It’s Almost a New Year and the Blog is Still Right Where It Was, Right Here

Well, two months ago or so, I announced that I was moving the blog over to my other page, and I still haven't. It's been a busy and rough two months. The most exciting music news, for me, is that my beloved Pentangle, the original line-up, is playing a show next summer in London. I truly doubt I'll get across the pond to see it, but what I'm really hoping for is an album. Then I can die happy.

Y'know, I always say that, but after this year I'd say that I will never ever be happy. For a few months this year I had pretty much everything I thought I needed to make me happy, and it simply didn't. I was still neurotic, still obsessive, still living a Woody Allen script directed by David Lynch. I know I'm skirting the edges of adolescent emo-ness (of course, that's not a word), *emotiveness*, maybe, but I think it's time I just accept that I'm going to be a miserable bastard no matter what comes my way. Most of my friends, during the course of this year, have said just that, and I've actually started to believe it.

So, for now, dear friends, I'm going to open up this page to strangers again (they're just friends you don't hate yet) and keep the blog right where it is. And I don't actually hate all of you; some of you are damned fine human beings. Thanks.

My New Year's Resolutions are simple, and I'm not even going to bother to read the surely emo ones I posted last year: finish the diss, get the PhD, live well, play more music with people.

Hope you all have a happy and safe new year, kids, and live well.

Currently listening : Off the Wall By Michael Jackson Release date: 16 October, 2001

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Judging Me, Judging You is Moving
Current mood: tired

Friends: this weekend I will be condensing my two myspace pages, this one and the former Room 19 page into one. _Judging Me, Judging You_, with its quasi-defunct mix of lists, reviews, and bile, will be reactivate, starting with a review of the A&E tv show, _Mad Men_ early next week, and all the album lists and worthwhile blog posts will be reposted over there.

So, if you're not friended or subscribed over there, please do so. It's myspace.com/leealanbleyer.

Friend me now, or friend me later.

See you on the other side.

Currently listening : Album By Shelagh McDonald Release date: 12 December, 2000

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Boots Randolph 1927-2007

The news services are reporting the death of saxophonist Boots Randolph at the age of 80. And, predictably, they're focusing on "Yakety Sax", the rockabilly instrumental that most people know as "the music from Benny Hill" and Randolph's legacy as a session musician, "Mr. Sax." As a music snob and armchair critic, though, I have a lot more to say about Boots Randolph than what I'm reading on the news services. Through the years, I've been as quick to dismiss the commercial and the frivolous as anyone - ask my non-music-geek friends - but Boots Randolph has always been something different. He possessed an amazing set of chops and the most clear, gorgeous tone I have ever heard. He was also (along with Floyd Cramer and Chet Atkins) part of the Nashville session mafia of the 50s and 60s who played with everybody who was anybody: Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison (The Big O referred to Boots as 'my good luck charm' when recording his 60s classics), Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis. Yet, Randolph's true love was jazz - hard bop; and his professed inspirations were Charlie Parker and Lester Young.

Boots Randolph was also the very first musician I was obsessed with. I was 10 and had been playing alto for about a year. One of my parents' neighbors gave me her late husband's copy of the _Yakety Sax_ album because I played, and I was set down the road to obsessing about music, obsessing about musicians, and, of course, collecting records (what a long long road that was and is). I would discover in turn the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and classic rock, the British folk-rock that is my great passion, progressive rock, punk, and "real" jazz - and those sounds eclipsed "Yakety Sax", but the place it holds in my heart is a near and dear one.

Of the many albums Randolph made from the late 50s until this year (_A Whole New Ballgame_ was released earlier this month), the vast majority teeter between two extremes - those modelled on his Monument debut, _Yakety Sax_, which mix short rockabilly cum r&b instrumentals with honky tonk versions of country ballads, and those which present Boots, usually with orchestra and chorus, doing straight versions of ridiculously inappropriate material (Boots covering "Feelings" and "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" in much the way Tony Bennett covered "The Age of Aquarius" and "Little Green Apples" around the same time). The 'yakety' albums are pleasant, well-played, and occasionally inspired on songs like "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "I Fall to Pieces", notable largely because the arrangements straddle a line between R&B (King Curtis, after all, was the inspiration for "Yakety Sax") and country. There are also occasional moments when Randolph's ridiculous abilities burst out of the stock arrangments, as on the 1965 version of George Jones's "The Race Is On" in which he and harpist Charlie McCoy trade fours for a few glorious verses. The orchestral, pop hits albums are, predictably, painful - especially during the '70s - when any nod to creativity has been reduced, roughly to the sound of a very fine tenor saxophonist playing in a karaoke bar.

