A Zen Moment

Watazumido-Shuso
8" x 5.25"
oil on wood, 2012

It's funny what kind of things can cause self consciousness. Take this afternoon for example. I was painting this portrait of Watazumido-Shuso and knowing that he was a zen master and all that, I constantly felt like I was doing it all wrong. With every brushstroke I felt his scorn, I could not get the colors right, not his likeness, nothing. What was lacking in the brushstrokes was consciousness. Not that I ever put consciousness in any brushstroke but now it was blatantly absent. And it made me remember painting lessons from a long time ago. My teachers actually taught me a bit of zen. They had their education in the 1960. At least three of my teachers were real hippies, at least two had lessons from a zen master, and at least one was a zen master himself. And then it was not just Watazumido looking down at me, but a whole score of teachers were shaking their heads. I suddenly could hear Ernst Vijlbrief laughing out loud. He did that a lot, you never knew if he thought something was funny or if he was laughing at your stupidity. I saw Sigidur Gudmundson's smirk. Ad Gerritsen was explaining something to Marlene Dumas, who giggled in response. Is it me? I actually really admire the zen attitude in art. Consciousness in every brushstroke is what I should go for in my new paintings. Only a few moments after I finished the Watazumido portrait, I got the confirmation that I had done it all wrong. It came in the form of Wikipedia, they had a much better reproduction of the photo I had painted from on their site than the site I used (couldn't even tell which one as couldn't find it back).

"Rinmon: Rinmon means playing at a crossroads to express one's feelings and show one's skill. It comes originally from the Kinki area. A 76 cm. Hotchiku was used."
Those words were used on the back of the record The Mysterious Sounds of the Japanese Bamboo Flute to describe my top 100 song, and those words are too good not to quote. I realize that I have now music from, Sado, Kinki, and possibly Lesbos in the Top 100, as well as two musicians that occupy that special place, the crossroads. Robert Johnson is obviously the other one.
Watazumi Doso Roshi (1910-1992) was a Zen master, he played the hocchiku, "stressing that to truly understand nature and oneself, one had to use an instrument of the most raw and natural origin." (Wikipedia)

One Blood

Shabba Ranks
6" x 6"
oil on wood, 2012

 Junior Reid
4" x 4"
oil on wood, 2012

Shabba Ranks, Junior Reid, Chaka Demus, Buju Banton, Eek-A-Mouse are some of the Jamaican dancehall stars that gathered points in the 2011 top 100 year. So when it came to selecting—from a large number that gathered less than 10 points—the last songs to complete the list of 100, I just had to include some in it, especially since dancehall music is a relative new style to feature in my top 100. There always have been plenty of its predecessors, reggae, ska, and dub but I had managed to largely ignore the new wave of Jamaican music. Dancehall came into being in the eighties in Kingston and is somewhat synchronous with hip-hop music (it at least shares some features). The impulse for dancehall in the top 100 was provided by the fact that some records simply showed up at my main source for gathering music, the local thrift stores. The Shabba Ranks CD As Raw as Ever is one of only a handful new CD's  I've acquired in a year, I paid 50 cents for it. On vinyl I gathered two dancehall compilation records, a Buju Banton LP, a Yellowman single, and also some roots records. Junior Reid comes into the list courtesy of The Wu-Tang Clan. He collaborates on the song Jah World with Ghostface Killah and RZA on the final track of the CD The W. The CD also features a sample of Reid's biggest hit One Blood (in One Blood Under W–Reid does some additional vocals there too).

Mapuche

Mapuche (Chile), Mother and Child
32" x 23", oil on canvas, 2012

I've assembled quite a few original records from Moses Asch's Ethnic Folkways Library, a collection now housed in the Smithsonian Institute. It was Asch's mission to have all the recordings in his Library available at all times. Folkways Records always had every item and after Asch died the Smithsonian Institute continued to grant his wishes. They digitized all Folkways recordings, and made them available as downloads for either 99 cents a song or anywhere between $10 and $20 for the whole album, or you can order it on cd or on a cassette for around $20. Downloads of the original booklet, that customarily came with all the vinyl records, are free. Every once in a while I'll preview an album, pick a few songs that I then buy as a download, and download a pdf of the booklet (it also includes a full size scan of the original cover art, front and back). The original Folkways records are the core of my vinyl record collection while the downloads have become the core of my iTunes folder.

