Dry Grass and Shadows

Alela Diane
10.5" x 11", 2013
ink, watercolor, pencil

Dry Grass and Shadows is the opening track from Alela Diane's CD To Be Still that I like so much. I bought it in 2009 at a festival in Nelsonville, Ohio. She was nice enough to sign it for me. The song was listed in the Top 100 2009 and the Top 100 2010. I didn't listen to the song since but it's back in the top 100 this year (2012) due to a live concert video recorded at the Nuits des Fouvière in 2012, and posted on line. Ms. Diane herself forwarded a link to it on her facebook page. The drawing may be a bit of a caricature (or at least it is mannieristic) but I think it's sweet nevertheless. (And remember, it's not about me, the drawings and paintings are about them. I'm a fan.)

Hirut Bekele again

Hirut Bekele
12" x 12"
oil on luan, 2013

One of my favorite "world" music albums I discovered in 2012 was this cassette by Hirut Bekele that I found on the blog Awesome Tapes from Africa. The cassette (notes are all in Ge'ez, or Ethiopic script) has two tracks in the Top 100, making Bekele one of only a handful repeat musicians in the list, and the only non-English speaking musician to do so. I can't read the titles on the jacket so the songs in the top 100 are simply labelled track 1, and track 5. I commented in an earlier post about the stripped down accompaniments on the cassette (compared to the jazz bands that were common at the time in Addis Ababa), and on track 5 it is stripped down even further. With the elimination of the keyboard that is heard throughout the cassette, all that's left is the krar to accompany Bekele's voice. It is the most hypnotic track on the cassette, and one that I consider highly and will store in a special place.

M.I.A. – Paper Planes

M.I.A.
11" x 8.5"
ink on paper, 2013

M.I.A.'s biggest hit, without a doubt, is Paper Planes. The inclusion of it in the movie Slumdog Millionaire propelled M.I.A.'s status from starlet to megastar. The song too, together with Born Free (see Top 100 2013, #2), made M.I.A. now enter the list of my favorite 200 musicians counted over 30 years of Top 100 history. Besides being on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, Paper Planes appeared on M.I.A.'s second album, Grammy winning Kala of 2007. It should not come as a surprise then, that on YouTube a score of live recordings are posted. One night I had myself a little Paper Planes marathon and watched six of these in a row. Some are fan videos recorded from within the audience, others are more official ones recorded properly on stage, and then there are still other versions that were recorded for a live TV audience, such as her appearances on Letterman and the Grammy's. And they're all different. My favorite one is labelled the "official live video". On it there are tons of people on stage dancing, another large group of kids providing the chorus, and a special guest appearance by Rye Rye. The small little ink drawing above almost didn't make it. I'm getting way to meticulous in my sketchbook. Out of frustration I almost tore out the page and threw it away (or folded it neatly to let the wind carry it away.

Sugar Man

Rodriguez
11" x 8.5", 2013
watercolor, pencil, pen, ink

It occasionally happens that my lists are in synch with those of the mainstream. Usually this is related to a current event. It could be the passing of an icon, a lifetime achievement award, or the making of a film about some musician. In the last case this musician is now Rodriguez. When I first heard about the film a half year ago ago, I was intrigued and had to find out what the musician in the film was all about. I had never heard of him and neither did anyone else it seemed. But by now it is not even necessary anymore to summarize his story in these few lines available here, because everybody would have heard all about him already as the film is nominated for an Oscar for best documentary. I haven't seen the film yet, just the same excerpts as anyone can see on YouTube, but I've listened to a lot of his music that suddenly have become available on various sharing sites. The documentary is called Searching for Sugar Man, the alter ego of Sixto, or Jesús Rodriguez, and also the title of the song in the Top 100 list.

