The Murder Party

One more to swing out 2010: The curtains in the background are designed by yours truly, recorded at Skylab 3/14/10, the Top 100 2009 exhibition still going strong, The Murder Party from Columbus, Ohio in their first gig ever, in a memorable performance that at the time I listed in the second top 10 of the year (see post: Skylab, April 8, 2010), the last entry for the Top 100 2010 in 2010. The video posted by their guitarist Royce Icon, makes it that a performance I saw live, can be re-experienced and thus open up the possibility for inclusion in the Top 100 (as it is a personal account from the history of recorded sound), which it did. Mother of Fire was the main act that night and they were, just like me, impressed with what they heard/saw. So much so that upon Mother of Fire's return to Columbus later in the year they requested the Murder Party once more as their opener. So I did see both bands live twice this year, and both bands (in audio format at least) will return to Skylab as part of the Top 100 2010 exhibition and countdown. This will take place in March 2011. The first concert of the Murder Party with Mother of Fire, that also included a great show by Mors Ontologica, was held a day after Time and Temperature performed for the opening reception of the Top 100 2009. Time and Temperature is featured again in the newest edition with the song Havana (at #4 as it stands).

The Alan Lomax Collection (2)

CD jacket for Piedmonte and Valle D'Aosta (from The Alan
 Lomax Collection: Italian Treasury -after a photo by Alan Lomax)
16" x 24"
watercolor on paper, 2010

Right before Christmas I mentioned that the Half Price Books store around the corner from where I live, carried a good many volumes of The Alan Lomax Collection. Nobody got the hint then, so after the Christmas holiday I went there again and bought myself another installment. This time from the Italian Treasury series a volume called Piedmonte and Valle D'Aosta. I was searching for the one that would carry the song Alla Campagnola that I already owned from the original 1958 vinyl edition, a compilation of Lomax's field recordings in Italy, called Music and Song of Italy but they didn't have that one. For lack of an appropriate image for the polyphonic love song in my Top 100 (Alla Campagnola was recorded in the South of Italy), I opted for the CD jacket of the recordings made in Italy's Alpine region. That would be just fine, I thought. I tell you I had a lot of fun with my sumi brush and fancy Arches paper reproducing that black and white photograph. (I couldn't end the year with a bad painting —see previous post, earlier today— could I?)
Happy New Year dear readers.
p.s. The Top 100 year runs until February 23rd —the exact day I started the project, back in 1983.

Japan, at last

Brass band, Japan, early 20th Century
8" x 13"
oil on wood, 2010

This month I've been comparing traditional music from China with that of Japan. The musical games I played (without any purpose, see posts on pipa vs. koto) resulted in victories for Chinese music. Five historical recordings from China made the Top 100 list so far and now finally the first Japanese recording secured a place in the Top 100 2010. And with three consecutive top 10 notations, the Japanese tune Seigaiha, by the Imperial Palace band recorded in 1903, moved straight into number 8 in this year's Top 100, higher than any recording from China. Japanese music had been very well represented in my Top 100 in the last fifteen years but this was mostly due to contemporary avant-garde music made in that country. This historical recording of the Imperial Palace band sounds quite "avant-garde" in its own right, the intro to Seigaiha sounds like In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, the flower-power rock classic by Iron Butterfly, and could have been played by the Acid Mothers Temple (a psychedelic rock band from Japan featured in the Top 100 2009). I was psyched to make the painting for Seigaiha and I worked on this a long time, too long maybe; it's not a very good painting at all. Resolution for 2011: Make better paintings! The image, by the way, is from a photograph without caption from the EMI archives tucked into the album Sprigs of Time that contains the Imperial Palace Band.

Free Jazz!?

