"I think that a price is paid for absolutely everything in life. That we’re sitting here, you and I, means that I’m not sitting in a sunken sauna and you’re not having a gin and tonic. Everything we do must mean not doing something or other."
When it's not publishing my politely scathing book reviews, The Literateur really is fab. I've just read editor Kit Toda's interview with Sir Christopher Ricks.
Ricks is wise. Few people fit the word better. He knows what he thinks - because he's really thought about it. He once gave a talk at my school, and I've don't think I've ever encountered such an eloquent advocate for the importance of how we say things. I remember being dazzled and charmed by his apparently off-the-cuff, but probably well-rehearsed, comparative analysis of the phrases "look before you leap" (it just wouldn't work if it were "don't leap until you've looked") and "he who hesitates is lost" (the dithering sighs of those aitches).
While I was at Oxford he gave nine lectures as Professor of Poetry. Despite renewed good intentions each term, I missed every one. With hindsight I can't imagine what could have taken priority. Certainly not a gin and tonic.
People hear music in all kinds of different ways. Some people experience music as colours; others just see grey water pouring out of the speakers. Some never listen to lyrics, they just fall under a spell. Some eat it whole. Some just take a bite. Some of us like to get on our backs and roll around in it like a dog.
In prehistoric times music ... was a branch of magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working.
Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Lately I've been spending more and more of my day 'doing' music. Singing it, playing it, writing it. Making music feels like something real; like work. Your voice gets tired, your fingers get blistered, you end up with pages covered in scribbles. With luck, you're exhilarated.
By contrast, listening to music, especially on your own, can be an almost ghostly experience. We're so used to processing the world visually that it's hard to fully accept this stuff, these sound waves emerging from a speaker, really really exists. It's there, and it's everything and everywhere; then it's nowhere.*
Music is the closest thing we know to magic. Not a new thought, but one worth repeating.
*This sense of music as hallucination is compounded if I'm listening to it with my cat, who blithely ignores it. You might think that a loud, pitched noise apparently coming from nowhere would make an animal uneasy, but he's long accepted it as one of the oddities of living with humans. From his non-reaction I occasionally think I really might be the only one hearing it.
Tonight is the last night of the London Jazz Festival, but after a week of (what felt like) non-stop gigs I badly needed a quiet one. This afternoon, though, I went to my last session of The Write Stuff, a fabulous course run by the LJF and Jazzwise magazine. If you've any aspiration to being a music journalist (jazz or otherwise) or just a journalist in general, I really can't recommend this enough. It's a free course, for 8 participants, taught by seasoned jazz writers including the wonderful Kevin Le Gendre.
On Wednesday all 8 of us had to write a 300-word review of John Surman's festival gig at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. One of these will eventually be published in the print edition of Jazzwise, but until then, all 8 are up on their website.
I have had reviews coming out of my ears lately. Not literally, thank Christ. There is enough ill-informed punditry around without my ears getting in on the action. Anyway, I'm up at this hour because I've just finished my first review with a proper deadline (the gig finished at 10.30pm, the copy's in for 11.30 am). The gig in question was John Surman at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which I really enjoyed. It was great to see the legendary Jack DeJohnette on drums as well as Surman himself. That review will eventually go up on the Jazzwise website, and I'll link to it from here.
In the meantime here's another of my reviews on The Literateur. Unfortunately I seem to have only written negative reviews on their site. I fear the editorial team must think I hate books. Oh well. By way of compensation: in the last couple of month or so I have hugely enjoyed Graham Swift's Waterland, was all shook up by Cormac McCarthy's The Road and am currently loving Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro. So there.
A few years ago I was revising for some tedious exams (AS Levels I think) and, though not much mental energy went into the revision itself, a huge amount went into finding more and more ingenious and bizarre diversions (the same impulse that prompted me to start this blog). I came up with something I tentatively call 'musical synchronicity'. This is the phenomenon of what happens when two entirely unrelated songs 'fit' together - as if played simultaneously on two different CD players. Far from the musical car crash you might expect, this sometimes yields listenable, even beautiful results.
Here is, I think, the finest example I've discovered. It's called 'Black Rainbow', because it combines 'Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair' as sung by Nina Simone, and 'The Rainbow' from Talk Talk's classic Spirit of Eden album. I've put the two songs into separate YouTube videos, rather than pre-mixing them, so you can have the experience of playing both. You can fiddle around with the volume on each to make your own mix. Below the videos is a bit more waffle from me.
