James Tenney Retrospective in Toronto

The Music Gallery is the place to be this weekend. Arraymusic, NUMUS and Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan have gotten together to present a James Tenney Retrospective. Here are the links for each day:

Friday, November 23 - Arraymusic: Celebrating James Tenney
Saturday, November 24 - NUMUS - In Memoriam: James Tenney
Sunday, November 25 - Memorial Open House w/Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan

Each concert will offer something unique in the Tenney experience, especially the last day which will pay tribute to the informal, collegial environment of Tenney's living room salons. This promises to be a comprehensive retrospective and a fantastic event, though I would have loved to see the Harmonium series of compositions represented, not to mention some of his later works for large ensemble/orchestra that like the Harmonia employ an available pitch/time bracket structure... major funding challenges notwithstanding.

in tune, out of time

Music as an escape from entropy? Somehow an old theme dressed up.

Myself I'm fascinated by entropy's approach, the breakdown -- when the kick, snare, hihat, handclap, etc. all land on the beat a microsecond apart. The fadeout -- the dying sustain of a piano chord. The flawed nuances in a rhythm, the fuzzy tuning of a choir of instruments (be it guitars, strings or winds) and the blur of their collective attacks. That's why I'll always prefer human players to even the best programmed sounds and beats. (Does anyone who programs worry about trying to make it sound human anymore?)

When writing music, I can't avoid somehow obliquely invoking the human condition -- no fanfares but elegies, things falling apart. Then again, I'm increasingly into traditional tonalities, or at least a tidy, ordered set of twentieth-century chord structures derived from pop, jazz and minimalism. There is an acoustic, mathematical reality in harmony and even that is subject to the imperfection of our hearing mechanism; not to mention culturally-bound, conditioned responses to certain sound patterns and/or cognition of verbal and textual symbols.

Meanwhile, entropy has taken firm hold over the harmonies of mass-produced pop. Noise (often pleasingly diverting noise) rules the texture, with vocal melodies locked in a lonely pairing with speaker-rattling bassline entities. That is, if you listen to commercial pop radio. It's just an indicator.

The metaphor of loss; the end of "progress" in music; the nostalgic fetishization of small, repeated samples of recycled riffs and misremembered poetry; running from the fascism of backbeat normalcy as sound becomes disassociated from its physical, muscular origins -- these are more often what I associate with our society's consumption of music than say with some celebration of existence and human togetherness. More epitaph than balm.

Really, one can project whatever narrative or theory one wants onto what music is or what it does for us. Its universality in anything but as a common phenomenon among world cultures breaks down too. More and more throughout streetcars and libraries of headphone clad strangers, the music is less in the air, less about a collective, body-based experience and more in our individual imaginations. Where will that take it next?

Born in the 80s

A young co-worker, recently married: I danced with my father at my wedding to a John Denver song he used to sing to me when I was a child. "Sunshine on my shoulders..."
Me: "...looks so lovely."
Co-worker, surprised: How do you know John Denver?
Me: In the small town where I grew up long before you, radio was 50% rock/pop, 50% country. More or less.
Other young co-worker: What, no hip hop?
Me: Word was not yet born.
[Groans all around.]

Beats, Breaks & Culture

Too many festivals this weekend: Afrofest; Beats, Breaks & Culture; the Outdoor art in Nathan Phillips Square; the Fringe theatre (the oldest of all of them)! And the Indy of course, how can you avoid that one since you hear it all weekend no matter where you live downtown? Nice planning City of Toronto. Nice planning in general on letting all of this happen at the same time...

Afrofest - always look forward to meeting up with friends, enjoying some fresh, culturally pertinent foods on a grassy spot and hearing the great music of so many different African traditions. Somewhat underwhelmed this year as we happened upon a stretch on Saturday when the schedule was pretty sparse and/or badly plotted. Also weren't allowed to enter the nearly empty beer garden not because we had a child with us, but because we had a stroller. A stroller. This didn't seem to be a problem at Drumfest a few weeks prior. I noted the organizers spent $20,000 on these security aces.

It's also kind of distressing that, at an event where so many black Canadians are gathered downtown (once we were "allowed" to do this when the Caribana parade was still on University Ave.), the cops just wait along the sidelines for folks to deal drugs or roll up in a blingy ride and park on the lawn like it's their cottage. And especially distressing that there are too many folks coming along fulfil the stereotypes.