Michael Hurley

Michael Hurley
11" x 8.5", 2013
watercolor, pencil

Michael Hurley hasn't gotten any younger since I met him in 2008, but then: neither have I. He released his first record in 1964, the year I was born. He released a whole score of consequent recordings, mostly hard to find, minor (his own often) label, small edition issues. I have a handful on CD, LP, and cassette. Top 100 2012 #54 is Knockando from the CD Ancestral Swamp. Released in 2007 on Gnomonsong Recordings, it's one of those self published discs. He has his own publishing company too: Snocko Music. I don't think anyone else publishes for Snocko, or records for Gnomonsong than Mr. Hurley himself. As with most of Hurley's record, it features his own artwork on the cover. As a bonus there's a cartoon inside. The hero of the story (I guess you call him Snocko, Hurley's alter ego) sleepwalks into a bar. I doesn't keep him from drinking though. He wakes up and then gets back into his patrol car and falls back asleep again behind the wheel.

Katajjaq (2)

Tumivut (Inuit) girls performing
12" x 12", oil on luan, 2013

Today it is exactly thirty years since I made the top 10 that lead to the Top 100 project. I've compiled 75 top tens on average every year since, and just yesterday I finalized the Top 100 2012, a list constructed from 74 top tens. Today is the official start of the Top 100 2013 but the images I post are still going to be belonging to 2012 for a while. There's an exhibition scheduled for May 11 to show the 100 paintings (details will follow soon!), and I'll be working up to that date to make paintings for it. Today's painting I made yesterday, and I struggled with it. It seems that the more I teach, and the better I become with demonstrations, critiques and such, my own paintings suffer. Pictured above are two Tumivut Inuit girls performing the song The Competion at a song tournament. The song nearly made it in the list, as did many others in the genre but the only one in the Top 100 is simply named Katajjaq (the word for this style of throat singing) and is performed by anonymous singers. It is the same track that was in last year's top 100, and if you click in this link you can read what I wrote about that style of singing in January of 2012.

Serbian Lazarus Song

Serbian women singing
8.5" x 11", 2013
pencil, watercolor

Pictured are a group of seven Serbian women engaged in song. These seven women are found on the cover of the LP СРПСКА НАРОДНА МҮЗИКА or SERBIAN FOLK MUSIC. The second song of side B of this marvelous album side is May This Tree Bear Fruit, a Lazarus 'to the fruit-bearing tree', from the village of Surlica in the Pčinja region. It is sung by six girls which rules out the possibility that the seven women pictured are the singers of the song. Overlap is possible though, some of the younger women in this group may well be a part of the group of six girls (called a lazarice—I don't know if, and how, this is related to Lazarus). The LP was produced in Belgrade in 1981, the music recorded in 1978. I'm surprised that the name Yugoslavia isn't even used on the album, as Serbia was not an independent country yet, or again. I spent way too much time on this insignificant little watercolor. My intention was to make a gestural sketch of the seven women and ink it in. In stead I found myself getting real tight and precise and before you know it, the evening has passed (I might as well just watched a movie).

Koleo

Guadalcanal, girl
24" x 12"
oil on luan, 2013

Photographers in the earlier and mid twentieth century had a blast photographing exotic women. Under the guise of anthropology they took license to shoot cute bare-breasted girls and women from around the world. They published them as postcards and it was a good business. Now, of course, you can't do that anymore. Even the photographers of National Geographic shy away from nudity. It is politically incorrect to objectify, but also—even in the most remote and secluded areas—the women have covered up. I have followed suit and stay (mostly) away from exploitative images (I used to search out precisely such images to illustrate the often anonymous recordings of the female voice in remote areas that I love so much). I make an exception here partly because the only timely image result for keyword search "Guadalcanal and girl" was the vintage postcard I painted this from. Sometimes those postcards are fake. Commercial photo studios, especially in Paris, dragged cute exotic looking girls into their ateliers and put them in front of a decor with palm trees or thatched huts, had them put on a bamboo skirt or even less, and sold the results as authentic photos taken in the colonies. I don't know if this particular photo I used is authentic or not but I do know that the scenery in the painting is located in Fort Myers, Florida, it's my back yard: guilty. The reason for my image search was a song on the record Iles Salomon: Musique de Guadalcanal, Ocora/Radio France, 1970, recorded by Hugo Zemp in the Solomon Islands for which I didn't have an image available. The song is Koleo: Chant Funèbre de Femmes that I used it on my compilation of funerary laments.

