Chindon’ya (チンドン屋) are companies of street musicians engaged primarily in advertising for shops, stores, cabarets, and game parlors. Their development is closely linked to the economic and cultural development of Japan since the end of the nineteenth century.
Although once a common sight in urban Japan, the number of chindon’ya has greatly decreased since the late 1960s. Recently, however, some signs of a new interest in this nearly obsolete profession have appeared.
Their profile has changed somewhat; job offers from rural communities are increasing, and engagements as main attractions in large hotels and at festivals have begun to be booked. The music has even influenced some pop music groups, who are taking up the chindon’ya repertory.
This according to “Chindon’ya today: Japanese street performers in commercial advertising” by Ingrid Fritsch (Asian ethnology LX/1 [2001] 49–78; RILM Abstracts 2001-24360).
We happened to be playing one of my last dances, somewhere in the Midwest, and I had another 12 minutes to kill before the set closed. A typical gig of that kind lasted four hours, including a 30-minute intermission. It was nearly 1 a.m., I remember, and we had played our whole book. There was nothing left that I could think of, so I finally said to the band and The Raeletts, “Listen, I’m going to fool around, so y’all just follow me.”
So I began noodling—just a little riff that floated into my head. It felt good and I kept going. One thing led to another and I found myself singing and wanting the girls to repeat after me. So I told ‘em “Now.”
Then I could feel the whole room bouncing and shaking and carrying on something fierce. So I kept the thing going, tightening it up a little here, adding a dash of Latin rhythm there. When I got through, folks came up and asked where they could buy the record. “Áin’t no record,” I said, “just something I made up to kill a little time.”
The next night I started fooling with it again, adding a few more lyrics and refining the riffs for the band. I did that for several straight evenings until the song froze into place. And each time I sang it, the reaction was wild.
Quoted in Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ own story by David Ritz (New York: Dial, 1978; RILM Abstracts 1978-5376).
Today would have been Ray Charles’s 90th birthday! Above, the album cover (note the keyboard and hands reflected in his glasses); below, the recording itself.
BONUS: The scene as it was recreated in the 2004 film Ray.
The Stax/Volt Revue was a central event in the history of the Stax record label and a key moment in the transatlantic appreciation of soul music. It was the first time that many of its participants visited the U.K., and it offered British soul fans their first opportunity to see the musicians who played on the label’s recent hits.
The Revue played to sold-out audiences in many of Britain’s major cities during March and April 1967. It cemented the appeal of Stax artists like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave in the U.K., confirming them as transatlantic soul icons.
At the time, the Revue was ignored by the national and local press, with coverage limited to the British music magazines. This sorely underestimates its significance, for it proved to be a transformative experience both for the musicians and many audience members; indeed, the response of young British soul fans to the Revue indicates that it was among the most important musical events of the decade.
This according to “The Stax/Volt Revue and soul music fandom in 1960s Britain” by Joe Street, an essay included in Subcultures, popular music and social change (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014 195–217; RILM Abstracts 2014-89164).
Luigi Cherubini’s Médée was the first new major operatic work based on classical subject matter to appear on a Paris stage after years of lip service to—but little artistic concern with—the heritage of Gluck. The work’s 1797 premier met a lukewarm reception because it attempted to reinterpret the classical tradition in revolutionary terms at a time when the conservative backlash of the Directoire had already begun.
Dramatically, the character of Médée symbolizes the fury of the Jacobin, while musically the colorful mass effects and harmonic boldness of revolutionary opera are matched with stylistic conventions of prerevolutionary composers. The result is an intermixture of musical realism and expressionism that anticipated not only the last works of Verdi and his veristic successors but also the psychological dramas of Strauss and Berg.
This according to “Cherubini’s Médée and the spirit of French Revolutionary opera” by Alexander L. Ringer, an essay included in Essays in musicology in honor of Dragan Plamenac on his 70th birthday (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969 281–99; RILM Abstracts 1969-1154).
Today is Cherubini’s 260th birthday! Above, the composer as a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, ca. 1820; below, Maria Callas sings an aria from Médée in a widely used Italian translation.
There’s a friend of mine who does, well, everything. He does bodywork, he’s written books on rolfing, how to play the banjo, and how to play the upright bass. His name is Ritchie Mintz.
I went to him a couple years ago and said, “You know, I’ve got too many guitars, and I need to come up with some money. Are you interested in maybe getting one of my Taylors?” I brought it over, he looked at it, turned it over and said, “Man, this is a working girl’s guitar! Look at all the scars on it. This has been on some airplanes and trucks and cars, hasn’t it?” “Yep, it’s been around!” I said.
And so that night he bought the guitar. He called me up the next day and said, “Rosie, you’re not going to believe this, but your guitar wrote a song for you.” I said, “For me? My guitar wrote a song for me?” And he went, “Yep!” So I came over and listened to it, and was just blown away. I said, “That is such a cool song, Ritchie!” So I just turned up the distortion and the overdrive pedal and went to town on that riff and just had a great time with that.
