"Rabbit Hole" by David Lindsay-Abaire at Arden Theater, Philadelphia

Oh, yes, the Prof was socked in by the snow on Saturday, but made it into the Quakin' City the next day because he held a ticket to a play at one of his favorite haunts. The Pulitzer-grabbin' drama was *eh* s0-so, but it starred the luminous Grace Gonglewski, so it was worth tunneling through a snowbank.

Jingle Jammin' VI: Cigar Box Nation Christmas

Download this collection by bringin' the electronic rodent to this hyar link.

The Dean Delivers: Christgau on Monk

The Prof has been following Robert Christgau's music writing since he started reading The Village Voice in 1982. Here is one of his all-time best pieces, his latest "Rock & Roll &" essay at Barnes and Noble's site (which they really ought to call "Barnes & Noble &") on the new biography of Thelonious Monk by Robin D. G. Kelley. Like a great New York Review of Books piece, it opens up from the book under consideration and expands to include an overview of the artist. If you read the Dean's picks for Monk discs, just keep in mind that the Prof loves Monk's Music beyond all reason.

Jingle Jammin' V: Honest-to-God Carols

Jingle Jammin' IV: Mommy and Santa Claus

Jimmy Boyd started it with the hit song by Tommie Connor, a recording that combined cutesy with a creepy vibe and went to the top of the Billboard chart. Buck Owens improved somewhat on the concept and a whole lot on the music with his rockin' country favorite "Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy." (But George Jones cashed in with "I Saw Mommy Twistin' with Santa Claus," yeesh. Oh, well, he's in great Thumper Jones mode at least.)


Mack Rice (above) went one better with "Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin'" in which daddy does the singin' and the cutesy kids are relegated to bed. (I particularly like the stanza where Dad gets fed up with trying to assemble a bicycle and longs to get it on with Mom before the little cherubs awaken.) His version was as funky as you could get and since then other rockers, funkers, and bluesmen have taken a crack at it, most notably Albert King. (The Christmas Jug Band has a nifty zydeco flavored live version, and alterna-acapella group The Bobs penned a variant from the point of view of Mrs. Claus.)

Akim and Teddy raised the stakes deliriously with "Santa Claus Is a Black Man" which made the racial element in Rice's song explicit. This time the high-pitched child's voice is groovy rather than creepy.

The idea of Santa with a libido, especially an uxuriously yearning Santa, is amusing, but Clarence Carter took the idea further with a Lothario Claus in "Back Door Santa," whose ho-ho-hos are not only lascivious, but perhaps slyly triumphant about his Kringling cuckolding of the hood
("I ain't like old Saint Nick--he don't come but once a year." Hmmm.)

Pig Iron Theater's "Chekhov Lizardbrain" in Philadelphia

The Prof slithered into his seat at the Arts Bank and wedged his scaly self in between the other patrons in the sellout matinee.

Many thanks to Mr. Pink for the tipoff.

Review in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Christopher Isherwood's review in the NYTimes.

As the anonymous review from BroadwayWorld.com explains:

The performance draws from Paul Maclean's Triune Brain Theory. MacLean noticed that when the human brain is dissected, one discovers a "paleomammalian" layer that looks almost identical to a pig or dog brain; this layer controls breathing, sleeping, hunger, and the startle response. Cutting deeper into the brain, one finds a "lizard brain" in the form of the human brain stem. This area is responsible for emotions, connections between individuals, and territorial behavior. A thrid layer is the "neomammalian brain," our large neocortex, which contains the wiring for symbolic thinking,self-awareness, ambivalence and language. In her bestseller Animals in Translation, autistic author Temple Grandin proposes that her own empathy with animals comes from an compromised "human brain" and a compensating "dog brain" and "lizard brain." Templeton notes, "here's the really interesting part: each one of those brains has its own kind of intelligence, its own sense of time and space, its own memory, and its own subjectivity."

"Me and Orson Welles" Richard Linklater

Though he is well aware that the framing story (or is it the sub-plot) of the film is a bit wan, The Prof was nonetheless exhilarated by this account of the Dog-Faced boy, the incipient Falstaff of celluloid in his gloriest days.

The Prof enjoyed Klawans' take in The Nation and invites you to check it out.