Among all these, though, there is one incredible gem of an album. Before Boots's career had been utterly defined, by television, and by sales, as the Yakin' Sax Man, he recorded a pure post-bop album, _Hip Boots_. Never issued on CD, it begs for re-release: Randolph, Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer (everyone's uncredited by Atkins and Cramer are unmistakable), and an incredibly funky rhythm section tear through "Billy's Bounce", "On the Street Where You Live", "Crazy Rhythm" (with Boots on baritone, a rarity in his catalog.) And on the albums "cool" tracks, "Relaxin" and "Body and Soul", Randolph rivals any early pre-skronk Coltrane for urbanity and grace. And if all this isn't enough, his unaccompanied solo in the middle of "Harlem Nocturne" still gives me shivers.

I've always wished that this consummate player and, as virtually all reports agree, incredibly good human being, would make just one more jazz album. And, apparently, that's just what he did. His new record, _A Whole New Ballgame_ is a return to his bop roots. I've an unused itunes giftcard and a free night, so I think I'll pour myself a drink, buy the album, and toast Boots Randolph. Rest in peace, Mr. Sax.

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"And Terry's Playing his Glockenspiel": Sweet Child and the Deconstruction of Popular Music
Current mood: silly

The most creative popular music has always been postmodern and post-structural; it is born in that liminal space where notions of essentialism are replaced by fluidity of identity, where European tradition meets African tradition, where symphonic music meets the folk ballad, where Appalachian song meets ragtime, where gospel meets the devil's music, to steal the hoary blues cliche: it exists at the crossroads, where opposites are simultaneously true, negating and reinscribing one another endlessly. The rise post-_Sgt. Pepper_ of commercial pop music as 'art' in serious circles resulted in a curious phenomena: the bounds that popular music depended upon for this very creativity, its continued vibrancy dependent upon being 'other', were being reinscribed by critics - rock 'n' roll was becoming the power structure, the dominant hegemony of musical art. The large-scale deconstruction of 'rock as art' is usually dated to the mid-seventies rise of punk, or, at best, credited to the Velvet Underground, laboring away unsuccessfully in New York singing of s&m and drug addiction while everyone else held flowers and dropped acid.

In reality, the deconstruction of the process of the making of musical artifact, of album, did not belong to the Velvet Underground alone. Dylan's Nashville phase, Zappa's orchestral endeavors, and The Beatles themselves in the satiric and self-parodic history of popular music that is the white album deconstruct "Rock" as signifier. The Pentangle's second album, 1968's _Sweet Child_, is an album that belongs surely to this movement. In addition to being an endlessly pleasurable listen (if a hair's breadth short of their debut), it wears its postmodernism, quite literally, on its sleeve.

The album art for_ Sweet Child_ was designed by Peter Blake, who had designed the cover for _Sgt. Pepper_. Its front depicts a woodcut of the band's signature pentagram. Inside, brief commentaries on each of the double album's songs are placed beside pictures that illustrate the songs, ranging from Waterhouse's _Lady of Shalott_ for "A Woman Like You" to a stylized pseudo-illuminated manuscript Christ for "No More My Lord" to portraits of Lester Young ("Goodbye Pork-pie Hat") and Moondog ("Moon Dog"). The rear of the sleeve depicts the five members of the Pentangle individually, with Danny Thompson appearing with his wife, child, and bass; Terry Cox with is children; John Renbourn with his guitar; Bert Jansch with his dog; and Jacqui McShee, unaccompanied by family, instruments, or animals. What distinguishes _Sweet Child_ from the debut (apart from its length; in its original form, it is nearly three times the playing time of _The Pentangle_), is this break down of the band into a collection of individuals. The debut presents the full group on all but one of its tracks (the handclapping on "Waltz" is likely McShee, which leaves only "Bells" missing her involvement) and largely presents eight songs that fall somewhere within the liminal space between folk, blues, rock, jazz, gospel, bluegrass and the rest of the spectrum of Western popular musics; _Sweet Child_, particularly on its live first disc breaks the band down both by personnel and by influence.

Recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall in May of 1968, the first disc of _Sweet Child_ includes only four tracks that feature all five members of the Pentangle, the opening two ("Market Song", "No More My Lord" and last two tracks ("The Time Has Come", "Bruton Town"). Between these four sparkling performances, in which the band interracts as if five parts of the same person, in the very best post-bop tradition, we hear the band broken down into component parts: Jansch ("A Woman Like You") and McShee ("So Early in the Spring") each appear totally solo; Renbourn and McShee ("Turn Your Money Green"), Renbourn and Cox ("Three Dances"), and Cox and Thompson ("Haitian Fight Song") appear as duos; Renbourn, Thompson and McShee perform "Watch the Stars", and the four instrumentalists appear on "No Exit" and "Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat" (both of which had earlier appeared on Jansch and Renbourn's duo album _Bert and John_). This technique of concert presentation had evolved from the band's earliest folk club gigs, where, as noted in Colin Harper's biography of Jansch, _Dazzling Stranger_, members showed up at different times, were off in a pub for a drink, needed a break, and so on. On record, what had begun as a practical necessity becomes a commentary on the nature of this band and its influences: the Renbourn-Cox presentation of three medieval to Elizabethan dance tunes on guitar and glockenspiel sits side-by-side with McShee singing a Furry Lewis blues, "Turn Your Money Green", accompanied by Renbourn, sounding most un-Elizabethan. Jansch's otherworldy "A Woman Like You", perhaps his best original song would later form the centerpiece of his solo _Birthday Blues_
and here shows just how much he was the soul of the band. Thompson's showcase, "Haitian Fight Song" is a Charles Mingus cover, as is "Good-bye Pork-Pie Hat", Mingus's own tribute to saxist Lester Young. This is an album about homage, about borrowing, about reconfiguring, and about paying tribute; Dorris Henderson, with whom Renbourn had previously recorded "Watch the Stars" and Anne Briggs, Jansch's sometime collaborator, major influence on the Britfolk scene, and author of "The Time Has Come" also receive tribute. The technique of breaking the band down into soloists and breaking its influences into pieces that belong to very particular traditions (the country blues of Furry Lewis, the Elizabethan dance tunes) is an extraordinarily effective subtextual means of defining who this band was, what they were drawing on, and in the four full-band tracks, where they were going and where they'd been ("Bruton Town" had first appeared on the debut). This technique would be used later in the world of progressive rock by both Pink Floyd (_Ummagumma_) and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (both volumes of _Works_), but never so well, or so purposefully.

With the business of deconstructing themselves and their music mostly out of the way, the band uses the studio second half of _Sweet Child_ to expand the vision of their debut. Sonically very similar to _The Pentangle_, small flourishes are introduced to the formula - Cox plays African drums, to great effect on several songs, making for a more idiosyncratic, less bop-derived rhythmic attack; Jansch contributes more vocals, and Renbourn and Cox each sing as well. Further, the songwriting is growing more complex; the sole new original band composition on the first disc, "Market Song" suggests the direction the band would follow - lyrics that are suggestive of multiple meanings, but seldom literal, allusive in the tradition of aislings or dream visions, but never muddled, accompanied by shifts in time signature and sometimes key from verse to chorus to bridge. Cox's solo track, "Moon Dog" dispenses with chords and changes entirely - it pays heartfelt tribute to Viking-helmetted New York street musician Charles "Moondog" Hardin with only Cox's vocal and those African drums. Elsewhere, three English traditional songs, "I Loved a Lass", "Sovay", and "The Trees They Do Grow High" are rendered more subtley than "Bruton Town", marrying a chamber jazz approach to material that could easily appear heavy-handed in lesser hands. The chamber jazz approach appears, sans lyrics and vocals, on "Three Part Thing" and "In Time", which fuse baroque structures and motifs with bop-derived soloing, in a fashion not unlike that of Third Stream composers Gunther Schuller and Jimmy Giuffre (and Mingus, too, for a brief period). The record's most memorable tracks, finally, though may be the originals "In Your Mind" and "I've Got a Feeling." The latter is a fairly straightforward blues "borrowed" from Miles Davis's "All Blues" ("I've got a feeling we stole it . . .", Jansch announces on the band's 1970 BBC TV special), most notable for the passion of its performance as these five Brits reclaim and reinvent American jazz and make it something uniquely theirs. The former is the pinnacle of the band's early songwriting, presenting a round sung by Jansch, McShee, and Renbourn, whose lyrics mirror the deconstructive nature of the band's oevre: each vocal line changing point of view, timbre, and melody like spokes on a wheel of Cox's drumming, Thompson's bass, and Renbourn's guitar. Unlike virtually everyone writing popular songs in the late sixties, the members of the Pentangle claimed not only no influence by the Beatles of Dylan, they claimed almost complete ignorance. While such statements may be merely self-mythologizing, songs like "In Your Mind" suggest they could indeed be telling the truth. Or not.

