matching tracksuits

Just before K and I moved from Poland in 2005, Zakopower, a new band, was growing popular. They performed at a few festivals and they had a hit single.

Unusual music — a combination of traditional highlander music (the original music sounds and looks something like this) with modern beats and instruments.

The first time I heard them, I liked them, but I wasn’t overwhelmed. The song was “Kiebys Ty”

Kiebys Ty

Original, but it just didn’t grab me.

When K’s dad came from Poland, he brought with him some music that K’d requested. Among the CDs was Zakopower’s Musichal.

Listening to it, I realized that Zakopower had committed an frequent-enough error: they’d released the wrong song! Most of the songs, while pleasant, didn’t grab me the first listen.

One did: “Love’s Regret,” with one Boguslawa Kudasik taking lead vocals.

Zol Milosci mp4

If you’re interested you can get it at CD Universe.

I listened to this song at least half a dozen times yesterday. The opening violin is so mournful that it can make one positively long for Podhale, the mountainous region of southern Poland from which this music comes.

What I love so much about it is how it typifies Goralski singing without being, well, typical. That sense of hanging on with white-knuckled vocal chords (wonderfully mixed, thank you) is at the heart of Goralski music — singing as high and mightily as possible without losing control.

“That’s why all the Goralski songs are so short,” K explains. “No one can sing like that for too long.”

At YouTube

• Video for “Kiebys Ty
• Sopot Concert (Two song set: a cover of Kelis’ “Trick Me,” and “Kiebys Ty”)

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I sometimes play guitar for L. She likes it, but she doesn’t sit quietly and listen, much to my dismay. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate music — she loves music. The problem is she wants to play too:

It’s not that I mind her playing. Rather, it’s somewhat dangerous: her little fingers fit between the strings and a tug can cause her sudden pain as the string digs into her.

Still, it’s an enjoyable way to pass some time.

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I’ve been painting. Lots of it. A house of it. And it’s not done.

But I have determined what music works best with painting — that’s always critical.

Topping the list, without a doubt, was Bach’s Mass in B-minor. Bach just exudes linear symmetry and exactness — just what you need when painting.

Next: Grateful Dead’s classic American Beauty. It’s a great travel album, and maybe that has something to do with it — traveling from one corner of the room to another and back again, from one room to another and back again, from one end of the house and back again … there’s a lot of walking to painting.

For jazz, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme seemed like a good choice, but it was too intellectual (read: tiring) when painting. I found Ellington’s Piano in the Foreground to be about perfect: not too stimulating, but not overly mellow.

Bad choices:

• Mahler’s second — I love it, but I swear, too manic-depressive for work.
• Beck’s Mellow Gold — like Love Supreme it’s too busy. Odelay was better, but not much.
• Springsteen’s Ghost of Tom Joad — holy cow! You can’t be depressed while painting!

In the end, silence was actually fairly acceptable.

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We just got Wynton Marsalis’ latest album, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary (AMG). It features relative newcomer Jennifer Sanon on vocals, and we’re both very pleased with our choice.

I listened to it four times night before last, and probably as many last night. It simply hasn’t left our CD player since we got it Monday.

With this album, in some ways it seems to be more about the lyrics than the music. Matt Collar, for the AMG review, wrote,

Long an outspoken figure in the jazz world and a lightning rod for debate over what constitutes the so called “jazz tradition,” Marsalis is less concerned about the direction of jazz music here and more about the direction of American society.

It is true that, lyrically, this is a very political album, but the thing about Marsalis is that he’s such an accomplished musician that he doesn’t have to be concerned about much of anything for the music to come out sparkling. It might not be a musically revolutionary album, but it is an intensely listenable collection, and I will certainly be returning to it often in the near (and far) future.

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I grew up in an area where bluegrass was not exactly ubiquitous, but at the same time, easily found. My friend’s grandparents were very much into bluegrass and I used to sit in while they were picking. It was a good way to learn basic guitar — there aren’t many chords, and the changes are predictable. Still, bluegrass as music was not something I really appreciated.

Twenty years later, I do. Enough to have a few bluegrass CDs in my collection and to drive festivals and such, anyway.

This weekend: the Bluff Mountain Festival, a fund raising festival for the Madison County Arts Comission.

After the festival, we drove to nearby Max Patch — a grassy mountain with views all around. (It’s also on the Appalachian Trail.)

More images at Flickr.

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A new video, set to R.E.M.’s “We Walk.” Which is from Murmur — perhaps the most appropriately titled album in history, regarding the intelligibility of the lyrics anyway.

The song choice was inspired by the title alone. Michael Stipe has never been known for writing coherent lyrics, let alone good lyrics. This one, from R.E.M.’s debut album, is a prime example.

Sing365 has the lyrics as a repetition of the following:

Up the stairs to the landing, up the stairs into the hall, oh, oh, oh
Take oasis, Marat’s bathing
We walk through the wood, we walk

Marat? As in Jean-Paul Marat (Wikipedia)?

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I’ve put together a new video. For the music, I chose one of the most widely known Polish lullabies: “Bajka iskierka” (”An Ember’s Bedtime Story”). It’s a modern-ish version by Polish pop stars Grzegorz Turnau and Magda Umer.

An Ember’s Bedtime Story

Traditional Melody, Words by Janina Porazińska

From the fire’s ashes
an ember is winking at Wojtuś.
“Come! I’ll tell you a bedtime story,
A long fairy tale.

“There once was a princess
who fell in love with a minstrel
The king gave them a wedding,
And that’s the end of the story.

