Compay

I know I said I'd post something more cheerful, but I lied. At least today's track isn't actively depressing. It's a track called Compay, by San Francisco avant-garde jazz group Tin Hat Trio, now known just as Tin Hat.

This was the first track I ever heard by the group, and it's still one of my favourites. It's from their fourth album, Book of Silk, released on Ropeadope records in 2004. Each of their CDs has a mood all of its own; it's not often you can say a band truly breaks away from genre definitions, and I certainly wouldn't want to bandy such descriptions around freely, but it's justified in this case. Elements are recognisable - maybe a nod to jazz violinists like Stéphane Grappelli, a bow to country styling (Willie Nelson actually featured, singing a track on 2002 album The Rodeo Eroded) or a hark to Philip Glass' repetitive, hypnotic and beautiful rhythms, but these are only really oblique facets. They're a mysterious band, full of dark corners and cobwebs.

Interesting fact - the track is in 7/8 time signature, which is pretty unusual. Well, I thought it was interesting.

Compay

You Never Wash Up After Yourself

Being teenage, disaffected and British it's pretty much a given that I have a soft spot for Radiohead, even if they formed in Oxford. There's been a bit of a backlash against them in recent times among indie circles, but to my ear the music is still groundbreaking and unique in its weird attractiveness. Thom Yorke has one of the most tender and moving voices of anyone in music today, and he uses it to great effect on big, shuddery songs, but also in tracks like today's. Today's track is from one of Radiohead's many, many EPs. Originally a B-side to the single release of My Iron Lung, later to feature on studio album The Bends, it's a very short, very simple track which to my ear is pure poetry, both lyrical and musical. The lyrics are classic Radiohead, combining pathos with grimy undertones, misery and longing. I promise I'll post a more cheerful song tomorrow.

You Never Wash Up After Yourself

I must get out once in a while
Everything is starting to die
The dust settles
The worms dig
Spiders crawl over the bed

I must get out once in a while
I eat all day and now I'm fat
Yesterday's meal is hugging the plates
You never wash up after yourself

You Never Wash Up After Yourself

Added bonus with today's post - Nude from In Rainbows played on old computer parts; mp3

A Time For Love

I think at least part of the reason I like Bill Evans so much is that, like me, he was a skinny white guy in glasses. So many incredible jazz musicians are black that occasionally there's a temptation to imagine that jazz is reserved for black people, that white jazz musicians are somehow disrespectful or pretentious. Bill Evans was one of the first jazz pianists I listened to who wasn't black; and to hear him draw the same cascading music that I'd been at first entranced by out of the piano gave me courage to keep on trying.

Bill Evans was, of course, one of the most important jazz pianists of the 20th century, influencing all sorts of incredibly talented musicians who would go on to great things themselves (Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis). He had a prodigious recording career, making about 50 LPs under his own name and featuring on as many more as a sideman. Today's track is one of my favourites, and one that I keep telling myself I'll transcribe and learn, but have yet to. It's called A Time for Love and it's from his first solo LP, Alone.

A Time For Love

Bedshaped

There are different kinds of wonderfulness, in songs. Some songs are feel good songs, songs that make you play your desk like a drumkit and forget all your worries for a few blissful minutes. Some songs are stirring songs, that inspire righteous ire or bloody revolution. Only a few songs that I know have the ability to give me goosebumps on a regular basis, though, and this is one of them.

Bedshaped is English piano-rock band Keane's third single from their debut album Hopes and Fears. It had an excellent stop-motion animated video, directed by Corin Hardy. This is the first track that's a bit of a guilty pleasure for me - Keane are quite definitely soft-rock, middle class and supremely inoffensive, three things I try to distance myself from; this song really gets me, though. Somehow Tim Rice-Oxley manages to twist his piano into drawing out shuddering, beautiful notes in the bridge that sound, to my ear, almost like whale song.

Keane come under a fair amount of criticism in the British press, mainly focusing on them being 'wet'. They're not my favourite band by any stretch of the imagination; in fact, I only really enjoy two of their songs. But any band that's capable of turning out something like this gets the benefit of the doubt in my mind.

