Art

My wife went and got her degree in Fine Art at OCADU a couple of years ago, and I got a second-hand Art education along the way. The thing that struck me most about it was the schism between the 'pure' art vs 'commercial' art disciplines in the school; neither area has much time for the other one, though the school ostensibly embraces both.

As my second-hand education progressed, I learned that the fine artists work in service of a concept, an idea that informs their work and is expressed with the Artist's Statement as much or more than by the work itself. A weak concept can sink a whole show and although the strongest concepts don't require much help from the Artist's Statement, if the idea is too obvious it can also fail.

On the commercial side, the concept still informs the content, but with an eye to selling something, which inherently robs it of its sincerity. Working (as I do) with advertising, I am routinely exposed to this conflict, where the clients pull in the direction of selling while the creatives pull in the direction of art. Finding the sweet spot on that continuum can be a victory for the advertiser's bottom line, so it's important to get it just right, so that the target feels entertained rather than manipulated.
 
My exposure to my wife's immersion in the purity of art-for-art's-sake made me think about how all this applies to music. Some musical 'artists' wear the title well; as we listen, we believe they created this piece to express a concept, and the fact that we liked it well enough to buy it in droves and make them millionaires was a secondary side-effect. Other music doesn't fare so well on the sincerity scale; however competently the song is constructed and performed, it still feels like the 'artist's sole intent was to have a hit record and make lots of money. Many, many songs come to mind here, Elvis copycats in the 50's, Beatles copycats in the 60's, arena rock in the 70's, 80's cock-rock, etc. etc., all the way up to misogynistic modern dance tracks. Many of them were even appealing enough to earn their creators a place in music history, but it is a place that is much more rarely revisited.

Artists are artists; they cannot help creating, and often branch out into visual media as well as music. And when we listen to their work, we don't picture them slaving over their instrument to create the next Top Ten hit, we picture them feeling pangs of joy or sorrow and putting those into inexplicably resonant words and music. Like this:

It's got a good beat and you can dance to it...

Of course, people have been dancing to music for centuries, but at some point in the middle of the last century it became acceptable, nay, de rigueur for dance music to include a strong beat for even non-professional dancers to hang onto during the dance. This strong beat got stronger and stronger over the years until it wasn't enough for a drummer to pound it out; it required electronic means to make it as big as possible.

Dancing is a mating ritual for humans, and as such it remains an unassailable power in the world of music, but the power of the pounding dance beat made it possible for even bad dancers to grasp the idea of dancing in rhythm, making it an attractive assist for many rhythm-challenged young people.

Over the years, dance music has divided into sub-genres that aficionados (or even casual club-goers) can identify instantly by their certain characteristics, but whether the music is Disco, Techno, House, Dub, Drum 'n' Bass, Electronica, Trance, Industrial, Breakbeat, Jungle, Hip-Hop, Trip-Hop, Indietronica, Acid House, Detroit House, Electro House, UK Garage, or any one of the other dozens of sub-genres, the common element remains: the beat goes on and on.

In addition to its consistently pounding rhythm, all these styles of Dance Music have something else in common: they've hived off into a separate universe of music from the rest of the world. Oh, there are big-name crossovers that appear on the Top 40, but there are always club hits that have never been heard of by anyone who doesn't visit clubs. Those in the know have that pounding four-on-the-floor as the soundtrack to their nights and weekends - the mating call of the young single.

It doesn't have to be complicated, it doesn't have to have a lot of chords (two will do) but it does need that beat pounding through, and it doesn't hurt if you can intersperse your verses (sung, rapped, whatever) with a melodic hook sung by a pretty girl voice...sounds easy, doesn't it? It's not really...

Entertainment

...which is, after all, the purpose of a good deal of popular music. Yes, there are protest songs, songs of anguish written to exorcise the writer's demons, songs meant to inspire and songs of worship, but at their core, the idea, spoken or unspoken, is that the songs should be entertaining enough to cause the listeners to pay enough attention that they'll get the message.

This is the same principle that advertising uses: a TV or radio spot contains a quick blast of entertainment as a kind of bribe to get the viewer or listener to pay attention to the message the advertiser wants to communicate. The Catholic Church figured this out centuries ago, and took over the general production of music to help sell their message to the masses. When the phonograph was invented and became commonly available, the music was freed to become an advertisement for itself alone, and record sales were the expression of their message.