Sonny Rollins’s extensive use of improvised thematic development in his 1956 recording of Blue 7marked a new level of musical evolution for jazz.
Jazz improvisatory procedures may be divided into two broad and sometimes overlapping categories: paraphrase and chorus improvisation. The former consists mostly of an embellishment or ornamentation technique, while the latter suggests that the soloist has departed completely from a given theme or melody and is improvising freely on nothing but a chord structure.
Most improvisation in the modern jazz era belongs to the second category, and Rollins’s recording is a landmark for maintaining thematic and structural unity in this type of playing.
This according to “Sonny Rollins and the challenge of thematic improvisation” by Gunther Schuller; this foundational work of jazz analysis from 1958 is reprinted in Keeping time: Readings in jazz history (New York: Oxford University Press 2015 193–202; RILM Abstracts 2015-155).
Today is Rollins’s 90th birthday! Above, the artist around the time of the recording; below, the recording itself.
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Schubert’s early female characterizations stem from the tradition of the poets whose works he set.
Matthisson’s Die Betende and An Laura evoke Petrarch’s Laura, an idealized, unattainable woman who combines chaste purity with erotic beauty, like some of Raphael’s religious figures; Schubert’s settings mix hymnlike elements with irregular phrasing and expressive chromatic features, intertwining spiritual and sensuous emotions.
Another archetype–the lament of a suffering woman whose only salvation lies in transforming sorrow into beautiful song–underlies Schiller’s Des Mädchens Klage, which Schubert dramatizes with an agitated D-minor section that pivots through the relative major into a final epiphany in C major.
While Goethe’s Gretchen is a more profound character than either of these two archetypes, she is related to both in some ways. In Gretchen am Spinnrade she alternates between sorrowful lament and ecstatic reverie, and Schubert’s setting again juxtaposes D minor and C major, but this time the minor key expresses stability and the major key intrudes as a disruptive force. The song’s climaxes convey erotic power in both text and music, underscoring the link between love and death.
This according to “Feminine voices in Schubert’s early laments” by David P. Schroeder (The music review LV/3 [August 1994] 183–201; RILM Abstracts 1996-16685).
In an interview, Edward Jay described his invention:
“My concertina is almost entirely fabricated on a 3D printer, meaning that it’s made of mostly plastic. In the prototype, only the reeds and bellows are made in the traditional way, though I am quite close to fabricating these on a 3D printer too.”
“3D printing has been around for a while actually, but only recently has it become more accessible and affordable. For example, the printers I am using now cost £800 each. But 3D printers aren’t exactly quick; to give you some idea of speed, each part on my instrument can take between 1 and 12 hours each to print. So having a farm of printers beavering away can speed things up significantly.”
“That said, it takes just 2 days for 3 printers to print all the parts for a single instrument, which I think still is a significant edge on the time required to fabricate all the parts using traditional methods. Actually, I understand it takes something close to 3 months to make a new traditional concertina—as long as my entire prototype development period.”
“Interestingly, I’ve somehow managed to create a concertina sound, I believe, due to my material choice, because 3D plastic is hollow! If you didn’t know, early concertina insides were made of balsa wood, or similar woods, woods that were chosen rather for their lightness than their integrity, which I believe in part gave traditional concertinas their signature sound.”
“This is not a toy at all. Every part of it is engineered properly; the stresses and strains, the tension forces, and so on, everything has been accounted for. So it won’t break. This concertina is very solid.”
Quoted in “Concertone Instruments: Interview with Edward Jay” by Kait Gray (Concertina world 480 [January 2020] 37–45; RILM Abstracts 2020-3864).
Below, Jay demonstrates his concertina; his website for Concertone Instruments is here.
Charlie Parker’s three improvisatory choruses in Parker’s mood(1948) can be viewed as one statement; the first is introductory, the second climactic, and the third provides a summary by repeating previous material.
Analyzed as a Schenkerian series of layers, the piece progresses in complexity from the background to the foreground. Parker’s palette of resources includes the blues scale, stock blues melodic figures, bebop-style scale runs, arpeggiated figures derived from substitute progressions, idiosyncratic articulation, and a historic tradition of improvisation.
This according to “Parker’s mood revisited” by Kwatei Jones-Quartey (Annual review of jazz studies X [1999] 221–35; RILM Abstracts 1999-13483.
Today is Charlier Parker’s 100th birthday! Below, the recording in question.
The Jazzomat Research Project takes up the challenge of jazz research in the age of digitalization, opening up a new field of analytical exploration by providing computational tools as well as a comprehensive corpus of improvisations with MeloSpyGUI and the Weimar Jazz Database.
The volume Inside the Jazzomat: New perspectives for jazz research (Mainz: Schott, 2017; RILM Abstracts 2017-48411) presents the main concepts and approaches of the ongoing project, and includes several case studies that demonstrate how these approaches can be included in jazz analysis in various ways.
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