John Storm Roberts Is Dead

The great student and promulgator of world music is gone. Read his obituary here.

Read an old interview here.

The dean's review of the immortal "Sound of Kinshasa."

Read the Dean's review of "Heavy on the Highlife" by Oriental Brothers.

Jingle Jammin' III: Leo's Bells

The Prof nods! How could I forget Leo Watson's "Jingle Bells"? (I guess if George Harrison forgot Billy Preston at the Concert for Bangladesh, I can be forgiven.)

To learn about this great idiosyncratic scatter, a bridge between swing and bop, click here to read Leonard Feather's reminiscence in The Jazz Years: Earwitness to an Era.

Watson was dubbed the James Joyce of Jazz because of his enthusiastically free associating as he scatted, evident in the lyrics here:

Jingle bells, jingle bells,

wedding bells,

bells of the wedding,

wedding cake,

cut the cake,

snowflake,

snowflakes of Chicago,

Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin' town...

Oh, yeah, and the band is led by a raucous Vic Dickenson on trombone with piano by "Jellyroll Lipchitz" (Leonard Feather, who put the session together, you could look it up, himself)!

Jingle Jammin' II: "One Horse Open Sleigh"

The granddaddy of all jinglin' jive, the archetype of secular yule-be-singin' along, an evergreen of of the old tree-killin' format--sheet music. The story goes that transplanted New Englander James Lord Pierpont composed it for a children's choir at his Savannah congregation's Thanksgiving service and it proved popular enough to be repeated at Christmas. (But the origin myths abound. Check here for a discussion of the controversy surrounding the song's composition.)

The song was first published in 1857 (see above) and then again two years later with the title changed to the more familiar phrase from the chorus. Some claim that phrase is an imperative sentence rather than an interjection-- "Jingle, bells." --commanding the bells to do their thing in much the same way as der Bingle does in his jive coda to the title song of Bells of St. Mary's ("O ring, you ding dong bells"). Over time we've come to think of the "jingle" as an adjective specifying just what kinda kooky bells won't stop ringing. (And, indeed, in the pop music recording biz adding that species of bells to the mix will convince you that that heavy metal Christian riff, greasy funk beat, or gypsy jazz instrumental actually is a Christmas tune.)

[By the way, there's a somewhat similar misunderstanding about the carol "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." Most of us tend to think of a bunch of happy fellows being granted a rest by the guy upstairs (God rest ye, Merry Gentlemen), but it is actually an idiom from medieval and Renaissance English blessing the chaps with a merry break from labor (God rest you merry, Gentlemen). Hence Capulet's servant to Romeo (I.ii): "Rest you merry!")]


The song was not a hit at first on the page, but the Currier and Ives atmosphere must have created a sense of instant nostalgia and it seeped into the country's unconscious. According to The Dawn of Sound website, the very first Christmas record ever was a version of "Jingle Bells" cut in 1889 by banjoist Will Lyle. No copies have survived. The next recorded version under the name "Sleigh Ride Party" is by the Edison Male Quartette in 1898 (download available here).

Bing's 1943 release with The Andrews Sisters which charted at #19 is probably the most-beloved pop version of the song, but I particularly enjoy the Armed Forces Radio Service transcription (apparently a rehearsal) where the sisters swing harder and Bing has one of his legendary blowouts when he flubs the lyrics and ad-libs "O Holy Jesus Christ" as a substitute. The Jesuits could perhaps assess whether this Gonzaga alumnus was blaspheming or channeling the seasonal spirit.

Check the All Music Guide database and you'll find hundreds of names, familiar and obscure, covering the song. Of course, the opening three notes serve as an opening or ending tag to a wide variety of original Christmas tunes as if to confer open-sleighed mojo to your fledgling seasonal composition. The Prof could go on with commentary on many more Jingling platters, but even the long-winded must pause for an intake sometimes or succumb to hyperventilation.