At some point, it became apparent that video could be used to improve the entertainment value of the music and, presumably, sell even more records. Most music videos were about the same length as the songs they were created to sell, primarily because of the expense of filming, but a couple of artists had enough budget to add a longer set-up and perhaps a coda to the storyline. Twisted Sister had a great little intro on "We're Not Gonna Take It," and Michael Jackson created arguably the best music video of the Music Video Era with the charming little story that framed "Thriller."

I remember one video, though, which was audaciously long, a short film that 'happened' to have a song in it. I haven't heard anyone mention it in years, but at the time it was considered to be groundbreaking and was expected to trigger a new wave in narrative videos. Of course we know now that didn't happen, but I found it (inevitably) posted on YouTube, and it stands up remarkably well for its age. Here's Julien Temple's "Jazzin' for Blue Jean" starring (twice) David Bowie:

Oh I Can't Sit Down

Today's post isn't any kind of analysis of any kind of musical genre, it's a little journey I went through concerning a particular song.

When I was growing up, we had the soundtrack album from the movie of "Porgy & Bess," a work which suffered through more than its fair share of troubles on its way to release, and more afterwards. (For the whole long, sad story, check out the Wikipedia entry) As a small child, I noticed something I thought was strange in the lyrics to one of the songs, "Oh I Can't Sit Down," which is an otherwise innocuous song about a celebration called Picnic Day. The male singer sang, "Guess I'll take my honey and his sunny smile along" at one point in the song, and also, "Hey there, Andy, be my sugar candy!" Another lyric in the song a little later on is, "Today I am gay and I'm free...," so when I got a little older, I guessed I had figured out the song's secret.

Fast-forward to a few days ago, when, for whatever reason, this song appears in my memory again; who knows why, perhaps I heard someone say, "I can't sit down" and that triggered it. I start thinking about the theory I've held for decades that this is a gay anthem, and then I realize that's impossible; when the opera was written, being gay was so illegal that no one in their right mind would even obliquely refer to it in public. Curious now, I google the lyrics, and find that the lyric is actually "Guess I'll take my honey and her sunny smile along," and the line about Andy doesn't appear at all. The plot thickens. Now I'm trying to figure out if the music director of the movie has hidden an Easter Egg for gay friends in the movie by switching the lyrics in that one song. Seems unlikely; Andre Previn was married 5 times and had several children.WTF??!

Eventually, I run across a YouTube video of some songs from the movie, including "Oh I Can't Sit Down," and I get my answer. In the movie, instead of being sung by a man, the song is sung by Pearl Bailey, a deep-voiced woman who for decades I have assumed is a man from the sound of her voice.

The music from the original opera is amazing, but often runs long and involves a lot of crashing and banging onstage in the recordings I've heard. Previn's edits to Gershwin's arrangements brilliantly highlight the lovely songs and dispense with the filler. If you want to skip straight to "Oh I Can't Sit Down" to see what I was talking about, skip ahead to 18:04, but all of this music is pretty great:

Genre Genesis

My interest in the notion of 'polymusical' tastes began because the songs I was writing myself seemed not to fall into the same categories as each other, but recently I've been thinking about where all the categories came from in the first place. My theory is that over a period of time, the contributions of numerous lesser lights finally culminated in the creations of one artist or group who synthesized their styles into one clearly defined style that formed the jumping-off point for thousands to follow.

So, for example, in simplistic terms, every modern musical is the result of composers and librettists struggling to live up to the legacy of Gilbert & Sullivan, who perfected the comic opera form that had been around for centuries. In the same way, every metal band is a child or grandchild of Led Zeppelin, who, as the first distorted-electric blues band, drew on generations of blues players, but created a new genre by changing the instrumentation and exaggerating the vocal style.

R&B is more difficult, because not only are the roots lost in poor historical documentation, but there are so many sub-styles, each with their own parent. Nevertheless, when the recording industry came into existence, the records of Lead Belly, Henry Thomas and "Blind" Lemon Jefferson had the effect of popularizing the music of the black American south, laying the foundations that would lead to the Motown sound. It's easy to miss the fact that, although Motown put out songs by many artists, the sound was the result primarily of one group of session musicians (The Funk Brothers) who played on dozens of hits, many of which were written by one group of songwriters (Holland-Dozier-Holland) thus codifying the style. I would argue that these two groups of creators are largely responsible for how R&B music sounds today, although much latitude needs to be extended as it's a huge category.

One of the most interesting genres for this historical dissection is Country Music, which, in contrast with the Blues Music of poor black American southerners, was the folk music of poor white American southerners. Originally known as 'hillbilly music,' it married instrumentation from Ireland (fiddle), Germany (dulcimer), Italy (mandolin), Spain (guitar) and West Africa (banjo), and later added the steel guitar from Hawaii. Generations of Appalachian settlers from these origins combined their talents and developed hillbilly music, and it all came together when one man laid it down on wax and became the voice of the genre: Jimmie Rodgers, The Father of Country Music.

