Category: Music

Here are my picks:

1. The best song to start with: Buy Wyclef Jean's Welcome to Haiti.  "Ou Marye" (track 8) is my single favorite song these days, sadly I cannot find it on YouTube but you can download it.  Start there.  This one also has strong Haitian influence.  This is a kind of Haitian rap, with a good video.  Here's a super-fun mix of ragga and compas, with Buju Banton and T-Vice.

2. Three groups which are best seen live: Ram, Boukmans Eksperyans, and Tropicana.  Tabou Combo is another.

3. The best Haitian collection: the Konbit! CD.  The voodoo-linked Rhythms of Rapture is quite good, as is the more acoustic Haitian Troubadours.

4. The best recent Haitian group and recording: Ti-Coca.  I like all their CDs but my favorite is a blue and orange one I bought in Paris which I don't see on Amazon.  I think they're better on disc than live.

5. Best Haitian musical star to dance to: Sweet Mickey.  For a while he was selling cell phone cards, but he has returned to the world of music.

6. The classic father-figure of Haitian music: Nemours Jean-Baptiste.  Try this song on YouTube.

7. The most comprehensive historic collection: Alan Lomax in Haiti, 9 CDs, of highly varying quality but always interesting.  

8. Best-known Haitian songstress: Emeline Michel, sometimes called the Joni Mitchell of Haiti.  Here she is doing "Many Rivers to Cross."

9. Best Haitian rara collection: That's the noisy. discordant music they play leading up to Carnival.  This would be my pick.  Overall it's a vibrant genre.

10. What else?: Haitian children's songs are often quite good, Haitian rap I barely know, and Haitian gospel is a vital area, though hard to capture on disc.  Here is the Wikipedia entry on Haitian music. 

11. Non-Haitian contributors: The group Simbi, a mizak rasin band founded in 1987, is made up of Swedes, who play an exact copy of Haitian voodoo rock.

12. Leading Haitian contributor to German rap scene: Torch.  Here is Torch, rapping in German.

Some of you may recall the third and fourth sentences in my book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures (now on Kindle by the way):

"The founder of Kassav, the leading Antillean group in the funky style of zouk, stated: "It's this Haitian imperialism [i.e., the popularity of the groups] that we were rising against when we began Kassav."  Governments responded with protective measures to limit the number of Haitian bands in the country."

Someone teleported through time from the early 1950s to 2009 would find a music business curiously similar to the landscape of 60 years ago.  Few specialty record outlets.  Department stores dominating the market.  A singles-driven industry.  Pop music dominating radio.  TV musical talent shows all the rage.

That's from the 21 December issue of Variety.  One difference, of course, is that the best-selling album of this decade — but not the 1950s — was by The Beatles.

Ezra Furman takes his music personally. He doesn’t want to just write songs, he wants to change lives, and in the process have his life changed as well.

Which is why the 23-year-old Evanston native is doing something (take your pick) outlandish, heroic, Quixotic, exhausting, ridiculous. He’s writing a song for every fan who buys his latest album, Ezra Furman and the Harpoons’ “Moon Face: Bootlegs and Road Recordings 2006-2009,” available at ezrafurman.bigcartel.com.

More than 100 albums have been ordered since it became available a few weeks ago. Each consists of 10 tunes culled from Furman’s voluminous archive plus a customized song written directly to and for each paying customer. The tunes range from talking blues to more fleshed out melodies that Furman bashes out into a computer microphone on the road and then emails to his father back in Evanston to mail out on compact disc.

Here is more information.

Every November I scour the critics' "Want Lists" from Fanfare, my favorite classical music periodical.  Then I go and spend a lot of money.  Here is the list of all the new recordings, from 2009, which were mentioned by more than one critic:

1. Mahler's 4th, conducted by Ivan Fischer.

2. John Adams, Doctor Atomic Symphony.

3. Mahler: The Complete Symphonies, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, remastered edition.

4. Kurtag's Ghosts, by Kurtag and Formenti.

5. John Adams, Transmigration of Souls, and other works conducted by Robert Spano.

6. Oppens Plays Carter, by Ursula Oppens.

Of that list, #6 received the most selections.  Here are the meta-list picks from last year, all of which turned out to be excellent, if you like that sort of thing that is.  I hope to be passing along more meta-lists soon.