Rahsaan Roland Kirk
35" x 19"
oil on wood, 2010

When I think about 'jazz paintings' I cringe. I suddenly feel my gums recede and become aware of arthritis in my knuckles. You've seen 'em, everybody's seen 'em, I saw 'em too many times, those paintings, gestural, with swirly lines, smoking audiences, and negro female dancers with exaggerated buttocks. Those paintings made in an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of a jazz combo improvisation onto a canvas. I'm not calling any artist's names (not that I could think of one from the top of my head anyway, but there are many, professionals and amateurs) because I know as a matter of fact what it feels like to make those paintings (and I don't want to discard any type of painting for the type it is). For a moment the painter can identify with the spirituality caused by a crazy high note, the moment when a combo miraculously slips in and out of time in unison as if weightless, or the essence of the ancient sorcerer or shaman in higher contact with the animalistic creator of the universe. Commercially speaking the portraits of jazz musicians have been my most successful but I have been able, I think, to stay away from making the quintessential jazz painting. I have painted well over one hundred jazz musicians so far, none of them with the intention to mimic the spirit of a jazz performance, but with a focus on the human characteristics of a person or the formal composition of a musician figure in a spacial context. Until now! I never made a jazz painting as large as I did with this one of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. I never focused on a jazz cliche (such as the super large cheeks when blowing a horn) either; combine this with the for me uncharacteristic black primer on the surface as if it were a black velvet painting and there you have the ingredients of a 'jazz painting'. OMG, I made a "JAZZ PAINTING!"

The Stars of the Top 100

John Lee Hooker
25" x 14"
oil on wood, 2010

Just when I congratulated myself earlier this month for my oblivion towards musical stars, a few more established names enter the fray. Both John Lee Hooker and Rahsaan Roland Kirk are legends of American music and mainstays in my Top 100. With respectively the purchase of another album and the viewing of a film both make once again the yearly list of one hundred. In my archive over 28 years Hooker and Kirk are #27 and #28 when it comes to points gathered by musicians; 434 for John Lee Hooker, 432 for Roland Kirk. Those ranks make Hooker the highest ranked blues musician but Kirk only the fifth jazz artist. With a bit of free time around the holidays I primed a few surfaces a little bigger than usual and the biggest stars of the Top 100 can now be painted on appropriate sizes. First up is John Lee Hooker, the Mississippi blues man who died a decade ago at age 88. His output is such that to collect all his recordings is a task so epic that it isn't even worth a consideration. I have no ambition towards such an achievement but I will occasionally add to my substantial representation of John Lee Hooker in my record collection. The latest addition is a handsome original LP on a label from Los Angeles called The Great Blues Sounds of John Lee Hooker and my song of choice from it is She Left Me.

The Alan Lomax Collection

Arantza Goikoetxea
12.25" x 7.75"
oil on wood, 2010

Good news is that a series of cds containing field recordings from Spain and Italy have become available as part of The Alan Lomax Collection. Bad news is that there are suddenly a whole bunch of cds out there I want to buy. Good news is that they have them at Half Price Books, right around the corner, for only $8.99 each. Bad news is that you'd spend 90 bucks to get 10. Good news is that it's almost Christmas. Bad news is that some vinyl I've treasured so dearly have become pretty much obsolete because the cds contain so much more music, pictures, and text than the LPs did.
I bought one from The Spanish Recording series, one from the Basque Country: Biscay and Guipuzcoa. Looking through the series I searched for Vascona because my favorite tune from a great 4 record set I have called Anthology of Spanish Folklore Music is from there; Ariñ-Ariñ is an anonymous recording from Viscaya, Vascona. I couldn't find either the title or the region so I settled for the Basque Cd. Little did I know but my intuition was rewarded because as it turns out Vascona is the same as Basconia, which is in turn the same as Basque while Viscaya is the very same place as Biscay. Lo and behold the liner notes state that the track Porrusalda is also known as Ariñ-Ariñ.  the tune is not anonymous, it is sung and played by Arantza and Andoni Goikoetxea. And better yet: The booklet to the Cd contains a picture of Arantza Goikoetxea, I started painting right away!

And it didn't take long... The recording, by the way, was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1952, four years before football player Andoni Goikoetxea was born (in Biscay), and thirteen before Barcelona player from the Dream Team years Andoni Goikoetxea was born. Wonder if any one of them is related to Andoni, the 'alboka' player on the recording, and/or his sister Arantza.

Fela Kuti

Fela Kuti
16" x 8.75"
oil on wood, 2010

A few weeks ago I mentioned that it was 25 years ago that Fela Kuti was last represented in my annual Top 100. A bit surprising maybe, considering my ever increasing infatuation with music from the African continent, and with jazz, to leave out its biggest star. Maybe not so surprising considering my ever increasing oblivion towards musical stardom. When in 1986 maybe half the musicians could be tagged as star, now I could maybe tag only one out of five as such. What constitutes a star then? A question as subjective in popular culture as it is objective in astronomy. The cutoff for me is somewhere between Beth Orton and Odetta, or John Jacob Niles and David Allen Coe. These are the thirteen stars in the Top 100 2010 so far (in order of stardom according to my subjective criteria):
Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Nina Simone, M.I.A., Ornette Coleman, Fela Kuti, Joni Mitchell, Cat Power, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Townes Van Zandt, Burzum, David Allen Coe, Odetta
Unconsciously or not, a star is painted differently, as a star I guess, an icon. So here's my painting of Fela Kuti, could easily be used as the cover for a The Best Of... album or something. (Darn, the image already was just that.)

