the 4AD release. The recordings were a result of 15 years of field work by Marcel Cellier who released a selection of the best tracks on his own small Disques Cellier in 1975. At the time of release I bought both 4AD's LPs (a year after the first one they released Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Volume 2 which won a Grammy award in 1990) and now 25 years later I dug 'em up again. These will be great records forever.

Gloomy Sunday

Erika Maroszán
7.5" x 5.5"
oil on wood, 2011

During a game of “YouTube-off”—in which each participant selects a YouTube video within a certain category, the participants then vote on the winner,  I nominated the song Szomorú Vasárnap in the version by the Hungarian actress Erika Marozsán for the category “sad”. The video was just a still, a photograph of a statue of a woman’s sad face that was rained upon (so it looked like tears). It didn’t get any votes :_(

But I didn’t take the opportunity to elaborate on the song’s history. How it was written in the direst of circumstances and how legend has it that many people committed suicide after hearing the song. It may well be the saddest song ever written.

Szomorú Vasárnap is better known in the Western world in English as Gloomy Sunday. The music was written by the Hungarian composer Rezső Seress in 1933. As a piece for piano solo he first titled it Vége a világnak (End of the world) and became Szomolá Vasárnap when  László Jávor added the lyrics in 1935. The song was translated into many languages, the English Gloomy Sunday was first recorded in 1936 by Hal Kemp but wasn't generally known until Billie Holiday's version of 1941. The song was billed as The Hungarian Suicide Song. People had reportedly committed suicide by jumping in the Danube with a copy of the sheet music in their hands. The song then was banned in Hungary. Seress, who was Jewish, was living in poverty in Budapest when he wrote Vége a világnak against a backdrop of looming fascism. He survived Nazi labor camps and died1968, a suicide. Such is the history of Szomorú Vasárnap in a nutshell. Björk recently added her name to the long list of performers that once recorded the song.

Erika Marozsán's version is from the German–Hungarian film with the same title (Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod in German). The film is a fictional account of the history of the song. Marozsán stars as Illona in the film. The painting I did of her is small, I used a small brush for the figure. It took me two days' worth of painting after I had done the background (my back yard at night) in less than 10 minutes. The technique I applied for painting the figure is not what I consider a technique for fine art. The technique is rather amateuristic suited for a kitschy image. With a brush even finer I should have added a tear under her eye.

My backyard as a stage

Seven back yard paintings, various sizes, oil on canvas, 2011

 Here are some of the paintings from before the musicians enter into it. My backyard as a stage as it were. The concept allows me to combine my old passion of landscape painting with my ongoing musicians' portrait series.

Keening

Greenham women
24" x 18"
oil on canvas, 2011

Those of you that regularly check into the posts on this blog know about my preoccupation with mournful singing by women, keening as it is called in Ireland. Slowly I'm developing a collection of recordings from all over the world that fit this category. True keening recordings are hard to come by (officially the practice of keening is extinct) and this recording by women from Greenham is the best example I've come across yet. It's a news video made by the British newspaper The Guardian. On it the Greenham women, about thirty of them, can be seen and heard keening while protesting nuclear power on the occasion of Ronald Reagan's visit to England in 1981. The woman had marched from the Greenham military base to Parliament Square in London. Sixteen of them were arrested on arrival. The recording marks the second occurrence of a musical performance broken up by police (see "Guatemala" for the first one) in the current Top 100, and the third example of cry-singing (also keen, wail, or lament). In the painting Parliament Square is replaced with an image of my own back yard, as has become habit lately.

Guitar Slim

Guitar Slim Green
6.25" x 5"
oil on wood, 2011

This painting on a small piece of wood was at first no more than a little exercise in landscape texture I painted on the side while working on a larger canvas. But the exercise was recycled, just as the landscape painting, into a Top 100 painting. The little ones are the most fun to do. They are as spontaneous, unmediated, and unassuming as they come. Doesn't Guitar Slim look like he's really enjoying it? (For you collectors of small paintings: they are a lot cheaper too!) There are several blues musicians who recorded under the name of Guitar Slim. The best known was born as Eddie Jones and had a huge hit with The Things I Used to Do. He couldn't handle success and died at 32. His son Guitar Slim, Jr still performs his dad's songs. Norman "Guitar Slim" Green had not such trouble. He still may be alive today, he may be playing at a juke joint somewhere as I write this. His 1970 record Stone Down Blues may well be the only record he made. What we do know for sure is that the two musicians that accompany Green on the record are still alive. They are Johnny and Shuggie Otis, father and son, both with a giant career in the music biz. Stone Down Blues is a great record, it rocks!

The mainstream jazz

Gato Barbieri
14" x 6"
oil on wood 2011

Anything that produces sound is fair game these days, from the latest million selling pop hit of Lady Gaga to the kid in the neighborhood practicing his guitar to play a tune in church next Sunday. They all have the potential to be listed in my archive alongside Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, and all the other greats from the long history of recorded music. Jazz has been fair game all along but not the kind of jazz creeping into my weekly lists lately. In the last three lists three different jazz musicians, all categorized as mainstream, made their first appearance. First there was the smooth jazz trumpet of Grammy nominee Chris Botti, then the flutes of New Age pioneer Paul Horn, and lastly the Latin Jazz sounds of Gato Barbieri. None of those jazz tunes are likely to make it into the final list of 100 songs for the year 2011 but in the case of Gato Barbieri I dug a little deeper and found some really great pre-Latin-pop on a Latin-free-jazz disc called El Pampero. The tracks were recorded live in Montreux, Switzerland in 1971. Gato Barbieri hails from Argentina and the song to be included in the list of the hundred for 2011 is the patriotic Mi Buenos Aires Querido, a tune that was originally a song by Argentinian tango legend Carlos Gardel.