Top 100 2013/14

Ham & Scram

Ham & Scram
11" x 8.5", watercolor, pen on paper, 2014

Today's painting hardly qualifies as such. The base of it is a pen and pencil sketch copied from one of two images on the sleeve of a strange record by Ham & Scram called Country Comedy. Then the drawing was abused—soaked, stained, balled up— until the point it started to fall apart. At that point, to salvage what I could, I glued the drawing onto a black and white xerox copy of Barbara Kruger's Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face (and called it a day). The story of the record, and the top 100 song taken from it—the traditional murder ballad Pretty Polly—is an interesting one. I bought the record at a thrift store (a junky one at that) in 2012. It was only a dollar but I almost didn't get it. My hope for this record after investigating the cover was low. The full title reads Country Comedy, Songs & Frolic by Ham & Scram, featuring Buzz Busby. I expected to hear backwoods slapstick humor and I was worried that such a well loved yet ominous folk ballad as Pretty Polly, would be totally butchered by such irreverent looking characters on the cover. I was wrong, totally wrong, their Pretty Polly is in fact one of the most intriguing versions I've heard of the song, and the  record as a whole easily falls into the A category of American traditional music. The moral of the story: Don't judge a book by its cover. On Musical Thrift Store Treasures, a blog I used to write, I did a little entry on the duo accompanied by an mp3 file of Pretty Polly. Viral is too big a word, but the blog exploded in October of 2012. In a few days hundreds of people visited the site and in another few days, I was urged—for reasons still unbeknownst to me, plagiarism I suppose—to take the song down. Ham & Scram are Pete Pike and Buzz Busby from Washington, DC. Guitar player Pete Pike from Virginia is mainly known for his association with the mandolin player Buzz Busby, who is an established name in the history of Bluegrass music. Bernarr Busbice was born in 1933 in Louisiana and among his credits is the formation of the popular group The Country Gentleman in 1957. But after the successful decade of the 1950s, Busby's career went downhill due to his "growing fondness of alcohol and drugs". After a term in jail he only occasionally performed and recorded. He died of heart failure in 2003. And such is the information I retrieved on line. Interesting to note here that Buzz Busby does not have a Wikipedia page in English, but the German version does. There's no mention that Buzz Busby ever performed, or even visited Germany, but apparently his song Rock and Roll Fever, was something of a hit there: "Im Bereich des Rockabilly ist Busby vor allem durch seine Single Rock and Roll Fever bekannt geworden."

"Bamboo on the Mountains"

Cover of "Bamboo on the Mountains"
24" x 23", oil on canvas, 2014

Today's painting depicts two Kmhmu Highlanders from a group of five musicians on a bench in Nan, Thailand. I can't be sure but the woman on the right might very well be either Ya' Ak Keodaeng or Ya' Seu Keodaeng who perform the Teum song that was recorded by Frank Proschan, and appeared on the CD Bamboo on the Mountains: Kmhmu Highlanders from Southeast Asia and the U.S. (Smithsonian Folkways, 1999). The recording was made in 1992 in the exact area (Chon Den subdistrict) in Northern Nan where the photograph was taken (be it on a different date).

Today's Painting

Christian Marclay
22" x 7", oil on wood, 2014

Today's painting features a do-over (actually a continuation) of a November 7th painting portraying the avant-garde artist Christian Marclay. For every musician featured in the top 100 an illustration is now done, and the time has come to revisit those paintings that are a part of this year's series of one-hundred that are not particularly to my likings (a painting, even though it exists on line on this podium, like Marclay's portrait, isn't considered finished until the exhibition takes place showing all hundred).  All finished paintings will be shown at the the Top 100 Archives Gallery in Fort Myers (home soil) in early March . Since Marclay is closer than any other individual musician in the list (be it with a few degrees of separation—courtesy of Mr. Jade Dellinger, director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery) I felt obliged to bring the portrait of Marclay to a state I'd be comfortable with.

