The Wonders of Transformation

Posted on 2014/02/18 by danneau

I ran across the second vid via Open Culture through the Gazetteer’s blog roll. I missed a certain amount of the Guns ‘n Roses stuff because I was preoccupied with other music. It’s always interesting to see how a piece can be reworked in a different context.

Of course, this is pretty much what Busketeering is all about, and the Gazetteer would be the one to know.

John Kessler, over at KPLU.org, does a Saturday and Sunday show called All Blues between six and midnight and, at eight o’clock, dials up the Blues Time Machine, wherein he traces songs back to their roots through three or four different versions. It’s gotten hokier and more formalized over the years, but still an interesting look at the evolution of some of the tunes that have become blues standards, or classics, or just favourites. He used to do different songs on Saturday and Sunday, but I guess it got too onerous. There are a bunch of podcasts on the site:

Blues Time Machine

Speaking of New Orleans jazz, I recently discovered Aurora Nealand and really a couple of collections I got through eMusic.

All good fun.

Now What? The Real Thing, I Guess

Posted on 2013/12/02 by danneau

Comment on FB from Laila Yuile:

The BC Liberals. Missing legislative sessions, missing information and now missing yet another important deadline.

Also, Missing in Action…. period.

Well, no surprise there. It puts me in mind of something Paul Hawken said:

We know—you know in this room—how to transform this world. We know what to do. We know how to provide meaningful, dignified living wage jobs for all who seek them, how to feed, clothe, and house every person on Earth. What we don’t know, admittedly, is how to remove those in power whose ignorance of biology is matched only by their indifference.

This came to me via Information Clearing House:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that youve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows youve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that it’s now or never
Everybody knows that it’s me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when youve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black Joe’s still pickin cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you’re in trouble
Everybody knows what youve been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows

Yes, we may know and there is ample evidence all around us, but, to finish off with one last little quip:

Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.

—M. King Hubbert

In the meantime, I will now get out and enjoy some of this:

The View

Now What?

Posted on 2013/12/01 by danneau

I must have hit the wrong button. Anyway, here is Garrison Fewell. Good listening, if this is a kind of music that you enjoy.

What the hell, here’s some more:

Now I’ll go find something to whine and complain about. CFN!

OK, here’s a slight reprise.

How Much Is A Little?

Given that the bells have been ringing for six weeks already, and that there are another three weeks before the hoopla even starts to fade, one has to wonder where the overdose level kicks in. I’m far past that stage, yet I know people who aren’t even approaching saturation. It comes down to the same conundrum as the generous person and the greedy person, where, in pure self-defence, the generous person must cease to be generous. This applies to tolerant people and the intolerant or to pretty much anyone who is willing to live and let live, as soon as that person is confronted by someone with a little too much courage of his, and everyone else’s convictions. So where can I sign up for a “little”?

Nasty First-World Problems

Posted on 2013/11/27 by danneau

A Place of Refuge and Reflection

There was a time when I thought I would be able, in my lifetime, to read all those works necessary to be well-educated, well informed and somewhat wise. For various reasons, I went off on several tangents, read a ton of material of little or no immediate value to one who would seek wisdom, engaged in other activities, and missed the target by a long way. The first and most obvious reason is that the target was silly and ill-informed to begin with and the product of an undeveloped intellect from the outset. There was a surfeit of worthy material before I ever conceived of the idea, and the parade of new material has hardly let up in the intervening years, so that I’m falling farther behind even as I work through my oft-redefined list of what constitutes the right matter for reading. This occurs to me with increasing frequency as we approach the end of the calendar year, which inevitably signals a torrent of “best of” lists. This helps me to see how little of a dent I’ve made in the literary pile, it gives me a sense of the scope of the production of the book mill, lends a focus to my sense of the expanding universe and leads me to reflect on where I am in this process. We need to add that this also applies not only to other forms of print, newspapers and periodicals, largely, in addition to the nuggets that come in the form of music (with or without lyrics), film, live drama and social interaction.

We don’t collect books the way some folks do. Generally, I read a book, ask Erica if it interests her, and following her use of said book, we look for a place to park it so that it will continue to be read in somewhat the same manner as certain plastic crab traps, once lost, would continue to kill crabs until something either buried them or they were broken up. The library is a good place for some of them, though we can never be sure that our lonely little contribution will be able to call out to potential readers before the physical book goes the way of the aforementioned crab trap. We also target friends and relatives who read, though this is also a bit of a crap shoot as people will smile at the site of a book from us, thank us profusely, and recycle it as soon as we’re out of sight, Who knows?