Watch as this woman smiles and nods while Jimmie casually dashes off a couple of verses about shooting up his ex and her new boyfriend.

Phoenix Careers

The trajectory of a musical artist's career tends to follow one of a couple of patterns: if the artist has gifts of a limited nature, they might enjoy success with a memorable song as a young person or band, then falter after a few lesser attempts at the brass ring; if the artist is unusually gifted, they might continue their ascendency through a series of hits. But once in a while, an artist or band can power through after the first decline and reinvent themselves for a second chance.

Of course, there are numerous variations on this theme, for example, the artist whose initial career is unknown outside a small geographic circle but hits it big with the reinvention. Think Alanis Morissette, whose dance-pop first release went platinum in Canada, or Katy Perry, who put out a gospel album as Katy Hudson before connecting with Morissette's old co-writer, Glen Ballard, and becoming an international pop-star.

David Bowie made a career of reinventing himself for every album, but it felt more like restlessness, and applied more to his visual image and less to the music, which still sounded like Bowie each time.

And some bands were forced to reinvent themselves when they lost a key band member: AC/DC, Chicago, Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and The Doobie Brothers all changed their sound to greater or lesser degrees when a founding member quit, was sidelined or died. For Floyd it was the launch of the most successful part of their careers, for AC/DC it just changed the sound of the vocals, and for the rest it led to a slicker, more radio-friendly sound that won new fans as it alienated old ones.

The reinventions that interest me, though, are the carefully mapped-out intentional ones: for example, the Beastie Boys were once a hard-core punk band, but after cobbling together a hip-hop song out of a prank phone call, they threw themselves into rock-flavoured rap and made hits. Or, after a series of bubblegum pop hits as The Turtles, the principal members of that band adopted the moniker Flo & Eddie and continued their careers as respected members of Zappa's Mothers of Invention (conspicuously remote from bubblegum pop) as well as providing session vocals on many other radio hits.

And then there are the artists who just stopped for a few years or decades, disappeared to relax, maybe write some more, maybe live a peaceful life out of the public eye, then dropped back into the scene, as strong as they ever were, no reinvention necessary. Here's an example of that:

Time (Signature) after Time (Signature)

I was thinking about how many (or perhaps how few) popular songs there are that change time signatures in the middle. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about prog-rock and jazz, they do that all the time, almost as a point of pride;  Zappa almost never wrote anything in one time signature, Dave Brubeck made a career of exploring odd signatures, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a track by Yes, King Crimson or Genesis that kept to one sig all the way through. Led Zeppelin experimented with odd time-signatures, but I'm pretty sure all their biggest hits were in straight time. I'm talking about songs that were hits on the radio, songs about which no one particularly commented on the odd time-signature changes. (Genesis did, however, have a Top-40 hit with "Your Own Special Way" which switched signature and tempo from verse to chorus)

Anyway,  I thought of a few examples, and as preparation for writing a blog post about it, I decided to Google and see if other people had made lists of examples. It quickly became pretty clear that although there are occasional examples peppered around the charts over the years, this trick was used most extensively by The Beatles and basically as a one-off for anyone else. It made me wonder if I'd stumbled upon one of the secrets of their success, out there in plain sight with no one paying enough attention to pick up on it. Check the (incomplete, I know, but you have to start somewhere) list of changing time-signatures in popular music:

Dionne Warwick - I Say A Little Prayer
Mason Williams - Classical Gas
Lee Hazelwood & Nancy Sinatra - Some Velvet Morning
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
Bee Gees - Jive Talkin'
Blondie - Heart Of Glass
Pink Floyd - Money
Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill
Kelly Clarkson - Low
The Beatles - We Can Work It Out
                    - She Said She Said
                    - Dr. Robert
                    - Good Day Sunshine
                    - Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
                    - Good Morning
                    - Strawberry Fields
                    - Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite
                    - Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
                    - All You Need Is Love
                    - Yer Blues
                    - Happiness Is A Warm Gun
                    - Here Comes The Sun
                    - I Me Mine
                    - Two Of Us
                    - Revolution
                    - Across The Universe
                    - I Want You (She's So Heavy)
                    - Don't Let Me Down
                    - Across The Universe
                    - Mean Mr. Mustard
                    - Martha My Dear
                    - Blackbird
                    - You Never Give Me Your Money
                    - Magical Mystery Tour
                    - The End

I'm sure you can think of others, both Beatles songs and songs by other artists, but I think my point is made. Most of the Beatles songs on the list are Lennon songs - one gets the feeling that he just thought up words that expressed what he wanted to say and adjusted the time to accommodate them. Maybe that's the secret: instead of slavishly contorting the lyrics to fit a predetermined melody, we should loosen up and allow the words to dictate how the music goes.