The recent "Today's painting" string I will keep going as long as I physically can. To be in the studio for many hours several days straight has been a blessing. Painting has taken precedence over thought, and within this process creativity has been allowed free reign. Paintings are good, in my opinion, when, within the process, surprises are happening that seem to appear out of nowhere, visual discoveries are made that could never have been thought up without a hands on proponent, that are beyond easy interpretation. For this to happen one needs to be alone behind the easel for an extended period of time. Like an experience on drugs, this is a different state of consciousness, that you can't explain but can recognize. In this frame bad paintings don't even exist anymore, and 'bad' you immediately recognize as being superficial. It is not so much good and bad, on which evaluations are based, but real and superficial. Within an hour the 'bad' painting of Christian Marclay was transformed into a 'good' painting. The surprise in it, admittedly, was somewhat premeditated, inspired by seeing an image, an appropriated selfie by Miami artist Marilyn Rondon.

Bagpipes

Serbian Piper
24" x 24", oil on canvas, 2014

Today's painting is done in a rather straightforward manner. There's the grainy black and white photograph taken by a tourist in Belgrade, another, yet bigger, canvas prepared by an amateur minimalist painter, than there's the customary set of oil paints (again donated by an amateur painter), and, most essentially here, a couple of rags. There were no criteria, no expectations, and not even the burden of having to make the person in the painting resemble the person in the photograph. The piper in the photograph is anonymous and without any discernible features. He functions to illustrate another anonymous piper from a small village in Serbia not too far away from Belgrade. The piper in question accompanies a small group of older men from Dupljaja engaged in a 'numera' performance way back in in 1951. They were recorded by Peter Kennedy for yet another volume of the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series that were edited by Alan Lomax. This is from volume 12 dedicated to Yugoslavia. (I do need to mention here that the liner notes to the album came from Albert Lord, who is kind of a hero to me, and provided me with the historical contextual concept my ideas of music appreciation are based on.)

p.s. It sure feels good to talk about your paintings, beginning the first paragraph with the sentence "today's painting." Yes I have time off from teaching! Happy Holidays dear readers! Let's see what tomorrow brings!

Suling gdé

Suling gdé player, Bali
16" x 12", oil on canvas

Today's painting has a lot in common with yesterday's. Like yesterday's it's painted on top of a seascape demo. It's a demo gone wrong though. It was fine after five minutes but more paint got smeared onto it, and more, and more, and more. Some of it was scraped off to allow an image to be painted on top. Here again the image does not illustrate the song very well. The song is Chalon Arang performed by a female singer is accompanied by a chorus and drumming. There is no 'suling gdé' (the bamboo flue in the picture) heard on this recording. Chalon Arang is track #22 of the LP The Columbia Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. VII: Indonesia. The gdé player, instead is featured on track #21 Gamelan Gambuh. The data for both recordings are, however, the same. The performers come from the same group of musicians, they were recorded in same year (and probably in the same day), and in the same place. The recordings were made in 1931 for Musée Guimet in Paris, under the supervision of Chokorda Gdé Raka Sukawati, in Bali. As with all the records in the Library series, this volume was collected and edited by Alan Lomax, while the music and texts on this specific volume were edited by Doctor Jaap Kunst, who also recorded most of the music, but not the track currently discussed. The following was written by Mr. Kunst, on the liner notes of the album: "This is an excerpt from a musical play in which the principle character is Rangda, the evil widow, who battles against the good principle. Rangda's song has that pressed, instrumental character typical of Balinese vocal music."

Haya music

Cover of Tanzania Instruments
12" x 16", oil on canvas, 2014

The illustration above is a bit misleading as the song it illustrates  doesn't feature any drumming. A more appropriate source image would have been the photograph taken by Hugh Tracey of a player of the  Bangwe raft-zither of Nyasaland (Malawi) but it was already used for a zither tune by the Hehe people of Tanganyika (Tanzania) in September. The top 100 song the happy drummer boy illustrates is called Mugasha, which was played by Habib bib Seliman and recorded by Hugh Tracey in Kabale, Tanzania, in 1951. Like the Hehe people's recording, this one is also found on the record The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Volume X: British East Africa. Habib bin Seliman belongs to Haya people habituating northwestern Tanzania. I never heard the Tanzania Instruments record but I know it features recordings by the Haya people. The recordings on that record were also made by Hugh Tracey, and, no doubt, the cover photo was also taken by him. 

The painting (but not the photograph) would have been an appropriate illustration too, of a water drum recording that belongs to my favorite African field recordings ever made. The water in the painting is the result of yet another landscape painting demo produced in front of a group of students. In a 6-week landscape painting class, a student had asked "how to paint water?" since I do not know the answer to that question, I figured I would just try.