"Ar" wants to know who they are.  When I was young I studied guitar for seven years (multiple styles), so it's an area I've long had an interest in.  I was never very good but I learned a lot about it.  Here goes:

Classical: Segovia, Eduardo Fernandez.  I enjoy the transcriptions of Yamashita and Larry Coryell's covers of Stravinsky, though he isn't usually considered a classical guitarist.

Jazz: Django Reinhardt, Joe Pass's Virtuoso album, Wes Montgomery live (no strings), and George van Eps.  Charlie Christian deserves a mention.  Today, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and the guy who plays for Trio Saudade.  There are plenty of others, including Jim Hall and John McLaughlin.

John Fahey-Leo Kottke: They deserve their own category and indeed they dominate it.  For Kottke try 6 and 12-String Guitar Music, and then his 1981 Guitar Music.  For Fahey try the 1959-1977 Greatest Hits collection.  This is some of my favorite music.

Electric blues: Muddy Waters, Robert Cray (live), Johnny Winter (live only).  Amadou of Amadou and Miriam.  The player from Orchestra Baobab.  Does Lonnie Mack count here?

Acoustic blues: Reverand Gary Davis, Son House and many others.  Jorma Kaukonen also.  Bob Dylan is much underrated in this area.  Can Richard Thompson go here?  d'Gary, from Madagascar, is one of the greatest and most original guitarists that few people have heard of.  Bola Sete too, from Brazil.

Bluegrass: Clarence White and also Doc Watson.

Rock: Jimmy Page, Brian May, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, of course Jimi Hendrix as #1.  van Halen and his ilk never much impressed me.

Les Paul deserves mention but he straddles a few of these categories, as does Chet Atkins.  Hawaiian guitar deserves its own post.  Dick Dale.  The Carnatic slide guitar players, including Bhattacharya.  Roger McGuinn.  The Zairean tradition, including Franco.  Neil Young has his moments, as does Thurston Moore.

Eric Clapton was impressive for a while but overall I wish to be contrarian and leave him off.  Who am I forgetting?  Duane Allman?

In general guitar is an instrument which works relatively well on YouTube.  Most of the names above can be found there.

…former Beach Boy Brian Wilson has been authorized by the estate of
George Gershwin to complete unfinished songs Gershwin left behind when
he died in 1937.

He plans to finish and record at least two such pieces on an album of Gershwin music he hopes to release next year.

Here is more information.  I am fans of them both, just not…together.

Adam Smith, a loyal MR reader (yes that is his name), writes to me:

I had a very MResque thought today I wanted to share with you.  Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different?  In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way up to the 80-minute maximum.  They're usually packed with intros, skits, and lots of 5 minute tracks that have extended intro and outro instrumental beat only sequences.  My metal albums, on the other hand, have an average run length of  no more than 40 mins.  Most albums are between 8 and 10 tracks with little in the way of tangential material.  These different run-times show up in other places too.  For example, my older jazz albums (i.e. Kind of Blue, Time Out, Blue Train) typically run around 45 mins with a half dozen or so tracks yet my newer jazz albums like MMW's The Dropper run almost the whole 80 mins.  Also, prog. rock bands tend to produce much longer albums than garage rock bands.  Even adjusting for the fact that prog bands emphasize longer musical passages, they could compensate by just having fewer songs or garage rock bands could just have twice as many (like the White Stripes did on their first album). 

Is there a relative price argument for these differences?  Or even signaling?  Perhaps there is a rat race among rappers to signal they're capable of coming up with enough material to fill out the maximum length, even if it includes lots of filler.  Perhaps the recording costs are lower as instrumentation relies so heavily on sampling.  Maybe metal runs into diminishing returns after 30 mins or so where the listener becomes numb to the intensity.