From Ameridian Music of Chile: Aymara, Qawashkar, Mapuche I downloaded a few songs from the Mapuche. The Aymara, Qawashkar, Mapuche are the three indigenous groups who are direct descendants from pre-Hispanic dwellers of America. The Mapuche are mainly farmers and are centrally located in Chile. Maŕia Paillalef is the Mapuche singer of a farewell song recorded in 1969 by Christos Clair-Vasiliades that resides at #34 in the Top 100 2011.

The Divas of the Top 100

Rita Abatzi
12" x 10"
oil on wood, 2012

Lata Mangeshkar
12" x 9"
oil on wood, 2012

As a form of national pride most countries have their unique musical style. And almost without exception these national styles have a leading female star, a singer so popular that she is considered a national treasure. Even in those countries where women are typically not public figures, Oum Kalthoum of Egypt and Fairuz of Lebanon to name a few, are larger than life.  are larger than life. Portugal has her Fado queen Amália Rodrigues, Edith Piaf is the face of the French chanson, South African Jive has Miriam Makeba, America has several national styles, jazz, blues, and country (to be politically correct one could argue that rap is a fourth—with Beyoncé the term diva gets yet a broader significance) with their respective stars Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Patsy Cline. Browse to the various guides of world music that are out there to read the chapter on the biggest female star of that country's national music. I typically stay away from listening to the stars but for the national divas I make an exception. Their voices are without exception soulful to say the least, their lives often tragic. Several divas make it in my Top 100 again this year, just last week I payed respect to Maria Callas and next week you can expect some words about, and a painting of Asakawa Maki. Today though, hence this lengthy paragraph as introduction, the paintings and brief stories of Lata Mangeshkar, who with her sister Asha Bhosle, are the biggest starts in the history of Bollywood music, and early Rebetica diva Rita Abatzi. 

Rita Abatzi (sometimes spelled Abadzi) was a huge star in Greece in the 1930's. Still early in the history of sound recording she made a great number of recordings. When I painted her several years ago the text that I wrote along side of it compared my painting to that of Robert Crumb's (in the CD booklet Hot Women: Women Singers from the Torrid Regions of the World, that features female singers from Crumb's 78 collection). The only image of Rita Abatzi that was available then is the one that we both used for our paintings, it's the same one I used again. A Rita Abatzi image search now shows a second photograph of her. I wish I had used that one instead as I again compare my new painting to that of Robert Crumb (The first time I won, but I think Robert Crumb vs. myself is a tie right now). I have quite a few of Abadzi's recordings including the one from Crumb's collection but the song in the Top 100 this year was new to me: Apopse ta Mesanyhta from the album Climodi ka Paradosiaka Tragoudia, 1930-48. It was brought to my attention through the blog Bodega Pop.

I've been a fan of Lata Mangeshkar since the early 90s. You would think I have a lot of her records, but I don't. Her records are hard to come by even as she "had recorded approximately 25,000 solo, duet, and chorus-backed songs in 20 Indian languages between 1948 to 1974"(quote: Wikipedia). In fact she was featured in the Guiness book of records for having made the most recordings of anyone. Most of these songs are from over a thousand Hindi films she recorded for, good luck trying to find any of these. I've tried, I even looked during a few weeks stay in Calcutta. In the twenty some years she's been on my radar, I managed to find one full length tape and a handful compilations she's on, so I was very excited to find one recently. Unlike all other recordings I have and heard, this one is not from films but are live concert recordings. They were recorded not  in India but in Britain.

The song in the Top 100 is Aaega Aane Wala, performed by Lata Mangeshkar live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1974. She first recorded the song for the film Mahal in 1949.