The geography of the Top 100 2013/14

1. Canada (2, Leonard Cohen and Inuits)
2. US: northwest (4, Oregon, Washington)
3. US: west (1, San Francisco)
4. US: south (8, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee—the blues)
5. US: midwest (1, Ohio)
6. US: New York (12)
7. US: southeast (5, Cat Power)
8. Bahamas (1)
9. Jamaica (2)
10. Cuba (2)
11. Ecuador (2)
12. Brazil (1)
13. Iceland (1)
14. Ireland (1)
15. England (12, London-9, Manchester, Liverpool, and Brighton)
16. Russia: St. Petersburg (2)
17. Russia: Moscow (4)
18. Poland (1)
19. France (2)
20. Spain (1)
21. Italy (1)
22. Central Europe (2, Hungary and Bulgaria)
23. Yugoslavia (3, Bosnia and Serbia)
24. Turkey (1, Kurdistan)
25. Lebanon (1)
26. Syria (1)
27. Iran (2)
28. Egypt (2)
29. Morocco (1)
30. Algeria (1)
31. D.R. Congo (1)
32. Burundi (3)
33. Tanzania (2)
34. Kenya (2, Swahili)
35. Botswana (1)
36. Malawi (1)
37. India (4)
38. Thailand (1)
39. Cambodia (1)
40. Indonesia (2)
41. Japan (2)
42. Tahiti (1)

Rapioen

Cover of Folk and Pop Sounds of Sumatra
12" x 16", oil on canvas, 2014

"I’m starting off 2014 with what I believe is a pretty exceptional rarity. Certainly it’s one of the earliest commercial recordings of regional music from the highlands of Western Sumatra made by the Minangkabau people, known as Urang Minang in the local language. With most of the local recording industry at the time based in Java and Singapore, we are lucky that music of the Minang, a matrilineal, Islamic culture primarily based in the Minangkabau Highlands, was set to shellac."

Such is the opening paragraph of an article on traditional Sumatran music, written by Jonathan Ward for Excavated Shellac at the start of 2014. The article is a contextual analysis of the recording Tandjoeng Sani by the female singer Rapioen. The singer and two musicians that accompany the recording hail from Bukittinggi (formerly known as Fort de Kock). The song was recorded in 1938. Here then, towards the end of 2014, is an illustration for that song. The source image I found clicking through links, starting at the comment section of the Rapioen web-page. The music of the Minang people is a rather appropriate topic at the end of a year in which I was more than casually interested in matriarchy in history. That this recording then too, comes from an Islamic tradition, further informs, and complicates, historical issues I've studied this year. No less than eight titles (and perhaps more) in this year's top 100 are by female Islamic singers. 

Alright then, dear readers, time for a final push. There are just a handful of paintings left to do, to complete the series. In a week or two I'll be posting the list and announcing an exhibition where all hundred paintings will be shown, accompanied by all this year's writings on this stage, as well as the customary seven-hour loop of the prerecorded one hundred songs.

Monotypes (2)

Abdellah el Magana
20" x 15", monotype, 2014

Less than a month after a first monotype workshop I hosted a second, and, in keeping with the custom of 'every-opportunity-a-top-100 illustration', the demo featured an attempt to portray a Moroccan group around Abdellah el Magana. Some technical improvements happened since the first workshop, but this time, after the initial demo, the students didn't allow me to focus thoroughly on a result. The web presence of Abdellah el Magana evolves around the recording Kassidat el Hakka (poem of truth), originally a 45 recorded in Casablanca during the 'golden era' of the Moroccan record industry the 1960s. The song features on an album called Raw 45s from Morocco, collected and compiled by David Murray.

The Swami

Swami Dattatreya Rama Rao Parvakitar
12" x 16", oil on canvas, 2014

Track 12 from The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. XII: India is a recording of a Svarāramandalā played by Swāmī D.R. Parvatikar. The Swami was recorded by Alain Danielou in Hyderabad (Deccan). Rama Rao Parvatikar was a prominent Hindu saint and sanyasin (Wikipedia), he was born in 1916 and died in 1990. He would stand on his head every morning for at least fifteen minutes after which he would play his dattatreya veena (a self built folk harp) right side up. Danielou, a professor at the University of Benares recorded Rama Rao Parvatikar on several occasions between 1950 and 1955.

