LA Opera to Perform The Complete Ring Cycle

I got the envelope in the mail and I didn't believe it. I read the whole thing and I didn't believe it. I looked it up online and I didn't believe it. I just wrote the title of this Blog and I don't believe it. LA Opera is going to perform the entire Ring Cycle next year. Cheapest non-obstructed tickets run a mere $350 per tutti. That's $87.50 per show to sit in the balcony for four of the longest operas in the history of western music. Der Ring Des Nibelungen is certainly not the most popular of works in the world, especially among Jewish communities including Israel where Richard Wagner's works have been unofficially banned since 1938. If you are unfamiliar then let me explain that Wagner, though dead before the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, was a relentless anti-semite and a boyhood hero of Adolf's. As a child Hitler was brought to a performance of Siegfried and the anti Jewish sentiments had a profound effect on him. Studying Wagner's Operas as well as his writings on political, dramatic, social, literary, and artistic themes reveals a man who turned against former heroes when he was criticized for copying them and then in turn denounced these men (Meyerbeer, and Carl Maria Von Weber among them) as being poor composers and lacking national roots and identity stemmed from being Jewish. His essay Das Judentum in der Musik was originally released under a pseudonym and later under his real name in the mid-nineteenth century and pushed an already existent anti-semetic sentiment among some of his contemporaries and colleagues in music as well as other prominent fields of political and social media. Hitler would eventually claim that Wagner's music was a symbol of the best of Aryan and German culture and even use Wagner's "The Flight of the Valkyrie," as the anthem of his Third Reich. Many today still have trouble separating the evil thoughts and senitments of Wagner from his works and contributions to music, art, drama, and later film. It is certainly understandable that Jewish people from all countries around the world still shun the performance of his works at weddings-where one of the most common songs to date is Wagner's wedding march from the opera Lohengrin, which you know as "Here comes the bride, all dressed in white..."- and certain locations of religious importance including synagogues and obviously the holy land. Even this very performance was fought against at the highest levels of Los Angeles' local government by appointed officials who believe strongly against some of the themes in these works and Wagner's post-mortem ties to one of the most infamous atrocities known to the western world. I, for one, believe as many musical and artistic scholars do, that the works must be judged separately from their author and that the effect Wagner's introduction of the music drama (a complete stage play in which the music serves only to push the drama and conforms to said drama and not the other way around as in earlier Italian and French Operas and more akin to the common movie score today) and the leitmotif (a short musical signature assigned to a character and/or theme of the drama made common by Wagner in works like "The Ring" and pushed to the forefront of movie scores by John Williams with his theme music for characters like Darth Vader and Indian Jones) is of utmost importance to the history of western music and makes his crowning work a must see this coming year. I also believe that any person who considers seeing this masterwork should have knowledge of the ties to Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Movement and Adolf Hitler and the literature on this performance, work, and composer, should educate possible audience members on both the negative and positive aspects help within both the man and his work. The German Romantic Opera is a staple of Wagner's, which he developed through Lohengrin, Tannhauser, Tristan und Isolde, and then perfected in the last of the four operas within the Ring Cycle known as Gotterdamerung (The Twilight of the Gods). To see a Wagner Opera is a long and sometimes overbearing experience. To sit through all four of these works in one weekend will take an audience of a certain pedigree and I am positive that I will be among the few who sit through the entire show every night. The Ring of the Nibelungs is based on stories from Norse legends and contains a ring fashioned by a gnome out of special Rhinegold and later cursed by Wotan, king of the gods, to bring misery and death to its wearer. These Norse legends were also loosely adapted by an author you may have heard of known as J.R.R. Tolkien. LA Opera's director Placido Domingo has commissioned Achim Freyer to design and direct the stage production along with James Conlon conducting the orchestra and these three men along with the supremely top notch players from the LA Opera and the cast make this one of the most highly anticipated productions of this closing decade. All of this splendor along with the fact that LA is also hosting an entire Ring festival including literary, musical, artistic, and political discussions of the work in various contexts throughout historical and contemporary society make this author a bit anxious. The education I called for earlier will certainly be available through lectures and presentations that will take place in venues including The Walt Disney Concert Hall, American Jewish University, Mount St. Mary's College, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and many more. There is simply too much to consider, but this also makes for so much to be excited for. For more information check:  RingFestivalLa.com   and/or  LA Opera.... This article contains paraphrased factual information from the History of Wetern Music by Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca and insight derived from the author's studies of Wagner and German Mythology while both an undergraduate and graduate student of music at the University of California, Santa Barbara and San Diego State University. Thank you for reading.