Ball-bouncing

Takahashi children in Bon performance
30" x 24", oil on canvas, 2012

Records that seek to give an overview of the musical traditions of a certain cultural or geographical group are the core of my collection. Often a children's song or two are included in such albums. I have gathered quite a few children's songs but to say I'm collecting is an overstatement, they're simply included. My interest in such songs is fairly new. I'm attracted to the uncomplicated spontaneous nature of these songs, they're so happy and playful and unassuming. No worries, no complex identities, no dejection. The song that the three Takahashi children illustrate is a ball-bouncing song that involves counting and "includes meaningless onomatopoetic sounds". The song was recorded by Edward Norbeck sometime before 1952 (the publishing year of the album Folk Music of Japan). Norbeck also provided the texts (hence the wonderful word onomatopoetic, that I would have never devised of my own) and images (the three girls above come from a larger group photographed by Norbeck) for the album published by Folkways. The ball-bouncing song performed by children from Kitaki Island is not illustrated by a photo. The girls above are from Takahashi, "dancing a reenactment of the fairy tale of Urashima Taro". I'd like to bounce a ball myself, always did, I wish I could make a living playing keepsies-upsies.

The Hurdy Gurdy (2)

David Munrow with Gillian Munrow on the hurdy gurdy 
8.5" x 11" (cropped), ink and watercolor on paper, 2012

2011 as a Top 100 music year has ended and the Top 100 2012 starts today. In a few days I will forward the complete list as I am still working on finishing it. Posts with paintings for the 2011 year will continue to be published until the Top 100 2011 exhibition opens on March 26th. At the moment I'm selecting 24 more tracks from about 50 tunes with 9 points to complete the list that must contain 100. Many of these last 24 entries will be illustrated with ink drawings and small watercolor paintings. Then another ten songs still have to be painted (with oils) from the 76 that scored 10 or more points in the 2011 Top 100 year. The posts will come fast and furious now. I will double them up. The first two to enter the Top 100 with 9 points are both interpreters of classical music. Maria Callas sings Casta Diva from Bellini's opera Norma, and David Munrow's The Early Music Consort of London performs Joliveté et bone amor on the hurdy-gurdy from the 13th Century composer Jehan d'Esquire. 

I have a fairly large collection of medieval and early renaissance music and I felt it had to be represented this year. I chose a track from the double record set Instruments of the Middle Ages and Renaissance by The Early Music Consort of London that I've played quite a few times this past year. The Consort's leader David Munrow is a remarkable chapter in the history of recorded old music. He was a scholar, a gifted, mostly self taught musician, wrote several books, and recorded over 50 albums in a very short career (Munrow committed suicide in 1976 at the age of 33.) Music from the middle ages barely has any musical notation so the performers of such early music rely on written accounts of performances, previous recordings of the material, associations with similar, later, and better documented music, but most of all their personal creativity and interpretive abilities. As far as my humble musical expertise can evaluate these criteria David Munrow belongs to the best.

That Maria Callas belongs to the best in her category goes without saying. I love Maria Callas. I have twelve records dedicated to the American born Greek opera diva and many of these are box sets. The aria Casta Diva is her signature song and one of her recordings of it represents for me one of the most beautiful voices ever recorded. 

Maria Callas
8.5" x 11"
ink on paper, 2012

Rebab

Mr. Shafiq Ghani
10" x 12", oil on wood, 2012

I've been watching and listening to a string of videos featuring Afghan musicians playing an instrument called rebab.  I have this wonderful recording of a rebab solo and I wanted to hear similar performances. (When doing a word search for rebab, Google suggests I have misspelled rehab, YouTube thinks I want to see Rehab by Amy Winehouse.) The rebab is really a great instrument and all recordings I found have this certain intensity, very deep and emotional. One of the outstanding performances was a one and a half minute solo by Mr. Shafiq Ghani, pictured above. The video is beautiful but disturbingly gritty, made with a low resolution hand held camera, it bizarrely reminded me of images from war torn areas made by some soldier's cheap camera. But on the video was not a prisoner of war, instead this master rebab player performs a brilliant piece of music. I used the image of Mr. Shafic Ghani to illustrate this anonymous rebab solo from the album Afghanistan et Iran: Musee de l'Homme Collection (1969), that features field recordings made by J.C. and S. Lubtchansky in 1956. The lira, a prominent instrument in early Western classical music, is a direct derivation of the rebab, and I can almost imagine how some medieval and early Renaissance music may have sounded like by listening to 20th and 21st Century recordings of the rebab made in Afghanistan.

