The Tea Lounge
has finally stopped with the Joni Mitchell already, and has
instead put this person on. I know nothing about her at all
except that young people with tattoos like her. These people
like some questionable things, but I'm right there with 'em
on Corinne Bailey Rae. This record is the jam. I'm
having, like, a serious memetic encounter right now. I've
had a couple of those in here, it's why I like the place.
You slog through three hours of Sting, but then they hit you
with the Cesaria Evora or Anti-pop Consortium or a tasty live
Bob Marley album.
This Corinne Bailey Rae, she's not breaking any new ground,
but she sounds good nonetheless. The tracks are utterly unoriginal
collages of Stevie Wonder and Beyoncé and Massive Attack
and Norah Jones and Aretha Franklin, flawlessly executed by
human beings playing instruments over a few unobtrusive loops.
Corinne Bailey Rae
Originality is a severely overrated
virtue. This music is feather-light without being too
corny, laid way back like Mary J Blige or Missy Elliott, creamy
but with enough corners in it to be too gooey. Who is this
woman? Where have she and her team of producers, songwriters
and session guys been all my life? My whole cortex is lit
up like a christmas tree, I can practically feel the
efflorescence and pruning of new connections.
When people talk about flashbulb memories, I think the underlying
physiology is a sudden upheaval in the brain's interconnectivity,
a memetic population explosion or extinction that rewires
a lot of cortex much faster than the cortex is used to being
rewired. The flashbulb is an excellent metaphor: burning very
bright, very hot and very briefly, leaving behind a document,
an image you can refer to later. CBR has set off so much associative
action in my head because she's operating in the same musical
landscape I am, and there are a lot of specific decisions
her music makes that I can identify and agree with. I can
just tell that CBR is going to put me squarely in the Tea
Lounge working on my web site in May of 2007 every time I
hear her.
My first and most intense musical flashbulb memory is the
Duke Ellington Orchestra's 1940 recording of Billy Strayhorn's
Take The 'A' Train.
Take The A Train
I took the A train quite a lot, since I grew up on 184th
street, where Washington Heights becomes Inwood. I remember
riding in the first car with my dad, dropping me off at day
camp before hopping back on to ride down to Citibank in midtown.
The A train has the longest run between stops anywhere in
the system, between 125th to 59th streets under Eighth Avenue,
during which speeds can get safely past eighty miles an hour,
and do when the traffic's light. Riding in the front car through
a dark tunnel at eighty, eighty-five miles an hour is better
than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom because it is real
life, baby! The transit museum had a TV commercial in heavy
rotation that year that began with the classic
Blanton-Webster band recording of 'A' Train, accompanying
some footage of the train roaring through the tunnel. It set
off a powerful emotional memory of my dad, so it's no wonder
I was such a receptive host to the tune. It took me until
college to put a composer and a context to it, and then I
swiftly became a devoted and obsessive Ellington and Strayhorn
geek.
A remarkable subway line is the A train, by the way. It's
the longest in the system, running from 207th street in Manhattan
out to the exact opposite corner of the five boroughs, the
remote satellite of Queens aptly named Far Rockaway. The ride
out to Far Rock from midtown can take well over an hour and
a half and feels more like the ride to Guam. The last half
hour is the fun part, when you emerge above ground and cross
about a mile of ocean on a narrow causeway. You're literally
passing fishing boats moored to houses on stilts in the marsh
grass, egrets, sandy beaches. It's like being in a Magritte
painting, or a Miyazake movie.
The A Train flashbulb has even set off secondary flashes,
years later. One such: Mood Indigo, as performed by the Hot
Sextet at Amherst College in the Campus Center, played by
a front line of clarinet, tenor sax and chromatic harmonica.
It was a weeknight in the dead of winter. There were maybe
twenty people in the room, studying or chatting quietly. Amherst
is the kind of classy establishment with fireplaces, and I
recall one being lit. The guys in the Hot Sextet were friends
of mine, or friends of friends, and I thought they were the
last word in hip. That summer the harmonica player, Matt,
a white guy from Lesotho, came to my dorm room, sat me down,
and made me listen to some of the bebop cornerstones:
Song For My Father
Kind Of Blue
The Hot Sextet's rendition of Mood Indigo was straight-ahead,
slow and uncluttered, and it totally knocked me on my ass.
The tune would sound good played on combs and wax paper, it's
so beautiful, but an imaginative horn arrangement does enhance
the experience. Ellington's original recipe remains the tastiest:
clarinet on the bottom, Harmon-muted trumpet in the middle,
and cup-muted trombone on top:
from the Okeh Ellington
Some other great recordings of this tune:
Wycliffe Gordon's arrangement for trombone trio
the classic Charles Mingus version
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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