I'll leave you with another McCartney song that fits the criterion:

Polymusical Party

You know those friends you have who you hope never meet? The fun, foul-mouthed friends from university who would embarrass you horribly if you bumped into them while you were with your elegant socialite friend? The gorgeous but dim ex you couldn't introduce to your scientist friend? You know what I'm talking about. 

But don't we all go through our lives, meeting people from all walks, learning what we can from them all, tourists visiting other people's lives for a little while before returning to our own? We're sightseers, nourishing our curiosity with each contact, and though our destinations might be inclined to war with each other, they're still all interesting places to vacation.

That's how songs are.

In the same way that you'd call up a certain someone you haven't seen for a while, you might put on some music you haven't listened to for a while, and either would make you feel just the way that person or that song always made you feel. Everyone has a music collection, and I would bet that most people's collections have a variety of styles for different moods and different activities.

But do you often find multiple styles on one CD?

When a song forms in my head, it makes itself known in a certain way, and I feel I'm just translating it into existence. I don't have control over whether it wants to be a rock song, a country song, a pop song or a folk song. Of course I don't want them all to be the same, but sometimes it feels like these songs go out of their way to distinguish themselves from one another, like desperately non-conformist friends vying to stand out. So I've given in to the demands each song makes, and put them all down exactly as they've asked. Oh, yes, they argue with each other about the silliest things, and I've caught them rolling their eyes at something one of the others said, but generally, they get along pretty well for such an eclectic group. And I've decided on a name for them all, following up on my Life as Tourism theme. The full collection (still a work in progress) will be called "Sightseeing At Rush Hour."

So welcome, Sonny's Sightseers!

Listen to "Sightseeing At Rush Hour" so far here

Rococo vocals

Rococo was an 18th-century artistic aesthetic that took the rigid but ornate baroque style further into a freer, yet even more ornate direction. When I use the word to describe vocals, I'm referring to the modern practice of adding trills and runs to every long note in the song, something which has gotten out of hand in recent years.

Where did it all start? I think Ray Charles might have planted the seed, adding the occasional scalic warble to the ends of long notes to establish his signature style. Not many singers could even do that, so not many copied him until Stevie Wonder came along. He could sing anything, and I believe it was his influence that has resulted, second and third hand, in the epi-diva-ic of today. But Stevie always sang with taste, exploding into a little vocal arpeggio for only a moment before returning to the melody, just enough to make you stagger backward in amazement.

The habit of ornamentation as a standard part of every vocal performance crept in as Whitney Houston put out hit after hit full of runs, and that led to the Christina Aguilera school of adding arpeggiated frills at every possible opportunity. Nevertheless, both those ladies were capable of singing a recognizable melody in between the sixty-fourth notes.

Now I hear singers who bury the melody so far under a barrage of embellishment that it would take a trained musicologist months to discover it. My ears get dizzy listening to them, and if they ever had any emotional connection with the lyric, it's been lost in the quest for ever more showy technical proficiency.

It's worth remarking that not every new singer has fallen into this trap, and though perhaps capable of any run, the likes of Adele and Bruno Mars can still break your heart with a long uninterrupted note. Will it come full circle? Will the habit of ornamentation for its own sake be put in the rear-view mirror of musical history like the rococo period of visual art before it? Let's take a little trip down memory lane and hear how it's supposed to be done:

Rap or Microtonal Melody?

When I first started hearing about 'rap' music, I was puzzled - why would the element of melody be removed from music, and why would anyone want to listen to that?

I didn't really hear much of it (partly by choice) until I spent a day doing grunt location cleanup work at a movie location with a young (white) kid who told me at the beginning of the day that he liked to listen to hard-core rap while he worked and (with a challenging expression on his face) he hoped that wasn't going to be a problem. I heard a good deal of it that day, and although I understood the rebellious energy and the power of the rhythm, I had a great deal of trouble understanding most of the lyrics. I could get little snatches here and there, but it went by so fast and contained so much street slang I was lost most of the time.