What I find so intriguing about traditional instrumental music from the middle east is the timeless quality of it. Save for evolving recording techniques it is nearly impossible to date recordings just by listening to it. The experience of time seems to happen there on a whole other level as we experience it here. Maybe it's not linear as ours, I don't know, maybe nothing changes. Maybe it's good, maybe it isn't, but for a music fanatic like me it's certainly good that there are still pockets in the world where Globalization doesn't get a grip on and traditions have not become obsolete.

Cold Storage Band

Cold Storage Band
10" x 16", watercolor on paper, 2012

Often the songs and melodies that have sustained through time and become known all over the world have an interesting history to tell. Some are linked to a historical occasion, some have become the embodiment of a cultural or social group, and others simply epitomize the work of a certain musician or band. I always want to know about the history of a song, always like to find "the original" version. Who wrote it? Who played it first? Is the melody or are the lyrics age old and passed on from generation to generation? Sometimes the answers to these questions are simple facts but often the history of a piece of music is shrouded by many unknowns. And even when authorship is clearly defined external sources can still be dug up from a distant or not so distant past. Conscious or unconscious something always precedes any idea, thought, or creation. Some musicians borrow blatantly, others not so, but both authorship and originality remain subjective concepts. And this is a lot of fun for the music connaisseur. A little detective work can make a song really better, or least the appreciation of it.

Skokiaan was first recorded as a sax and trumpet instrumental by the African Dance Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia or simply The Cold Storage Band. The author August Musarurwa was part of the band. Hugh Tracey (him again) made an early recording also with Musarurwa before it took off all over the world through the likes of Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, and countless others. "Skokiaan" so I read in Wikipedia, refers to an illegal self-made alcoholic beverage.

Children of the Sun

Oliver Lake
17.5" x 6"
oil on wood, 2012

The following text was first published last December as Free Jazz in Musical Thrift Store Treasures. On that site I weekly publish a song from a vinyl record that was found at some thrift store. That many of these songs end up in the Top 100 goes without saying. The record this text refers to has now two songs in the list of 100. The image above is the first painting, another will follow soon.

My wife found a remarkable record for me. Its title is Ofamfa and the name of the group listed is Children of the Sun. Searching in Google for Ofamfa doesn't yield many results. There's a new media company situated in the Netherlands in Nijmegen of all places (it's where I'm from), with ties to Africa and Asia. And then there's an African-centric twitter account with that name. Thirdly the very record I have in front of me appears on the first Google page. On the next pages these results are repeated before I finally stumble upon the meaning of the Ofamfa I'm looking for:

  Ofamfa is the Akan symbol of critical examination.

Children of the Sun on the other hand yields many results but (looking at Wikipedia) none refer to the group of jazz musicians (or muse/icians) that play on the record. The best known of these musicians is Oliver Lake who went on to have a distinguished solo career as a jazz saxophonist. Children of the Sun operate under the umbrella of B.A.G. (Black Artist Group), an organization of creative people of all disciplines from St, Louis, MO. The record is a raw example of free jazz with equal attention to poetry and jazz. The sound reminds me of the recordings by The Last Poets many years later.

Click on the ▷ below to listen to the first of two the two songs in the Top 100. It's called After Jeremiah's Wed. Enjoy!