Currently listening : Sweet Child By Pentangle Release date: 24 May, 2001

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Death Alone Walks with No One to Converse with: The Pentangle
Current mood: struggling against emotive

I'm a bit rusty with this whole blogging about music, thinking too much, judging me, judging you thing, but I thought I'd throw myself back in, at last beginning my re-evaluation of the Pentangle and Bert Jansch. I've decided to start with the Pentangle albums before I tackle Jansch, though, so here goes.

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The Pentangle's self-titled debut, released early in 1968, has always been an album that is difficult to place into pop musical context, sounding simultaneously ancient and modern, drawing on the traditions of blues, jazz, folk balladry, gospel, early music, and a soupcon of everything else, all at once, in a combination that is at once instantly recognizable and consistently foreign. Perhaps that's what draws me to it and to them; this is music that is constantly challenging, and rewards repeated attention. It's also pure ear-candy, a marvelous combination of production and performance. And, most importantly, as always, it's soulful.

The orginal Pentangle concept was to draw upon each of its five members' considerable talents equally (it's a five-pointed star, get it?) Gradually, as the band's fortunes waxed and waned, conditions grew far less democratic, but here on the debut, this is truly a band of equals. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn bring the dual-baroque-blues acoustic guitars, interweaving lead and rhythm in a fashion that rivals any pairing you'd care to mention (Richards-Jones, Fripp-Belew, Richards-Taylor, Morrison-Reed). Jacqui McShee, who had apprenticed as a blues singer in London, and sung on Renbourn's second album, Another Monday, provides occasionally otherworldly vocals that are by turns tender and ghostly, and affectingly human when her very British pronunciations combine (not always perfectly) with her Americanized blues phrasings. Danny Thompson and Terry Cox provide the bop-leaning rhythm section that propels it all, squeezing the most out of the tricky polyrhythms without ever sounding merely professional, without ever once falling into wankery.

Encompassing eight songs and a running time of just over a half-hour, _The Pentangle_ wastes no notes. Airy production from Shel Talmy (who'd previously made a name for himself suing the Who for not recording enough of his compositions and making the Kinks sound like their albums were recorded in a room filled with feathers using a mixing board made entirely of tin cans and string) is a minor miracle: it's spacious, and, apart from a little abuse of the panpots during the bass and drum solos, doesn't sound in any way dated. The opener, "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme", an ancient 'come-all-ye' has been described as volcanic, and McShee demands full attention from the moment she opens her mouth. "Bells" (originally titled "Belles of St. Mary's") follows, the first of the band's signature instrumentals, in which Jansch, Renbourn, Thompson, and Cox spin some amalgam of blues/bop/folk out of a series of interrelated figures (and it has a drum solo that is not gratuitous, to boot). "Hear My Call" is a seriously swinging cover of a Staples Singers song, propelled by an irresistible Thompson descending riff. The album's first original, "Pentangling" became a central part of the band's concert repertoire, joining an opening segment that begins to suggest Swinging London pop, before turning into a boppish jam, a bass solo, and a final segment that is furious double-tempo folksong. I've been listening to this song for more than twenty years and still have almost no idea what it's about, but it contains the line "Death Alone Walks with No One to Converse With" and that's hard to argue, er, with.

"Mirage" is pop song rendered Pentangular, a love ballad written by Jansch featuring the sort of cryptic melancholic lyrics that defined his early solo work (and which were a major influence on the young Nick Drake). "Way Behind the Sun" has been credited both as a traditional song and as a band composition; either way, it's a rollicking blues, with McShee doing her best impression of Southern blues diva. "Bruton Town", on the other hand, is pure (or impure) traditional, a murder ballad of the sort that would define the careers of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span just a few years after this album. McShee and Jansch debut here a feature of all the Pentangle albums to come, duetting and providing a perfect light/dark, soft/husk contrast in their harmonies; the song indeed is such a showpiece for all five that it provided the opener for the band's reunion on BBC radio earlier this year. "Waltz", an instrumental based on a combination of Renbourn's early solo track "Waltz" and on Davy Graham's cover of Charles Mingus's "Better Get Hit in Your Soul" (aka "Better Git It in Yo Soul", rewritten as both "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" and "Slop"), sees the album out on a shambolic virtuoso tour-de-force, a group of Brits channeling everyone from Cecil Sharp to Mingus himself, and spitting the pieces back in Joycean quilted fashion. This is as close to a perfect debut album as anyone has ever released, endlessly new, and comfortingly familiar.