For a long time I avoided rap, because every time I ran into it the song just seemed to be a celebration of bling, violence and macho chauvanism. The first time I heard a rap I actually liked was Tony M.'s contribution to a Prince song called "Live 4 Love," which I listened to over and over. I realized that a good rap could use the accented syllables to pull the rhythm of the song a little off the beaten path, and how pleasant that could be. I started listening for rap tunes that successfully did that.

And then Eminem started hitting the radio. His songs combined the offbeat rhythms with insistent rhymes that cascaded over one another like a prizefighter demolishing a weak opponent, hit after hit, rhyme after rhyme, each one coming earlier than expected. Somehow in all that technical artistry were passionate stories, and all shouted at a pace that I could still grasp as it went by, and no verses full of filler about bitches and n*****s. Oh, and when he had to sing on key, he could sing on key. That made me wonder about the pitch of the rap portion of the songs, and I realized that he was deliberately selecting a note a quarter tone away from the scale of the instrumentation to cue the listener that the part he was 'singing' was the rap. It brought a tension that a straight melody couldn't, and completely justified the enterprise to my ear.

Then he sealed the deal with this:

Let's put on a show!

There is a convention in musical movies, and now, musical TV shows, in which two or more of the performers decide to sing a song together. They jump up on the stage (there is usually a stage) and start singing, and a verse or two in, it becomes glaringly, embarrassingly apparent that this is no spur-of-the-moment performance. Without so much as a nod or a hand gesture, they trade lines back and forth, then break into perfect two or three-part harmony, to the delight of the assembled audience.

It always helps move the plot along, and we accept it as we watch, (in the same way we accept the dial-tone on the other end of the phone when the movie caller hangs up) but I've always found that it takes me out of the story. Does this happen to everyone, or just people who have experience performing music? Do non-musicians assume that real musicians are so talented they can just jam out a complex arrangement based on telepathy? Face it, the most realistic depiction of an impromptu vocal performance in the history of cinema is in "Spinal Tap" when the lads try to sing "Heartbreak Hotel" at Elvis' grave. And don't get me started on the band behind the singers...not only do they play every song in every key, they all know where that surprise modulation in the middle of the song is coming.

It happened in all the old musicals, you expected it when you saw Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby or Danny Kaye. But it persisted through The Sound Of Music, innumerable beach movies and right into the 90s, when musicals became almost exclusively the domain of animated children's fare, and the unacknowledged rehearsal ceased to be an issue. Now we have a slew of musical TV shows thanks to the technological breakthroughs that allow TV producers to bang off a half dozen professionally recorded and choreographed songs per episode, and the magically perfect improvs are back. (I'm going to excuse "Nashville" from this accusation, because outside of some over-perfect songwriting scenes, they've largely kept it pretty real)

So what would a real-life unpremeditated musical collaboration look like? A couple of weeks ago this circulated on social media, and we found the answer. There's no reason this couldn't happen, and it really looks like it probably did.

The Minority

There is a musical world out there that everyone knows about, but few frequent. In clubs with sparse, polite audiences, musicians of the highest calibre perform the most complex music. When one of the musicians steps into the spotlight and improvises for a verse or two, the audience applauds when the solo is over, even if the song is still going on.

Dictionary.com defines jazz as: "music originating in New Orleans around the beginning of the 20th century and subsequently developing through various increasingly complex styles, generally marked by intricate, propulsive rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, improvisatory, virtuousic solos, melodic freedom, and a harmonic idiom ranging from simple diatonicism through chromaticism to atonality." 

As definitions go, that's a start, but there are a couple of problems: not only is it a weak description of most slow jazz styles, it also could apply equally well to some kinds of rock, latin and even certain modern classical music. So what makes jazz different from those? I guess we know it when we hear it; there are some jazz traditions of substitution chords, and chords with remote bass notes, some instrumental cliches on piano, bass and sax, and some peculiarly 'jazzy' vocal styles. The definition gets even harder to nail down when you add in fusion styles, hyphenating jazz- primarily with rock, but also with latin and other world music elements.

I'm going to admit that I don't reach for jazz albums first when I decide to put on some music, and it's a world that, like most people, I haven't spent much time in. There was l little window, however, back in the mid-seventies when Jeff Beck put out back-to-back albums ("Blow By Blow" and "Wired") of instrumental jazz fusion and won over a huge audience of blue-jeaned rock fans, and I was one of them. (I would never have dreamed at the time that within the next few years I would be playing in a band that was opening for him)

Here's Jeff Beck playing a Mingus piece, a lovely example of the reasons jazz fans love it when it's good; the melody is seductive, the changes are emotional, and the playing is very, very superior. 
(I was amused that one commenter on YT claims that after hearing this song he threw his guitar out the window and never played again)

Psycho Lyricists

There are thousands of perfectly beautiful and valid sentiments expressed in song lyrics, and some have even inspired people to do great things.

