Category Archives: Performers

by | March 23, 2016 · 6:00 am

Bismillah Khan and Varanasi

Bismillah-khan

The renowned Hindustani śahnāī player Bismillah Khan lived in Varanasi for all of his adult life, and never wanted to leave the city even for a day—for example, complicated negotiations were required to persuade him to travel to Eluru to receive a prestigious award.

An American patron once invited him to come and live in California, but he replied that he could not bring himself to leave his beloved house. When the patron offered to build him an identical house and create a similar neighborhood, Khan asked him whether he could also bring the Ganges River!

This according to “The legend that was Bismillah Khan” by Pappu Venugopala Rao (Sruti 264 [September 2006] pp. 20–21).

Today would have been Bismillah Khan’s 100th birthday! Below, a live performance; can anyone help us to date it?

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by | March 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Indie pop and kitsch

 

Indie pop has had a complicated relationship with mass culture—it simultaneously depends upon and deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth, and it is especially adept at generating personal authenticity.

It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood as an aesthetic and not a synonym for bad. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors.

The honesty of indie pop does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.

This according to “‘…This little ukulele tells the truth’: Indie pop and kitsch authenticity” by Emily I. Dolan (Popular music XXIX/3 [October 2010] pp. 457-469).

Below, Stephin Merritt, whose music and career serve as a case study in the article.

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by | March 6, 2016 · 6:00 am

David Gilmour and Polly Samson

 

In an interview, the Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour was asked why, when he could get any lyricist to write for him, he chooses to work with his wife, Polly Samson.

“When you’ve got such a good lyricist so close by, I could not feel the point in going elsewhere” he replied.

“Polly and I are on a working partnership as well as a life partnership and she’s as good as I can get. Other lyricists would be writing more for themselves than for me and they would not know me that well. If I asked Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan to write for me, I love their work but I don’t know these people. So it seems to me more artistically sound to work with someone who I live and breathe with every day.”

Quoted in “Q&A: David Gilmour” by Emmanuel Legrand (Billboard CXVIII/8 [25 February 2006] p. 31).

Today is Gilmour’s 70th birthday! Below, On an island, one of many songs that Gilmour has co-written with Samson.

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by | March 1, 2016 · 12:00 am

Mitropoulos and the ethos of performance

Valuable conclusions can be reached on the aesthetic and moral perceptions of Dimitri Mitropoulos from the study of his commercial and private recordings and his concert programs.

Mitropoulos was a unique interpreter who combined respect for significant works of historical Western music with the fight to project characteristic examples of the musical language of the 20th century. Far from the dictates of popular and easy recognitions, he gave us his own, often idiosyncratic, point of view of a morally honest and aesthetically valuable interpretation.

This according to “Ο Δ. Μητρόπουλος και το ήθος της ερμηνείας” [Dimitri Mitropoulos and the ethos of performance] by Stathīs A. Arfanīs and Giōrgos Maniatīs, an essay included in Δημήτρης Μητρόπουλος (1896-1960): πενήντα χρόνια μετά [Dimitris Mitropoulos (1896–1960): Fifty years later] (Athīna: Orpheus Edition, 2012).

Today is Mitropoulos’s 120th birthday! Below, rehearsing and performing with the New York Philharmonic.

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by | February 28, 2016 · 6:00 am

Svend Asmussen and Benny Goodman

 

In 1948 Benny Goodman invited the Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen to consider coming to the U.S. to play in his band. Asmussen agreed, but he soon discovered that the U.S. Musicians Union had other ideas.

To play in Goodman’s band musicians had to be union members; but the union required foreigners to live in the U.S. for one year and have a sponsor to pay them before they could join. As Asmussen recalled, “That means you had to spend a year in America without playing or making any money.”

The two finally had a chance to perform together in Copenhagen in 1981; it was Goodman’s last recorded live performance.

This according to “Svend Asmussen: Phenomenal jazz fiddler” by Richard J. Brooks (Fiddler magazine XII/1 (Spring 2005) pp. 4–12).

Today is Asmussen’s 100th birthday! Below, history in the making.

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by | February 13, 2016 · 6:00 am

John Reed and Gilbert and Sullivan

john reed

The great Gilbert and Sullivan singer John Reed was renowned for urbanity, verbal inanity, touching humanity, antic insanity, and a singular lack of theatrical vanity.

