Bravo for Brubeck

Nice to see Dave Brubeck get a well-deserved honor yesterday…the legendary jazzman came to Washington DC to honored with the Ben Franklin Award for Public Diplomacy – a sort of “lifetime achievement” award for Americans going abroad. The award was launched last year by our piano-playing Secretary of State, who noted at the ceremony yesterday, “As a little girl I grew up on the sounds of Dave Brubeck because my dad was your biggest fan.”

Here’s the link to the entire half-hour ceremony, courtesy of State’s website.

Or you can listen here to Brubeck’s moving comments about the emotional experience of playing in Poland for the first time a half-century ago….

AND listen to what he played when he put his “cold hands on this cold [and slightly out-of-tune] piano:” Dave Brubeck: Dziekuje (Thank You)

There’s also a very nice article about Brubeck’s incalcuable impact (with a wonderful slide show) as an overseas jazz ambassador during the ’50s and ’60s here.

Bill Buckner, Won’t You Please Come Home?

Quoth the Elder: “The Red Sox understand that Greek Drama will be written by Geeks and Dons.”

Seems it took two World Series wins to chase all the ghosts rattling the Nation’s cage. Good for all concerned. PS. Sox won the game, too…Five-zip.

Montani Semper Liberi….

Or, “One Commie Waffle, hold the Parfait…”

In the Morning News from the Mountain State:

KFC employee accused of stealing 16 ice creams

By SHERREE GREBENSTEIN / Journal Staff Writer MARTINSBURG — West Virginia State Police arrested an Inwood man Sunday after he allegedly took about 16 parfaits from the freezer of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant where he was working, records show.

As of press time, Kevin Lee Morris remained in Eastern Regional Jail in lieu of $2,500 bond, said a spokesperson at the Martinsburg facility.

According to a criminal complaint filed by Senior Trooper Z.L. Nine of the West Virginia State Police, Martinsburg Detachment, Morris is charged with a second offense felony petit larceny and might face one year in the penitentiary

Nine responded to a call Sunday regarding a larceny at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on Hovatter Drive in Inwood. The manager advised him that Morris had taken about 16 parfaits from the restaurant’s freezer and put them in a compartment on his red mo-ped and then came back into the restaurant.

The 16 parfaits were valued at about $32.

Morris reportedly admitted to taking the sweet treats and placing him in the mo-ped, but advised the trooper that he wanted to pay for them later

No firearms, no business

By Jacob “Ross” Palmer
Gerrardstown:

For many years, Waffle House has used the slogan “America’s favorite place to eat. America’s favorite place to work.” Since their recent ban of guns on their Inwood premises, I think that a slogan such as “America’s unsafe, communist place to eat and work” would be more fitting.

Waffle House’s no firearm policy makes the Inwood restaurant, (which) is already notorious for petty crime and trouble-makers, even more unsafe and invites criminals to take advantage of the defenseless establishment.

In the fantasy world of Waffle House, innocent, helpless and unarmed patrons and employees denied of their rights are kept safe and protected from the criminal, robber and insane gunman that lurks outside by a small sign on a glass door that reads “NO FIREARMS.” If signs stopped crime, we wouldn’t need police.

If you would like to blindly feel safe, I urge you to dine at this local place and perhaps enjoy a communist waffle with hash browns.Mon

Play in Subway, Win Pulitzer…

Not quite one year to the day it was published, funnyman writer Gene Weingarten‘s celebrated story about Joshua Bell busking in the Washington Metro wound up as one of six Pulitzer Prizes won by the Washington Post today – an impressive and near-record haul. Even though the little social experiment was in itself something of a failure (hardly anyone recognized who it was playing underneath that Curly W cap, and even fewer chucked in any change); the story itself was a PR bonanza for Bell — and now, it seems, for the author.    BTW, you can hear Bell’s entire subway performance  here.

And if the past is prologue, I’ll bet that the “Joshua Bell Pulitzer” will get a lot more attention than the “official” Classical Music Pulitzer for 2007: The Little Match Girl Passion, by David Lang, commissioned and premiered at Carnegie Hall by Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices ensemble.

My piece is called The Little Match Girl Passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen’s narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach’s Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Han Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word “passion” comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus’s, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane

Nothing against Lang or his work, which sounds interesting enough, t’s just that invariably these Pulitzers go to pieces that have been played once in often out-of-the way locations.  Back in my NPR days, tracking down the actual *recording* of a Pulitzer-winning-composition – and doing it in time for the morning news! – invariably involved a combination of detective work, browbeating, and more than a little luck.