Having lead a fairly tranquil life, I still have recordings going back to something Maggie gave me when I was seven years old, a Saint’s Day present. It was a collection of stuff by some black women singers, principally Billie Holliday. I still like it and I suspect that I might have gotten this gift because it was to be part of the general family music education and because Maggie might well have wanted to have it around for her listening pleasure. I guess multiple justifications are fine, and when I was seven, I wasn’t one to question a mother’s motives. I have vinyl going right into the Eighties, a bunch of CDs and a rather hefty collection of digital files through iTunes, Wolfgang’s Vault, eMusic, CDBaby, ripped CD files and the odd free download from Joe Bonamassa and suchlike. In spite of this, all these download sites show clearly that I’m losing the race to own all the music I like. Here again, a problem arises in that my musical horizons keep opening up, meaning that, even though I’m losing the Blues race, and the Jazz race, there’s much in the Classical bin that is, and will remain, untouched for lack of time and other resources.

A serious question that arises from this discussion: what drives us to this impulse to “complete the set”, even when we know that the set will never be complete? Perhaps some of the cause lies in the barrage of advertising that confronts us at every turn, or perhaps this phenomenon is a result of other unmet needs. My answer? It’s not such a big deal, as long as we can keep our perspective. As long as the parade of content continues to get distilled into some vision of increasing wisdom, and as long as I don’t get walled in to a too-narrow definition of wisdom because of self-selection of content, there isn’t too great a cause for distress. However, we might give a thought to how we direct our energies: is all this creation making for better lives?

That Time Of Year

Posted on 2013/11/12 by danneau

Yes, it’s the Christmas selling season. We don’t even wait for Halloween to be over any longer, with perhaps the slightest hint of a truce for the Remembrance Day Ceremonies, and then right back at it. This record came home when I was about nine years old. It gave me a somewhat different perspective on Christmas:

Of course there’s also Black Friday to get through, but in Canada there seem to be a series of Black Fridays and other Black Days. It also seems that the back-to-school routine, which starts about the time students hit the beach in July, is barely cold in its grave when the Halloween sugar orgy fires up. In addition, the aforementioned Remembrance Day observations seem to have stretched out into a month or six weeks of breast beating and bleating about the freedoms we enjoy as a consequence of the sacrifice made by current and previous generations. I fully subscribe to the notion that we should honour, cherish and care for those who serve the greater good of society, and it’s galling that the politicians who are always front and centre at the ceremonies and who bleat the loudest (well, not quite as loudly as Donald S.) are those who plot to send these folks on what are most often the business of business, indefensible missions to chase people of colour off the land under which is hidden our oil, gold, diamonds, potash, lithium or whatever else is necessary to keep the consumerist wheels turning. What seems to pass entirely under the radar, besides the nonsensical idiocy of the missions, is that we’re still doing diplomacy about the same way Metternich did post-Napoloenic Europe, and that these wars clearly represent a failure of diplomacy and a failure to address the structures that underlie that (lack of) diplomacy. But I know that we will really have come off the rails when I see Valentine’s greetings before we finish the Christmas orgy of consumption.

It puts me in mind of something that St.-Éxupéry wrote in The Little Prince, where the fox is talking with the Little Prince about what makes one day distinguishable from another:

“What is a rite?” asked the little prince.

“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all.”

There is so much noise about special occasions that the occasions are less and less special. The celebrations are so ritualized that they risk losing any personal meaning or context: this works out well when the message from one holiday to another is that we ought to go out and buy stuff, and shopping is pretty much the same, window dressing aside, from one occasion to the next.

So Mr. Lehrer, you say it so well:

“Christmas time is here, by golly, disapproval would be folly.

Deck the halls with hunks of holly, fill your cup and don’t say when.

Kill the turkeys, ducks, and chickens, mix the punch, drag out the Dickens,

Even though the prospect sickens, brother, here we go again!”

In The Night Garden

Posted on 2013/10/01 by danneau

My grand daughter used to watch a rather pointless television show called iIn The Night Garden, and example of which you can find here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeYhb8h47CE

I was out planting the last of the garlic this morning and found this.

