Going To Have To Be Better

     The net goodness of the world diminished a little yesterday, when Dolly Parton died.  In the face of a world filled with all manner of monstrous evil, she pushed back.

     You're going to hear a lot of talk about Dolly Parton being inherently good, a a simple country girl from a poor family* who rose to great heights -- but from the evidence, she worked at being good; once her success reached a point where a high and steady income was nearly certain (and it wasn't quick), she targeted charity along lines that aimed at the root of suffering, working to encourage literacy, support human rights, and fund medical research.  Initially a songwriter, her music and her occasional comments about religious philosophy reveal a Zen-like simplicity, a willingness to work down to root causes and tackle issues at the broadest level.  It was both a driver of commercial success (once she got to the top of the country charts, she actively sought out material with crossover potential, while staying true to her musical roots) and a source of the positive difference she made in the world.

     She was intelligent -- and knew that mental horsepower wasn't even half of what it takes; she had plenty of ambition and drive, but her "emotional IQ" was off the charts and I think it was the source of the deep and lasting goodwill she engendered.

     Dolly is gone.  Her legacy remains -- and the rest of us are going to have to be just a little bit better to one another to make up for her loss.
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* While she cultivated a fun and slightly zany public image, I have always liked a story from the set of Steel Magnolias: the director began berating her for a poor performance, saying he didn't even know why she had been hired for her role.  "They hired me because I'm Dolly Parton," she replied, "And it's your job to make me look like I can act."  He did, she did, and the film did right well at the box office.

Easy Listening

     When I was young and (some) regular household electronic devices still had genuine light-up vacuum tubes inside, I took Radio-TV Production classes for all three years of High School.

     The man who taught that subject was middle-aged and very heavy.  He'd worked his way through college as a jazz and middle-of-the-road music deejay before getting into news (and part-time police work, but that's another story), and told stories of the days when even a medium-sized directional AM station was a Big Deal, with full-time engineers on duty to turn the knobs.*

     One day, a particularly apple-polishing student lamented that there was hardly any jazz at all on the radio any more, and he chuckled.  "You watch TV, don't you?  Listen to the theme music.  Nearly all of it is light jazz of one kind or another."

     He was right.  Most of it still is, with some notable exceptions, and if you want background music and have an Alexa or similar widget that only needs a single song to go searching for more of the same but different, you can spin up a nice fifteen minutes or half an hour of undemanding entertainment by asking it to play the theme from "Mannix," "The Wild, Wild West" (TV show) or something along those lines.

     Semi-relatedly, when I was even younger, I was a fan of both "The Wild, Wild West" and "Love, American Style," and it wasn't until years later that I realized what they had in common was that they were as close as TV ever got to newsstand pulp magazines.  There are other good examples, but those two had taken the essentials and run right from pulp-paper page to the camera lens.
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* That's not all they were doing.  Directional antenna arrays for AM radio are large, from two to as many as nine towers in the 100-foot to 700-foot range and spaced about that far apart, with a large, complex gadget called a "phasor" (no, really) to feed the right amount and phase angle of radio-frequency energy to each one, and a smaller gadget called a "phase monitor" to ensure it was all working as it should.  They were drifty, and regular readings had to be made, along with occasional adjustments.  Over time, the change to transistors and then integrated circuits meant the phase monitors got better and better, and as computers replaced log tables and slide rules, the design of phasors and antenna arrays became less art and more science.  Eventually, it became obvious even to the FCC that most of the drifting was not, in fact, the big hardware, but the little gadgets we used to check it every half hour.  30-minute checks became three-hour checks; engineers on duty 24/7 were replaced by a requirement for one full-timer with the right license and, eventually, "whoever," a part-timer to occasionally look over the automated monitors and make sure the EAS tests ran.  But oh, it used to be a thing, once upon a time.

But First...