I'll offer a few points:

1. The average career of a rapper is short.  A long CD increases the chance that something will "stick" and the rapper won't get too many other chances to try.

2. Some metal bands develop great loyalty among their followers and achieve durable franchises.  That gives them a lower discount rate and they are more inclined to save up material for the future.  Plus they are marketing an overall sound — rather than clever particular innovations — and if the first forty (five?) minutes don't convince you nothing will.  Rap songs probably have a higher individual variance.

3. Many older albums are short for technological reasons, plus the albums were due in relatively rapid succession for contractual reasons.  In the 1960s there was lots of technological advance in music, so if you sat on the sidelines for a few years you could become obsolete.

4. It is relatively easy for a contemporary jazz artist to tack on additional improvisations and he can choose standard compositions if necessary.  Other forms of popular music cannot expand quantity so easily without hitting a wall in terms of quality.  One prediction here is that "compositional jazz" albums should be shorter in average length than albums of jazz improvisation, contemporary that is.

5. If you wanted a somewhat strained explanation, you could argue that the longer CD is a more bundled product and it will make economic sense as a form of price discrimination, the more varied the valuations of the audience.  This would require that rap CD buyers have a higher variance of marginal valuation.

Many of the criticisms of Liszt stick, but you can't judge these pieces by the standards of a Bach fugue.  If there's anything in classical music that comes close to the ecstasy of The Clash, or the beauty of Brian Eno, it is these works.  The Etudes are also nearly impossible to play and as monomaniacal works they try to contain everything pianistic.  A new version of the Etudes has appeared, by Miroslav Kultyshev.  It starts slow but by Mazeppa (YouTube here) the listener takes notice.  There are many bad or unlistenable versions of the Etudes but the recordings by Freddy Kempf (download here), Kemal Gekic,(YouTube here) and Vladimir Ovchinikov are of note.  Nikolai Lugansky (YouTube only) is good with the dynamics.  It is somehow appropriate that none of these talented pianists has met with major success more generally, as if other music is somehow "too little" for them.  Or they sold their souls to the devil to play the Etudes and they are, underneath the surface, shattered empty men.

I enjoyed this story:

Monkeys don’t care much for human music, but apparently they will groove to their own beat.

Previous experiments have shown that tamarin monkeys prefer silence
to Mozart, and they don’t respond emotionally to human music the way
people do. But when a psychologist and a musician collaborated to
compose music based on the pitch, tone and tempo of tamarin calls, they
discovered that the species-specific music significantly affected
monkey behavior and emotional response.

“Different species may have different things that they react to and
enjoy differently in music,” said psychologist Charles Snowdon of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, who published the paper Tuesday in Biology Letters with
composer David Teie of the University of Maryland. “If we play human
music, we shouldn’t expect the monkeys to enjoy that, just like when we
play the music that David composed, we don’t enjoy it too much.”

Indeed, the monkey music sounds shrill and unpleasant to human ears.
Each of the 30-second pieces below were produced with a cello and
Teie’s voice, based on specific features from recordings of tamarin
monkey calls. The first “song” is based on fear calls from an upset
monkey, while the second one contains soothing sounds based on the
vocalizations of a relaxed animal.

There are MP3s at the link (enjoy!) and I discuss related themes — how it matters if we make philosophic aesthetics more empirical — in one chapter in Create Your Own Economy.  Hat tip goes to Christian Bok.

Don Boudreaux offers a simple calculation:

If each viewer of only The Beatles' first two "Sullivan" appearances
deposited $1 into an account in return for watching The Beatles on
these telecasts, this account would have had in it, on Feb. 16, 1964,
$143.7 million. If this money had been invested at the historical rate
of return earned by U.S. stocks, it would have earned an annual return,
on average, of 8 percent. Today, this account would be worth about $4.4
billion.

Divided equally among John, Paul, George and Ringo, Paul's share
today would be $1.1 billion — his approximate current net worth. And
this from only a small payment made 45 years ago by each viewer of a
mere two episodes of an American television show.