Concert Review: Fanfarlo and Freelance Whales @ The Echo Last Night

I heard about it,  read up and listened, posted about it, and went. Where in the deuce were YOU at, buddy? Freelance Whales of New York opened for Fanfarlo of Great Britian at The Echo last night and it was an entertaining affair. Let's start with negative points for both bands. "Hey kids! You have thousands of dollars worth of keyboards, drums, guitars, banjos, and all other kinds of instruments on stage! Invest a hundy or two and buy a real set of orchestral bells!!!! You are playing a part of a $75 dollar junior-high percussion set that also includes a book, sticks, a snare drum, and a snare stand." Also, I hate to be such a percussionist, but if you are going to switch off who plays them every song you might think about at least one of you learning how to play them and what kind of mallets you should use. It sounds like crap. Despite these feelings, however, I must admit that when the lovely female member of Freelance Whales was playing a sixteenth-note pattern on the bells with her right hand and producing the bass line with hammer-ons and slides with her left I was impressed. Ok. Other than that the bands were both fun and the sound was similar, but obviously more polished with the headliner. Fanfarlo is an interesting group of chaps and one lass who dress up in stripes and flannels buttoned all the way up and look like they are posing in an old west photo booth at Disneyland. They are a six piece unit, but when they break it down to just the main singer/songwriter and the female vocalist and violin/multi-instrumentalist it makes for some of the best moments. In particular, the second to last song of the set was really beautiful with just guitar and their two-voice harmony. The music is all rich in texture with a range of instruments including trumpet, keyboards, mandolin, violin, extra drums, melodica, clarinet, bells (obviously), and the nearly always present bass and drums. Having a group of multi-instrumentalists is very much the basis of their sound and with the exception of the glockenspiel, which I have perhaps over-killed, the switching of instruments and textures works very well. The grooves range from country-stomps to more upbeat 6/8 twirlers, but remain relatively focused around an indy-rock vibe in the southern/country-rock vain. I still think they sound like Neutral Milk mixed with Andrew Bird, but the American influences of groups like The Band, Crosby, Stills..., Little Feat, etc., are laced throughout. Good times and catchy chants, sorry you missed, but that's why you read this....right? Hello? Anyone?

New Research on Musical Gestures and their Effects on Audience Perception

There is an extremely enlightening article in the latest edition of Percussive Notes (The Journal of the Percussive Arts Society) about the use of gestures and their effect on the Audience's perception of acoustic properties. Basically, studies have been done at Northwestern University in Illinois that prove that while gestures don't change the acoustic value of notes they do change the audience's perception of the notes. Bachelor of Music students who are not percussionist's were subjected to an experiment in which they watched and listened to the striking of single marimba notes with different attack and release gestures (Short vs. Long). Though the students were told to ignore the gestures they were ultimately unable to. The subjects were also informed that what they watched and the sound that they heard may have been mixed up from actual performances (which they sometimes were....though the sounds are acoustically identical whether the gesture is long or short...) and that they were therefore expected to judge only the length of the note based on aural perception. The data shows that the long gestures produced the perception of much longer notes to the young musicians. Pretty interesting stuff, which personally makes me wonder about the effects of the same test given to average audience members. Would the lines drift much further?
The effect is compared in the article to optical illusions such as the Ebbinghaus Illusion (shown above) or the Muller-Lyer Illusion, which famously trick the mind into thinking that two objects are different in size based on their individual surroundings when in fact they are identical. The author then goes even deeper into the mixing and matching of human senses to create our overall perception referencing surround-sound movie theaters and multiple scholarly articles on cognition, musical perception, and percussion performance. The findings show that whether the gestures actually change the sound or not, they do change the audiences perception greatly and therefore should be considered in performance practices. So, yes, Pete Townshend is a freakin' genius....

