Dec. 31, 2020
I am not one of those people who makes Top Ten lists, annually or otherwise. It’s just not how my particular OCD tendencies are wired. Selecting one essential song by a single artist I can do (sometimes), but ten songs from the entire range of what I know and love? That’s just crazy. I simply don’t understand how anyone with far-ranging musical interests can make such decisions.
Last year my friend Kat told me about a series on our neighborhood micro-FM station KBFG in which guests are invited to share and discuss ten of their favorite songs. She innocently asked what I might play if I were invited. Because I like Kat and appreciate a mental challenge, I gave it some thought. So much thought. Too many thoughts later I had lists of ten songs in about as many categories. I thought maybe if I took one song from each of those I could do it. But I failed.
Now here I am over a year later, still thinking about it. And I’ve failed the assignment yet again. Sorry, but this list goes up to fifteen. (Believe me, it could have easily gone to 25. Or 50...) Also, it has no relation to this particular year. These are eternal touchstones, music I find indispensable from various times and places that opened my mind and deeply influenced me, even though they have little or no connection to my own work. I can’t possibly put them in a rated order, so I’ve arranged them according to when I first heard them, fleshed out with a bit of personal story.
1. Studio der Frühen Musik: Chanterai Por Mon Coraige, by Guiot de Dijon
A stunningly beautiful interpretation of a 13th century trouvère song from northern France, and one of my favorite recordings ever. Stumbled upon when I worked at Tower Records before I went off to college. As someone who never listened to much classical music from the 18th or 19th centuries, early music was a revelation. In most classical music the instruments are specified and the parts are notated, but with medieval music the notation often exists in only skeletal forms, if at all; sometimes only the lyrics are available and everything else is speculative. So it remains open to many possible interpretations based on cross-disciplinary scholarship. For this reason, early music specialists tend to be polymaths who are not only performers but also composers, improvisers, ethnomusicologists, historians, linguists, instrument builders, tuning theorists, etc.
2. The Consort of Musicke: Lachrimae (Seaven Teares), by John Dowland
The winter of 1982-83 was a confusing and difficult time in my life. I needed to escape the rainy gloom of Olympia and went to Santa Barbara, where a friend got me a job on his landscaping crew. I rented a tiny room in a boarding house downtown. It had a table, a chair, a sink, a fridge, a hot plate, and a shared bathroom down the hall. I slept on the floor in my sleeping bag. During the day I mowed lawns, pulled weeds, dug holes. I spent most nights in my room reading, writing, and listening to music on a small boom box. My grandfather died that February and I wasn’t present for it, which I still regret. One night I was trying to write a poem for him and this suite of mournful pieces for viol consort from the early 1600s came on the radio. The poem more or less wrote itself. At least, that’s how I remember it.
3. Word of Mouth Chorus: Idumea, by Ananias Davisson & Charles Wesley
One night in Olympia some friends invited me over to sing songs from The Sacred Harp, a collection of shape-note hymns from the 17th and 18th century. The notation literally uses different shapes for the notes, to help people learn how to sight-read four-part harmony. I confess it didn’t help me much, but I loved the music. We ran through a number of tunes that night, but this one really stuck with me. I eventually recorded my own weird version. I appreciate it as an expression of uncertainty, something rarely found in religious music. Shape-note singing began in New England but also has strong roots in the South. This group is from Vermont and was affiliated with the Bread & Puppet Theater. They’re a bit less rustic sounding than the southern groups heard on ethnographic recordings, but they were my introduction so I’ll go with their two-part version.
4. M. Nageswara Rao, vina: Ragas – Nata, Goula, Arabhi, Varali, Sri
I believe I heard this in Olympia at the same house as the Sacred Harp singing. By then I had of course heard some Ravi Shankar thanks to the Beatles and Monterey Pop, but the famous sitar player was all I knew of Hindustani music, the classical tradition of North India. This album of South Indian Karnatic music by the vina (or veena) virtuoso M. Nageswara Rao got me interested in digging a little deeper. There seems to be nothing substantial about Rao on the internet, and I still know very little about this artist, or Indian music in general, to be honest. But this album got me interested. I can’t believe it’s never been reissued on CD. There is no one “song” on it; it’s a series of ragas strung together continuously over both sides of the LP. The other side is here, if you want to hear the rest.