So let this last comment suffice. "Jingle Bells" tends to appeal to jazzbos quite a bit. Maybe the dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit rhythmic pattern calls out to arrangers stacking riffs and performers looking for a steady beat to syncopate against. Certainly, you can hear it in Fats Waller's sly 1935 recording, Glen Miller's straight-ahead 1941 swinger with Tex Benecke, and Count Basie's machine-tooled live blast from Birdland in 1961. Both sophisticated arranging gents the Duke and Gerald Wilson conceived more harmonically complex frameworks for the chestnut later. And the original swingmonster was Spud Murphy's arrangement for Benny Goodman. The first version made in June 1935 for Thesaurus Transcriptions as The Rhythm Makers at an all-day marathon featuring cracking solos by Pee Wee Ervin and Art Rollini. The Victor recording a month later had the immortal Bunny Berigan with the original Benny Goodman Orchestra. Benny's own clarinet soars through the loping reeds and brass on both, and the Victor went on to become a hit when the label rushed out everything it could after the band broke the following year.

But the Prof's own favorite "Jingle Bells" is from a 1936 London session of Benny Carter and his Quintet. The guitar chugs along for a measure and the bass introduces the by-then (and by-now) instantly recognizable Kringle cadence. Carter's clarinet insinuates itself in and the ensemble takes off. Carter continues under a trumpet solo and reappears on alto later on. Just when you think reindeer will lift them into the stratosphere, Benny returns to clarinet and cools things down for the final cymbal crash. Combining such relaxation and insistent swinging is the secret of the greatest small group jazz--a Christmas gift, indeed. O what fun it IS to ride.

"A Left Hand Like God": Recommended Boogie Woogie Website

The Prof loves barrelhouse piano and has been fascinated with its culture ever since reading Peter J. Silvestri's book on the subject years ago. Want to find out where his evocative title phrase came from and what it has to do with boogie woogie? Then bring that mouse-like object to this link to the Boogie Woogie Foundation' site run by Nonjohn (scholar John Tennison). Marvel at John's mastery of the minutiae of train lore. Thrill to his crusade to get boogie brothers George and Hersal Thomas admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Deepen your understanding of the wonder that is Meade Lux Lewis' "Honky Tonk Train" by clicking on the link to a PDF of an academic paper on its sources and meaning. In short, beat me daddy eight to the bar, cats and kittenheads.


Recommended soundtrack to boogie browsing:
The French Fremeaux label is a good place to start exploring the sounds born on the rail and turpentine camps of the Piney Woods. Their first volume rumbles around the Prof's den on a regular basis. (Amazon UK has the better deal). Seventy years ago, Alfred Lion started Blue Note Records by recording his boogie faves Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons. That session is still out in a bargain cd "The First Day." Jasmine records has compiled a swell anthology of big band numbers that trace the boogie craze, "Bands That Can Boogie." The generically titled "Boogie Woogie" is an awesome ten disc box that has no documentation but plenty of rolling thunder and is a steal at under $20.

The Prof leaves the final word to John Lee Hooker in ?Boogie Chillen":

"One night I was layin´ down, I heard Mama and Papa talkin´,
I heard Papa tell Mama: Let that boy boogie woogie,
´cause it´s in him and it got to come out!
Well, I felt so good, and I went on boogie-woogie´n´ just the same..."

Jingle Jammin' Begins! : Featured Cut: Merry Christmas, Baby

Prof Pals are well aware what the Prof will be doing in the next few weeks aside from saving the brains of the youth of America--burning Xmas mixes! Yes, cats and kittenheads, he's up to volume 46 of the customized "Jingle Jammin'" CDRs and will attempt to reach a half o' hundred by New Year. So the Prof herewith initiates a series within a series, featured cuts and albums from his humble estimation of the bestest of Kringlepop music. (That's ol' Fezziwig above gettin' down at the archetypal holiday office party just to get you in the mood. The illustration is by John Leech from the first edition of A Christmas Carol. You can check out a cool site dedicated to the book and other Dickens by clicking your mouse (a creature that isn't stirring, I guess.)

We begin with one of the biggies, the number which is probably the first R & B Christmas composition, written by Lou Baxter and Johnny Moore and first recorded in 1947 by Moore's Blue Blazers with an assist in the studio by Johnny's brother Oscar, guitarist for Nat Cole's trio.
The track begins with bluesy arpeggios wrapped around the chords of a celesta (suggesting the jingling season subliminaly) and leads into the smoky vocals of the keyboard player Charles Brown (photo below), who switches to piano a few measures later. Brown and Moore keep it simple and urbane so that the music glows with its easy good-time feel and Moore gets in a jazzy Jingle Bells quote that spirals back down into the blues.

