My friend and collaborator Andre Burke passed away this year on June 30th. Andre has played violin on my most important and personal music since 1993. My last solo record, Shadow Economy, released in 2000, featured Andre on six of the eight tracks. We have been working intermittently since then on a collection of new music which will finally be released this year on December 23rd, which would have been Andre’s 48th birthday. The new record is called X-Ray Yankee Zulu Tango, and this is the opening track, Milonga Del Zero.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andre’s violin playing the last few months. Thinking about how I, as a composer, could give Andre a few scrawls on a piece of staff paper, and he would give me back music. Music infused with emotion, with attitude, with life. Composing is often regarded as somehow “above” mere musicianship, a higher form of artistic expression. But with Andre, his violin could always transform a simple, even trite, idea into a rich and seductive landscape. Consider the two-note phrase that opens “Total Harmonic Distortion”, our collaboration from the previous record (which you can hear here): nothing but a simple whole-step up. Two notes played one after the other. Could anything be simpler from a compositional point-of-view? And yet, listen to Andre play those two notes, and it has all the life and emotion one needs from music.

Another two-note example: the minor third played in the end theme from “The Wire” (the track called “The Fall”, which you can hear an excerpt from here). Those two notes, played that way, give you the necessary humanity in the midst of a track which is otherwise mostly machines. I think it’s the violin which makes this track exceptional, and it’s probably the most popular piece of music I’ve ever written.

So there will be no more now. Andre is gone, and I’m left with only the music. A dozen years of violining now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A finite body of work.

Thank you Andre, I miss you.

*****

Andre has a web site with selected examples of his writing and filmmaking here. You can see some of Andre’s films here. Our previous record together, Shadow Economy, is available from Amazon, CD Baby, and the iTunes Music Store.

This new release from Harkit Records out of the UK appears to be the most definitive and complete release yet of Komeda’s brilliant score for Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby. It *appears* to be, but it’s hard to be definitive, because like so much else surrounding Polanski, and particulary this film, the specific details are always somehow shrouded in mystery.

The liner notes to this version contain many compelling factoids such as:

Directed by Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, he actress Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his followers, who titled their death spree “Helter Skelter” after the song by The Beatles, whose leader, John Lennon, would one day live (and in 1980 be murdered) in the Manhattan apartment building called The Dakota — where Rosemary’s Baby had been filmed.

and

To keep the rituals and chants as realistic as possible, director Roman Polanski had Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and composer of “The Satanic Bibles,” serve as an assistant in the ritual scenes. In return for his help, LaVey was allowed to play Satan in the “impregnating sequence.”

That’s all well and good, but couldn’t the liner notes tell us something about the difference between the two tracks both called “Main Title” which seem to be alternate versions?? Which one is the actual Main Title?? I’m posting track 1 from the CD. There have been several releases of this soundtrack over the years, and no amount of Googling can sort out the details — accusations abound of re-records, mislabeled tracks, shoddy remastering, bootlegs, etc etc. Suffice to say that this release contains a lot of astounding music, which sounds like it was taken straight from the mag masters of the film. There is also a “jazz” version of the main theme recorded live in a Warsaw club in 1989 which starts out as a breathtaking avant garde vocal interpretation but then devolves into kitsch jazz after the 80 second mark, and two takes of Komeda improvising around the theme at the piano, apparently while writing it. These improvisations are remarkable in their spontaneity and rawness - not a view of the composing process one usually gets on a soundtrack CD. It actually seems unlikely to me that Komeda would have agreed to their release if he were still alive.

Krzysztof Komeda was the Polish Jazz master who scored 65 films, including ten for Roman Polanski, the first being Polanski’s 1958 student short Two Men and A Wardrobe. He died from head injuries sustained in a mysterious accident shortly after completing the score to Rosemary’s Baby. (Anybody know that story? The details on that are also mysteriously impregnable to Google searches).

You can buy this version of the Rosemary’s Baby soundtrack here, or from the label in the UK here. Harkit has also just released another excellent Komeda/Polanski score, The Fearless Vampire Killers, which you can find here and here. Komeda has an official (posthumous) web site here.