“Long ago lived Baba Jaga.
She lived in a hut made of butter.
And in this house all was enchantment.”
Psst! The ember’s died.

From the fire’s ashes
an ember is winking at Wojtuś.
“Come! I’ll tell you a bedtime story,
A long fairy tale.”

Hush! Wojtuś won’t believe you anymore,
little ember.
You flicker but for a moment,
then you die.

And that’s the whole fairy tale.

Z popielnika na Wojtusia
iskiereczka mruga:
Chod?, opowiem ci bajeczk?,
bajka b?dzie d?uga.

By?a sobie raz kr�lewna,
pokocha?a grajka,
Kr�l wyprawi? im wesele
i sko?czona bajka.

By?a sobie Baba Jaga
mia?a chatk? z mas?a,
a w tej chatce same dziwy!
Psst� Iskierka zgas?a.

Z popielnika na Wojtusia
iskiereczka mruga:
Chod?, opowiem ci bajeczk?,
bajka b?dzie d?uga.

Ju? ci Wojtu? nie uwierzy,
iskiereczko ma?a.
Chwilk? b?y?niesz,
potem zga?niesz.

Ot i bajka ca?a.

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One of my favorite albums is Dave Brubeck’s 1959 classic Time Out, with probably his most famous piece, “Take Five.” The quintuple time signature (5/4) could give it a somewhat jerky feel, but Dave’s light touch smooths the piece and provides minimalistic base for Paul Desmond’s now-timeless melody.

Playing in 5/4, I would imagine, is all about self-awareness. It’s such an odd time signature and so rarely played that I would think it takes a conscious effort to stay in time.

It’s almost as if Brubeck and Desmond were writing a soundtrack for events forty-seven years in the future, a commentary on some of the difficulties the kids I work with have, and how they deal with it.

“Why don’t you just take five?” A question that comes from my lips almost daily. “Take five” means, in our program, getting up and walking to the front foyer and taking a break from a situation that is in some way upsetting. Staff can tell the kids to take five if the staff member feels things are getting out of control, and the kids can simply say, “I need to take five.”

I imagine that the circumstances leading up to those “take-five” moments feel a bit like the 5/4 time signature played badly: jerky, unpredictable, out of control.

From the outside, it often seems like the smallest thing has set a kid off.

• Sometimes, I have to ask a kid to stop talking so I can finish explaining something, and boom. “Why are you always on my back?!”
• Occasionally, a couple of kids are talking, so I stop talking and just wait for them to finish. And then wait for there to be silence so I can continue. “Man, why you just standin’ there?! I wanna get this class over with.” Usually, the one who says this is one who was talking.
• Every now and then, insisting that a kid correct his work — providing negative feedback, in other words — upsets him to the point of distraction, even if I’m sitting there working with him. Indeed, this can make it worse.

In all these situations, and many others, I find myself thinking, “What’s going on here? Why is this simple request to be quiet or to correct a wrong answer so upsetting?”

Such moments are harsh reminders of the simple fact that I see only a small portion of their lives — almost incalculably small. These behaviors didn’t appear instantaneously, and they were reinforced by events that I’ll never know about and could do nothing about even if I did.

Bottom line, the reaction doesn’t make sense, and the reason why they’re occasionally reacting in such ways is the same reason they’re in our program and not still in school.

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We got some new music today � joined BMG again, with the intention of getting out within the month and doing it again.

Visions of high school, except the selections are a little more mature. Since I organized my music by genre ten years ago, the “rock and pop” collection has remained virtually static.

Among today’s arrivals:

• Bill Evans Conversations with Myself
• Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus, Max Roach Money Jungle
• Thelonius Monk Monk’s Dream
• Chick Corea Now He Sings, Now He Sobs
• Bach Mass in B-minor

It’s too early to pick a favorite, but I’ve listened to the Monk and Evans and find them to be everything jazz should be. Evan’s version of “Blue Monk”� could make anyone smile. It’s anything but blue.

Well, okay — I do have a favorite, previously unmentioned. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. I burned a copy of that many years ago and finally got an original. If you have only one jazz album, it should be this one.

As AMG says, “It doesn’t just sound sophisticated — it really is sophisticated music, which lends itself to cerebral appreciation, yet never stops swinging.”

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One of we regular listeners’ favorite aspects of NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” (other than the bookend effect it gives work day) is the musical interludes between segments.

Enough listeners apparently wrote in, asking for details, that NPR posts this information on their website.

It even spawned a new show: All Songs Considered.

Looking through ASC’s archives, I stumbled upon a link to the music NPR played on September 11, 2001.

As NPR covered the events of September 11th, it was music that gave listeners time to reflect, to digest the images and the impact. So many letters came to NPR telling us how comforted they were by the music. We’ve put together some of those songs here, in part to answer some of those letters wondering what we played (precise record keeping was impossible), and also to create an aural snapshot that in some small way tries to capture the tone of a nation shaken and changed.

It includes Philip Glass, John Williams, Pierre Bensusan, Ben Harper, Michael Hedges, Mark Isham, and Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major (played on a double bass). Many of the selections are from film soundtracks, and that makes sense. The music has been composed with the visual element imagined, or even projected on a large screen. It’s naturally conducive to subtly underlining the visual.

I’m not one usually to get sentimental about such things, but listening to the music, I couldn’t help but recall the footage we were shown over and over and over. At the time, it was tragedy only — no one had started using it for political gain. We didn’t know what lay in store.

The music brings back the overwhelming emptiness we all felt that day and puts some things back into perspective. It’s available at NPR.

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