A Jew and a Black guy walk into a practice room, or The Afro-Semitic Experience

The Afro-Semitic Experience. Image credit: http://afrosemiticexperience.net  

I was digging though some old CDs (remember those?) in the hopes that loading up another hard drive with my music is not in vain, even while the cloud-based streaming services battle it out.

Lo, and behold what I found - The Afro-Semitic Experience. I first ran across them in 2005, in conjunction with the release of their album, A Plea for Peace.

The group is the result of the steady collaboration of Warren Byrd and David Chevan. Here's what their website says:

With their highly accessible ethnic world music mix and their ability to get an audience on its feet, The Afro-Semitic Experience is emerging on the festival scene and redefining the jazz concert. This is a band beyond category—a mix of spiritual, world-beat, funk, jazz, cantorial, gospel, salsa, swing . . . soul-driven music. Their concerts are celebrations where they play great music, tell stories, and offer a positive and meaningful message: Unity in the Community.
Co-founded by African-American jazz pianist Warren Byrd, and Jewish-American jazz bassist David Chevan for an interfaith Martin Luther King memorial service in 1998, The Afro-Semitic Experience has gone on to share their music at concerts, workshops, and worship services all across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Their music is an intricate tapestry of the distinct cultures and heritages of the members of the group. They weave stories and music together as they celebrate and explain the Jewish and African-American sacred traditions.

So the mission of the group is a good one. But that never guaranteed music that cooks! Fortunately for the listening public, ASE is an incredibly talented group, fusing and synthesizing disperate traditions - a hallmark of the American experience, as well as the African- and Jewish-American experiences.

I encourage you to pick up a disc (or download the tracks), as their studio work is engaging, but don't miss live recordings either! Any group that is 'experiential' deserves as much:

Composer Cartoons - Holiday Edition

Here's an amusing holiday installment of Final Markdown. h/t SohoTheDog!

Classic dComposer - Tango Shmango

from 11/12/2007

our sources say that link is broken!

the tango boring...

I attended a nice little performance last night at the Indianapolis Historical Society's Basile Theater. The Pro Arte ensemble, headed up by Dr. Stanley DeRusha performed with guest soloist Gabriela Diaz (see the misprinted poster here - scroll down).

The first half of the program consisted of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Overall, they did a very good job, and Ms. Diaz was especially good. There were some slight intonation problems with the violins, but at the moments when the ensemble seemed most engaged (third movement of summer and most of the winter movements), they were close to flawless. I thought the Basile theater was a nice choice of venue, too. The Four seasons are so often piped through speakers in shopping malls, or used to sell us diamonds and luxury cars, that to hear them in an intimate recital hall with a small ensemble was like sharing a secret with the performers and Vivaldi.

The second half of the program featured Piazzolla's Cuatro estaciones porteñas (known in English as the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires). Now, I don't know a lot about Piazzolla, and there isn't the cursory-search/almanac-type-blurb/info-on-demand research in my usual spots, so it's hard for me to put this piece in context. According to a reviewer of a CD on Amazon (take that for what it's worth), the four movements of Piazzolla's Four Seasons were composed as discrete pieces of music over the course of the last 6 years of the 1960s. So packaging them together might be seen as misleading or inappropriate, especially bundled with Vivaldi's work.

But the real story here is not any of that. The real story is how boring Piazzolla's music is. I like tango, don't get me wrong. It can be very compelling, but these four pieces, and the two incidental tangos they performed before the four seasons, were so monochromatic and such a snooz that i wanted to slit my wrists. Fine musicians, painful program.

Classic dComposer: hello darkness, my old friend... - January 2008

From Jan. 3rd, 2008:
hello darkness, my old friend...
mood: dorky
Rolling Stone sounds off on modern CD mastering techniques. I especially like the SXSW discussion panel they reference titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" But actually, it seems my own loss of interest in commercial music and turn towards art music exactly coincides with the rise of hypercompression trends in recording. I blame Buch Vig. Ok buddy, you produced Nevermind, a seminal work and very important to me personally. Congratulations. now go home, retire, and stop ruining music.
Tags: cranky old man complaints

Stars and Stripes For Ev Ver.

John J. Miller's Between the Covers at National Review Online has an interesting interview with John Philip Sousa IV. The great-grandson of the famous American composer was on to plug discuss his new book. John Philip Sousa's America: The Patriot's Life in Images and Words explores Sousa's legacy through archival photographs and his presence in contemporary media. Popular tastes have shifted over time, of course, but Sousa IV insists that Sousa was "the Rock star of his day."

The review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer shares images from the book and some annoying popup ads. The images are interesting, the ads annoying. But the interview with Sousa IV is very informative. Sousa IV boasts that the earlier Sousa visited 11, count 'em, 11 continents. Turns out musical talent doesn't run in the blood, as Sousa IV was unable to define what a 'march' is, beside it being popular during his granddad's life.

The book includes a 19-track cd with rare recordings of, among other things, Sousa himself conducting Stars and Stripes Forever (which I couldn't dig up posted any place). I'm almost glad I couldn't find it. Some searches for composers conducting their works only end in disappointment incarnate.

I'd much rather have awful video and decent sound. So in honor of tomorrow's Independence Day holiday, this wednesday, Wednesday, WEDNESDAY, put your hands together for the one - the only...

Long time, no type...

Apologies to my readers, for I have encountered some technological hurdles of late. Fear not, for I believe I have remedied most of them, and the remainder are slated for reclamation as soon as is possible.
While I've been away, I've found myself more and more obsessed with The Band. Here's a ditty, quite famous of theirs, that challenged my perspective on music, harmony, the civil war, and plaintive memorial. Here's to perseverance in the face of obstacles, and continuing to sing anyhow...

Nay, toe.

This is a pic I snapped of some occupiers down at LaSalle and Jackson on Thursday, before the majority of protesters opposing the coming NATO summit found their way to old Chicago.

The scene was bizarre, with spectators and police far outnumbering the nascent occupation. That ratio has since flipped, but this was a quiet moment on a wonderfully warm and sunny spring day.

You can see a man playing guitar while seated in some sort of rolling PA system. Something between a rickshaw and a parade float. And this man was playing guitar and singing a folk song. His song was about the Exxon Valdez. Not exactly sure what that had to do with NATO, but it got me thinking about music in protest.

Here's one kraut's opinion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-njxKF8CkoU

The Valdez song was about as far from consumable or commoditized as music can be. So Adorno's barking up the wrong tree with this one.

Tom Morello, front-man emeritus of Rage Against the Machine, spoke at the inaugural rally on Friday May 18. Though Rage was always derisive of, well... the Machine, I'm pretty sure Adorno's critique perfectly applies to them. He even worked in a plug for his music in his speech:

"I'd like to make a suggestion to President Obama, if he doesn't have the courage to close Guantanamo Bay, how about he takes some of those Wall Street criminals? Throw them in there, lock the door, throw away the key and blast Rage Against the Machine 24 hours a day!"

Read more about Morello here: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/tom-morello-gets-fired-up-at-chicago-nurses-rally-20120518#ixzz1vL9SXAOt