Chewa

Chewa Girls
8" x 10", oil on canvas, 2014

Manyanda is the "Kulowa first movement of the Muganda dance". It was performed, and recorded, in 1950 in Nyasaland (current day Malawi) by Hugh Tracey. It was performed by a group of young men with malipenga (singing gourds) led by Benson Phiri at Native Authority Masula, in the Lilongwe district. The information comes from the liner notes written by Tracey on the record The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Volume X: Bantu Music from British East Africa that was collected and edited by Alan Lomax. Hugh Tracey provided all the recordings, the photographs, and liner notes. The collection of photographs did not include the Chewa young men of track 17 and I reverted to a simple Google image search to find a substitute. Benson Phiri was not found and the first photo that came up next had a the heading: "Women are central to Chewa culture and performances." I looked no further (even though it makes me guilty of exoticism and use of gratuitous [semi] nudity). Later, before writing this, I searched further and I'm glad I did. The Chewa, so I learn from Wikipedia, is a matrilineal society, in which "property and land rights are inherited through the mother." And, like the heading to the photo source, "Women have a special place in Chewa society and belief" (did I redeem myself?)

Saraswatibai Fatarpekar

Shrimati Saraswatibai Fatarpekar
10" x 8", oil on canvas, 2014

Everything I know about Raga Basant "Aayi Ruta" by singer Saraswatibai Fatarpekar is from Excavated Shellac. The blog about rare 78 recordings from all the world posted in 2013 an item including a recording of the song Aayi Ruta. The research on Excavated Shellac is always impeccable and any gaps will be filled in by any of the many musicologists commenting on the site. Suresh Chandvankar of the Society of Indian Record Collectors added some scans from a catalog. It included the image of the (obscure) singer Saraswatibai Fatarpekar that I used as source for the painting above. The recording was made around 1933 in Bombay. Raga Basant means evening raga. All I can add is another portrait painting done on top of yet another small amateur colorfield painting.

Songs the Swahili Sing

Juma Bhalo
10" x 8", oil on canvas, 2014

A second track in the top 100 from the LP Songs the Swahili Sing: Classics from the Kenya Coast on John Storm Roberts' Original label is from the taarab master Mohamed Khamis Juma Bhalo.  Known as the King of Taarab "professor JB" passed away in April of this year, Bhalo was born in 1942. The LP was recorded by Roberts in the early 80s and released in 1983. Juma Bhalo's song is Kem Kem.

Finishing up the last paintings for the top 100 just got an enormous boost with the purchase of a boxful of used canvases in various sizes at a per-pound thrift store in Fort Myers. Somebody who was into painting abstract geometric almost minimalist paintings must have given up. All paintings were unsigned and simply not interesting enough to research who it was that donated all these canvases to the Goodwill store. The smaller canvases, it appears, were painted by someone else. At least the top layers, superimposed on rough geometric designs, are such that they were either the artist's playful sketches or given to perhaps a family member to play with. I didn't gesso out the canvases but on this Juma Bhalo painting the ground has been almost totally obscured. Yesterday's painting of Ros Sereysothea shows more of the 'found' background.

Khmer Rocks!

 

Ros Serey Sothea
10" x 8", oil on canvas, 2014

The criteria to evaluate the quality of a painting are embedded in the process of making it. It always involves some kind of surprise element. The trouble with many paintings starts when there is no such surprise happening. Then there usually is a strong temptation to evoke it. Enforced and calculated surprises cease to be surprises and it's better not to demand anything from your painting other than just painting the thing you set out to paint in the first place. It is difficult enough to just paint a picture without enforcing any idea or expectation. A picture without the reference of 30 years experience, 30 years of learning the history of art, 30 years of evaluating art is nearly impossible to make (but I try).