Townes

Townes Van Zandt
12.5" x 8", oil on wood, 2012

To continue the thread (from last week) on familiar music a little note now on the Texan songwriter Townes Van Zandt. I've seen him perform a number of times and met him once on one of these occasions. We had a few (more) drinks after a concert in Columbus in the Fall of 1996. There were maybe five other people in the room while he talked a bit about some songs and strummed his guitar. He would never remember me as he was much more interested in the female I was with than with me reminiscing about a concert of his together with Guy Clark I saw in the Netherlands a few years earlier. It's a moot point anyway, Mr. Van Zandt died a few months later. The inclusion in the Top 100 of the song Waitin' Around to Die by Townes Van Zandt raises the numbers of repeats from last year to a meager five. A cover of the same song by the Be Good Tanyas is another one of these five. Waitin' Around to Die is also only one of five songs that feature in the list of 500 songs counted over 29 years as well. At number 160 it is Townes' second best in the all time greatest songs list. His song Nothin' resides at #10. Needless to say that I made quite a few paintings of him over the years. All together they could fill a whole wall. I probably could paint his portrait without looking at a photograph by now. Next time he's in I'll try to do just that, promise.

Time and Temperature

Val Glenn (Time and Temperature)
11.5" x 8", oil on wood, 2012

Towards the end of compiling the 2011 list a big resurgence of American music is happening. From the last 10 songs new in the list, 9 are American made. The music is closer to home suddenly. The extremely eclectic mix of songs so far is now being anchored by a bunch of music that I've been familiar with for a while, and whose words I can understand. Guess I needed some reassurance, psychologically. Time and Temperature is back in for the third consecutive year with a song called It Trails from the (download only) album Cream of the Low Tide of 2010. Time and Temperature is the one man band of Val Glenn of Columbus, Ohio. Pretty close to home indeed (at least until I moved down South a half year ago, but the Top 100 is coming back to Columbus with an opening scheduled at 5 on March 26). Val is a friend and the source of the image is from her facebook page (that's a first!) The song then, It Trails contains a reference to the Milky Way. I love the concept of these words, it rings magical, it's the home galaxy of our Earth, milky white is a beautiful color, and the Melkweg (Dutch for Milky Way) is a great club in Amsterdam. Yes I can understand the words in It Trails but do I get the meaning? I'm horrible at that. I can really enjoy watching a good movie but the storyline remains elusive. I love poetry but I would make a horrific poetry teacher as I either don't catch the meaning of a poem, or interpret it totally wrong. I think Val is great writer of song lyrics, don't ask me why though, she just is...

The Top 100 of 2011

Four ink drawings, 02-03-2012

 Berry van Boekel: Top 100 2011

Swing Space Gallery

1556 North High Street
Columbus, OH 43201
614.292.0234 (phone)


Monday, March 26–Thursday, April 12
Reception: Monday, March 26, 5­–8pm 

The four ink drawings I did tonight look like trading cards the way they're laid out. I think it would be so awesome to print all hundred as trading cards. I collected football (soccer) cards for many years so it would be right up my alley. The reasons for suddenly shifting from medium size canvases to ink drawings on paper are many:

•  They can be done rather quickly, given that I still need to paint 40 paintings to have exactly 100 come March 26, it keeps me from having deadline stress
• Commercial: drawings like these I will sell rather cheaply—I'd like earn a little bit of money at the Top 100 exhibition
• Convenience: I've been working construction full time in order to convert a garage into a studio, it is hard then to do the work of painting in the evening—drawings can be done at the dining room
• I felt like doing a few that are immediate, without the option to rework and rework and rework

The four musicians portrayed are all recent arrivals into the list of 100 songs. They have in common that they have English as their language, and they've all passed away.

Jim Carroll —one of those cult figures, really well known in the artsy circles, that I had never heard of. A poet and a post-punk-rocker he died on 9-11-2009. My fiend Jake is a big fan–I borrowed a couple of cds.

• King Stitt —another one of those, I only learned of him after he died. This happened just a few days ago. Winston Sparks aka King Stitt was a pioneer Jamaican DJ. Nicknamed the Ugly One for his disfigured facial features he is credited as one of the first performers of 'toasting', a sort of rapping, in the 1950s.
• Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-1977) —Pedal Up is a repeat from last year's 100 and the fourth Kirk tune in this year's. I have the song on his Bright Moments 2LPset but I prefer the live version performed at Down Beat in 1975.
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973) —A short outtake of Up Above My Head featured in the wonderful French film Amélie. Her name was not credited at the end but I recognized (be it not immediately) the singer.