The lyrics are iconic American secular Xmas good-times hipness-- the first verse evokes the bling (she gave him a diamond ring so he's "livin' in Paradise," no, not that Paradise), the second verse gets all self-reflexive (he's feelin' mighty fine coz there's good music on the radio), and the last provides a good-natured gag about not drinking but feeling all lit up like a Christmas tree (they did call what Johnny and Charles and Nat and Osacar did cocktail music, after all).

This formula proved so potent that Brown recorded the song at least a dozen more times (and the Prof has interlarded them throughout his Xmas Mix), most notably in a duet with Bonnie Raitt. Brown also became a specialist in Yuletide piano blues--as we shall see later in this series.

A durable blueprint for so many great versions:

1950 Lionel Hampton Orchestra with a blistering vocal by Sonny Parker in the jump manner of Wynone Harris.

1960 Chuck Berry sliding some twangy chords that influenced snake around Jimmy Johnson's classic Chess Chicago-style fills that update Johnny's and Charles' original conception.

1964 Ike and Tina Turner burn up the Yule log with a choogling version that ends with Tina screaming "Jingle all the way!"

1968 Otis Redding Kicking off with a "dashing through the snow" riff by Booker T on the organ and cushioned by the jubilant Stax horns, this version features an exultant O at his best. You can hear him grinning through the whole track.

1971 Elvis Presley stretches out and gives it his all changing the last line from "I'm livin' in paradise" to "I'll play it through Al's mike." He plays an electric guitar solo as D J Fontana urges "Play it dirty." El is one bad Santa, know what ahm sayin?

Sherry Coben at Movie Smackdown

The Prof spent most of last Sunday afternoon reading pieces by Sherry Coben at Movie Smackdown, the site that promises "Two films! One review! No holds barred!" The format is revelatory, the referees deft and witty, and Sherry's the best writer there. Click and enjoy.

Afropop Extravaganza I: Mambomania in Another Continent

From the Honest Jon's label two compilations of Afro-Latino cuts that the Prof can't stop sneaking back to the player.

The first chronicles the Congolese love affair with Cuban rhythms and recordings just before the rise of the local style known as Rumba (a style which would develop into soukous by the end of the 70s and conquer the rest of the continent in popularity). The disc seems to capture the ineffable moment when folk styles metamorphose into "pop." You can hear the various indigenous forms in the acoustic strums and tentative vocal style meeting Cuban son montuno (itself an folk music form come into the city and turned into a virtuoso small-band format that influenced the Latin big band crazes to come from "El Manisero" ("The Peanut Vendor") to mambo mavens such as Miguelito Valdez, Machito, and beyond).

Two examples from guitarist Adikwa Depala make this mix clear. The plaintive tune of "Akei Cimetiere" would have been at home in a bolero-son you might hear from sextetos or septetos from the 30s and 40s in Cuba. But where the vocals there would be keening and penetrating, here the voice is more falsetto and even breaks in a few spots. The accompaniment by a raspy fiddle seems a rural throwback in a music now playing in Havana and imitated here in the urban explosion of Leopoldville (later Kinshasa) and Brazzaville.

In his excellent liner notes, Gary Stewart, author of Rumba on the River:A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos, evokes the sights and smells and sounds of a city night's Saturday entertainment beautifully. His comment on "Moni" serves for the other example from Depala:

"Local musicians swapped the Spanish of the originals for Congolese languages like Lingala or Kikongo. In his version of Peanut Vendor, included here, on top of his musical changes Depala replaces the seller's cry of 'mani', or peanut, with a lovelorn lament for a woman named Moni — a neat encapsulation of one step in the evolution of Congolese music."

Every track reveals a group of young musicians trying to create an appropriate soundtrack for their new environment, and they cobble it together from local traditions, newly imported styles from the immigrants from the coast, and the beloved Latino forms they'd been playing on 78s.
There are a whole handful of percussion instruments--shakers, claves, tambourines--flutes and whistles, and even kazoos! Throughout it all run guitars that haven't quite reached the assurance and intensity they'll have when the rumba craze arrives, but you'll probably feel you don't quite want it to come as long as you can keep playing this blessedly sweet CD.