     I went off to the kitchen for a coffee refill and asked the robot to play "Saber Dance."  She picked a version by the Boston Brass, and it was a good one, the kind of performance that has me idly wondering if they aren't having to rotate valved brass players out to the alley to fan them down while the rhythm keeps plonking along.

     Then it segued into something seasonal, doubly familiar and yet not familiar at all.  It turns out you can borrow riffs from Take Five and hurl them under the wheels of We Three Kings Of Orient Are, and it works out very well.  If you start picturing the wise men from the mystic East arriving in porkpie hats and sunglasses after this, well, I guess you can blame me.  Cool, baby, and dig them angelic trumpeters!

Inhumanly Talented?

     I don't think "talent" is the right word for Mixmastering vast amounts of stolen intellectual property, but didja hear the story about the singing cowboy whose Microsoft Copilot ran off with his ChatGPT account in OpenAI's truck?  It's playing out right now on the country music charts, as least in the ratings for downloads.

     Country music has long been a rich source of parody, and is not above self-parody; the best of it is as deep and rich as any genre, sharing roots with blues and folk music, cross-pollinating with rock again and again, sharing bits of swing and occasional jazz riffs.  At its worst, Nashville's Music Row turns out stuff as homogenized as anything from Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building; but we don't remember any of them for their worst or even average music.  We remember their best work.  AI only creates an average of hit songs, empty, catchy sound as disposable as a gum wrapper.

Music For The Day

      Aaron Copland somehow managed to put the best fireworks into music, an astonishing feat even with the score in front of you, up-close magic for brass and percussion.

A Tune For These Times

     Round and round and round it goes -- mostly.

Speaking Of Broadcasting

      I have long preferred to listen to radio news in the morning while I catch up on dishes,* make breakfast and rearrange the kitchen clutter.  These days, there's not a lot of news on the radio in Indianapolis, so it's the local NPR station† or nothing, unless I dig out a shortwave receiver and go hunting.

     This morning, closing a long story about an Olympic field hockey player who had part of a broken finger amputated rather than repaired so he could make it to the Paris Olympics, NPR played nearly all of what sounded like the John Williams arrangement of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream," the inspiring fanfare used for most U. S. network TV coverage of the Olympics since 1964, across two different networks.  The TV networks are protective of it; NBC was a few years getting the rights to the music after they wrestled Olympic coverage away from ABC and if you decide it'd be a great accompaniment to your "Olympics tire sale" commercial, better lawyer up and buckle in for a bumpy ride that will end in a crash.  Public radio sometimes gets a pass, on a "You wouldn't hit a skinny kid with glasses, would you?" basis and a tenuous extension of Fair Use: even big corporations don't like to get caught looking like a bully.  Or they may have worked something out with NBC, which is effectively out of the radio network business these days.

     One thing for sure: every time I hear those big kettledrums lead into that uplifting theme from the brasses, it chokes me up.  And I'm not even much of a sports fan. (Here's an interesting piece on music for the Olympics, with plenty of examples.)
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* Judge me if you must, but several dropped ceramic mugs, drinking glasses and nice plates back, I decided that if I was sleepy, I wasn't going to do the dishes after dinner, just scrape them, rinse them and let them soak until morning.  It was the trying to sort out razor-sharp shards from slippery, soapy silverware while sleepy that convinced me.
 
† They've got a local news department as least as good as the best county-seat AMs had forty years ago, which counts as pretty darned good these days. Without a subscription to the crumbling, tattered remains of the local newspaper, how else would I find out about scandals involving city government officials?

Set

     The cover of "Holly Holy" I posted day before yesterday was reminding me of something else, just a little.  It wasn't until this morning that I picked it up: it has some structural similarities to theme from The Mandalorian.

     The TV theme goes off in its own direction, picking up cues from big-orchestra Western theme music, (like "Old Trails" from Gunsmoke); and that leads to another interesting performance from a smaller ensemble: Pink Martini's "Andalucia."

     Play them one after another -- you decide in what order -- and you've got an interesting set, perhaps something for my "Wrong Elevator" music format.

