Over Christmas Davis Rogan was in NY, and we spent an afternoon in my studio playing some music. My friend Tony Jarvis joined us with his tenor sax and bass clarinet, and this track was one of the results. It’s been sitting on my drive 98% finished for months now, so this afternoon I decided to put the finishing touches on it and send it out into the world to fend for itself.

I’ve been interested in this song for many years. It’s one of the most covered tunes of all time, and it’s resilience and malleability never cease to amaze me. You can find an extensive collection of mp3s of many versions here, and a long discussion about the history of the song here.

Davis is a pianist and provocateur from New Orleans who was previously covered here, and who has a myspace here. Tony is a great musician, friend, and neighbor, who currently is playing in the house band at The Box, among other things.

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In other news, I’m currently music supervising David Simon’s new show for HBO, Treme, which is eating me alive — in a good way. But I have plans to start posting more here at The Ten Thousand Things soon. We shall see…

I wrote the score for a new documentary that’s premiering at The Tribeca Film Festival tonight. The film, called Pray The Devil Back to Hell, is about the Liberian Women’s peace movement. It’s directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abby Disney.

This is the second documentary in the last year on an African subject that I have scored (the other was Shadow Work by Nigel Walker). One particular challenge is to create music which has an appropriate African sensibility but is not just ersatz African music, or African kitsch. I always encourage filmmakers to use actual African music if that’s what’s called for — and both of these films do have wonderful uses of authentic music from the places they are set.

Anyway, Pray The Devil Back to Hell needed a real film score to support the intense and moving story of a group of Liberian women who rise up and take on Charles Taylor, ultimately becoming a key factor in bringing a fragile peace to their country. We ended up with a dramatic and quite dark score that uses some African elements but is primarily bass, trumpet, strings and percussion, with some wonderful contributions from the great Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo. It was a great honor to work with Ms. Kidjo, and her extraordinary voice brings a transcendent, human, female element to the music which I could never have created without her.

The track I’m posting here is the song from the end credit sequence. I wrote the music first and gave an instrumental sketch to Angelique, and she wrote the lyrics (in Yoruba) and sang the vocal parts. I also was blessed with a beautiful solo from master Kora player Yacouba Sissouk (who happens to be the cousin of Toumani Diabate). I mixed the track, along with the rest of the score, in my studio.

All of the screenings of Pray The Devil Back to Hell at Tribeca are sold out, but you can get more info about screenings at the official site for the film. You can also see the trailer at that site, which features some other excerpts from the score. And the film has a Myspace here.

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.

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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.

Today finds us with a triple-pronged post about The Beatles. Yes, those The Beatles. One of the very first records I owned and loved, in 1971 at the age of eight, was a scratched vinyl LP of A Hard Days Night, which for some reason came to me inside the cardboard sleeve of With The Beatles. I played that thing to death, and later moved on to most of the band’s other catalogue. But after the age of 14 when I discovered The Clash, and John Cage shortly thereafter, I never voluntarily listened to The Beatles again. As an adult I have mostly felt about The Beatles the same way I feel about Beethoven; geniuses who revolutionized music, but all due respect, I’d most often rather listen to Bach.

Eighteen months ago I started working as the sound designer on Julie Taymor’s new film Across The Universe, and I was surprised to realize that not only do I know the lyrics to almost every Beatles song by heart, but the music is stunning. This may seem like a vapid or disingenuous statement, but I mean it sincerely. At this point in history, The Beatles music has become an archetypal cultural touchstone to Western Civilization that functions in the same way folk music has operated for earlier cultures.

Across The Universe is a musical featuring 35 re-imagined Beatles songs. It tells the story of a young man from Liverpool named Jude who comes to America looking for his father and becomes embroiled in the counter-culture of the 1960’s in New York. The film features new versions of the songs, sung live by the actors, with a few celebrity cameos from the likes of Bono (I Am The Walrus) and Joe Cocker (Come Together). The film is 95% finished, and I think it’s great - one of the most enjoyable working experiences of my career, and the most elaborate sound design I have created since The Abyss in 1989. The film is scheduled for a release in September 2007, and you can see the (corny but effective) trailer here.