(Here's the label's own blurb, most of it excerpted from Stewart's liner notes.)


Or that's what I thought all through the summer as I played The World Is Shaking over and over, never suspecting that October would bring the next volume, Africa Boogaloo.

"The Road" Directed by John Hillcoat

The anti-buzz on this film has already begun, but the Prof avers that it is a Good Film based on a Good Book. The "it's a literary zombie" meme has surfaced in half a dozen reviews I've read and the "Cormac McCarthy's prose is untranslatable to the screen" meme is right behind it. The book was a page-turner where you were so afraid of what might come next that you wrestled with the turn-urge, and the movie had me hunkered down tight in my seat. McCarthy stripped down his vocabulary and untangled his thorny syntax for this one and Hillcoat's staging is direct and simple in its translation to screen. The cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe (Vicky Christina Barcelona and (gasp!) Twilight: New Moon) washes a muted color scheme across the characters' quest--eerily beautiful and dread-filled. Kodi Smit-McPhee is surprisingly good as the boy, even in the crucial moments where he confronts his father with what may be an outmoded morality. Viggo Mortensen inhabits the character of a decent man without being self-conscious heroic, a kind of a post-apocalyptic Henry Fonda. The star cameos by Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, and Guy Pearce are unobtrusive and apt (and Garret Dillahunt is excellent, as usual). The audience I saw it with hated it--what a downer, they thought.
The Prof recommends it.

Update: Mr. Pink informs the Prof that he has been reading the buzz differently, and because the Prof is notoriously inept at predicting anybody's taste, let alone the American public's, he defers and wishes the flick well.

RIP H. C. Robbins Landon

We're nearing the close of the bicentennial for Haydn's death and the Prof hasn't gone a rant about the beloved Papa Franzjosef...yet. Today comes the news of the passing of the great musicologist who rescued most of Haydn from oblivion in the last third of the twentieth century.
Read the NYTimes obit for an account of an unusual man.


The Prof is something of a fanatic about Haydn, especially his string quartets. He has been obsessing this morning on the neglected three quartets of Op. 54, checking out recordings by the Tatrai, Angeles, Festetics, and Amadeus Quartets. (He desperately wants to hear the Salomon version again, but doesn't know where he put it a few days ago!) The Lindsays are closing in on the Prof's faves in this work, the Pro Arte quartet, whose version is still fresh, exciting, and, in the slow movements, meltingly lovely nearly eight decades on.

More on Haydn recordings and the Mendelssohn bicentennial in posts to come. And the dawning of the Chopin and Schumann bicentennial is only weeks away...

(Below--a photo of the Pro Arte Quartet.)



It's almost turkey time, cats and kittenheads, but the Prof is pausing long enough to update as he turns to North African guitar-slingers. New updates and more catching up ahead, especially with Afro-pop popping out all over. Before he heads out the door to visit folks and friends, the Prof may also post about a new flick. Stay tuned.

Catching Up IV: PAFA and Azuka Theater at Drexel University

"Public Treasures/Private Visions: Hudson River School Masterworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Private Collections" (on view until May 15, 2010--see here for more).

"Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool" (If you want to know more, you know what to do with the mouse, cats and kittenheads.)

Drexel Theater

Not the cast member we saw, but one of the same puppets below.

Catching Up III: Arshile Gorky and more at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Gorky retrospective (details here).

40th anniversary (Click here for more information.)

Catching Up II: "She Stoops to Conquer" at McCarter Theater, Princeton, 11/1/09

Reap the Freakin' Harvest

The TA sent this to me weeks ago and it's been making the rounds.

Read it and weep!

The Prof Returns: Catching Up I: Nichols, Drury, Takagi (and a touch of Duncan)

When the Prof got into this interwebs racket, he was determined that it was about fun--fun for the reader foremost, dear friends, but fun for the Prof, too. When the school year begins that proposition is sorely tested, occupied as the Prof becomes with reading the writing of about one hundred and twenty other folk. But here, at last, is the Prof again.

