Jazz: The Language of the Heart

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of Jazz is that it is an all American artform. The second is that it is joyous, swingy, funky, recreational music, the kind that you can play in the background while you tend to your accounts, whatever they may be. While the roots of jazz extend across the globe, from the darkness of Africa to the cool chic of the European renaissance, from the folk forms of the Mexicans & native American Indians to the microtonalities of India & middle east, it was the American circumstance that threw all these into ingredients into one cauldron & brought it to a boil. And it is joyous celebrant music, since it really is the expression of the strength needed to overcome the struggle of daily life & turn even the harshest of social persecutions into a reason to rejoice.

Today’s listening post is about looking at jazz differently. Jazz is largely a comment on social inequity, hypocrisy & discrimination. However, instead of being a messenger of gloom, jazz turns it into a uniquely participative art form, one that engages you & demands your attention, you accounts be damned. This playlist is meant to nudge you into thinking about where we come from & where we are headed as a civilization. Playing time: 60 minutes.

The Life and Times of Pandit Ravi Shankar

My secret Santa gifted me The Living Room Sessions Part One after I read about it in some of the articles that began doing the rounds after Pandit Ravi Shankar’s death on December 11, 2012. It was fascinating to hear the informal recording of the 91-year-old with his old friend Tanmoy Bose on tabla. The four pieces, which includes one in Raga Satyajit, a spontaneous creation in honor of his friend, the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, are delicately nuanced with some very intricate embellishments, and seem set for a permanent place near the top of the pile for all Indian classical music lovers. His phrasing is subtle and lyrical, and these pieces lack the flashy question marks that several of his later recordings made a habit of. At 91, he sounds like he has finally found what he sought all his life, peace and certainty.

I wrote in detail about my understanding of the life and times of Ravi Shankar over at Parth's blog. Do take a look. Click below to read it.

Read the whole post>>

Bollywood Jazz

There are times when words are totally unnecessary. Here are two videos from this evening's MTV Unplugged featuring A.R. Rahman. These transcend genres. Have a nice weekend.

10 Albums to Restore Your Faith in Music

A friend recently wanted to “refurbish” her library on her iPod and asked me for some suggestions. Our tastes in music have a large degree of overlap, so I set out enthusiastically, only to realize how difficult it was to come up with a finite list for great listening. At a time when not a lot of contemporary popular music seems to have a chance of surviving beyond a few years, here is a list of albums that should restore your faith in music.

1. Surprise – Paul Simon
You know the Live at Central Park Concert by heart, you use their lyrics to help you deal with daily strife, and you still hang on to the Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m. cassette that no longer plays. You will be surprised by the urban contemporary tone (without losing out on the lyricism or the wit of the older songs) of this one from Paul Simon.

2. Mercury Falling – Sting
I love everything by Sting. Almost. This album is his maturest best, balancing musical ideas with sentimentality, technology with originality, and middle age cynicism with hopeless romanticism. Two other good but relatively less popular/known listens from Sting would be All This Time which he was recording while 9/11 happened and Live at The Perugia Jazz Festival which sees him freewheeling and improvising like never before.

3. My Rock – Walk Off the Earth
New India band that I found thanks to youtube! Nice and original sound, neat covers. They only have two albums out so far, and they make for good listening. They do not strictly fall into the category of serious music, but they bring a freshness that takes you back to the time when The Beach Boys and The Beatles were putting out there initial music. Their music videos are a visual treat unlike anything you have seen before.

Music for Manic Monday Mornings

In the blogging world, Monday mornings are manic for most. If your post isn’t shipshape, you are probably racing against the clock to be able to hit publish by the time people log in to work, by the time the homemaker settles down at his computer after packing the kids and the working woman off. And then there is the mad social network hopping to get the word out. I am no different. But I am lazy. And wicked. And a hedonist.

So over the long weekend, I came up with something that this Monday morning is just right for. Music. Not a post about music but a post of music. Yes, a playlist it is. A devilish Peter Pan sort of a playlist. A journey back in time to the music I grew up with, starting from what I heard before I could decide what I would listen to, on to the music that I couldn’t avoid once I was old enough to make a choice.

Like parents, one often does not get to choose the music that shapes one’s life. It is a combination of the culture of the times, your milieu, and what resonated within you for reasons that will forever remain unclear. Enough of introduction. Lets get to the music.

The Beatles Remastered: Revolver

Music has been so integral a part of my personality that there are a large number of performers and performances that I feel extremely challenged to write about. I feel that no amount of effort that I put into writing about them can ever do justice to how important they are to me. Over the years, I have gathered courage to write about some of them in the best manner I could, but they still come across as inadequate to me. The Beatles is one such musical phenomenon. Though I have attempted reviewing works by Paul and written about John and the 70s, I cannot bring myself to write about the music of The Beatles.

While browsing, I found that I had replied to a question on an audio forum a long time back, and I thought it merited a place here, since I doubt I will ever be able to reproduce the cocky clarity with which I answered. The questioner had asked whether the 2009 remaster of The Beatles' Revolver was worth buying for a fan who already has the original vinyl...