A lot of the most heartfelt lyrics, however, tell darker stories and express human passions of the less pleasant or admirable sort. The lyrics to "Walk On By" or "Crying" depict a songwriter who is experiencing the temporary insanity of a breakup, and "Paint It Black" takes it further with a more permanent end to the relationship. We don't envy these characters, but we do empathize: I clearly remember welling up while listening to Macy Gray's "I Try" and the first time I listened to "She's Leaving Home" I almost broke down at the top of the stairs myself.

But there are some songs which sound innocuous enough as lyrics, but if they were expressed as prose could be cause for calling a psychiatrist, or even the police. The first group are the victim lyrics: songs where the story is told from the point of view of someone who has lost all self-respect. Some of these songs just sounded like nice tunes until you looked closer: in "Maggie May" Rod Stewart is apparently the helpless (and possibly underaged) boy-toy of an older woman; in "Chain of Fools" Aretha admits to her inability to leave a man who treats her badly, and Bonnie Raitt consciously embraces denial and gives herself anyway even though "I Can't Make You Love Me."

The second group are the ones that I find most insidious, though: cheerful little pop songs which turn out to be the dark thoughts of sociopaths and criminals. The groundwork for the misogyny of modern rap music was laid long ago with "That's What You Get For Loving Me" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright." We all forgave John Lennon for his disaffected apathy in "Norwegian Wood," but if you think about it, the girl in question didn't really seem to deserve having her house burned down, did she?

I believe it's a form of lyric populism, where the lyricist appeals to the thoughts and feelings we may think, but dare not express. It's comforting to be allowed to imagine deflowering a virgin a la "Tonight's The Night" or carrying out a revenge fantasy like Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats."

But I think my favourite for blatant creepiness that apparently went largely unnoticed by the music-buying public is still this one, a controlling stalker singing to a woman who should, by rights, be terrified, disguised as a love song:

Major Minor

While I'm willing to concede that many of my readers are trained musicians and are therefore completely conversant with the difference between major and minor keys, indulge me a little. Isn't it fascinating how we innately understand the difference? How even when we were very small children we could 'feel' how a particular piece of music sounded happy or sad, and how the dichotomy is between happy and sad instead of, say, loving and hating or some other emotional split.

For non-musicians who are unfamiliar with the meaning, the technical difference between a major and a minor chord is a semitone, which is the smallest difference between two notes in western music. It's a small change, a half-step of the scale, but it makes as much difference to the sound of the music as playing it on an organ instead of a harp would.

A composer who wants a piece to be serious and maybe tragic would never consider writing it in a major key, and if he wanted a light piece, say, to celebrate a wedding, he would avoid a minor key in the same way. However, for an ambiguous, wry sound, it's possible to bend the third note of the scale from minor to major as part of the setting, and we hear that used in some blues music; the result is music that sounds like it's making fun of a miserable situation.

A couple of years ago I read about a new technology invented by an engineer at Celemony called Direct Note Access which would allow an audio engineer to go into an existing arrangement of multiple instruments and adjust a single note in a chord. It occurred to me that every album ever recorded might be fodder for manipulation, that well-known recordings could be modified so the singer changed the melody or the guitar solo played different notes. It did NOT occur to me that a whole song could be changed from minor to major or vice versa, but apparently it did occur to someone else. As an illustration of the importance of choosing whether to write in a major or minor key, I can not think of a better example. Here's The Doors' "Riders On The Storm" converted to a major key - remember, this is not a cover version, this is the original recording with the scale altered!



Major Scaled #3 : The Doors - " Riders On The Rainbow" from major scaled on Vimeo.

Bespoke Music

For centuries, music composers have laboured to produce music that moves them, sometimes just for the sheer joy of creation, but more often to earn a living from some wealthy benefactor who gives them what they need to live on in exchange for the compositions. For a long time it was The Church for western composers, and that gave way to affluent bluebloods and merchants trying to buy royal court respectability.

In modern popular music, the impetus for songwriting has, to a certain extent, reverted back to the idea that the composer should be composing for themselves, and if they do a great job their works will be so popular they'll earn huge benefits from them. Once they do, however, the modern bluebloods and merchants come out of the woodwork looking to commission their own customized popular songs. All the time I was growing up, songwriting for hire was considered 'selling out' and was frowned upon enormously. Pop songs written for products were few and far between; the only example that springs easily to mind is "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing." This song was inspired when an ad agency guy was stuck in an airport with some songwriters and it began life as a song that failed to achieve significant radio play, but became a hit when it was released following its use in the Coca Cola TV ad "Hilltop."