Sunday afternoon at Harbourfront for Beats, Breaks & Culture was just right, despite the rain. We saw an old friend of my girlfriend's from Recife, Brazil - DJ Dolores - perform with his band and electronics. Lots of interesting and varied grooves and totally danceable.




Also caught the Pop, Lock & Load breakdance competition. Many of my generation still attach a stigma to this form because of its lamentable mainstream trendiness in the early 80s. But unlike most of the suburban bandwagon-jumpers back then, many of the practitioners today are very serious about it, and very, very good.


No real decent photos here, but we were busy balancing little Queen Peace and food; trying to stay out of the throng and away from the superloud speakers. Already pushed it too far at Pride. Queen Peace is a complete club crawler now.

The Return of Mbu'ube

This Friday marks a rare visit to a club and onto the decks for this new baby daddy.

I will be DJing at Electric Love. Oooh, sounds slinky doesn't it?

Here’s the details --

Date: Friday, June 15th
Time: 10 pm – 3 am
Venue: White Orchid
Location: 812 Dundas Street West (two blocks west of Bathurst at Palmerston), Toronto
Cost: $5, FREE before 11 pm

It’s going to be a nice, nice party with 5 DJs including:

Shit La Merde
Egyptrixx
Lofi Hifi
Monkestra
Mbu'ube (aka yours truly)

...many styles of music including:

electro, post-punk, soul, krautrock, & Afrobeat

... and beautiful, dancing people.

I will likely be on early in the night. Hope to see you there!

Arvo Pärt

We spent Good Friday evening on our first date without baby since her arrival. Dinner in a semi-decent chain resto, a concert in a church and back to grandma's to pick up baby by 9:30. Hello approaching midlife... Don't get me wrong, being a parent is awesome so far.



This was no ordinary concert. It was the Mendelsohn Choir performing Arvo Pärt's Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem, or the Passion of the Christ according to St. John, known simply as Passio. I would imagine it's probably been performed only a handful of times in these parts since its writing a quarter century ago, so this was a special occasion. It was the first time I've be able to hear it live, after about twenty years of listening to my beloved CD copy of the original recording.

At seventy minutes, all in a slow-moving A minor with no arias, it's not your average Easter oratorio. Powerful interjections from the choir at key points provide drama as a complement the stark solo writing for bass (Jesus) and tenor (Pontius Pilate), and the ethereal, smaller evangelist chorus. The music itself is classic early Arvo, his tintinnabuli style. Basically, this involves simple major/minor chord arpeggios, layered with non-chord tones adding a quasi-dissonant spice. The overall vibe here suggests the influence of Russian Orthodox musical traditions.

The Mendelsohn's performance was admirable, though the passages felt disconnected from each other. The work sounds best in a very resonant acoustic space where the sound reverberates for several seconds, which was not the case here -- then there was the furnace which kept kicking on below us, and the subway line below that. Still, a good time if you like this type of music, and clearly I do.

If you're into religious choral music (and if you're religious or not); if you're into minimalism (a very general label that doesn't always fit Pärt); or anything medieval or gothic then this is music for you. I believe there are several recordings of the work but the first recording by the Hilliard Ensemble on ECM will always be the best.



Perhaps my fav Pärt work is Kanon Pokajanen, a 80-minute acapella choral setting of the canon of repentance, a text integral to the Orthodox Church. Sung in Church Slavonic, this more than any of his works evokes an image of an Orthodox monastery. I was fortunate to hear the group who made the first recording, the Estonian Chamber Choir, perform it in its entirety several years ago, and it was surprising what full sound came from only a dozen or so singers. This CD plays best on a cold, late autumn or winter's night, preferably with warm company to stave off the bleakness... or alone if you want to pine over paradise kind of thing. I recommend just enjoying the music.



For a more bite-sized intro to Pärt's choral work, the disc Da Pacem, which won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance this year, is an excellent choice. It surveys his work across several decades and all the pieces are short.

