mellow

Salubrious Saturday: “Old Friend,” Alexander

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This song feels like an appropriate one with which to conclude Ukraine Week on The Daily Tune-Up.  We will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow, but please keep an eye trained on Ukraine.  Equally important: if you are fortunate enough to live in a country where you have freedoms of speech and assembly, exercise that right every day.  Vote.  Organize.  Protest.  Speak out.  Educate yourself.  Be an active citizen.  We insult those who don’t have these rights when we take them for granted.

—

Mr. Magoo, he took off with Betty,
And I’m on the porch carrying wood.
My heart is confetti.
I’m having a party,
I’m feeling good.

You say you’re comin’ to crush my skull,
To bash in my face, and shatter my frown,
To mingle my blood in with the ground,
All this as the sun was setting down.

Old friend, trying to hunt me down again
Old friend this is your exit, you’re no, no no friend

Who is this man, who’s afraid of death?
Who fears it so that death’s all he brings?
I s’pose he wage war till nothing is left,
With a mouth full of teeth and nothing to sing.

Well he put his hands around my neck,
And I s’pose I let him from natural respect.
As he frothed at the mouth, I twinkled my eye,
And gave him this vision just before I died.

He saw his lines drawn in the sand,
Upon a land of beauty and wind,
And he in the distance dragging a flag pole
Across a desert that never will end.

Old friend, trying to hunt me down again
Old friend this is your exit, you’re no no no friend

Funk Friday: “Summer Rain,” BoomBox”

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BoomBox is a fun band formed by a couple of friend from Kyiv in 2004.  When I was in Ukraine a few years ago I saw their posters everywhere I went and I’m glad I took the hint.  Their songs are really solid and run the musical gamut from synth-heavy funk to mellow instrumental.  This song is one of my favorites by them.

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s Interim Prime Minister, rejected Crimea’s vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.  Here are some interesting Russian and Ukrainian perspectives on Crimea.  And finally, it doesn’t look like the U.S. has much leverage over Russia – or, Putin wants to make the world believe that.

—

My memory doesn’t sting anymore, my thoughts don’t strike on my hands
I accompany you to other shores, shores
You are a migratory bird, you look for happiness on the way
You come to say goodbye and leave again, leave again.

Chorus:
The summer rain, the summer rain started early today
The summer rain, the summer rain washes my soul’s wound
It mourns together with me by the blind window.

The summer rain, the summer rain whispers to me softly and simply
That you’ll comme, you’ll come, you’ll come, but it’ll too late
Untimeliness is the eternal drama, where he and she are.

I’ll soon stop dreaming of you at all, but then
I’ll have a new dream about our cold house
You ‘ll understand with time that one doesn’t look for love out of love
But you listen for now and you won’t bring yourself back, you won’t.

Funk Friday: “I Got The…,” Labi Siffre

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It’s too damn cold this week for me to be in an uptempo funky mood, so I pulled Labi Siffre off the shelf for today’s funk offering.  I love how spare this song is at first and then builds to a simple richness.  A nice and mellow sound while you pour yourself a drink and curl up indoors.

Funk Friday: “Concentration,” Quantum MC’s

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This song is so wacky.  (Then again, it was 1999.)  It’s gotta be the most mild-mannered rap song I’ve ever heard, layered over a tight rhythm and feel-it-in-your-bones baseline.  I recommend starting any conversation with, “Yeah-yeah, yeah, yeah…oh yeah.”  Also, this has got to be the only song written ever, in any genre, that uses the lyric “flowing like soy milk over sweetened cereal.”  Quantum MC’s were a great group that included two favorite artists of mine – Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow.  I find that I tend to start the song fairly soft and then crank it by the time it gets to 3:37.  What-what!  Happy Friday, Tune-Up Fans.

Throwback Thursday: “Abendlied,” Josef Rheinberger

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Humans are social animals.  We wither on the vine without interaction or companionship.  And yet, what wounds us more deeply than these same things, without which life is awful?  It’s a terrible truism, but a truism nonetheless, and one that I’ve been turning in my mind these past few days, for a variety of reasons.  It puts me in mind of a wonderful passage from C.S. Lewis:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

What nourishes will always wound; humans are imperfect.  What we need we will always ultimately lose; humans are mortal.  It is a far lovelier truism that the nourishment outlasts the wound, and that our mortality does not drain the memories and impressions we gave to others.  Let us bide with each other, then, while we are here.  Let us be vulnerable.