Not so in the Internet age, however.  Want to hear Lang’s piece – or even download it?  Get it here- direct from the Carnegie website.     For that matter, this may be the most information-rich Pulitzer ever — you can even hear an interview with Lang about the creation of the work.

Oh, yeah, and there’s one more musical Pulitzer today – a Special Citation for Bob Dylan – for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

See the complete list of Pulitzer winners here.

PS – nice to see another Hans Christian Andersen piece set to music to some acclaim.   Throughtout his career the Danish writer/poet/playwright collaborated with and was inspired by a number of notable composers – including Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Wagner.     And Lang is just the latest of a long line of musicians who have in turn found inspiration in Andersen’s words.

When Bad Names happen to Good Bands

Funny blog post today by Bob Boilen of All Song Considered about Bad Band Names…a perpetual source of amusement for musicheads. What got Bob going was a band called The Dodos, whowere DOA until he heard them play at South by Southwest in Austin.

Of course, poorly-named bands have been around since Bill Haley launched his Comets. And by pure coincidence, I had just happened to run across another post in the Web-o-sphere the day before called The 25 Most Ridiculous Names in Rock History -broken down into “Stealth Ridiculous” – (Porno for Pyros, the Alan Parsons Project) “Lazily Ridiculous” (Of Montreal, W.A.S.P.), “Just Plain Ridiculous” (The The, Mr. Mister, The Mr. T Experience), and finally, “The Painfully Ridiculous,” (Archers of Loaf, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Numero Uno, !!! (or Chk-Chk-Chk, in tribute to the 80s cult classic movie The Gods Must Be Crazy)

Common to both lists: bands inadvertantly named by members of the Monty Python troupe, including my personal favorite, Toad The Wet Sprocket. Both a Brit and American band took the name after a hilarious Eric Idle skit on (“Rock Notes”) on Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album.

And Death Cab for Cutie was coined by Pythoner Neil Innes, during his days with the gonzo Bonzo Dog Band. Don’t remember Neil? He’s the smart-aleck minstrel chronicling the adventures of chicken-livered “Brave Sir Robin” on Monty Python and the Holy Grail….

PS – Click here for more than you ever wanted to know about Band name origins…

Miscellaeneous Musings: the NY Phil, Howard Theatre, WYPR, No Depression, Pete Seeger…

Any resemblance to Mike “I Was Just Thinking….” Barnicle is purely coincidental….

• Kind of amazing to hear the wall-to-wall media coverage of the New York Philharmonic’s trip to North Korea….startling and gratifying to hear snippets of the New World Symphony in the middle of network newscasts. Worth reading:  Anne Midgette’s column in the WaPo on this not being a case of bringing Great. Western. Art. to poor benighted souls behind the Bamboo Curtain….

But in Vienna, Austria, there is another image of them: as conducting students. The elite conducting class at the University of Music and Performing Arts there has trained no fewer than 17 North Korean students in the past decade.

• Also check out the blogon-the-road-to-Pyongyang reports from WNYC’s John Schaefer.  For an opposing viewpoint on cultural diplomacy:  Terry Teachout’s thoughts in the Wall Stret Journal on why this whole Philharmonic performance was a political abomination.   Click here to hear a portion of  Pyongyang performance.

• Which reminds me of a similar history-making venture I helped to orchestra for NPR in 1999: The Milwaukee Symphony’s trip to Cuba, which was the first time a US orchestra had performed on the island since the Philadelphia Orchestra had been there in 1959.  ‘Course, it was a little easier for our NPR crew to move around the country than it was for the delegation traveling to North Korea this week…I remember that producer Laura Bertran even managed to lend some technical and logistical help to the struggling public radio station in Havana to broadcast the concert live on the island. (Oh yeah, they played Gershwin, too….the Cuban Overture, natch)  Click here to hear some of the music from similar symphonic excursions in the past,  and here for a similar Washington Post story on other “Diplomacy Concerts” of that past half-century.

• Also in the Post: a feel-good story about the Radio One company moving back into D.C. and helping to anchor a redevelopment of the Howard Theatre, one of the great jazz venues when DC was a great jazz town.