So. I hope you enjoyed that.
These, then, are not mash-ups as such. No mixing skill is involved here - that would be cheating. Vocals have not been isolated, nor tempi changed, nor pitches altered. I have pressed 'play' (as you just did) and let the songs intertwine of their own accord.
The seeds of this idea were planted, I think, when I was waiting in the corridor of my school's music building before a singing lesson. Two cellists in two different practice rooms were playing two different pieces. They couldn't hear each other: only I was privy to the startling results, as the two melodies unknowingly clashed against each other in wonderfully strange and dramatic ways. And as I had revision to do, I set about trying to apply this to the records I loved.
Perhaps the nearest point of comparison for these musical blind dates is the so-called 'Dark Side of the Rainbow' effect: the crackpot theory that Pink Floyd intended Dark Side of the Moon as a soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz. While it's clear that this wasn't, in fact, the Floyd's intention, it's also clear that there are points where the audio and video really do fit together remarkably well:
I've chosen 'Black Rainbow' as my first example of this phenomenon's musical cousin, not just because of the rainbow theme, but because it's the best, the most natural-sounding. There a number of reasons why the pairing works. Both tracks are in the same key. Both are in free time, until the beat kicks around 2:45 on the Talk Talk track. Both are spare and stripped-down in their instrumentation. But even so, in combining them all these strange musical coincidences appear: the relay-race of Nina and Mark Hollis's vocals, the sustained harmonica whine that matches Nina's held note, the guitar that often seems to be doing a call-and-response with her.
So, there are genuine congruences and coincidences between the two. But above all the fact that these pieces of music can combine, in blissful ignorance, and seem to make such strong musical sense - this surely tells us something about the human brain's ability to make connections, to notice coincidences and disregard all those moments that don't conform so well. It suggests a neural preference for pattern and harmony rather than chaos.
I'm thrilled to bits to be published in this week's Times Literary Supplement. My piece is a 500-word review of a rather unexciting book about jazz and its role in Cold War cultural exchanges. But more importantly, here I am next to Tom Paulin on the contributors' page. As someone who enjoys nothing more than talking in a dodgy Tom Paulin impression, sometimes for hours on end, I'm very tickled by this.
Dead chuffed with tonight's effort, the 7th and final song of this whole experiment. I'd reached midnight and was still completely lyricless, though I had some chords for a chorus and a nice melody to go with it. Then I had the idea of writing a song about writing a song every day. I know, I know, but since it was my last one I thought I'd indulge myself. In this version (life translated into pop) the song-a-day thing is a symbol of missing someone you love - hence the chorus:
While my love's away I'll write a song each day And pin them to the trees in her neighbourhood Have you seen this girl Finest in the world Please send her back to me
The whole thing is very sweet and innocent, but often that's the hardest kind of song to write (or at least to write well). I'm very proud of it. It also has a proper middle-8, as promised.
So there it is. The full list, in chronological order:
Everybody Makes Their Own Jam Trains And Sunsets Maida Vale Higher Shelf Miles From Land I Draw The Line A Song A Day
As predicted, there are songs in there I'll most likely never return to (except to record them for posterity). In the case of I Draw The Line, I'll probably play it to myself (the guitar part is lovely to play) but not to an audience (especially if that audience includes its subject, who really doesn't deserve to be subjected to it). Some - like tonight's, and Trains And Sunsets - I think stand on their own as some of my best songs. The self-imposed deadlines were fantastic for pushing me to the end of a song, and forcing me to run with ideas I would usually have rejected at an early stage. Every day it would get to the afternoon or evening and I'd worry that I wasn't going to be able to produce anything, but somehow 7 songs materialised (though some are short and runty).
As soon as I get all the gear I need, there will be some musical evidence to go with all this verbiage. Thanks (to whom it may concern) for reading, though.
(a) I am an English grad, and as such, of a pompous and verbose disposition.
(b) I may occasionally have an interesting thought. In the rare event of this happening, I'll write a blog about it.
Please feel free to comment on anything I've written, though do bear in mind that, this being the internet, I am mainly looking for withering semi-literate abuse.
***UPDATE: I HAVE MOVED TO PASTURES NEW***
