The Substantially Similar Weblog

Last Friday, we saw The Bad Plus and Color and Talea at the Somerville Theatre. It was one of the best live shows I’ve seen in a long time. The two groups, while superficially similar in that they are both avant garde jazz/funk influenced bands with similar instrumentation, were fundamentally different in influences and vibe. They were both quite innovative, though, and pushed boundaries in ways that felt really fresh.

The Bad Plus was particularly remarkable live. I’ve been listening to their album, These Are The Vistas, for a long while, but I wasn’t prepared for the dynamicism and almost-falling-off-the-edge feeling of their performance. Rather than the typical “jazz trio” with two musicians performing backup rhythm section while the other one does an improvisational solo, the image that came to mind for me were three jugglers conversing on a party line. They created more combinations of three standard instruments than I thought possible. You don’t really pick up on it in on the album, at least not until after you’ve seen them live.

I’m not sure who best to compare them with; there’s definitely some Keith Jarrett in there, but otherwise, I’m at a loss. Maybe Stravinsky, and Bach or Chopin. Their pieces feel more like “compositions” than most jazz, but somehow that doesn’t undercut the spontaneous feeling of it.

Their new album (the fourth), Suspicious Activities, is even better than the first. They are masters of giving you just enough of a funky groove to get into it, and then sliding into something more free form, and then just when you feel like you’re about to lose your grounding entirely, they’ll slide back into the funk. Here’s a less-than-30-second clip from “Theme from Chariots of Fire” which is a good illustration: ogg format (388k) and mp3 format (697k). (For some reason, they called this “The Theme to Cagney and Lacey” in concert.)

Most of the songs on Suspicious Activities have some accompanying narrative story, which is unusual for an instrumental jazz album. For example, ‘Rhinoceros is My Profession’ is about a bullfight. After the matador slays the bull and is basking in adulation, the gate opens and a rhinoceros comes charging into the ring. Ethan Iverson, the pianist, introduced this story by saying (in a perfectly dry tone of voice), “If there’s one thing we in the Bad Plus all agree on, it’s our mutual disapproval of bullfighting.” Another song, ‘O. G. (Original Gentleman)’ was originally intended to be a tribute to legendary drummer Elvin Jones, but since that was too ambitious a task, it ended up being about the lingering feeling in a donut shop after Elvin Jones has left the place.

They also posted some odd photos of their visit to Somerville on their blog.

New in circulation on my iRiver iFP-799:

• Bruce Springsteen’s Devils and Dust
• Eddie from Ohio’s This Is Me (my first purchase from the iTUnes Music Store)
• Tracy Grammer’s Flower of Avalon
• Beck’s Guero

If you’re like me, you’ll like all these albums.

I’ve been quite happy with my iRiver MP3 player (which I’ve taken to calling “my iPod” which tends to confuse people). It’s tiny, holds 1G of music, and plays ogg files. I only yesterday discovered its great flaw: you can’t move files off of the device. According to the FAQ:

Why can’t I upload my MP3 / WMA files from my iFP player?

A. Due to copyright protection laws that apply towards our technology, media files (MP3 / WMA files) cannot be uploaded from an iFP player to a PC. All other non-media files (documents, images, etc.) can be uploaded to a PC from the iFP player.

This restriction is in the firmware, so there is no trivial workaround. Apparently one workaround is to rename your files so they don’t have a music extension before moving them off the device, but that didn’t work for me, and is also terribly inconvenient.

I suppose iRiver implemented this control to avoid liability for contributory infringement, but it just seems damn silly to me. My Neuros Audio Player had no such restriction, and my impression is most portable music players let you move music on and off as desired. There is also apparently an alternative firmware that turns the device into a simple USB storage drive (while still functioning as a music player) that eliminates the restriction.

My biggest fear is that, by implementing this sort of unnecessary and unhelpful copy protection technology, hardware makers who fail to implement such controls will be accused of contributory infringement because they didn’t meet “industry standards.”

I was recently searching for an MP3 downloadable version of Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto,” having heard an excerpt in this episode of This American Life. I came across this version, which is quite likely the strangest cover of an Elvis song I’ve ever heard. I hope it’s not a sign that I’m out of tune with popular culture because I’ve never heard of dictionaraoke before.

In keeping with my recent theme of linking to publicly available public radio recordings…

So it’s a little late for St. Valentine’s Day, but I’ve been busy. On This American Life, Sarah Vowell’s The Greatest Love Story of the 20th Century (about 47 minutes in) is fantastic and a must-hear for Johnny Cash fans. The story dispells a longstanding misconception I’ve had that “Ring of Fire” is actually about syphilis.

Incidentally, did you know that you can jump to the middle of a RealAudio stream simply by appending ?start=47:00 (to jump 47 minutes in) to the URL? Unrelatedly—that Vowell was the voice of superhero Violet Parr in The Incredibles?