The musical director here (and on the original recording of Passio) is Paul Hillier, biographer and early champion and biographer of Pärt, and a great performance figure in both early and modern music -- he's worth a blog post to himself at a later date. Hillier makes the observation that Pärt is one of the most popular composers in the secular world, has written mostly religious music that usually gets played for a paying, applauding, secular audience. (The audience for the concert I attended were a diverse group, and certainly not all Christian or religious, but hard to know especially on a religious holiday.)

Steve Reich considers Arvo Pärt the greatest living composer today, and Reich's own more recent music has shown some of Pärt's influence. He sums up this other deeply religious composer's place in the world nicely: "He's completely out of step with the zeitgeist and yet he's enormously popular, which is so inspiring. His music fulfills a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion."



If you're more an instrumental, secular kind of person, then Arvo's still got wonderful music to offer. Alina is a short CD of intimate, lullaby-like works for piano solo or with either violin or cello.



The disc at left came out on Deutsche Grammophon's 20/21 series, and is an excellent program featuring the early, moody classics Fratres and Tabula Rasa. I can remember the first time I heard Fratres. The first melancholy chords caught my ear, then I was blown away by the clever turn of harmony that suggests a sweet cadence in another key and returns suddenly to the bittersweet, all while the melody line flows without changing scales. It's perhaps just such a nuanced hook that has made this the most popular work of Pärt's, one which he has arranged for numerous groups of instruments over the years.

Both Fratres and Tabula Rasa are also on the next disc, along with the wrenching Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, with its giant, grieving wave of A-minor (again!) for strings and solo bell.



This is the one that started it all as far as exposure to a wider, global audience for Pärt. It includes a rare classical appearance by Keith Jarrett on piano for Fratres. I sometimes prefer the DG disc though, for a more balanced sound, and inclusion of Pärt's Symphony No. 3, which has an interesting, pre-tintinnabuli yet medieval sound.

There are several other very good Pärt CDs in my collection, and dozens if not hundreds of discs out there dedicated entirely to his music. The few that I've mentioned are the ones I find myself listening to most often.

The Motherlode

Picked this up the other day. One thing about Ultimate Breaks & Beats, if you were stuck for something to drop (not that good DJs ever likely are but I have been in my limited experience), you can reach for one of the UBB volumes and an anthem of dancefloor-filling, hands-raising calibre is guaranteed to be at hand. Some deejays spin on a steady diet of Breaks & Beats -- nothing to sneeze at, if you have some nimble technique with this sometimes too-well-known repertoire.

So what this little set is, is the entire official series (minus two "unofficial" volumes) in sound file form. All 25 volumes, 174 tracks totalling 12 hours of ultra-classic grooves. My word yes.

Egads, THE essential music library in one go, for CDN $80. $80 more than freeloading all these tunes if you could find 'em all, but you're assured of clean sound, proper labelling and correct song versions... and you're done in one easy purchase and drag 'n' drop.

The set comprises three discs. The first two are CDRs featuring all the songs in .mp3 format at 192 kbps. This is a standard file size and sound quality, suitable for iPods (unless you use good headphones instead of the cheapie earbuds, then you'll notice otherwise). I suppose you could use 'em for iPod deejaying but they probably won't sound great.

The third disc is a DVD containing all the songs in .aiff format at 1411 kbps. Much better sound, equivalent or better to the "lossless" category. It may be harder to hear the improvement with some of the jams from the 1960s that are sourced from crunchy vinyl or rotted tape, but the bass will be punchier and the high end crispier with most of these files.

The DVD also includes cover images for all 25 LPs at 300 dpi. For my money, they could have just put out the DVD. However, portable CD/mp3 players and some older computers wouldn't be able to read it, plus the term "mp3" markets better than "aiff". Even if the latter sounds better -- though it also hogs more memory, and not everyone wants to load nearly 7 GB of files just for this many songs.

Oh, one thing is that of course UBB never listed artist names nor do they here, just track title and composer, I suppose to avoid lawsuits. However, the artists are easy to find online, including via the Wiki link above.

Now you're thinking, didn't this guy just say that he was totally unimpressed by the sound of the iPod? Yes I did, and I'm left cold by the sound of mp3s in general. But again, aiff sounds a lot better. For that matter, high bitrate mp3s sound fine on my iMac, which to my ears has a better sound card than the iPod. And even average bitrate (128, 192) mp3s sound better burned to audio CD and played on a good machine.