Bedshaped

Many's the time I ran with you down
The rainy roads of our old town
Many the lives we lived in each day
And buried all together
Don't laugh at me
Don't look away

You'll follow me back
With the sun in your eyes
And on your own
Bedshaped and legs of stone
You'll knock on my door
And up we'll go
In white light
I don't think so
But what do I know?
What do I know?
I know

I know you think I'm holding you down
And I've fallen by the wayside now
And I don't understand the same things as you
But I do

Don't laugh at me
Don't look away

You'll follow me back
With the sun in your eyes
And on your own
Bedshaped, and legs of stone
You'll knock on my door
And up we'll go
In white light
I don't think so
But what do I know?
What do I know?
I know

Oh, and up we'll go
In white light
I don't think so
But what do I know?
What do I know?
I know

Bedshaped

Piazza, New York Catcher

Today's track is by Belle & Sebastian, who are from Glasgow. Well known in the indie scene, Belle & Sebastian, named for a BBC children's television series (in turn based off a series of French novels) had their break into the mainstream with their third studio album, The Boy with the Arab Strap.

The track's actually off their sixth studio album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, which to my ear represents everything that's right with Britain. It's called Piazza, New York Catcher, and deals with a baseball player leaving the game, using Mike Piazza's name as a touchpoint. Belle & Sebastian's strength is in writing light, folky songs with deceptively simple chord progressions that actually make up carefully crafted structures and pairing them with evocative and heartfelt lyrics from frontman Stuart Murdoch. I think it comes across better if you just listen to the track.

Piazza, New York Catcher

Elope with me, Miss Private, and we’ll sail around the world
I will be your Ferdinand and you my wayward girl
How many nights of talking in hotel rooms can you take?
How many nights of limping around on pagan holidays?
Oh, elope with me in private and we’ll set something ablaze
A trail for the devil to erase

San Francisco’s calling us, the Giants and Mets will play
Piazza, New York catcher, are you straight or are you gay?
We hung about the stadium, we’ve got no place to stay
We hung about the Tenderloin and tenderly you tell
About the saddest book you ever read, it always makes you cry
The statue’s crying too and well he may

I love you, I’ve a drowning grip on your adoring face
I love you, my responsibility has found a place beside you
And strong warnings in the guise of gentle words
Come wave upon me from the family wider net absurd
“You’ll take care of her, I know it, you will do a better job”
Maybe, but not what she deserves

Elope with me, Miss Private, and we’ll drink ourselves awake
We’ll taste the coffee houses and award certificates
A privy seal to keep the feel of 1960 style
We’ll comment on the decor and we’ll help the passer by
And at dusk when work is over we’ll continue the debate
In a borrowed bedroom virginal and spare

The catcher hits for .318 and catches every day
The pitcher puts religion first and rests on holidays
He goes into cathedrals and lies prostrate on the floor
He knows the drink affects his speed, he’s praying for a doorway
Back into the life he wants and the confession of the bench
Life outside the diamond is a wrench

I wish that you were here with me to pass the dull weekend
I know it wouldn’t come to love, my heroine pretend
A lady stepping from the song we love until this day
You’d settle for an epitaph like “Walk Away, Renee”
The sun upon the roof in winter will draw you out like a flower
Meet you at the statue in an hour
Meet you at the statue in an hour

Piazza, New York Catcher

Faire is the Heaven

The anthem Faire is the Heaven, by William Henry Harris, is one of my favourite pieces of Anglican church music. Harris was comparatively recent, dying in 1973 at the age of 90, but never wrote a large catalogue. The anthem is scored for double choir, in the key of D flat major, and it's beautiful. The text, below, is by Edmund Spenser.

Faire is the Heaven

Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place
In full enjoyment of felicitie;
Whence they do still behold the glorious face
Of the Divine, Eternall Majestie;

Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins
Which all with golden wings are overdight.
And those eternall burning Seraphins
Which from their faces dart out fiery light;

Yet fairer than they both and much more bright
Be the Angels and Archangels
Which attend on God's owne person without rest or end.
These then in faire each other farre excelling
As to the Highest they approach more neare,
Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling

Fairer than all the rest which there appeare
Though all their beauties joynd together were;
How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse
The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?

Edmund Spenser

The file I've got is by Tenebrae, who are an absolutely stunning professional choir. The album's available on iTunes, and I strongly suggest you buy it, as all the tracks are either well-known or wonderful lesser-known works. As an ensemble the choir is incredibly precise and yet still very warm and sympathetic, bringing together the best things about larger and smaller choirs.

Faire is the Heaven