Music To Smuggle Elephants By

     An unexpected arrangement of a classic pop hit.

2023 Waltzes Away

     The year is ending in waltz time.  Have a look at the calendar: today is 123123.  Can't say this year's got much to dance over, other than the COVID-19 pandemic receding to a persistent hazard, especially for those still avoiding the vaccine.  We're a lot better off now, with effective treatments, but the damnable virus is here to stay, right next to the flu.

*  *  *
     Politics remains a worry.  Gone are the days when I could poke fun at the tail-chasing ineffectiveness and occasional dangers of the Federal government, secure in the knowledge that it would all work out in the end, while keeping legislators, the Executive branch and a wide array of bureaucrats busy and out of worse trouble.  Nope, they've managed to screw that up and now I watch 'em warily, waiting for them to find a new next shoe to drop.  It turns out they have as many as a centipede, and the current crop of office-holders hurls them with heedless abandon.

     I'm not impressed.  All systems of government are bad, compromises we make to avoid the necessity of having to go to war with the next city over, or those awful people down the street, but some are a lot worse than others.  Ours has been one of the least bad for a long time, and a good many people appeared to be trying to make it even less bad.  A lot of them have given up; some of them (ahem, Republicans, mostly, though the Dems have still got a Senatorial Menendez to yeet) have decided they'd prefer it to be even more bad.

     It's got me voting regularly -- voting against crummy candidates and incumbents, mostly, rather than for, but I'm certainly not going to pass up the opportunity to chime in when so many people are pushing for autocracy and the mailed fist.

*  *  *
     With all this talk of waltzes and hard times, the Boswell Sisters offer something different, close harmony and a willingness to fiddle with tempo and key that reminds me our country -- our fellow citizens -- can manage chaos pretty well.  Sometimes brilliantly.  We may get through this yet.

     See there? Some good things have come from Louisiana. It's not all Kingfishing.

Still Watching

      Oh, Gil Scott-Heron, you sweet summer child.  You'd laugh yourself sick over who's fighting.  The Revolutions are all over the television -- and The Man threw out the first tanks.

     And I'm finding I can neither watch for long nor look away.

You've Never Heard It Like This

      Rather than talk about all the troubles of the world, here's a lovely version of a lovely piece of music:

Song For The Day

      A familiar tune, in something more like the original form.  Words to live by?

This Just In--

     The National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda has issued a Severe Brainstorm Warning for all of the United States.  At 7:45 a.m.m Eastern Time, mental disturbance "Stone" was expanding, and may strike anywhere, at any time.

     Persons in the warning area are advised to seek a comfortable area in the living room, family room or bedroom of their home.  Comfort food, favorite movies and TV shows, children, pets and other family members should be close at hand throughout the storm.  Even favorite songs will be of some assistance.

New Year's Day

     Corned beef is soaking, protected (I hope!) from Huck's attention by a lidded pan.

     Tam saw the New Year in with fireworks; I was in bed by then, awake but barely and with one cats snuggle up next to me while the other one occupied my legs.  We all have our own ways of celebrating; I'm not sorry to see the old year chased off and we'll see what the new one will bring.

     It's trite, but why not play the song?

Ooops!

     Never have posted anything yet today, have I? 

     Okay, here's something.

     Would a rock & roll tribute band featuring a flutist and composed entirely of condemned murderers in prison be called "Death Row Tull?"

He Invented The Shotgun Guitar, You Know

     Ain't a-kiddin.

     Oh, and that shotgun guitar?  Look here.

     Of course, he's from Indiana.

The Off-Beat Path

     I don't often recommend articles from The New Yorker; while the writing is of indisputably high quality, the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency drove their editorial staff into a frenzied zeal that had the man showing up multiple times in every issue, simultaneously evil mastermind and bumbling moron.  It got to be too much; it would have been even if they loved him because, well, the amount of Presidency I enjoy in my lit'ry reading is somewhere between a pinch and a dot at most.  POTUSes loom large in the news cycle and you can pick up news about 'em most anywhere.