5. Hamza El Din: Escalay (The Waterwheel)
In the summer and fall of 1983 I lived with my friends Cheri and Leslie in an old farmhouse in central Massachusetts, and this was in their record collection. I had seen it in the bargain bins at record shops but never heard it before. A wonder hidden in plain sight. Hardly a “primitive” folk musician, Hamza El Din studied electrical engineering in Cairo before he began studying music in university. He went on to tour internationally and eventually emigrated to the US, living in the Bay Area where he became friends with the Grateful Dead, Dylan, Joan Baez, Sandy Bull, and the Kronos Quartet. He taught ethnomusicology at many universities, including here in Seattle at UW.
6. Blind Willie Johnson: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground
When I was living in New England I went to visit my friend Jonathan in Boston for a few days and he introduced me to a ton of life-changing music. I knew a little about blues, the usual big names, but Jonathan gave me a master class in blues, gospel, R&B, folk, and country music, and how they all flow into and out of each other. This went immediately to my Forever Best list. I consider it one of the most important pieces of American music ever recorded. Johnson was a powerful singer and slide guitarist, but from the little we know about him, it seems he never played blues, only gospel. This miracle was recorded at his first recording session in 1927 in Dallas, Texas. It never fails to make the hair on my arms stand up.
7. Skip James: Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues
Another piece from Jonathan’s master class. Skip James sang in this beautiful falsetto voice, a real contrast to much of the more rough-edged style often associated with blues singers. He didn’t use a slide on his guitar, but instead played with an intricate style of finger picking. From what I’ve read about him, he was not a very pleasant person – bitter, vindictive, jealous, paranoid. I find it difficult to reconcile that with the sweetness of his voice. Humans are complicated. This piece is beautiful.
8. Ba-Benzélé Pygmies: Song of Rejoicing After Returning from a Hunt
Yet another masterpiece gleaned from Jonathan’s collection, recorded in the Central African Republic by Simha Arom and Geneviève Taurelle in the early 1960s. This is music-making at its most fundamental and essential: human voices (solo and choral), a pair of simple whistles (a hollow twig called hindewhu), two machetes used as percussion, hand claps. Nothing more is needed. Everything is here. I especially appreciate the way this recording was made. It sounds to me as if the musicians are in a circle surrounding the recordist, who then revolves slowly to focus on each part of the ensemble. This album went on to influence many other musicians, notably Herbie Hancock and, less blatantly, Jon Hassell.
9. Shigenkai & Garyokai Gagaku Ensembles: Ryoo and Nasori
Gagaku is ancient court music from 10th century Japan, but its roots go back to 6th century China. And yet it sounds as contemporary as any recent experimental music. After my grandfather died I spent the winter and spring of 1983-84 living with my step-grandmother in the Bay Area. My friend George helped me get a job at a local music distributor specializing in many small record labels releasing mostly blues, gospel, folk, country, rockabilly, and world music. Much of my pay went to records, including this one. (I can’t find that album on any free streaming service, but the one I’ve linked to is also excellent.) I can’t recall if a co-worker played this or if I put it on myself out of curiosity. Either way, I was instantly smitten.
10. Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard: A Few More Years Shall Roll
This song comes from a deeply soulful folk tradition of country gospel singing also found in the music of Roscoe Holcomb, Ralph Stanley, and many others. In the Fall of 1984 I moved to New York City to do an internship at the art space Franklin Furnace for my last year of college. I fell in with the Downtown improvised music and dance crowd and made many friends whom I still hold dear today. One of them was Cinnie Cole, a banjo player who had come to free improvisation from a bluegrass background. She turned me onto the first album by Hazel & Alice. See also Hazel’s gorgeous solo song Pretty Bird, an original in the same vein that I eventually convinced the wonderful Marideth Cisco to cover.
