From the Editor

With the approach of the holiday season, we at Music Media Monthly wish all our readers a joyful year-end — and we especially extend our best wishes to those suffering from natural disaster in the mid-Atlantic region. This month’s reviews cover a memoir by rock legend Neil Young, an assortment of websites devoted to Van Morrison, DVDs documenting masterclasses by two world-renowned virtuosi, and a roundup of Christmas CDs. Enjoy, and happy holidays!

Books

Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream by Neil Young

Your reaction to Neil Young’s idiosyncratic memoir might depend on how much you enjoy his music. The same practiced artlessness that is so endearing in his records makes this an engaging, occasionally maddening pastiche of memories, pronouncements and contemplative thoughts.  It’s like listening to him jam with Crazy Horse: wonderful, though sometimes a mess.

Born and raised in Canada, Young landed in southern California just as the folk-rock era boomed. He consciously avoided listening to Bob Dylan because he knew he was “a sponge.” With his quivering tenor voice and guitar skills both acoustic and electric, he soon established himself. He skimps on his time with two signature bands, although he briefly recalls Buffalo Springfield’s appearance at Woodstock (“It was so big it was scary. No one could hear. I was really uncomfortable because everyone was very jacked.”) and Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s date at Altamont (“a monster cocaine-fueled ego trip.”)

Young provides tantalizing glimpses into the creative process that led to some of his greatest songs. For instance, one day he picked up “a guitar in a case near the bed – probably too near the bed in the opinion of most of them women I had relationships with.” It was “in a tuning I was fond of, D modal, with the E strings both tuned down to D. It provided a drone sound.” Young began noodling, and in a single sitting composed “Cinnamon Girl”, “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand.”

Young is a musician, not a writer – anyone who hoped he had inherited authorial polish from his father, Scott, a Canadian journalist, may be disappointed. Unlike Pete Townshend’s Who I Am, this is not a linear journey from childhood to stardom to geezerhood. Its audience is folks like me who revere Young as a singer-songwriter with an incomparable body of work stretching across 45 years. At first, repeated riffs on his preoccupations, especially his crusade for a new standard in recorded fidelity that would replace the degraded quality of CDs, are exasperating. Live with that. Eventually you’ll get in synch with his quirky style, including his acknowledgments within the text, rather than in a stand-alone section, of everyone from his mother (Thank you, mom!) to his source material (Thanks, Wiki!).

Early on in the book, Young tells us he is clean and sober for the first time since age 18, on doctor’s orders. He is matter-of-fact about his drug-taking, principally marijuana, and even pokes fun at his sobriety. (“I am feeling very fashionable, even trendy.”)  He’s smart to listen to the docs. An epileptic whose recent health issues included a brain aneurysm, he is haunted by the death of close friends, plus his father’s slide into dementia before his death in 2005.”I am always getting scared that I will be in the middle of some long winded story and forget what I’m talking about and my secret that I am slowly losing my mind will be out.”

The most poignant passages deal with his children. His first son, by actress Carrie Snodgress, has a mild case of cerebral palsy. His second, Ben, the first of two children with his wife Pegi, was born a quadriplegic, also with cerebral palsy. Ben’s diagnosis, he writes, devastated him.  “I was in shock. I walked around in a fog for weeks. I couldn’t fathom how I had fathered two children with a rare condition that was not supposed to be hereditary, with two different mothers.” Young believes his initial anger was the “root of instability inside me.” Ben, now 33 years old, is fed through a tube in his stomach, and has round-the-clock caregivers, yet is completely integrated into the lives of his parents and siblings.

A broken toe that limited Young’s mobility was the catalyst for this book. That, and the money: “Writing is very convenient, has a low expense, and is a great way to pass the time. I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn’t know what to do next.” Before long, he’s enjoying the process. “No wonder my dad did this. There is no live performing, which I love to do as long as I don’t have to do it, and writing could be just the ticket to a more relaxed life with fewer pressures and more time to enjoy with my family and friends… and paddleboarding!”

There’s so little irony in his story-telling, so much loopy sincerity, that only in hindsight do you realize you’ve been played. Young constructs his personality as that of a 67-year old boy and his toys (including a fleet of cars and Lionel trains) who feels the cold draft of mortality. An “incurable collector,” he hoards hundreds of hours of unreleased studio sessions and live performances (some of it “complete shit”) that “still have their place in my chronological obsession.”

Regrets and sly humor find their way in his musings about Charles Manson, Costco, iPods, drugs and other topics. On one occasion, David Crosby visited Young’s ranch south of San Francisco. His van “was a rolling laboratory that made Jack Casady’s briefcase look like chicken feed. Forget I said that! Was my mic on?”