Surely one of the greatest album covers of all time, and among the top three Beatles album covers for me.

Here is my reply.

Revolver is a landmark album for The Beatles in many senses. It is a point of departure from their earlier albums and contains all original tracks and no covers. It also sees them experimenting with electronically altered sounds, and unusual instruments. It also marks the beginning of their foray into psychedelia.

Tina Turner - Simply The Best

I was really not aware of Tina Turner’s body of work or her journey as a musician and as a person when I first heard her sing Private Dancer and What’s Love Got To Do with It. I was a teenager fed on a diet of campus rock, and for all purposes, this was nothing more than glam pop pretending to be rock. Yet, something about her voice, her delivery, and the urgency of her singing made me sit up and listen to it carefully. This was at a time when other than the weekend pop time and the occasional top of the pops or Eurovision fillers on Doordarshan, all you had on music television was an hour of MTV in the late afternoon. When I first saw her perform on television, her energy and intensity bowled me over.

I grew out of my teens. Tina Turner drifted in and out of my musical horizon with Mad Max and 007 soundtracks and duets with Barry White and Bryan Adams. My growing propensity towards jazz and the blues saw her climb lower on my personal charts. As a student of popular music, I familiarized myself with her early work with Ike Turner and the Revue with masterpieces like River Deep Mountain High and of course, Proud Mary. Beyond that, I was ready to ignore her songs as ones that were going to go to the bottom of the shelf. What I could not ignore, however, was the electricity of her singing and her live performances, whether it was with Beyonce at a Grammy performance or with Cher for the Oprah Winfrey show. Of course, there were other rockers her age who were rocking too, but she was something special. I could not put my finger on it then, and I have not been able to put my finger on it now.

Grunge: The Unclassifiable Seattle Sound

The Operative Note embraces all genres of creative musical expression.  In this post, guest blogger Sandeep of Crack The Sky takes a look at the phenomenon of grunge, that brief period when it looked like the counter culture movement might evolve into something more meaningful. Over to the expert.

*****

"Here we are now, entertain us!!!" -Kurt Cobain, singer and guitarist of the band Nirvana.

The Early Rumblings
For all its intents and purpose, the American underground musical movement of late 80s and early 90s known as grunge was never meant to see the light of the day. Grunge as a musical movement was never aiming to be accepted by mainstream culture, but all that changed thanks to a handful of Seattle rock bands who mixed the distorted apocalyptic chords of heavy metal with subject matter such as alienation, apathy and angst. The grunge bands of those period were fiercely independent and idealistic and they despised mainstream success. So what exactly happened that dragged the grunge movement from its underground roots to the blinding lights of mainstream music.

Bob Dylan: The Tambourine Man

Bob Dylan's 71st birthday came and went. My friends and I celebrated by watching Scorcese's documentary on Dylan's life, No Direction Home. Lou Majaw did his thing at Shillong and then some more at Mumbai. Lou has kept the annual Bob Dylan tribute concert going in Shillong for four decades now. Barrack Obama, the US President who as a young person felt the world open up when he heard Dylan sing, conferred the Freedom Medal on him around the same time, a sight as bizarre as the artiste lineup on Amnesty International's tribute album featuring nearly 80 of Dylan's best songs sung by artists from all genres.

Why am I writing this on the day that he first recorded Mr. Tambourine Man (surely one of the finest set of lyrics ever) nearly half a century ago in 1964? I write this because I feel a great sense of loss when I see how this man allowed his personal choices to stand in the way of making a real difference to the world. Of course, no one can deny that the hurricane he created with his songs has changed the world for ever and for good. However, as a lover of Dylan's work, it would be wrong of me to discount what could have been.

Robert Moog Google Doodle

The Google Doodle for Robert Moog's birthday is going to go down as a landmark, this much is for sure. It is a full fledged tone generator with all the wave modulation that one can ask for, and comes with a four track recording and playback button. And all of it with a very amazing range of controls. While modern listeners may be quick to call it a crazy squelchy sound, those of us who have witnessed the evolution of the synthesizer will be all starry eyed and ranting about this for a while.

Screen snippet of the Google Doodle for Robert Moog's 78th birthday

The app, built using the web audio research that the madmen at Googleplex have been doing for a while comes with 19 fully functioning knobs, a modulation wheel, a four track recorder, and volume control for individual oscillators. The three oscillators are paired with filters that let you tweak the attack, decay, sustain and contour, and an on/off switch for the modulation wheel. It works with a keyboard (QWERTY and the numpad) as well as with a mouse, but if you are trying to build a melody, the keyboard is the obvious choice. So, skipping the jargon, here is a Doodle that lets you create your own sound, modulate and envelop it the way you want, and then record up to 30 seconds and four tracks of it, play it back, and share it.

It took me a while (a huge while actually) to figure out all that it contained, and once I did, I was awestruck and nostalgic for quite a while. Before I return to the magic of this doodle, a quick look at the world of Robert Moog and what he did for the modern sound.