I thought this blog would be about the arts in general with a specific focus on the actual events I see and hear (you know, cats and kittenheads, the etymology of "blog" is "web" + "log") so the next few posts play catch up with October's and November's events. Posts will soon follow on anniversaries and new discoveries.

The biggest story in events is October's exhibition/concert in the New Gallery Concert Series at the Community Music Center Boston. Prof Pals Steve Drury and Yukiko Takagi played works for two pianos by Reich, Feldman, and Adams, and Beethoven's own transcription for four hands of the Grosse Fuga for string quartet. The Gallery was hung with the latest works by artist Warren Nichols (another Prof Pal known on this site by the handle Mr. Pink) and a further contribution by Prof Pal Barry Duncan (aka Master Palindromist, or should that be Profpalpalindromist?).

I'd seen most of the works in the show before, and my acquaintance with them varied over time.
But seeing them arrayed together in respective groups, carefully balanced throughout the space, gave them a cumulative force that increased their power. Apparently hanging them in these eloquent groupings took some doing on the artist's part in the brief time he had and in the, er, idiosyncratic geometry of the gallery's walls! By the way, check out Nichols' site for succinct explanations of the different groups. In different ways they re-conceive visually the classical notion of oracle as simultaneously revealing and concealing vital knowledge. I suppose by that I mean they explore the difference between information and truth. At first I felt the softly radiant colors of the Rapture series signaled some kind of hope after doubt, a kind of relief from the monochrome approach of the other pieces, like the three minutes of Andrei Rublev's frescoes at the end of Tarkovsky's film. But all the works are sensually inviting--the sure draughstmanship of the cluster of miniature studies and the luminous sheen of the white brushstrokes on the larger canvases alike.

In Warren's opening remarks he acknowledged Steve's crucial role in the art by recalling how Steve had helped open his ears to new music (and New Music) and how much listening had influenced seeing in his work. (Warren's quip: "He shares some of the culpability for what you see here today.") Steve and Yukiko's performance certainly resonated with what was on the walls. John Adams' "Hallelujah Junction" combines the rollicking rhythms of Meade Lux Lewis' boogie woogie "Honky Tonk Train" with gospel harmonies--the Pentecostal feel of the piece suited Warren's own brand of "speaking in tongues." Steve and Yukiko's fierce concentration on Steve Reich's "Piano Phase" left the audience breathless. The pianos begin with a unison statement of a twelve-note theme which is put through permutations as one begins to phase out with the other; the emerging harmonies nevertheless feel inevitable and not at all "wrong." Once again the apparent fact--here's the melody--gives way to a different sort of truth. If Warren's different groups seemed to hold up to the light different related subjects arranged in a way to illuminate each other, the Grosse Fuga certainly felt apt--the subjects of the most notorious modern music of its day (we're still catching up to it) weaving together in a soundscape that is clearly meant to convey some spiritual message, but one beholden to no specific creed.

As a lagniappe there was also Barry Duncan's contribution. Delivering on a long-outstanding commission from the artist, Barry framed a palindrome on the theme of aging in astonishing proportions--121 words in 431 letters--which imagined the metamorphosis of Mr. Pink's body and mind as he runs out of gas, "Re: No Gas in Age? Beware." The descriptions tersely and wickedly trace the amusingly horrifying breakdown of matter, time, and meaning ("Era we began is a goner"). Warren was so pleased with the results that he framed the palindrome and placed it beneath one of the groups of his work. The facts, ma'am? It reads the same backwards as it does forwards. The truth: puzzling through the auguries artists construct can lead to raptures no sacerdotal utterance ever adduced.

Gary Giddins on Jazz Writing

Giddins is the best jazz writer there ever was. Period. He's also one of the best writers on any subject currently writing about American culture. Here's a recent post to his site about being a writer. His new huge tome on the history of jazz, co-authored with Scott Deveaux, is due out in a few weeks. no doubt the Prof will have more to say then.

Featured Cut: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"

Ellie Greenwich's obit here.
A lively article (if a little too Greil Marcusian) on the influence of the song from Warren Ellis.

Dardenne Brothers Film Festival

Here is a lovingly detailed unofficial website dedicated to the brothers.

La Perfectly Swell Romance

Now and again, the Prof nods. Somehow he missed this very good piece in the NYTimes about Fred and Ginger.