He’s ambivalent about one of his most famous lyrics – “Better to burn out than to fade away.” It was written “right after death of Elvis Presley, one of my childhood heroes,” says Young, and it weighs on him that Kurt Cobain quoted it in his suicide note; Young had been trying to get in touch with the troubled grunge rocker “to tell him he was a great artist.” Cobain’s death “struck a deep chord inside of me.”

A determination to do things his own way have earned Young the label “difficult.” An old record company lawsuit accusing him of making albums “uncharacteristic of Neil Young” still irritates him.  In the end, he says: “I accept the extreme nature of my blessings and burdens, my gifts and messages, my children with their uniqueness, my wife with her endless beauty and renewal. Am I too cosmic about this? I think not, my friend. Do not doubt me in my sincerity, for it is that which has brought us to each other now.”

Make no mistake; Waging Heavy Peace is completely characteristic of Neil Young.

Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream by Neil Young  2012.  522 pages. ISBN: 9780399159466. Penguin Group

— Grace Lichtenstein

Sound Recordings

This year has brought something of a bumper crop of Christmas recordings to my desk — nothing in the way of any other holiday music, but lots of Christmas material in a variety of genres. Instead of just picking three or four and reviewing those in depth, I’m going to provide capsule reviews of eight particularly good (or at least interesting) ones, four coming from various neighborhoods of the jazz tradition and four with a more classical bent.

Starting with the jazzier offerings, there’s a very fine set of Christmas standards in straight-ahead jazz settings performed by various artists from the Justin Time label. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Justin Time JUST 245-2) features such familiar performers as Diana Krall and Hank Jones alongside less well-known artists like Quartango and Coral Egan, as well as the Jubilation Gospel Choir singing a medley of Christmas hymns in a calypso style. It’s an occasionally strange, but consistently fun set.

The Knoxville Jazz Orchestra delivers a thoroughly charming set of big-band arrangements on Christmas Time Is Here (Shade Street, no catalog number). This ensemble’s sound is as big and rich as you’d expect, and the album features guest artists like Hammond organist Dan Trudell, saxophonists Gregory Tardy and Tim Green, and two different choirs. If you’re looking for a slightly different take on the old holiday standbys, then consider this band’s samba arrangement of “Jingle Bells” and the blues-shuffle take on “Silent Night.” (If I were giving grades this month I’d dock them half a grade for the title track, which is hands-down the ugliest and most depressing Christmas song ever written and is nevertheless an inexplicable favorite of many jazz artists.)

For an even bigger and brassier set of tunes, check out the Brass Band of Battle Creek’s A Christmas Festival (MSR Classics MS 1425). This ensemble was recorded live in concert back in 2006 at the W.K. Kellogg Auditorium and turns in a performance that is by turns jazzy, witty, and grand. The program is a bit more varied than you might expect; alongside “Motown Jingle Bells” and a salsa-inflected version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” you’ll hear Victor Herbert‘s “March of the Toys” and a lovely tune called “Ukrainian Bell Carol.” This one is really lots of fun.

The last entry from the jazz side is a little bit of a curiosity. On Song of Simeon: A Christmas Journey (self-released, catalog number 008) the Will Scruggs Jazz Fellowship seeks to convey “the profound, spiritual mystery of the radical Biblical story of the birth of Christ.” The album’s eleven tracks are presented in a two-part program organized around a line from the book of Luke: “A light to enlighten the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” But although the artists’ intentions are explicitly programmatic, the music itself is pretty abstract: tunes like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “Go Down, Moses” are treated in standard jazz style, their melodies used as heads on which protracted solos are based. The result is an album of technically and artistically advanced modern jazz that occasionally makes explicit reference to Yuletide themes. It’s an impressive album, but maybe not the best choice for a holiday party. (Nor, in fairness, was it likely intended to be.)

Moving into the classical realm, consider this two-disc set documenting the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge performing their world-famous Nine Lessons & Carols service (self-released, catalog number 0001). Initiated in 1917, this annual tradition finds the choir alternating traditional English and European carols with relevant Bible readings. This recording also includes a selection of carols commissioned and written for the choir since 2006, one of them by famed English composer John Rutter. If you’re looking for Christmas music of a more solemn and devotional kind, this is about as good as it gets–and needless to say, the Choir of King’s College is absolutely first-rate.