     Conversely, really good writing, writing by people with a crazy love for the color, heft, texture, taste, scent and sound of words like a kid with a bag of licorice allsorts and an open account at an old-fashioned candy store, that's a thing you can hardly find; I've been known to unearth moldy old essays by Buckley and Vidal* just for the joy of reading words from men intoxicated by the language.

     The Trump-Era New Yorker serves up mainly absinthe.  Straight.†  But not always and not today.  Today, they've poured the good stuff, bottled in bond.

     There was a fellow named Stephen Cheng  who emigrated from Shanghai to the United States after World War Two, ending up in New York.  He was a classical Chinese singer, who studied at Juilliard, worked on Broadway, and by the 1960s was touring widely, with occasional television appearances, performing both pop and traditional Chinese music.  He passed away in 2012.  A working musician who moved to teaching later in life, he raised a family and you can find a few of his recordings of Chinese folk music on YouTube.

     You can also find this: "Always Together:"

     It's a minor gem of Rocksteady (a Reggae precursor), recorded in the late 1960s, copies passed from hand to hand since then and reissued as recently as 2010.  It was a minor mystery to Reggae scholars: Stephen Chen was only in Jamaica once, recorded only the one song, and didn't leave much of a trail there.

     He apparently never mentioned the recording to his family, either; in 2017 his son Pascal was looking up his father's recordings on YouTube and the site's algorithms recommended "Always Together;" as he writes, "...until recently, [I] had no idea that he had recorded this song. I accidentally discovered it on YouTube. I am pretty sure that he was not aware of its popularity as a rocksteady classic."

     As we move through life, we leave ripples.  We don't always know what shores they will reach.
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* Which man, do you suppose, wrote, "Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could," and which of them wrote, "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."  Among their better shared attributes was their deep loathing for one another.  One doesn't often see feuds of that quality and longevity.

† I'm not going to explain this.

And Now, Music

     You need something with good bass response and decent stereo separation to fully enjoy this.  It came on the radio on my drive home last night and I found it charmingly askew:

RIP, Aretha Franklin

     We lost a legend yesterday -- you don't need me to tell you that; the mainstream media has been all over the story, with their usual subtlety.

     NPR re-ran an interview with her from the late 1990s that had more substance to it, including a recording of her at the age of 14, performing gospel music in church.  Even then, her talent is unmistakable.  Her father was a preacher and the interview included a brief excerpt from one of his sermons.  His style was impressive -- not quite "hiccup" preaching, but rhythmic, melodic, a well-written sermon in fairly free verse, almost but not quite sung.

     It reminded me of working in radio a lifetime ago.  Sunday mornings in a typical Indiana county-seat station, you ran a lot of religious programs, in hour or half-hour blocks.  If you were lucky, one of two of them would be a "nemo," live services from a local church, carried over high-quality phone lines. The station I was working for had two such programs.  One was from a very large Methodist church, a professionally-produced, multi-microphone, half-hour segment of their morning services that included the sermon and a few hymns.  It was reliably good and back at the station, I could sit back and spend time in the kind of church I'd grown up attending.

     The other one was from a traditional African-American church.  The sound was picked up by a single, high-quality microphone over the pulpit.  The preacher worked in full-on "hiccup" style, a pattern of verse as structured and complex as any old Norse skaldic poem, and included plenty of call-and-response.  The music was wonderful gospel, full of joy.  The entire service was mesmerizing and I looked forward to it every Sunday I worked.  With just one microphone, it took a little gain-riding at the station -- but that single mike meant you were right there, in the middle of everything.  It was some of the best radio I ever had the opportunity to be involved with.

     TV and radio has been playing plenty of Aretha Franklin's better-known work.  Here's one they may've missed, her take on "I Say A Little Prayer."