On April 11th Nonesuch are releasing a special 25th anniversary edition of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, the record which changed the course of music by combining found vocals with “world” music influenced musical collages, giving rise to a new genre of sampled music and influencing everyone from Public Enemy to… Moby?

The new version contains all of the original tracks remastered, plus seven previously unavailable outtake tracks. Well, almost all of the original tracks… the track featured here, Qu’ran, has not been included on most versions of the record since shortly after it’s initial release. A partial explanation for this comes from the enoweb site:

The Islamic Council of Great Britain had approached the record company with a complaint about the use of the “found” material [a ritual chanting of the Holy Koran. Actually, I’m surprised that anyone got permission to even tape it in the first place]; There are some expressions of Islam in which *all* music is considered “haram” [I think that’s the Arabic term, anyway] - or against the teachings of the Koran. There is an argument about whether or not Mohammed (pbuh) stated that “music” for use in certain Islamic festivals or special occasions *is* allowable, but that’s for folks who know the Surahs better than I.

At any rate, the Islamic Council voiced its strong disapproval of having the original source material used in the way it was used [in some ways, the objection is really quite similar to that raised by Kathryn Kuhlman’s estate when they wanted her sermon on Lot and the angels removed from what finally became “The Jezebel Spirit”], and in the days of watching the Fatwahs [pronouncements of death] fly back and forth, Eno and his pals deemed it meet to exclude it. “Very Very Hungry” was added instead. However, my copy of it includes both, so some other judgements must have been made later [I think that my copy is a domestic one, so perhaps that’s why]. {The track could for many years be found on the US releases of the cd.

More detail from enoweb here.

I am making Qu’ran available here for a limited time because I believe it to be one of the best tracks of this important part of 20th century music history.

There is a great site about the new release here. You can buy the new 25th anniversary release of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts (minus Qu’ran) here.

Lee Scratch Perry turns 70 today, March 20th. This track, sung in appropriated Hindi by an un-credited vocalist, comes from the 1978 masterpiece Return of The Super Ape, which Perry recorded with The Upsetters as a sequel to the original Super Ape.

A great background article about Perry from Sasha Frere Jones can be found here. The Dub Discussion Board has some interesting background on the lyrics to Bird in Hand here. Apparently Scratch borrowed the Hindi words from a song which he heard in a 1950 film called Babul directed by Raj Kapoor.

Lee Perry has a site here. You can buy Return of The Super Ape for a measly $8.98 here.

Happy birthday Scratch.

In 1992 Gershwin historian Artis Wodehouse transferred twelve of Gershwin’s piano roll performances from 1916 - 1927 into a Yamaha Disklavier, creating brand-new pristine digital recordings of those performances. The resulting CD, Gershwin Plays Gershwin, is a fascinating historical document as well as a toe-tapping romp, with a somewhat ethereal, outside-of-time quality. It contains several previously unknown compositions, like this track Novelette in Fourths, as well as a 14-minute rendition of Rhapsody in Blue and a piano roll masterwork from Gershwin’s editor Frank Milne which arranges An American in Paris for two pianos over almost 17 minutes.

Gershwin was something of a piano roll virtuoso, creating sophisticated arrangements, complete with over-dubbing, for the medium which was extremely popular in the 1920s. In the CD liner notes there is a quote in which he recalls one of his first musical memories from the age of six:

‘I stood outside a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping through Rubinstein’s Melody in F. The peculiar jumps in the music held me rooted. To this very day I can’t hear the tune without picturing myself outside the arcade on 125th Street, standing there barefoot and in overalls, drinking it all in avidly.’

In fact, it turns out that Gershwin actually learned to play the piano at the age of ten by studying piano rolls, which he would slow down and mimic. While some composers initially dismissed piano rolls as a mechanical gimmick, Gershwin had always embraced the medium, and went on to create 130 carefully crafted rolls, using the finest technology of the era.