—

“Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden, und der Tag hat sich geneiget.
Bide with us, for evening shadows darken, and the day will soon be over.”

In memory of Nancy Harris Smith.

Sacred Sunday: “Officum Defunctorum & Missa Pro Defunctis,” Cristobal de Morales

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Some Tune-Up fans might think it a bit of a cop-out to post an entire body of work instead of a song – since this blog is devoted to providing you with the “song of the day” – but I just was incapable of pulling this piece apart.  It needs to be heard in its entirety; it’s just that gorgeous.  Those of you who are up on your Latin will know that these two bodies of work are funereal – “Officum Defunctorum” means the office of the dead (a cycle of prayers), and “Missa Pro Defunctis” is the mass for the dead.  Without knowing the titles and therefore purposes of these pieces, I wouldn’t have guessed they had anything to do with funerals, and that is one of the reasons I love them.  The harmonies are the other reason.  They are simple, accessible, and exquisite.

Cristobal de Morales is rightly considered one of the giants of the Spanish Renaissance, and really one of the great composers of the Renaissance in general.  He was born in Seville, Spain, around 1500 and died in 1553.  I cannot possibly overstate the importance of buying the Jordi Savall recording, if you’re inclined to get a copy of this for yourself.  It is superlative.

Throwback Thursday: “Symphony No. 5 in D, 3rd movement,” Ralph Vaughan Williams

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If you hear movie soundtracks in this piece (or a bit of Downton Abbey), you’re not hearing things.  Vaughan Williams was such a master at capturing undefinable moodiness that he inspired a whole generation of movie and TV score composers.  I had once wanted to be among them based solely on his works.  There isn’t a sound so lush as a Vaughan Williams string section; I don’t think it’s possible to cram any more instruments or harmonies in there.  I particularly love the range of his orchestration at the beginning, from the lowest notes of the double basses to the highest notes of the violins.  Combined with the vaguely eastern chord progression, and the solo oboe (a classic Vaughan Williams tell), it makes for a very evocative beginning.  Until the strings settle into something a little more standard around 0:50, and we remember, oh right, we’re in England.

This particular symphony is an excellent gateway drug to the rest of his body of work.  Vaughan Williams’s most famous pieces are The Lark Ascending and Fantasia by a Theme by Thomas Tallis, but you’d be better served by diving a little deeper.  If you like this piece, check out his Norfolk Rhapsody, whose simplicity surely must have inspired Aaron Copland.

Salubrious Saturday: “Walking in the Sun,” Fink

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You ever have those moments where you feel like you can look at yourself from a removed vantage point?  I had one of those moments not too long ago.  I was sitting in my office at work, and, all of a sudden and out of absolutely nowhere, I was able to look behind me (in my mind, of course) and see the path I’d walked on to get to where I was in that exact moment – doing what I was doing, wearing what I was wearing, all of it.  It was the strangest and most wonderful feeling.  I could see the places I had made an active decision, the places where an outside force had cleared a few feet of the path ahead, the places where I’d stumbled and made a slight course correction.  There were It made my life today seem both inevitable and accidental at the same time, in that everyone is a product of their own decisions but no one exists in a vacuum.  It was a beautiful moment.

That is what this song reminds me of.

Worldly Wednesday: “The Man in the Desert,” Yoko Kanno

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Something wakes up, stirs, and evolves in this piece.  It starts so simply but builds to a massive and complicated climax before resolving back to the six-note lilt with which it began.  It’s so hopeful throughout.  It feels like running your fingers over an angora blanket.  (Now is probably a good time to mention that your Yankette has mild synesthesia, which is when the senses get a little jumbled and, in this case, sounds have colors and textures.)  The beginning especially sounds like a convergence of Aaron Copland and Steve Reich, both of whom I love.  Yoko Kanno is a modern Japanese composer from Sendai, Japan.

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She is mostly known for her soundtracks to anime films and video games.  This is my favorite piece of hers.  I have been looking everywhere for the words.  Intrepid readers, if any of you can find them, I would really appreciate it.

Sacred Sunday: “Go Down, Moses,” Louis Armstrong

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A bit of a curveball today.  It’s not the type of weekend for a serious choral work.  It’s the type of weekend for a zippy, jazzy spiritual piece, and I for one have no qualms about calling anything Louis Armstrong did “sacred.”  And you gotta love it when it gets all New Orleans at 2:42.  So groovy.  Happy Sunday!