Tom Waits is featured on this week’s American Routes public radio music show (archived here — real audio link). There’s a great interchange where you can’t tell if Waits is totally screwing around with the host, or just being himself. Here’s the clip (10 second ogg):

Q: I don’t want to misquote you, but I think I saw you once said something like “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
A: Oh right right right…
Q: Very succinct and poetic line.
…
A: Mmm… Um, I read that on a bathroom wall.
Q: Oh — did you really?
A: Uh huh. Yeah.
Q: But it strikes me it’s also somebody that sang that at that time that maybe — drinking was probably pretty important to you at that point?
A: Oh, well, I haven’t had a drink in like fourteen years.
Q: But… I… when you said that, my guess would be that you probably were, unless you were totally playing a character…
A: Oh, yeah, I was drinking in those days, yeah, sure.
Q: Yeah, yeah.

Apparently, the “lobotomy” quote, often attributed to Tom Waits, is actually written by Atlanta physician Randy Hanzlick. But it’s entirely plausible it got to Tom Waits via a bathroom somewhere. I’d believe it.

Update: a commentor points out that Hanzlick himself actually got the quote from graffiti on a bathroom wall. The plot thickens.

‘He feels he can do more good working within the system.’

I figured this space could use a little levity for a change. Interestingly, this New Yorker cartoon was actually the result of a captioning contest where readers sent in suggestions based on the image. Above is the winning entry.

Richard Shindell’s new album, Vuelta, is great. (Vuelta means turn, reconsideration, or homecoming). I’ve been a Richard Shindell fan since I first saw him at a free folk festival at Harvard in 1996 or 1997 (anybody know what that festival was?). I’ve always preferred his live performances to his albums, though, because I find the full backup band on the album gets in the way. A lot of folk performers seem to like to record with backup bands, maybe because it makes it more interesting for them since they often tour solo—but I almost always prefer the solo acoustic performance.

Shindell has moved to Argentina since his last album, though, and this one is much more sparse by way of instrumentation. The album is also more brooding than his others—although Shindell has never been a lightweight pop songwriter by any standard—and Shindell’s outlook has clearly been made dark by world events since September 11.

My favorite song on the album is Shindell’s adaptation of Pete Seeger’s Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a story about a World War II army training operation in Louisiana gone awry. For some reason, it only recently became obvious to me that this song is actually about Vietnam.

The song has fresh relevance now in the context of the Iraq war, even if you don’t buy into a simplistic “another Vietnam” analysis. Here is an excerpt (OGG file, 30 seconds, 630K) from the song that goes to the heart of the matter:

“Captain, sir, with all this gear
No man will be able to swim.”
“Sergeant, don’t be a Nervous Nellie,”
The Captain said to him.
“All we need is a little determination;
We’ll soon be on dry ground.”
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fool kept yelling, “Push on!”

Or, as Secretary Rumsfeld puts it: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

They Might Be Giants, perhaps my favorite band when I was a teenager, is doing the right thing and selling unencumbered high-quality MP3s online at a reasonable price. Directly from the artists. Please support Them—They really seem to “get it.”

Tonight I saw A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn· at the Coolidge Corner Theatre·’s summer jazz program·, an excellent documentary about one of my favorite non-categorizable musicians·.

In the film, Zorn rails against facile attempts by critics to pin him down into a packageable description (“Ornette Coleman meets Klezmer Music”). He talks about people judging with their eyes (“Oh, trumpet, sax, bass, and drums, I know what this is”) rather than their ears, complaining that our culture is far too visually-oriented even when it comes to music.

This film is as much about the filmmaker, Claudia Heuermann, as it is about its subject. Halfway through the making of the film, John Zorn apparently refused to answer the phone or return Heuermann’s calls, and she couldn’t even locate him. So she turned the camera back on herself. But of course this is the case with all documentaries to some degree, it’s just more transparent here. In this sense, A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky was reminiscent of My Architect· (IMDB link·), the story of the son of legendary architect Louis Kahn and his journey to figure out who his absent father really was. You never find out who Louis Kahn was, but the insight into the character of his filmmaker son Nathaniel is profound.

Zorn did see the final product and approved, although enigmatically. I believe he said something like, “Nothing is changed.”

I’ll admit outright that I loved Kill Bill Vol. 2, even more than I loved Kill Bill Vol. 1. I would love to see a Tarantino lecture on the film—or even better, I thought that a semeter-long film course could be designed around Kill Bill, looking at the works of each great director to which Tarantino pays homage.

Uma Thurman’s defense of the film’s alleged violence was a little less intellectually profound than I might have hoped, though:

She said, “People have to have creative freedom. I love violent, sexy movies.”