Fanfarlo @ The Echo this Monday, 11/23

I'm currently listening to a tasty cover of "In the Aeroplane over the Sea," the third cover I have watched from the Fanfarlo myspace page. The indie-rock boy wizard, my roommate Jon, turned me on to this band and their upcoming show at the Echo this coming Monday. I believe it came up during a conversation on how the hell to stand out in this age of blog madness and ten-second singles. Jon mentions that Fanfarlo hand out those plastic tubes, which when swung in a circle over your head create a strange whistle-hum similar to Jim Carrey's tractor-beam noise made by his mouth in Dumb and Dumber. "Sucked me right in..." The band hands these out to the crowd and then everyone joins-in creating a collective whoomph whilst Fanfarlo plays the next number. Sounds cool to me. So being a good little music blogger I read up and listen and so far I'm interested. Their songs sound a bit like Neutral Milk mixed with someone a little wimpier, say Andrew Bird. Their "Diary," is really cool. I read the top installment about touring Europe andthen launching right into a US tour with a ridiculously large trailer. I'm into these bands that Beavis and Butthead would have called "college music..." You know, intelligent musicians who read books (I know, crazy right?) and right poetic lyrics and paste them on the type of rich musical textures, which only multi-instrumentalists could create. Look out for the review or else I'll see you at the gig.

Movie Review: Control (2007)

Control is a movie about the tormented life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the band Joy Division. The film was released in 2007 and directed by Dutch director Anton Corbijn. Control saw some critical acclaim in Europe, winning a few awards at the Edinburgh Film Festival including; "Best actor," Sam Riley, and "Best new British film." It also received brilliant reviews from the likes of Rolling Stone, Maxim, The Guardian, and Rogert Ebert. What's more important and a little surprising is that the surviving members of the band approved of the movie; claiming that it certainly wasn't one hundred percent factual, but that it was more so than 24 Hour Party People and that "you could tell that Anton knew us, and he knew us well..." (Peter Hook). Another cool fact about this movie learned from the IMDB page is that the actors learned to play the songs and all of the live footage of the band is actually the actors playing the tunes and not them faking to some tape. Not many music biopics can say that, my friends. The movie is black and white, which adds to the "authentic" feeling and it is shot beautifully, it is moving, and funny, and sad, and keeps you locked in for the entire two hours. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves music or film.

Twitter me This......

Twitter? Hello? Why must you make me feel so old? I keep asking Obama if he can help a brother out and tell me how to use this thing. I think I may have hooked my Blog up to it at this point and this post is kind of just to check. You can follow me on there @lefshodrummer if you do that kind of thing. I'm following people like Rob Corddry, Questlove, Pitchfork, Mr. Obama himself, and San Francisco mayor and possibly soon to be Governor of California, Gavin Newsome. See ya 'round....

RVOW: Taj Mahal's 1968 self-titled Debut

For this week's "Random Vinyl," I am spinning Taj Mahal's 1968 self titled debut. If you love the blues or even just rock-and-roll you will dig this record "top left to bottom right."

Taj Mahal was born in Harlem in 1942. His father was a pianist and arranger and his mother sang in a local gospel choir. Mahal was raised to be proud of his heritage; having parents who witnessed first hand the art, prose, poetry, and music, of the Harlem Renaissance. This sense of pride for his West-Indian and African ancestry would prove ever-present in his work as he matured and became one of the most prominent voices in blues music; eventually melding it with the likes of gospel, funk, rock, reggae, and Caribbean music.
On his self-titled debut, under his stage name, which he took around 1961 at the age of 19, we hear what the average listener today might call 'classic blues.' The electric blues as played by people like Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King. When Taj Mahal began playing it in 1968, however, it wasn't so well known and wide-spread. Classic blues was Robert Johnson and Son House and was acoustic. People like the blues legends mentioned above and Taj Mahal (certainly a legend in his own right today) were responsible for plugging-in and electrifying the genre. This album is certainly a classic, though, with tracks like the opening "Leaving Trunk," and "Dust my Broom." Songs that have been endlessly covered, but rarely played with as much grit, emotion, and loose groove as they are represented here on this LP. The most notable musicians on the album other than Mr. Fredericks are Charles Blackwell (Drums) and Ry Cooder (Guitar), but I prefer the description of the group quoted from Taj Mahal himself on the back of the sleeve: "We got a pretty tight band here, though-a son of a Texas sharecropper, a Hungarian Jew, a wild-eyed Irishman, and a crazy swamp Spade...(playing) Blues-rock-gospel-Country-funk. Screamin' and Singin'." Its hard to argue that last sentiment. They are definitely screamin' and singin' on "E Z Rider," a classic blues tale of lost love, and on the album's closing track, one of my personal favorites, "The Celebrated Walkin' Blues," which features Mahal playing some tasty slide guitar and, of course, his signature blues harp.