The 2001 re-rerelease adds seven bonus tracks, the most interesting being the instrumental "Koan" (called "Koran" on the recent box set) and an edit of several takes of "Bruton Town" that features a head-spinning Renbourn solo. Band versions of Jansch's solo songs "The Wheel" and "The Casbah" are unremarkable, though an instrumental version of "Way Behind the Sun" is a nice curiosity since it features Renbourn on slide guitar).

Currently listening : The Pentangle By Pentangle Release date: 10 July, 2001

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Goodbye CUA

Goodbye, CUA, it's been a good run . . .

More on this later; I need a cigarette . . .

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Greatest Movie Ever
Current mood: sleepy

Well, I saw the Aqua Teen movie, and the first five minutes were unbelievably hysterical. I fell asleep for a stretch in the middle (20 minutes? 30 minutes? hard to tell); it had been a long week and a long day yesterday before I got to the theatre, so I guess I'll be going to see it again. However, I am more than convinced by the evidence that I have that Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theatres is, in fact, the greatest film in the history of cinema.

I have spoken.

Currently listening : Songs from the Wood By Jethro Tull Release date: 20 May, 2003

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Charming Pretense
Current mood: sick

After a trying week with no phone (and probably another week without phone; maybe without it surgically attached to my ear, I can get some work done . . . maybe), missed student conferences, and general exhaustion, Eno and Cale's "One Word" just made me smile. There really should be more songs that reference Augustus John. Does that make me an elitist? Or is it just that I am charmed, again and again, by pretentiousness? God bless John Cale. And Brian Eno, too.

Currently listening : Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night By Stereolab Release date: 21 September, 1999

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Pentangling
Current mood: good

I have returned from the non-blogging universe to begin my most ambitious project here on Judging Me, Judging You since the favorite albums 1958-2006 project that I never actually fleshed out.

Over the next weeks and months, I'm going to attempt to collect all of my various writings on Bert Jansch, the Pentangle, and the numerous offshoots of the Pentangle family.  Jansch and the Pentangle have been severely undervalued both critically and commercially, but in the last few months, following Jansch's brief North American tour in support of his lovely new album The Black Swan, activity in those camps has markedly increased.  To wit, the original line-up of the Pentangle reunited for a performance on BBC2, received a Lifetime Achievement Award, from the Beeb, are the subject of a new box set (due out in the next few weeks), and may even do some live dates.

Watch this space for the collected reviews, tributes, and recollections of my twenty-odd years (God, I'm old) of obsessing on the music of Bert Jansch and the Pentangle.

Currently listening : Moonshine By Bert Jansch Release date: 07 December, 2001

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Stuff of Sleep and Dreams
Current mood: silly

I don't often remember my dreams. When I do, they're mostly of the nightmare/night terror variety, and they feature the most heavy-handed, nearly medieval/allegorical imagery possible. If my subconscious is trying to tell me things, it assumes I'm not a terribly perceptive critic: through the years, my dreams have been filled with duels, trains (getting hit by a train while carrying saxophones is a recent-ish personal favorite), houses filled with dead family members (once even including Livia Soprano; I'm apparently not limited to my own dead family members). Last week, I dreamed I was crushed in a maze whose walls kept getting tighter and tighter. Perhaps my favorite is the sole flying dream I've ever recalled having: I could fly and I also happened to be mentally retarded.

And that brings me to today. I fell asleep this afternoon and dreamed that I had ordered a pizza, but the delivery guy brought instead five loaves of bread and seventeen (yes, seventeen) packages of vanilla pudding. Anyone out there know anything about dream imagery? What is the significance of dreaming of bread and pudding? And now it's Sunday night and I'm really jonesing for vanilla pudding.

Damned afternoon naps.

Currently listening : Monsieur Gainsbourg: Revisited By Various Artists Release date: 01 August, 2006

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