Among the attributes that equipped Mr. Reed spectacularly well for the job were an elfin physique, fleetness of foot (he had been a prize-winning ballroom dancer as a young man) and, perhaps most important, the elocution lessons he had taken in his youth, which let him sail through the patter songs that are the hallmarks of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic baritone roles.

This according to “John Reed, master of Gilbert and Sullivan’s patter songs, dies at 94” by Margalit Fox (The New York times CLIX/54,965 [20 February 2010] p. A26).

Today would have been Reed’s 100th birthday! Above and below, one of his signature roles: Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in The Mikado.

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by | February 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Arias for Stefano Mandini

Arias for Stefano Mandini

Arias for Stefano Mandini: Mozart’s first Count Almaviva (Middleton: A-R Editions. 2015) presents 13 arias that portray the voice of Stefano Mandini, who created the role of Count Almaviva in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro in 1786.

stefano mandiniDating from the peak of Mandini’s career in the 1780s, the arias were composed by Giuseppe Sarti, Giovanni Paisiello, Giuseppe Gazzaniga, Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi, Antonio Salieri, and Vicente Martín y Soler. Taken together, they show a versatile singer who sang serious and comical roles in both tenor and baritone ranges.

The arias are presented in the form of vocal scores, some taken from 18th-century editions and some made from orchestral scores. The edition and commentary are by Dorothea Link.

Below, Saper bramate from Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782), one of the arias included in the collection.

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by | January 31, 2016 · 6:00 am

Roosevelt Sykes’s upbeat blues

 

The music of Roosevelt Sykes demolishes the notion that blues is too depressing to enjoy.

His romping boogies and risqué lyrics such as Dirty mother, Ice cream freezer, and Peeping Tom characterize his monumental contributions to the blues idiom; he was also responsible for the influential pieces 44 blues, Driving wheel, and Night time is the right time, and his rollicking version of Sweet home Chicago presaged all the covers that would surface later on.

This according to “Roosevelt Sykes could play those 88s” (The African American Registry, 2006).

Today would have been Sykes’s 110 birthday! Below, his signature song The honeydripper.

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by | January 24, 2016 · 6:00 am

Doug Kershaw’s big break

 

In an interview, Doug Kershaw recalled a turning point in his career, when he received an offer to perform on The Johnny Cash show in 1969.

“They gave me a choice: I could play seven shows, and become one of the studio musicians, or I could be on the premier show and have one big solo spot. I decided that I would go for the solo spot. I knew if I was going to be a solo performer I would have to compete with people like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, who was also on that show. I gambled and I won.”

“That show introduced me to a whole new audience…I thought I knew what it was like to be a star, but I just had no idea. I went from playing the Opry with Bill Monroe to playing at the Fillmore East with Eric Clapton. And it proved what I always felt, that I could play my music for any audience, not just a country one.”

Quoted in “Doug Kershaw: The real deal in Cajun fiddle” by Michael Simmons (Fiddler magazine X/1 [Spring 2003]).

Today is Kershaw’s 8oth birthday! Below, the turning point itself.

BONUS: That was way too short, right? Here’s Louisiana man.

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by | January 19, 2016 · 6:00 am

Dolly Parton, semiotically speaking

 

dolly parton

Dolly Parton’s signifiers are at variance, allowing for her prismatic sign.

She is a highly visible culture icon who is a rhetorical text; she articulates as an artifact in popular culture, a semiotic sign of meaning. To study her is to perceive and understand a personal and particular imagery, leading to full understanding of her myth and ironic status.

Parton is part of a gendered industry that produces contradictions; furthermore, she is an example of romantic irony and pastiche. Her rags-to-riches narrative is complex, and her romantic signifiers yield to stylistic representation in a postmodern industry.

She is an entrepreneur, an actress, a songwriter, and a songstress, and she is accomplished at all of these roles. She is also very shrewd at presenting her myth; she uses much ironic play in revealing her pastiche. She is a self-parody and a matrix in which many elements are embedded, and all her talents contribute to her semiotic status. Semiotically, Parton exists in an ideological site of struggle where constant tensions exist; including her outrageous costuming versus her spirituality.

This according to Dolly Parton: A semiotic study of her life and lyrics by Maureen Cecile Modesitt, a dissertation accepted by Ohio University in 2001.

Today is Parton’s 70th birthday! Below, her signature hit Jolene in 1988.

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