Pipa 2 – 0 Koto

Pipa player (Janet Hsieh)
15" x 6"
oil on plexi-glass, 2010

Another goal for pipa. Pipa is up two now against koto. After a musical comparison the pipa was also ahead when it came to  comparing visuals. I believe this is largely due to the introduction of the pipa into pop culture whereas the koto is still reminiscent of an old rigid tradition. Indeed, the picture I chose to paint from, as an illustration to the melody Xiang Yu, The Conqueror Removing His Armour by the pipaist Chen Yin (whose picture I could not find), is an image of a present day celebrity named Janet Hsieh, a Taiwanese-American model/musician appearing in a video by fellow Taiwanese-American superstar Wang LeeHom playing pipa. As a guitar-like string instrument the pipa has the advantage over the koto in that one can play it like a rock star. Its real Japanese equivalent is not the koto but the biwa, while the koto finds its relative in the Chinese guzheng. The pipa melody is the fifth recording from China in the Top 100 so far while Japan, a traditional Top 100 heavyweight, is not represented yet. It is not all gloom for Japan though, there is hope on the horizon as I re-discovered a recording made by the Imperial Palace Band in 1903! With its In-a-Gadda-da-Vida like intro it could beat all Chinese competition and will certainly find its place high up the ranks of this year's Top 100.

About a painting depicting Janet Hsieh

Within the larger tradition of painting every year one hundred musicians, exists the tradition of painting one of the musicians on top of the palette used for the other paintings. It used to be the very last painting I did for a Top 100 (often #100) but the timing changed to the moment a palette was worn out and I was in need of a new one. That moment arrived a few days ago. Paint was piled so thick on the palette that it became too hard to use it again. I turned this dirty palette around and around and again, comparing various source materials, until the image of Hsieh and her pipa started to form itself on my retina. I used the paint still malleable on the palette to shape the image and used fresh, clean paint from a fresh, clean, and new palette to finish it.

Physiognomy

6 x Mishka Ziganoff
4.25" x 5.5" each
marker on colored paper, 2010

The photo of Mishka Ziganoff, apparently the only one in existence, appears on Google Images either cropped at the top or cropped at the bottom, none showed the full photo. The character of Ziganoff in the images of which the chin was cut off appeared more sympathetic than those in which the forehead was cut off. In these images Ziganoff also appears leaner than with the reverse crop. Intrigued and puzzled by why I interpreted the same image so differently I did a little experiment: I drew the face several times, starting with one or the other cropped variety, and investigate how it would influence my act of drawing it. I would investigate the physiognomy of Ziganoff's face. I soon found out that beside the different croppings that influence the interpretation of his face several other elements contribute to the assessment of the character Mishka Ziganoff as well. Some interpretations are subjective, some objective, others are plain old stereotypes. Knowing a bit about the cultural history of Mishka Ziganoff certainly influences how I depicted the person. This is what I know: He was Russian, born in the late 19th Century in Odessa, Ukraine. Immigrated to the United States (possibly via Italy) in the early 20th Century, recorded his Koilen in New York City in 1919. His heritage is either Gypsy or Jewish, or both. Now, at the risk of being a biased jackass:

• The person appears heavier in the pictures in which his full chin is shown. It changes the smile into a full laugh. In Russia heavy means healthy, in America the opposite. In my native Holland a big person epitomizes the (hard to translate) term 'gezellig' (joyous, cozy). The drawing center right looks like a 'gezellige dikkert'.
• I noticed that when I had either "Jewish" or "Gypsy" in my mind when I was drawing, I indeed managed to bring out the stereotypical characteristics of each. (I wouldn't be able to tell you what these are exactly save for the "Jewish nose".)
• Seeing all six quick little drawings in a row the differences are obvious while at the time of drawing them I thought each time I was drawing the proportions right and captured Zigonoff's likeness. Even in the first one, the most awkward portrait drawing, center left, appeared fine to me at the moment I drew it...

Apparently the awkwardness lies in its relationship with its neighbor...
That's a good enough assessment in a discussion on character interpretation for right now...