Ros Serey Sothea is a Khmer Cambodian singer of romantic (and later also patriotic) songs. Her early recordings are traditional ballads and later work consists of popular, even psychedelic, songs. In her short career, she died in 1977 at the age of twenty-nine, she recorded hundreds of songs. I only know one, and it's a good one. I'm not even so sure if it is her singing on that recording distributed by khmerrocks.com. All other information on that record, besides Vol. 78, is in Cambodian script but a picture on the sleeve is unmistakably Ros Seresothea. The website Bodega Pop did an item on it and shared with me and the rest of the world this gem that is known by Gary of Bodega Pop and me only as track 4.

tommy johnson and the raincoats

Tommy Johnson, the Raincoats
8" x 8.5", oil and collage on wood, 2014

I worked incredibly hard and long on this painting. It measures only eight by eight and a half (68 square inches) which makes the average time spent on each square inch about twenty minutes. It first was an oil sketch depicting the Raincoats, and as such discarded. I picked it up much later, turned it sideways to paint a portrait of blues musician Tommy Johnson. That portrait was alright but the painting still wasn't. There was a ghost left of the Raincoats that I liked and refused to cancel out. So it then was turned back to its original orientation and the Raincoats took precedence again. But not after a border of World Cup stickers were added. (I particularly like Didier Drogba right on the shirt of singer and bass player Gina Birch.) Tommy Johnson's song in the top 100 is Big Road Blues, a song so powerful that bands, a radio station, and websites were named after it. And it also was a book, a whole book dedicated to that one song, and it's one of favorite books on music, ever, it is Big Road Blues:Tradition and Creativity in Folk Blues by David Evans. Themes in that book can universally applied and, as a matter of fact, my whole artist thesis is based on it. And of course, the song was covered many times, Canned Heat is just one of them (Johnson also recorded a song, in 1928, called Canned Heat Blues.) The Raincoats' song is In Love, which is together with Fairytale in the Supermarket, my favorite Raincoats song. Now the Raincoats don't have much in common with Tommy Johnson, and even less with a bunch of World Cup stars, but hey...

Monotypes

Patricia Gonzalez
17" x 14", monotype, 2014

My collection of Latin American records is growing steadily. This is due to an influx of, mostly Mexican, records in the thrift stores of south Florida. This is reflected in the Top 100 Archive. In the the nearly finished Top 100 2013/14 there are as many surnames like Gonzalez, Sanchez, and Rodriguez as the are Smiths, Johnsons, and Williamses. In some thrift stores in Miami nearly half of the records come from one Latin American country or another. It's a bit messy, browsing through the shelves in thrift stores in Miami (where of course records are placed on the lowest shelves in the entertainment section of the store). The condition of the records is mostly poor, often the wrong disc is inside a jacket, if there's a jacket at all. Sometimes you'll find the back half of the jacket in a different location than the front half, and the vinyl in yet a third location. It is hardly a deterrent for me. I may assume that those records in good shape represent less popular ones, and I assume too that I often like less popular records better than popular ones. And that introduces me to this gem I found in a Goodwill store on Tamiami Trail in Naples. The gem is an LP by the Ecuadorian singer Patricia Gonzalez titled Un Amor Canta al Amor. The singer is pretty obscure, she doesn't have a presence on line, and as far as I can tell, it's the only one she ever made. But it's spectacular, and in near mint condition too. I saved painting her portrait from the image on the cover of the record for this special occasion that was a monotype workshop that I conducted just today. It's been waiting in anticipation for many weeks. Monotypes are cool. ♥ 'em!

Count Ossie

Count Ossie
18" x 9", oil on wood, 2014

Not long before he died Count Ossie, with his band The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, produced with the three-record-set Grounation his magnum opus.  He was 50 when he died in 1976 in a car accident. He had lived a storied life. As a rastafari in the early fifties he had problems finding work in the music business. It was Marguerita Mahfood who gave him his first break, and his first record was produced by Prince Buster in 1959. Oh Carolina is by some critics considered to be the very first ska record made. In the early fifties Ossie (Oswald Williams) had started a rastafari community in Kingston near Wareika Hill, introducing it to many of the Kingston musicians. The painting illustrates Ethiopian Serenade from Grounation.