• I don’t know any of the politics involved, but imagining WYPR in Baltimore without Marc Steiner is simply bizarre. If there is any station, public OR commercial, defined by a single personality it would be WYPR and its erstwhile talk-show host. Perhaps that was the problem; I don’t know. But props to the station for broadcasting (on morning drive, no less!) a refreshingly candid and honest account of a stormy Feb. 20 community advisory board meeting about the issues involved.   With a transcript, no less.  That took some courage.

• On the other hand, for the same station to air during afternoon drive a six-month-old repeat of a Mario Armstrong “Digital Cafe”  feature?  About an Internet startup being Beta tested?   With a casual disclaimer that “some information may be out of date?”  Incredibly. Lame.

• Speaking of public radio: Terrific story by Joel Rose of WHYY on the inevitable move to the Web by niche music magazines. Simple explanation: As record companies decline, there’s no one else to pick up the advertising slack…

• And, apropos of my Guitar Zeroes posting the other day, the Youth Radio piece that ran on All Things Considered was another fascinating take on how music and gaming are converging: Producers who discovered music through gaming and moved on to become audio professionals are suddenly finding inspiration and incorporating the sounds and techniques of such games as Dance Dance Fever and Rock Band into their productions. Worth a listen.

• It’s nice to see Pete Seeger getting his props from PBS this week, with an American Masters portrait airing tonight on most PBS stations around the country. Except, that is, in DC, where despite Pete being on the cover of the Post’s TV Week,  the local pubtv powerhouse WETA inexplicably is running a show a three-year old show on Judy Garland.    Huh?   I’ll have more to say on Pete in a later post.

• And until I heard Garrison Keillor’s promos this week, I had no idea there was a band called The Wailin’ Jennys. Cute.

Academy Award Followup: Jian Wang = John Wayne

After Sunday’s posting about my non-viewing of the Academy Awards (and judging by the low-ratings scorecard, I had plenty of company!), once I got to the concert I realized/remembered three more factoids that made the whole music – movies link with Jian Wang even more even more apropos:

*It could be argured that Jian owes his entire career to the silver screen. It was a film, after all, that introduced the West to Jain Wang — as a ten-year old budding cellist who appears while the credits roll at the tail-end of the 1981 Isaac Stern documentary From Mao to Mozart. Continuing the previous theme, an Oscar winner, natch. (You can see the YouTube Video of the last 10 mins or so of the movie either by clicking on Jian’s picture above or here). And what happened after that? This from an interview Wang gave to Strings magazine:

Sau-Wing Lam, a music enthusiast who had left China in 1948 and built up a large and prosperous business in the U.S., saw From Mao to Mozart and was fascinated by the young cellist. Through the director of the Shanghai Conservatory, an old schoolmate, he made inquiries about the boy and learned of his exceptional promise. Lam then wrote to China’s Minister of Culture, proposing to help Wang further his studies in America……

*So when Jian Wang (pronounced “zhan WHONG”) eventually made to America, his Juilliard classmates gave him an American nickname: “John Wayne.”

*And as Wang racks up glowing reviews for his interpretations of the Bach Cello Suites, (and I considered it a real treat to hear him play these life in a room before an audience of about 100 people), he credits…(wait for it)……a terrific French film about the life of Baroque composer Marin Marais and his teacher Saint Colombe for changing his approach to playing Baroque music in general, and Bach in particular.

In the beginning I tried to play the [cello] suites like songs, to make them pretty. But by my mid-20s, they became about more than just being beautiful – also about what we hope to be in this world but can’t. At least for me, it was a view into another spiritual world. After that, I started liking the way I played them better, and then I noticed that other people did too.

I would say one of the triggers was the movie Tous les Matins du Monde. The scene that touched me greatly was when Saint Colombe sits down and begins playing, thinking about his wife who had just died. The simplicity of the music, the organic feeling of it, brought tears to my eyes. From then on, I listened to a lot of Baroque music. I find it very much like Chinese poetry. You know, some concertos are like novels, with fascinating, fantastic stories. You get an entirely different feeling when you read a 20-character poem in Chinese. In those four lines, with five characters per line, you have a mini-universe, so dense and yet so simple. It makes you feel that the world is much more logical.

Click here to read the entire interview with Jian Wang, who’s playing the Bach cello suites tonight at the new Harman Center in Downtown DC.

And here for more on the great soundtrack recorded by Jordi Savall that sparked the worldwide Marin Marais craze. Okay, that’s a stretch. But I do remember the haunting Bells of St. Genevieve got a fair amount of airplay after the move came out in ’92….