Calling Card

It’s about ten centimetres across, and is either from a very big dog, or, more likely, one of our local bears. We’re very careful about compost and we don’t leave fruit on the trees. This part of the garden is fenced, but bears hardly deign to recognize the existence of a fence. I went looking for the “deposit” type of calling card, but found nothing.

Meanwhile, here is what I brought in for Sunday dinner with the rest of the family. Grandchildren do love them some corn, and there seemed to be no difficulty in giving away some butter to go with it.

A Gathering

In addition, there remains a load of stuff to be harvested on an ongoing basis, some of it to be mulched and some to have tents for cover through the cold, rain, and snow, truly local food, which brings me to the subject of today’s venting: local food that isn’t.

A recent labeling decision by the provincial government defines as local anything that comes from this province, meaning that food from the Peace River area is now local to Vancouver Island, a notion so patently absurd that it could only have come from the kind of government currently occupying the throne. This is the kind of drek that allows supermarkets to advertise local food that patently isn’t local, and who’s to tell the difference? It represents further cheapening of language by removing any sort of precision from the meaning of key terms so as to keep maximum hold on all aspects of the economy in the hands of Jimmy Pattison. There have been many attempts to water down the idea of organic culture, and it’s getting to the point where organic will be impossible because there will be so much genetic pollution in the seed pool that there will be no organic feed nor fertilizer, meaning there will be no organic food in the real sense, but who knows what Christy lark, Stephen Harper and Jimmy Pattison (or any of the Westons, or others of that ilk) will be able to call organic and actually have people believe.

Finally, and after this I’ll go do something constructive, I promise, in response to a Facebook post by Denis Olsen, I posted this video link of Albert Collins playing with Lonnie Mack and Roy Buchanan. Check out where Collins attaches his capo!

Collins, Mack and Buchanan

Two Teles and a V

Send In The Clowns

Posted on 2013/09/30 by danneau

Un Clown pet en cacher un autre!

Had a chat with a friend about how Berlusconi can send the whole Italian government down the crapper when he, and probably a good number of his colleagues ought to be locked up and forgotten. Yet somehow, he retains office and influence al out of proportion to his contribution to society: some folks there seem to identify with him even though they are most likely among his victims.

Loose lips, and all that.

Of course the Italians have no corner on the idiocy in politics market, and a swing through Washington these days is likely to be good for a few guffaws before the spate of tears that must inevitably follow, given the consequences of the lack of substantive action in the face of impending disaster. It’s not just Ted Cruz reading Dr. Seuss (you can almost hear the Seussian spirits gagging in the next dimension), but the whole notion that the peoples’ business can be stopped dead in its tracks by the collection of louts that sits in those august chambers is beyond ridicule and goes a long way toward explaining why nothing has been done about climate change, about oil spills and the devastation of water resources through tracking, the sacking and pillage of the economy by the sponsors of said louts, who mostly hail from Wall Street, the crisis, not only of health care, but of health itself, brought on by our inability to tell ourselves the truth about diet, medication, exercise and the spare parts philosophy of care.

Innocent-looking fellow, don’t you think?

Caped Cruzader? Cruz Missile? Here is another man whose message is hidden behind the rhetoric of individual freedom. The unstated and sinister part of the message is that he protects his own freedom to plunder at the expense of the freedom of millions of fellow citizens, and he has a lot of company.

It’s everywhere: the Olympic torch has left Greece headed for Sochi, for a winter pageant to be held in a place with a sub-tropical climate, and where the vultures have moved in to boost the cost of hosting the event to something in the $50 billion range, according to recent reports on CBC news.

The government in Ottawa is removing the culture of medicinal marijuana from small operations run by individuals and is putting it in the hands of large corporate concerns. It will be interesting to see if the Bronfman clan gets in on the action. This looks from the outside as an invitation to graft and corruption where the current group in Ottawa are running like hell to catch up to the crew in Washington.

Go find a copy of Stephen Bruton’s song “The Clock”: it’s ticking, you can hear it every time you contemplate the direction set by leaders in all levels of political and corporate governance. What did Frank Zappa say about stupidity? That there’s more of it in the universe than hydrogen, and that it has a longer shelf life….