Vespers

Sergei Rachmaninov (w/A. Schönberg and K. Perry)
20" x 16", oil and acrylic on canvas, 2014

That the Schönberg painting (superimposed on a Katy Perry portrait) wasn't going to survive was clear ever since its inception. But instead of aborting the idea of painting one portrait on top of the other, I repeated it. Sergei Rachmaninov then was painted on top of the Schönberg/Perry combo. A 1965 Russian issued recording of Rachmaninov's Vespers Mass was the impetus for the choice. If I were to add yet another portrait of a classical composer to the mix the focus of the painting would surely shift back to Katy Perry again. But I won't do that: this painting is officially the illustration for the Vespers recording in the 2013/14 edition and exhibition of the top 100. Vespers is a wonderful choral work in fifteen parts divided over four sides of a double album. Steeped in the Russian Orthodox choral music tradition but with Rachninov's 20th century sensibility the piece breathes life. The fifteen parts of the choral work "are based on ancient chants such as the Znamenni, Kiev and Greek." (liner notes) I'm paying special attention to this because in the Spring I'm thrown in front of a class wanting to learn about the art history of the world up until the 15th century (yikes!) One of the last images in the textbook the class will be using is the famous 14th century German wood carving Vesperbild (Pietà).

Surrealist Techniques (5)

Did a fun little workshop yesterday on the topic of Surrealist techniques. So here are a couple more of my experiments with xeroxes that were source materials for paintings.

Mariko Gotō

Pounding maize

Sergej Ryabtsev

Poly Styrene

Macedonian woman

Pussy Riot

S.E. Rogie

Delia Derbyshire

Arnold Schönberg

Arnold Schönberg (w/Katy Perry)
20" x 16", oil and acrylic on canvas, 2014

Well, the paintings aren't getting any better, are they? Looking for a surface to paint a portrait of Arnold Schönberg on, I stumbled on this two-year old acrylic painting of Katy Perry. It once functioned as a demo in a portrait class with young people (thought they may appreciate that). My wife is a Katy Perry fan but she didn't like the painting. So I painted over it. That was the intention at least, but couldn't make myself cover up those pretty lips of hers. So here's the painting then stuck behind two thoughts. The Top 100 entry for Schönberg is his second string quartet.

Art and music, music and art

Christian Marclay
22" x 7", oil on wood, 2014

Five categories are distinguished when comparing artists and musicians:

1. The avant-garde artist. From Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Laurie Anderson, to Christian Marclay, these artists blur the distinction between the two media. Art is music, music is art.
2. The artist who also plays in a band: Walter Dahn, Sadie Bennett, Mike Kelley, and others. The history of this category goes back to the post-punk (the D.I.Y.) era. The graphics (and videos) for these bands are considered fine art.
3. The musician who becomes an artist (mostly painters): Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, and many more. Musicians who become “Big” have a certain responsibility in culture as a whole. To be taken seriously as a bonafide cultural torch bearer many musicians expand their activities into the field of the arts. This presumes a higher standard on the hierarchy scale of culture. The latest to come through in this respect are Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg. The description doesn’t quite do justice to the initial three examples whose paintings are reproduced on some of their album sleeves). It should mentioned too that the composer early 20th century composer Arnold Schoenberg was also a painter and that important writers such as Goethe and Strindberg produced significant experimental works of visual art.
4. Bands with a background in art schools (especially in Britain): The Beatles, Stones, Who, DEVO, etc.
5. Many artists have an affinity with certain music and musicians. They end up producing visuals for them. I’m thinking here of Andy Warhol mainly, but artists like Raymond Pettibon and Mike Kelley come to mind too. The English anarcho-punk band Crass considered visual artist Lee Vaucher a band member.

Then there are songs about art, but maybe not as many as you would expect. Even though there is a clear affiliation between contemporary art and (rock) music, most band shun the topic in their lyrics. The songs there are about contemporary art are almost without exception songs full of anxiety (and full of cliches too).
1. Art Brut: Modern Art
2. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Art Star

Songs about famous paintings.
1. Mona Lisa
2. Don McClean: Starry Night

Songs about famous artists.
1. Jonathan Richman: Pablo Picasso
2. David Bowie: Andy Warhol

Songs about being an artist.
1. Michael Hurley: I Paint a Design
2. Terry Allen: The Waitress