11. Idjah Hadidjah & Group Jugala: Tonggeret
In the fall of 1985 I returned to NYC to work at New Music Distribution Service. The level of music geekery among the staff was intense, and the stereo wars were competitive but educational. One day our boss put this on and smugly asked if anyone knew where it was from. I think I guessed Thailand. He’d been traveling in Java and asked a cab driver what he liked to listen to, and the guy played him this cassette. He was licensing it for re-release on his record label. This song is a style called kliningan, one of a constellation of semi-related genres from the Sunda region of West Java that are quite different than the classical gamelan of Central Java or Bali, although they use similar instruments. I find this style of singing to be incredibly elegant and refined. There were hundreds of tapes of this kind of music produced in Java in the 1970s and 80s, but this was perhaps the first album of commercial Sundanese music released in the US. I nearly chose Arum Bandung, which I adore, but this was the first piece I heard so it wins out.
12. Quách Thị Hồ & Dinh Khàc Ban: Bắc Phản, by Truc Hiên Nguyên Nhu Lâm
I found this album while crate digging at St. Mark’s Sounds in NYC, and it opened me up to the extraordinary world of Vietnamese music. Ca tru is a form of chamber music sung only by women, who also play the fast, high-pitched percussion parts on phách, a piece of wood or bamboo. This is accompanied by a three-string lute called dàn-day, with punctuation by a drum played by a knowledgeable audience member to signal praise for certain passages. Although ca tru is considered a classical style, this is a recent piece composed by the man who plays the praise drum here. To my ears this also has a very “bluesy” sound, and there are other Vietnamese styles that use guitar modified with the frets scalloped out, or electric lap steel guitar, which push the analogy even further. I love all of it.
13. Valya Balkanska, Lazar Kanevski, Stephan Zahmanov: Iziel je Delyo hajdutin
Before the haunting group harmonies of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares made Bulgarian choral singing the next big thing, there were a couple of albums of Bulgarian folk music that were the gateway to Balkan music for many of us. I think I first heard this when I was cat sitting for my friend Chris in NYC. It was another one of those records I’d seen in bargain bins and never given a second thought. I don’t know what I imagined Bulgarian music might sound like, but I definitely wasn’t expecting anything this powerful and intense. It’s quite different than those lovely choral records, much less polished but no less potent. Valya Balkanska’s voice is a force of nature, and also an excellent introduction to the next selection as well.
14. Sory Kandia Kouyaté: Souaressi
Sory Kandia Kouyaté was an amazing griot singer from Guinea who died young in 1977. I first heard of him when my friends John and Dana came back from the Peace Corps in Senegal and brought me a cassette with him on one side. I found this album at a flea market in Paris in 1988. I didn’t know much about it but I had a feeling it was probably great, and it is. I still know relatively little about him or this music, but I would put his powerful voice up against any operatic tenor in the European classical tradition. I have this fantasy image of him in the studio totally overdriving the microphone, and the recording engineer asking him to step back a little farther from the mic…just another step or two…maybe all the way to the back of the room…
15. Sanggar Guna Winagun Gamelan Klasik: Gending Sekar Gadung/Kidung Yadnya Di Iringi
Jenny DeBouzek and I moved from New York to New Mexico in 1988. She had played in a number of Javanese and American gamelan groups and studied the music in Indonesia before we met. When we got to Santa Fé she had Barbara Benary build her a set of instruments and started a gamelan ensemble that continues today. In 1995 we went to Indonesia to study Javanese music. An acquaintance had set us up with a teacher and a place to stay in Yogyakarta. Our plan was to chill on the beach in Bali for a few days to get acclimated, then go to Java to study for a month or so. The second part of the plan didn’t work out (long story), so we went back to Bali, rented a shack at the beach in Candidasa, and studied gamelan slonding in the nearby village of Tenganan with Pak Gunawan, whom Jenny had met on her previous trip. This was nothing like the Central Javanese style we played at home – a much smaller ensemble, iron keys, no gongs or drums. I found it really difficult to learn and was not very good at it, but it remains some of my favorite gamelan music. This was the first piece we learned, minus the choral singing, which I believe is not normally grafted onto the music in this way, though it may be more common than I am aware. In any case, the two together are gorgeous.