Friday Chimes

Posted on 2013/09/20 by danneau

I first Saw Andy McKee in a video from TrueFire, I think, and he was one of those people like Pete Huttlinger, Vicki Genfan, or Tommy Emmanuel whose apparent talent would be overwhelming to a budding old guitarist unless he had a really thick skin and a firm sense of his place in the musical universe. This is not my absolutely favourite musical genre, but it can be great listening, and especially getting to watch the magic of the hands and fingers working with the wood and steel can cause bouts of rêverie.

http://youtu.be/Exm5g6Z3f9Y

Have a lovely Friday evening. I’m off to commune with the Bandudes.

Old Friends

Posted on 2013/07/28 by danneau

Objects can’t be friends, I know, but sometimes there is something familiar in the feeling of manipulating an object that has become a fixture over the years. So, then, in a fit of teen fantasy about music that swirled around my head (and sometimes still does), in the midst of a summer soaked with Dickey Betts and company playing stuff from Brothers and Sisters, the first post-Duane recording, I went out and bought this:

Old Gold

It’s strange, in a way, that a chance encounter at the Student Union Building a couple of weeks earlier had pretty much decided me that I wouldn’t be pursuing music as a career. The building was on an events-only status, meaning that my games area gig had turned into door security for some events, one of which was a party of some sort where a pick-up band was scheduled to be the entertainment. One of said musicians drove up in a very banged-up Beetle and approached the door with what was clearly a case with some variety of Gibson guitar in it. He was early and pleased enough to show off his ’54 Les Paul Gold Top, then to give a quick overview of what he could do with it (without any sort of amplification), proving that he was a fine musician. We got to talking some, and he allowed that he wasn’t exactly basking in the glow of recognition of his talent, nor was he spending freely the largesse of the music-loving public, little of which seemed to have been deposited in his pockets, and he and his wife were struggling to make ends meet with their two children, even though she worked at a reasonably well-payed job. Apparently, she respected his talent and desire enough to continue to subsidize his playing habit. Finally, he handed the LP over to me, an opportunity I couldn’t resist despite minimal learning and possibly even less innate talent. His example was enough of a cautionary tale, despite his encouraging words, to keep me from ever seriously considering music as a steady gig. However, it never kept me from playing, though mostly in the comfort of my own quarters, where I get to play what I want, when and how I want. I have also managed to acquire other instruments, all of which I like a lot, but this old warhorse has tolerated my moods and continues to pump out lovely sounds when I take the time to work at it. It’s rare, particularly when life seems to be constantly accelerating change cycles, to keep something for forty years, but today is the fortieth anniversary of this particular acquisition and I thought it would be nice to share the thought.

Here is what Bruce (and co-conspirator Garfield) cooked up for me:

Money well spent.

Some Of The Good Stuff Stays Good

Posted on 2013/05/30 by danneau

I first heard James Cotton on the Sam Charters Vanguard anthology Chicago/The Blues/Today in 1965 and saw him on stage at the original Fillmore Auditorium not too long after that, a show where, I believe, he was actually still touring with Otis Spann and S.P. Leary (If you haven’t heard Otis Spann’s barrelhouse piano, I highly recommend it). Highlights since include a show at Winterland where he and his band pulled the rug out from under Cream in March of 1968, a week’s worth of shows at a club called the Egress in Vancouver in 1973 and a show at the Commodore in 1976 (at this show, per usual practise, the band played a couple of warm-up numbers, and Matt Murphy was a real stand-out. I assumed he was in his twenties because of his youthful energy and contemporary chops, but it turns out he’s of an age with Cotton.). I haven’t seen Cotton live for several decades, but have continued to buy his records, and I got this despite feeling that it might be like the Tony Bennett duets stuff, or B.B. King’s 80th birthday set: none of that. He doesn’t sing any more, but he sure can play and, while he has some stellar players with him, they leave lots of room for top-notch harpooning. The set has a really nice feel to it, the tunes are fine, and the stars add to the music rather than dominating it. Not bad having Joe Bonamassa around, or Warren Haynes. Keb Mo’ lends warmth to a couple of cuts and Ruthie Foster and Delbert McClinton each brings a special touch to a tune. Darrell Nulisch, often the singer with Cotton’s band since Cotton gave it up, takes up the mic on other tunes, and the band is always good. Chuck Leavell, a fave since he showed up on the Allmans’ Brothers and Sisters, plays some as well. All in all, I’ve found this a very satisfying set and am happy to reconnect with one of the favourite musicians of my younger days and to find out that everything is cooking along as it seemingly always has.

Rub Eyes, Shake Head

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Category Archives: Music