Since I’ve been spending so much ear-time on The Beatles, I keep stumbling across Beatles-related items and cover-versions, and today’s mp3 post is one of my favorites. Laibach are a group of Slovenian conceptual-industrialist crypto-nationalist parodist nutjobs who archly responded to charges of fascism by saying “We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.” Their 1988 re-working of Let It Be is a radical demonstration of the durability of The Beatles music; the songs maintain their integrity and essential function even when torn to pieces musically, politically, sonically, and artistically. If you like this track as much as me, be warned that it is not typical of the Uber-metal thrashing screaming stuff which beautifully comprises most of the rest of the album. You can buy this version of Let It Be here. Laibach have an official site here, and their Wikipedia entry here is efficiently enlightening. Thanks to my colleague Igor Nikolic for suggesting this record to me.

The final prong for today is the extraordinary book Recording The Beatles by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew. If you are interested in the historical development of the recording studio, or you love gear, or you are a technically-inclined fan of popular music, this is a bible. Exhaustively, obsessively, insanely, the authors have documented the minutiae of everything related to how The Beatles records were created. We get floor plans and architect’s blueprints for the studios at Abbey Road, detailed photos of knobs, nostalgic recollections from the tiniest of minor technicians, diagrams of who sat where, lists of percussion instruments used on specific tracks, on and on and on. And the whole thing comes in a beautiful collectors-edition package big enough to prop open the heaviest asylum door. Could these guys PLEASE make another book like this about Lee Perry??? Mind-boggling and highly recommended. You can see excerpts and buy it 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.

I was the Sound Designer on Julie Taymor’s film Frida, which in addition to a lovely (Oscar-winning) score by gentleman and scholar Elliot Goldenthal, includes a boat-load of fantastic traditional Mexican music. This beautiful Pirekua song from Trio Los Chapas appeared in the Dio De Los Muertos graveyard scene, and it has captivated me since I first heard it. It will most likely captivate you too, especially as today is again Dio De Los Muertos. Pirekuas are the traditional songs of the Purepecha Indians of central Mexico.

The soundtrack CD for Frida includes some of the best Mexican music used in the film, but not this track. You can find it on a compilation from the excellent Mexican Corason label here, or to order in the states try here. The soundtrack to Frida is here, and the DVD is here. More info about Dio De Los Muertos can be found here.

Nelson Riddle’s exquisite arrangements are the perfect frame for Sinatra’s crying into his beer after Ava Gardner left him in 1955, and the combination of Riddle’s unexpected harmonic tangents with Sinatra’s new-found earnestness give the record an unprecedented emotional weight. In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning was Sinatra’s first 12″ album, and a landmark of 20th Century popular music, cited as a major influence by everyone from Tom Waits to Miles Davis. We can also credit Sinatra and Riddle here with one of the first “concept albums”, a coherent collection of music with a common mood, and a beginning, middle, and end, rather than a random collection of popular tunes or an overview of a particular composer’s catalog.

Check the woodwinds… the opening phrases here, reminiscent of Stravinsky (!), are a stellar example of Riddle’s genius.

You can find In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning 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.

Nonesuch have finally re-released the long out-of-print classics Red and Green from Malian guitar master Ali Farka Toure. Previously available only on vinyl, these were originally put out on a small label in 1984 and 1988. This track comes from Green and is typical of the raw intensity of this music.

If you’re new to Ali Farka Toure and his brand of desert blues, this double-CD set is a great place to start; if you’re a fan, these are essential listening. You can find Red and Green here.

And oh… samplers and loop gurus take note: in this track at 3:47 there’s a hypnotic section of voice and calabash without guitar which would make a very useful loop in another context.

In 1994 the Senegalese Person of the Century teamed up with the stepdaughter of the Romanticist Pocket Trumpet Revolutionary to produce this planetary pop hit.

Youssou N’Dour has an official site here. If you are in a hurry, check the BBC’s Youssou N’Dour In One Minute. Find this song on 7 Seconds: The Best of Youssou N’Dour, which you can buy here.