I've spent quite some time now working in the ad business and periodically get the brief that the soundtrack for a commercial should 'sound like a hit song on the radio.' I'd like to mention that achieving this is not as easy as it sounds, although we have a good record for it so far. Also, the stigma associated with having one's song used in a commercial has done a 180, and now it's considered a mark of success to be invited to sell out in this fashion. Is this another symptom of The Corporatization Of Everything? I invite opinions...

The exception to the 'sellout' rule, of course, was movie soundtracks; but it takes a certain kind of mindset to switch over from writing for yourself to writing a custom song, often with title already a requirement. Probably the best example of this over the years has been the James Bond movie franchise; the popular songwriters of the day were commissioned to write the title track for the current movie, and elements from John Barry's original arrangement of the Monty Norman motif were sometimes incorporated into the new song's arrangement. There have been some successes, "Goldfinger" was a Top Ten hit, and after Paul McCartney opened up the tradition to encompass composers other than film score specialists there were a handful of Bond hits for Macca, Carly Simon, Sheena Easton, Duran Duran and Adele, among others. But the one that stands out for me in its loopy 60s glory is John Barry's masterpiece, "You Only Live Twice," which,  period warts and all, suits the Bond style more perfectly than any of them:

Is it the song or the singer?

Some songs are so good it doesn't matter if the singer phones in their performance. (No, I'm not talking about Flash & The Pan) When a crowd of drunks belts out "Hey Jude" it can be almost as effective as the original recording due to the strength and originality of the lyrics and the melody. A so-so singer can rock out a karaoke performance of "Satisfaction" if all they do is sing loud and stay on beat because the accompaniment is so ballsy.

And then the reverse is true too: some singers are so adept that they can bring a transcendence to truly average material. There are some great songs on "21" but there's some filler too; if anyone but Adele was singing it, "Lovesong" would be completely forgettable. And what kind of impact would "What'd I Say" have on popular music if it had been a lesser singer than Ray Charles improvising it on stage? There is certainly a long list of novelty songs that stick in our heads in spite of their conspicuously banal quality, songs like "Hey Mickey" and "The Monster Mash,"  and they often owe any semblance of success to the capability of the lead vocalist, which might not be great singing, but is always great performance. 

And then there are the songs which are elegantly constructed, carefully edited, beautifully arranged and exquisitely sung. Those are the ones that really get stuck in our heads, and when they do we actually don't mind, don't curse them as 'earworms' and try to drive them out. For me, this is that song for this week, and this is the performance I first heard of it; it's so refreshing to hear a singer who obviously doesn't depend on studio tricks to sound good. As someone said on a comment thread, he won The Voice that night despite not being a contestant...

It's the emotion, stupid

I was going to write today's entry about Frank Sinatra. About how my father had Sinatra records and when I was quite young I heard them over and over and didn't really like them - they sounded old-fashioned; a grown-up man in a suit singing with a conspicuously American accent. I meant to write about how my admiration for Sinatra grew as I got older, how I realized what a fantastic instrument he had, and how four years of trumpet study in high school led me to appreciate the bold intricacies of Nelson Riddle's arrangements. I wanted to illustrate this column with a definitive example of what an amazing singer Frank was, so I started listening over to all his hits, one by one on YouTube.

That's when I ran into a bit of trouble.

While it is true that I have come to admire Sinatra's phenomenal voice, his distinctive style and his brilliant showmanship, I realized that I've never put on his music to listen to just for my own enjoyment, and listening to all those hits made me realize why: even with that unbelievable voice, Frank Sinatra was awkward about getting too emotional in his songs.

Ah, I hear a chorus of angry denials. But I also hear those jazz licks, the finger snaps, the signature 'scoop' down to the note that became the signature of so many bad lounge singers, as parodied by Bill Murray on SNL. As a child, I instinctively recognized those vocal licks as 'tricks' to avoid getting too close to the emotion of the material, ways to keep the music intellectual instead of heartfelt.

I'm going to put it down to the fashion of the day. Vocal music was changing from traditions of religious music, opera and music hall comedy songs, and Frank was at the forefront of what would be considered at that time a more emotional style of singing - for a white guy. The overtly emotional vocal was the domain of Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole, of Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne. Frank was unknowingly breaking ground for white rock singers, even though he himself loathed rock and roll.