Lee Perry

Lee "Scratch" Perry
11" x 8.5", 2013
pen, ink, pencil, watercolor

Lee Perry is back in it too! It's been a long time since he'd be there. Yet he's my favorite Jamaican musician. He's been through it all, from the ska, the dancehall, and the dub. He was instrumental in the development and popularization on reggae music. Disco Devil is the track, he recorded it back in the late 70s in his famous Black Ark Studios in Kingston. It wasn't released on CD until 2012 as part of the Disco Devil compilation. Lee Perry lives in Switzerland these days. Disco Devil is a remix of the song Chase the Devil that he wrote with Max Romeo, who had a hit with it in 1976. The music is provided by Perry's house band The Upsetters.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan
11" x 8.5", 2013
ink, watercolor, pencil

Here he is again, Bob Dylan, standard fare every year, plus I've done 4 watercolors of him over the Summer (The 100 Greatest Recordings Ever), and I may have to do another before the Top 100 2012 paintings are completed. I've listened to his new record Tempest and I liked it, but it's not what makes this year's list. Instead it's two songs from the live album Before the Flood recorded with the Band in 1974, an album that somehow got separated from the other 30 records I have of his, and was placed in a stack of records right next to my player. The first of the two songs illustrated is It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, a classic, one of his many. He performs it acoustic on Before the Flood, and receives a huge cheer from the audience when sings the lines "But even the president of the United States—Sometimes must have to stand naked". That the area right under his nose is painted red is purely coincidental, I wasn't thinking about the song at all when I did that. I would never take his lyrics that literal, would I?

The Record Collector

Jon Ward
12" x 12"
oil on luan, 2013

I used to think of myself as a record collector but now I merely consider myself as someone who collects records. Being a blogger, and looking at blogs of people that are serious collectors, I've come to realize what it means to be a real record collector. In the old days my Top 100 depended on my own modest collection and those of my friends but now I can browse almost any collection, of anyone who's serious about collecting, and—a lot of them do—shares their findings on line. So, as I did last year, I'd like to forward a top 8 of music blogs I have been following in 2012. Nearly 50% of the music in this year's list I found on one of the many music blogs available on the web. 10% came from Excavated Shellac, a blog written by Jonathan Ward, collector of old 78 discs from around the world. The discs he writes about are pretty obscure and hardly ever is a picture of the musician available. For illustrating these then, I have to revert to appropriate approximates. In the case of a recording by Rizeli Sadik (Top 100 2012, #18) I chose to paint Jon Ward himself. And rather than writing something about Sadik's song Erkek Kadin Oyun Havasi, I'll link you to the post in Excavated Shellac that deals with it, and let Mr. Ward explain all about the record in his own words. Besides being an awesome record collector he is also an excellent writer.

The following then is my new Top 8 music blogs, the ranking is based on the Top 100 2012 list (last year's ranking in parenthesis):

1. (–) Excavated Shellac by Jonathan Ward
2. (–) The World's Jukebox by Gadaya
3. (5) Bodega Pop by Gary Sullivan
4. (3) Awesome Tapes from Africa by Brian Shimkovitz
5. (1) Tools and Techniques by Lightactivity
6. (6) Ghost-Capital by Nick Barbery
7. (–) Musical Thrift Store Treasures (my own music blog)
8. (4) Friends and Wieners by Ryan J

Charles Duvelle

Charles Duvelle
11" x 8.5", 2013
ink, watercolor, pencil on paper

Charles Duvelle (b. 1937) is a French musicologist best known for his ethnographic recordings made in former French territories in Africa. On Ghostcapital, one of the music blogs I follow, I found this wonderful hypnotic recording he made in Niger that appeared on Rhythmes et Chants du Niger (Ocora, 1971). The sound example Ghostcapital used in their article is also the one to appear in the Top 100: Chant de louanges Sonrai (Sonrai praise song). It was performed by the singer Doulo Soumahilou accompanied by Ibrahima Douma, who plays a kountigui (a one stringed lute), and a group of six young men who clap the rhythm.