For something earlier and a bit less familiar, the Quadrigia Consort offers a very lovely assortment of “early Christmas music and carols from the British Isles” with On a Cold Winter’s Day (Carpe Diem CD-16293). Vocalist Elisabeth Kaplan and a sextet of wind, string, percussion and keyboard players deliver a wonderful program of words you’ll recognize set to tunes you won’t (and vice versa) as well as several songs and tunes you’re likely never to have heard at all and some (like “The Holly and the Ivy” and “Wexford Carol”) that will be familiar but somewhat different than the versions you’re probably used to. It’s a thoroughly delightful album overall.

On a disc simply titled Christmas (Signum Classics SIGCD291), the virtuoso a cappella vocal group Voces 8 delivers what is probably the most technically impressive and at times sumptuously beautiful classical Christmas album I’ve heard in years. Selections come from all over the place and include works by Hieronymous Praetorius, Francis Poulenc, and William Walton, and their accounts of the hymn “Once in Royal David’s City” and Jim Clements’ arrangement of “Away in a Manger” are both absolutely breathtaking. I’ll be playing this one repeatedly at home during the upcoming Christmas season.

Those whose tastes run to the seriously obscure and early, and who appreciate brilliant vocal work by a top-notch early music ensemble, will welcome the latest album by Alamire. Titled Deo gracias Anglia! (Obsidian CD709), this disc draws its material from the Trinity Carol Roll, “the earliest source for the English polyphonic carol.” The thirteen pieces preserved in this 15th-century document include a carol commemorating the Battle of Agincourt and the famous early song “Ther is no rose of swych vertu.” The instrumentation includes gothic harp, psaltery, and the rarely-heard gemshorn; the singing and playing are excellent, but this is not music that will sound especially “Christmasy” to most ears.

Happy holidays to all!

— Rick Anderson

Videos

The discs reviewed this month are only two of a 40-odd-disc set from the Masterclass Media Foundation. Earlier this year, all videos in this series were made available through Classical Music in Video, a streaming video subscription published by Alexander Street Press [disclosure: ASP is also the publisher of Music Media Monthly. — ed.]. These masterclasses feature two highly accomplished—well, masters—instructing students at the Verbier Festival Academy in Switzerland. These discs are not among the newer releases from MMF, though some more recent titles you may want to investigate feature violinist Rachel Podger at the Three Choirs Festival and two separate discs featuring pianist Boris Berman at the Royal Northern College of Music.

Emmanuel Ax at the Verbier Festival Academy. Piano Masterclass. The Masterclass Media Foundation (MMF 2-031), 2010. 99 minutes. $39.00.

This disc shows pianist Emanuel Ax working with three students on two Beethoven piano sonatas (No. 2 in A major and No. 15 in D major) and his Variations on an Original Theme, C minor, respectively. For the sonatas, Ax asks each student to play the first and second movements in entirety. He seems to have a plan for what he wants to cover as he starts picking the piece apart from the beginning, laying the score in front of student to easily indicate which part of the piece he is critiquing. Ax expresses himself mostly in nonsensical verbal examples and hand gestures, and it makes me giggle to imagine a transcript of this conversation. But his approach seems to work: he truly brings out the qualities he wants to hone in each student, whether it is refining rhythm and dynamics; getting an opening line to “sing;” asking the student to develop a comprehensive “sound picture,” to have more “atmosphere” in his playing, and think beyond the notes; or to have a strategy for connecting each variation to the theme, yet accentuate the differences between each variation. The camera angles are fabulous throughout the video. I wouldn’t have minded a little more sonicpresence from the piano, but Ax’s voice is crystal clear. The students are all unmiked but they do not speak much, anyway, which seems somewhat appropriate during the session but makes me wonder if there would be value to interviewing the students afterward to hear their thoughts about how they might approach that piece, and perhaps other pieces they are working on, differently. Ax reveals himself to be a positive gentleman and one who is very good at being particular without being critical. As a nurturing advisor who guides each student gently to some degree of success, Ax’s demeanor alone makes this disc as valuable for instructors as it is for students.

Ana Chumachenko at the Verbier Festical Academy. Violin Masterclass. The Masterclass Media Foundation (MMF 2-027), 2009. 120 minutes. $39.00.

Unlike Ax, Chumachenko is armed with her own instrument, and she uses her violin often to demonstrate what she would like to hear from the students. Each of the three students is working on a Mozart violin concerto, so there is the added challenge of dealing with the interaction between the student and the accompanist, who plays the piano reduction of the orchestra and is a patient, talented, supportive, and lovely player. Chumachenko stops each student after about four minutes into each movement; she is a constructive yet demanding and unrelenting instructor. With each student she seems to choose an underlying issue of their playing—timidity, style, tension—and in general coaches them on that instead of particular passages or techniques (though at one point she does for a couple minutes break away from the concerto into Bach’s first Cello Suite to represent a technical issue). She works one student in particular very hard but the improvement is evident—the student is emboldened, passionate, and plays with greater finesse. I doubt she’ll go back to her mousey, conservative ways with this piece! The camera angle on Chumachenko is not as useful as it could be; especially in the beginning of the video, the shot is much too focused on her face, and the entire time it’s on her left side, so we can’t see her fingerings or bowing technique very well. Still, Chumachenko’s instruction is positive and progressive, and this disc is a must-watch for serious students of the violin.