Men with mustaches

Lazar Radak
13" x 9.5", oil on wood, 2014

Mukim Tahir Oturan
12" x 6.5", oil on wood, 2014

The wonderful thing about the research in the music of the past, and the research of music from far away places is that one is confronted with a humanity that is so strange yet so familiar. Considering the now widely accepted assumption that people from long ago and far away places had the same mental capacities than we have, it tells us a lot about our own identity. Through otherness, or through negation, we can see a more completed picture of what it means to be a creative human being. We can see historical connections and understand better how the culture is evolving. In the arts we conclude now that the work that was made 40,000 years ago in caves in France, Indonesia, and Australia, was as cognitively advanced as what is produced in the present. Music is more difficult because recordings only go back a little over a hundred years. Music notation has been around longer but not nearly to extent that we witness in visual art. We have to do with approximation then, which gets harder and harder in the current global culture. There is however a wealth of historic recording that provide a glimpse into what music could have been like ages ago. Early ethnomusicological recordings document societies that did not have contact yet with western civilization and whose music, it can be assumed, was relatively unchanged throughout the centuries. Early recordings also bear witness to a fast vanishing oral poetry tradition. The music and poetry from the more remote areas of classical Greece, such as Macedonia, that tradition was alive well into the 20th century. An insight in the workings of oral poetry provides invaluable information for the ongoing debate of originality, authorship, copyright, and plagiarism in western discourse. Listening to oral poetry performed by Balkan musicians strikes a chord of timelessness into the listener. In a similar vein it explains the durable character of old blues recording (that also stem from an oral tradition). The two men with mustaches depicted here come from areas with a long Grecian tradition. Macedonian Lazar Radak performs an epic poem in the Homeric tradition accompanied by the customary one-string gusle, while Mukim Tahir Oturan hails from Şanlıurfa in Southeast Turkey. His music stems from ancient Islamic traditions.

Harmonica Frank (Facebook)

Harmonica Frank Floyd
11" x 9.75", oil on wood, 2014

Harmonica Frank Floyd
10.5" x 8", pastel on wood, 2004

The invitation postcard for The Top 100 2004 exhibition featured this image of Harmonica Frank. His song Swamp Root was #2 that year. That same image became my avatar when it was time to give in to the Facebook lure. He still is my alter ego there, never changed the avatar. Ten years later Harmonica Frank is in the list again and I used the same photo to create the painting from (top). The song this year is not Swamp Root but Mosquito Bay Britches. The version is from a German TV broadcast, and the German subtitles are hilarious but meant so serious. I love it when they do that (and they always do: Johnny Rotten becomes Johnny Verdorben). The song is hilarious too, I had no idea as to how Harmonica Frank pays his harmonica. Watch below to find out for yourself how he does it.

Surrealist Techniques (4)

Janet Hsieh

Kitty Gallagher

Ahmad Ehbadi

Collage/decalcomania

Jolie Holland/Fayza Ahmad

Sviatoslav Richter/Naseebo Lal

Chikaha Rahma/Nico

John Lomax/anon. Nigerian musician in London

Rachid Taha

Rachid Taha
8" x 10"
oil on canvas panel, 2014

Sometimes there is a name in the list of the 100 songs that makes you wonder how in the hell it got there. Who is this? But the top 100 is objective and a painting is made for every song. Here's then one for Khalouni/Ya Oumri by the Algerian musician Rachid Taha. I don't even know how I found the song (it must have been through the blog Bodega Pop that I follow.) Of course, like most recordings, you can find it on YouTube. I found it, and after playing the video I realized why it is in the top 100. For a second I thought it was a Sex Pistols song when the video started playing. And to answer my earlier question (he also has a Wikipedia page): Rachid Taha is 56 years old, born in Sig, Algeria, residing in France. His music is a blend of Raï, funk, and punk. He was influenced by the Clash. It was mutual, his early music (with a band called Carte de Sejour, that I will try to find next) apparently inspired the Clash to write Rocking the Casbah. And yes, despite the deluge of photographic images that you may seen pass the review, I still paint, can't give it up. Mr. Taha's portrait took little over an hour to paint, probably the fastest painting in oils that you see in this year's list. The portrait of this handsome Algerian simply formed itself on top of this ridiculously bad flower still life painting that I'd produced teaching a one evening flower painting class in Bonita (ouch!)

Surrealist Techniques (3)

The Vivian Girls

Cat Power/John Storm Roberts

Kel Hamza

The Flaming Lips

John Storm Roberts/Klezmer group

Jessica Lea Mayfield

Pounding maize

Nina Simone

K.B. Sundarambal