Nonesuch re-released the CD along with a second volume featuring not only Gershwin’s own compositions, but his piano roll interpretations of several other composer’s popular works of the time. You can find Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls here. There’s a Volume 2 here. Artis Wodehouse has a site here, which includes several detailed articles describing the process she used to bring Gershwin’s rolls into the digital era.

Ennio Morricone must be not just one of the most prolific composers of the modern age, but one of the most prolific artists, period. Maestro has written over 500 film scores and released hundreds of CDs. Each year dozens of new Morricone compilations hit the shelves, most of them lazily curated based more on licensing agreements than any guiding aesthetic principle. But now… here is something of a different order: On November 29th Ipecac will release Crime And Dissonance, a stunning double-disc set compiled by Morricone-freak Alan Bishop. The collection focusses on Morricone’s out/avant-garde/experimental work, and some of it is pretty out… heartbeats, metal screeches, orgasmic breathing, metal screeches, and impossible time signatures abound. But it’s not all screechy free jazz, either… there are plenty of quiet, moody, textural sets. The sequencing is outstanding, sound quality is superb, and the liner notes are by John Zorn.

It’s hard to pick a single track to excerpt here, but I’m going with 1970, from the Dario Argento horror movie Il Gatto A Nove Code (The Cat of Nine Tails), which starred Karl Malden as a blind man searching for a killer.

This is in no way a definitive Morricone collection ~ it’s not trying to be, and as Alan Bishop says “a definitive collection of his work would have to be at least 50 hours of material” ~ but it is a truly magnificent collection of some of the composer’s lesser known and more fascinating work. Absolutely essential listening.

More detailed info about the release at the label here, and a very interesting interview with curator Alan Bishop here. You can buy Crime And Dissonance here.

This is one of my favorite Waits songs and was already almost unbearably poignant and nostalgic last week; today, I defy you to listen and not get a lump in your throat. It comes from Small Change, Waits’ 1976 outing which you can find here.

While I don’t exactly wish I was in New Orleans tonight, I do have a bit of that feeling that I should be there. People with emotional ties to New York who weren’t here on September 11th 2001 said the same thing. New Orleans is one of the very few American cities I have ever wanted to live in. Some of the best and worst times of my life happened there. She owns a piece of me.

For an interesting insider perspective on current events in New Orleans, including eyewitness reports of police looting (only in N’awlins!), check out The Interdictor.

Here’s a 14-minute-long, rambling improvisation that also happens to be one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever written. It came up this morning on the random play from my iPod and somehow seemed like a good end of summer mood, so I thought I’d share.

It’s taken from my 2000 CD Shadow Economy, and features my long-time collaborator Andre Burke playing violin, myself on fretless bass, and Chris Muir on guitar. You can find more information about Shadow Economy here, and buy a copy of the CD from Amazon here, or from CD Baby here.  Buy Shadow Economy from The iTunes Store here.  And you can get this track for free anytime here.  Enjoy!

Sometimes you just need to hear all those Brazillian girls singing in unison over guitars and percussion. This track is unusual in it’s rubato feel and relative lack of groove, making it even more haunting. It comes from the sensational Afro Sambas, Baden Powell’s collaboration with poet Vinícius de Moraes. This is the 1990 re-recording of the 1966 masterpiece.

While the 1966 recording is long out-of-print and remains something of a holy grail for Brazillian music aficionados, you can find the 1990 version here. Another fantastic Baden Powell record is Seresta Brasileira which is available here.

Bernard Herrmann was the greatest film score composer of the 20th Century, and Vertigo is arguably his finest score. While Hitchcock was one of the great film auteurs, his best work is unimaginable without Herrmann’s music. North By Northwest is their most exciting score, Psycho the most terrifying, and The Birds the most eerie and experimental. But Vertigo is the most haunting and psychological, giving perfect external expression to the character’s interior states.

I’m taking this from the 16-track 1995 restoration release, featuring the London Sinfonia Conducted by Muir Matheison, which features the most complete and definitive version of the original score. You can find this version here. There’s lots more information about this and other scores at The Bernard Herrmann Society.