— Anne Shelley

Websites

Van Morrison, one of the most unique singer/songwriters in popular music,  was born in 1945 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The son of music-loving parents, he was heavily influenced by American blues and jazz records.  His own “Caledonia soul music” is a musical combination of blues, jazz, soul, and rock, delivered with his inimitable voice and poetic lyrics ripe with evocative imagery, mythical themes, a deeply mystical spirituality, and an ongoing list of his musical and poetic influences.

There’s nobody quite like Van the Man, and few artists’ record catalogs come even remotely close when it comes to sheer originality, dedication to a muse, and a vision that Morrison himself compares to William Blake.   Morrison recently released Born to Sing: No Plan B, his 40^th recording.  A potent blend of jazz, blues, and what one friend once dubbed “Vanerisms” to describe his vocal style, Morrison’s latest is another successful chapter is this storied artist’s career.

With Van in mind recently, this month’s column takes a stroll around the Web to visit a few Morrison related sites.  A good place to start includes Van’s official website , which includes an official list of his albums (buyer beware: there are a lot of poorly recorded bootlegs of the early “Brown Eyed Girl” phase of his career out there – Van’s official site lists the recordings officially sanctioned by Morrison himself).  It also includes concert news and reviews, as well as a list of all his songs (with the occasional lyric sheet tossed in, only detectable by mousing over the song titles).

Morrison has an official YouTube site that includes over a dozen live tracks culled from several  concerts in 2008 and 2012. There are new tunes, a handful of older classics (“Listen to the Lion,” “Moondance,” “Gloria,” and “Saint Dominic’s Preview”) as well as a number of tracks from his 2008 live concert performance of his brilliant 1968 album Astral Weeks – and more about Astral Weeks later in the column.

Morrison has long been a reluctant interviewee, but recently he has been opening up a bit.  He gave a lengthy, spirited interview to John Bennett at his hometown newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph, back in September.  Last month Morrison was interviewed by musician/producer Don Was, and spent some time talking about his musical influences and some of the first records he bought. The video of the interview can be found here. 

Morrison’s long career is marked by a number of brilliant, critically acclaimed recordings as a solo artist, including Astral Weeks, Moondance, Veedon Fleece, Tupelo Honey, His Band and Street Choir, and Saint Dominc’s Preview.  AllMusic.com has a very good biographical sketch  that describes his career highlights and changes, as well as an annotated discography with full album reviews.

Back in the beginning of his career, Van was first known for his work with the Irish R&B band Them (“Gloria”) and his first solo hit, “Brown Eyed Girl.”  But he stunned the musical world in 1968 with this first major label solo album, Astral Weeks.  At that time, while the  musical world was filled with grinding guitars and psychedelic fury, Morrison went into the studio with several respected jazz musicians, including bassist Richard Davis, drummer Connie Kay, and guitarist Jay Berliner.  They recorded a highly personal, introspective, and entirely captivating song cycle that owed more to scat singing than three-chord rock n’ roll.

The album has stood  the test of time and most recently was ranked #19 in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”  The album’s recording engineer, Brooks Arthur, told NPR  what is was like to work with Morrison during Astral Weeks: “This is not an exaggeration,” Arthur says. “A cloud came along; it was called the Van Morrison sessions. We all hopped upon that cloud, and the cloud took us away for a while. And we made this album, and we landed when it was done.”

Legendary rock critic Lester Bangs wrote a long rumination on Astral Weeks, in which he pondered the album’s qualities in a way that cuts to the core of Morrison’s musical mysticism:

You’re in trouble anyway when you sit yourself down to explicate just exactly what a mystical document, which is exactly what Astral Weeks is, means. For one thing, what it means is Richard Davis’s bass playing, which complements the songs and singing all the way with a lyricism that’s something more than just great musicianship: there is something about it that more than inspired, something that has been touched, that’s in the realm of the miraculous. The whole ensemble – Larry Fallon’s string section, Jay Berliner’s guitar (he played on Mingus’s Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), Connie Kay’s drumming – is like that: they and Van sound like they’re not just reading but dwelling inside of each other’s minds.

— Gene Hyde