Pipa–Koto, 1-0

Ornette Coleman (2nd Version)
10.75" x 7.5"
acrylic on paper, 2010

This watercolor of Ornette Coleman will substitute the oil painting of him for the track Free Jazz  in the Top 100 2010 exhibition in March 2011 at Skylab. The original (see Free Jazz!, September 6) is not with me anymore. I didn't lose it, it didn't burn, it wasn't stolen. White Columns, the gallery that has been showing these paintings, sold it at the NADA art fair in Miami Beach this weekend. I was there to enjoy the sun, the beach, the food, and to promote these paintings. Coleman's was the first one to sell. Jazz musicians always sell the best, the first, and the most. I brought ten of this year's Top 100 paintings and returned with none. The other Coleman is gone too, the only two Jazz paintings so far. The ten paintings that were sold will be represented in the Top 100 2010 exhibition by either a color reproduction or, as in this case of Ornette Coleman, a second version.

In the beautiful week of art fairs and palm lined beaches, I didn't paint, didn't pay attention to any music, and didn't blog, leaving my schedule is in a state of disarray. The next two months must harvest forty more songs in order to arrive at a list of one hundred. I was thinking to help matters a bit by revisiting those musics just a point or two short from being in it. It's a good way of playing music, enjoyable, playful, and purposeful. To make it even more of a game I decided to play songs against each other: the winner being granted the chance to be in the Top 100, the loser back into the archives for maybe another chance next year. As with cup football the draws result in some interesting match-ups, Fela Kuti, a Top 100 veteran from 1988, just beat Alem Kebede (never before in the Top 100), Mishka Ziganoff (with Koilen) was the winner of a Bella Ciao play-off against Giovanni Daffini, and 'pipa' defeated 'koto'. The last of these was a match-up between arch rivals China and Japan. China represented by Chen Yin playing an ancient traditional Chinese melody on the pipa, while two of Japan's parallel string instrument, the koto, in a tune also of considerable antiquity, were played by Keiko Nosaka and Sachiko Miyamoto. An interesting detail surrounding the East Asian match is that both the long string instrument numbers (both the pipa and koto tunes are about 10 minutes in duration) are followed on their respective records by a short piece for a large bamboo flute. The Chinese flute is called 'dizi' while the Japanese equivalent is called 'shakuhachi'.
Misha Ziganoff, Fela Kuti, and Chen Yin, are the newest arrivals in the Top 100 2010.

Oogjes dicht en snaveltjes toe: Welterusten lieve kijkbuis kinderen.

Bella ciao!

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

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

Morning Star

 Ornette Coleman - Body Meta
Painting by Chief Z.K Oloruntoba
12" x 12", 1978

Ornette Coleman
16" x 11.5"
oil on wood, 2010

"Free Jazz!" I exclaimed a few weeks ago. Now with Voice Poetry there's a second Ornette Coleman track in the Top 100 and a new painting is already made. Voice Poetry comes from the LP Body Meta, it's not free jazz but with a prize tag of only a dollar it was pretty cheap. I saw an asking prize of $60 on line but that of course is for a mint condition copy. Mine is not—not many of my records are—I hardly buy anything new, and I hardly ever pay more than $5 for a copy. The art work on the cover of the 1978 LP on the Artistshouse label by Nigerian artist Chief Z.K. Oloruntoba is psychedelic in an curious way. It reminds me of the recent work by Cincinnati painter Mark Harris, co-exhibitor in the soon ending show of our work at Country Club Projects in Cincinnati. I'll send him a copy of it, soon. It's the last week of his show called Morning Star. Go check it out before it closes; or if it's too far away:
http://www.countryclubprojects.com/exhibitions/mark-harris-morning-star/index.html
The above painting of Ornette Coleman isn't anything like it. It reminds me of the work by Columbus' painter Curtis Goldstein, not in subject matter but in painting technique. Similar too is the use of polarized (or enhanced otherwise) source material. The difference here is that Goldstein takes his own photographs and enhances them too whereas I take an image from elsewhere (from the Volkskrant in this case) and without much ado paint what's seen in the original (which is a Getty image of Coleman in concert in 2009). In this painting I used wider brushes than I usually do and worked wet in wet. I cannot make myself stick to certain techniques, I just get bored with it. I don't even have a preference to a certain technique, I use whatever I fancy. Every painting contains a few technical inventions that, of course, I can never remember, let alone repeat.