Jimmy Winokur
My
Favorite Musicians -- Page 3
and some
personal background
A major part of my jazz experience over the years has been my encounter with the European (mostly) jazz record label, ECM (Editions of Contemporary Music). The extraordinary role of ECM and its unique sound has been widely debated, and is difficult to describe. To give some hints, here are some attempts.
Manfred Eicher,
Founder, ECM
I wrote about ECM music in an Amazon.com review of Horizon's Touched, an exquisite book devoted to the ECM experience:
"It has been 35 years since Manfred Eicher's brilliant ECM label released Gary Burton's and Chick Corea's wonderful collaboration Crystal Silence.
It
is 38 years since the label was first launched. .
Since then, ECM has created and released so vast and extraordinary a
collection of music - path breaking improvisational music, often jazz that
does not swing -- that adventurous jazz lovers have come to know the "ECM
sound." Over its lifetime so far, it has released the work of a huge range
of artists, including these extraordinary albums:
Oregon, Dave
Holland's
Prime Directive,
Keith Jarrett's
The Köln Concert,
John Abercrombie's
Timeless, Kenny
Wheeler's
Angel Song, Trygve
Seim's
Different Rivers,
Ralph Towner's and Gary Burton's
Matchbook, and Art
Lande & Mark Isham's
Rubisa Patrol.
When the Portland Jazz Festival honored the anniversary of Crystal Silence's release in February, 2007, listeners, critics and ECM representatives spent hours in lively seminars seeking words to define this ECM Sound. For me, that sound is usually abstract, pristinely clear and spare in production, often with the disciplined ambiance of chamber music, and always original."
Writing in 2007 about the same book in "Manfred Eicher: ECM Squared" Philip Baker said:
"The most beautiful sound next to silence" is how the Munich-based record label ECM, founded in 1969, proudly brands a catalogue of recorded music where nothing has been placed off-limits. ECM has managed to encompass most of the prevailing trends in contemporary music. The distinctive clarity of what has been dubbed "the ECM sound" has often been discussed as readily as the music it carries, a paradox that makes label founder Manfred Eicher notoriously exasperated. He'd rather talk about the music, but the sound of his recordings is as enigmatic as the formula for Coca-Cola.
The defining date for ECM was 24 January 1975, when Keith Jarrett - suffering chronic back pain and playing on what was undoubtedly the worst piano of his illustrious career - gave a solo concert at the Cologne Opera House. Eicher's mobile recording unit captured a gig that, at the time, Jarrett would rather have forgotten - but ECM's resulting Köln Concert release was the sort of popular smash-hit that jazz recordings rarely become.
Jarrett's fluid, psychedelic arpeggios and his clubbable harmonies tapped into the New Age zeitgeist of the 1970s, and ECM suddenly became an independent label with clout approaching that of the majors.
And from such exploratory beginnings, ECM helped to create a genre - Holy Minimalism...."
The ECM aesthetic extends also to its cover art, and I include a bunch of examples here.
Billy Kilson
Robin Eubanks
Steve Nelson
Sting
I'd avoided this guy, because...who would want to hear music by someone names "Sting"! (Duh!) Then, Kevin Shea introduced me in '87-'88 to the live double album Bring on the Night (with Branford Marsalis & the late, great Kenny Kirkland), -- in the odd setting of the 200 lawyer firm Holme Roberts and Owen. I was visiting HRO as Special Counsel , on leave from DU for a year. Rock music was the last benefit I imagined receiving there.!
Soon, I had the joy of seeing him live at
Fiddler's
Green, then under attack from neighbors disturbed by the noise and crowds.
(By luck, I ended up doing some legal work in this controversy!) The
concert was in Sting's tour for
Nothing Like the Sun
,
his most lyrical and literate album. This was an all-time favorite concert.
Years later, in October 2003, I have seen Sting and his lady love discuss... tantric sex on Oprah! He should stick to music.
Joni Mitchell
Most original and finest
woman singer-songwriter of the counter-culture generation, from the likes of
The Circle Game &I Think I Understand,
to A Case of You, Mingus
& Hissing of Summer Lawns
From the first time I was struck by James Taylor's newly released 1st album, playing in Jerry's Records on E. Market St. in Philly, I've loved his music -- the smooth thin tenor and the trademark acoustic guitar licks.
In the 1990s, when I first saw James in person, at the Telluride Bluegrass (and Folk) Festival, he was accompanied by perhaps 15 musicians! Times had changed! But with all the fuss, James himself commanded rapt attention by the absolutely beatific radiance with which he performed -- both with the supporting musicians and for a brief solo section of the concert.
In that extraordinary concert, he was the embodiment of his own song, Secret of Life . I've never experienced a performance like it!
By contrast, when I saw him in 2008 at Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver, promoting his "Covers" album, James seemed awkward, stammering and uninspired. Go figure! Still, he is for me. a musical treasure!
to the controversial introduction -- in Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints -- of African and some South American - sensibility into pop music. in 1998, Simon's brought his perfectionism to Broadway with the ill fated The Capeman. Opening to poor reviews, the show had only 68 performances. Nonetheless, the music was compelling.
Singer-Songwriters...and
Notorious Exam Characters:
Karla Bonoff &Terence Boylan
Each is a superb singer songwriter of the '70s, though neither has really
escaped obscurity. Bonoff , who still plays at the Boulder Chautauqua each summer, his the
better known of the two, and is equally known as the writer of several Linda
Ronstadt hits of the 70s (which Karla performs better than Linda, to my
ear).
Bard College classmate of Walter Becker & Donald Fagan, Boylan released two superb but little known albums in the 70s, backed by several of the sidemen who played with Steely Dan in that era. "Boona" Boylan then disappeared from the recording scene until the late 90s, when he re-released the best tracks from the two 70s albums on a truly wonderful new, self-titled collection. (Through the original of this website, I actually got an email from Terence around that time, when he stumbled across my site via Google because it contained his name.)
^ The Ride of the
Valkyries ^
2nd in The Ring
cycle, was a prominent musical theme -- Wagner's most aggressive -- used by
the Nazis
Tristan & Isolde
Along with The Ring cycle of 4 operas, Tristan & Isolde is the culmination of Wagner's work.
Wagner's egotism & idealism were reflected in his concept of the 'Total Artwork' or Gesamtkunstwerk, synthesis of Arts with opera served as a vehicle for a single, integrated, multimedia artistic expression
Richard Wagner,
social
philosopher & despicable Anti-Semite
, was nonetheless the the 19th century's most revolutionary and influential
composer. His sensibility inclined toward the archetypal of mythology,
and his music was celebrated years later by the Third Reich. His
soaring harmonies broke dramatically with classical rules, and opened the
way to Mahler and the great High Romantic and Modern composers who followed.
Nowhere are his exquisite harmonies more profoundly moving than
in
<-- Tristan & Isolde.
My love of his music is focused on the orchestral preludes, infused with Wagner's revolutionary harmonies, introducing his musical themes rather than the vocalized core of the operas.
Paul Brady
with Bonnie Raitt
Special
Women
Singer-Songwriters
<--Ferron
Cheryl Wheeler-->
________________________
From the
British Isles :
VVV
Sandy Denny
Mary Black
George Gershwin
Songwriters for
Musical Theater:
George Gershwin,
Richard Rogers,
Sigmund Romberg,
Jerome Kern
George & Ira
Gershwin's
Porgy & Bess
Sigmund Romberg
Richard Rogers
Jerome Kern