But in the end, happily, I was able to find a great example of Sinatra singing a gorgeous song with a lovely arrangement and actually allowing himself to get wrapped up in it. Must have let his guard down that day...

Surprise!

It feels like it used to happen much more often: I would be listening, to the radio, to the TV, and Surprise!..something would catch my ear and hold on, would stick in my head and become my New Favourite Song for at least a week. Maybe it was because it was back in the days of polymusical radio, before corporations took over the creation of content for commercial radio.

I know that musicians have continued to slave away, learning their craft while playing to half-houses with no cover until they have mastered whatever style they aspire to and appear, apparently suddenly fully-formed to the greater public. Once in a while their talent is so great that they manage to break onto the world stage without having to conform to some corporate ideal of what music ought to be, but more often they have to soldier through a commercial phase, either to disappear again when corporate support is withdrawn, or to arrive at a place where fans love them so much they can do whatever they want.

All I'm saying is that as the road got harder, the Surprise!s became fewer and further between. I'm also aware that this has to do with me aging, that I'm more attached to artistic lightweights from my adolescence than I am to serious talents who appeared when I was in my 30s, but I do still have those Surprise! moments, even now. They just don't happen very often.

So what a treat it was to click on a link a friend recommended and find this, a genuine old-fashioned band of skilled players with great songs and great vocals. This song was my first exposure, but I bought the album and found so many other songs that have become my New Favourite Song for a week or three each. Enjoy!

Desert Island albums

There are all kinds of theoretical puzzles; the ones where you have two tribes, one that always tells the truth and one that always lies, the ones where you have a goat, a chicken, a wolf and a boat that only holds two, and my favourite, the one where you're stuck on a desert island that somehow has electricity and a functioning CD player.

There are a few variations of this one, sometimes you're allowed 10 CDs, sometimes just one. Questions arise: is it cheating to pick the Beatles White Album? OK, it's a double album, so technically it's 2 CDs, but it kind of solves the problem of variety by having a truly Polymusical programme. Well, if that's legit, what about boxed sets?

I've long had my own answer for this challenge, and it doesn't involve cheating; it's a single CD, 10 songs (no, I don't need the special enhanced editions with extra tracks, thank you) and in the over 40 years since its release I have not yet tired of a single one. For me, the Desert Island album is Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection.

In interviews, he laughingly complained that Bernie Taupin kept writing all these lyrics that belonged in country and western songs and he'd had to upbraid him for it, but for this one moment it appears he caved, and everyone in the band came along for the ride. They never sounded like that before or since. So listen to this, and remind yourself over and over that it's a bunch of white Englishmen:

Inches Per Second

Inches Per Second. Sounds a little dirty, doesn't it?

But it wasn't that long ago that this was a common measurement, specifically of how fast the tape was zipping past the head in a tape-recorder. The standard was 7 1/2 ips, but for professional quality that would be doubled to 15 ips. If you were just recording voices in a meeting you might save tape by dropping down to 3 3/4 ips or even 1 7/8 ips if you didn't really care whether it was clear.

Musically, though, it was Les Paul who figured out that you could slow the tape down to half-speed, record a track at the slower speed, then speed it up again to get a speedy musical effect that would be virtually unplayable at the speed you were hearing it. He used the effect on many recordings, and I remember reading an interview with Chet Atkins (with whom he used the technique) in which he described meeting some young guitar student who had been diligently practicing one of these speeded-up lead lines, and Chet was shocked that the kid had mastered it at the double-speed pace.

It's been used since then as well; the example that everyone knows is the 'harpsichord' solo in the middle of John Lennon's "In My Life," which is actually a double-speed piano solo. I always assumed everyone knew this, but apparently it's not obvious unless you (as I did when I was a kid) have played around with changing speeds on your tape recorder.

The effect on the human voice is known as the 'chipmunk' effect, after its extensive use by Ross Bagdasarian's Alvin and the Chipmunks. If you search YouTube you can find The Chipmunk Song slowed down to where the chipmunk voices sound normal. Well, normal-ish. In order for the chipmunks to be comprehensible when speeded up, the singers have to overpronounce all the lyrics, and they sound a little otherworldly. (although not as otherworldly as Dave, who in the slowed-down version is identified as Satan)

The best example I can find of altering speeds, however, is something that was pointed out to me by a colleague, who played me a version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" slowed down. It's nothing Dolly ever did on purpose, but it highlights the mastery of her voice and her musicians when you realize that this is like 'listening under the microscope,' where any imperfection would be magnified. Check it out: