Grammys vs. Oscars?

It's award season again. And so I'm wondering. This is really a question for people who are both music fanatics and movie fanatics; more specifically, music snobs and movie snobs. I know you're out there. Represent.

There is a certain contingent of music fans -- let's call them "discerning" as a convenient and/or infuriating label -- who don't bother with the Grammy Awards. They know that there's really nothing to see, or hear, and that the so-called "best" music that wins the flashy awards is nothing but the big-label fat cats congratulating themselves on an increasingly irrelevant phenomenon. The movie equivalent would be films such as The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel winning Oscar after Oscar.

In truth, the Grammys do recognize some worthwhile music. But those are the smalltime awards for categories such as Best Traditional Blues Album and Best Boxed or Limited Edition Package. By the time we hit the big Sir Elton John/Lady Gaga duets at 8:00, those awards are long past.

So my question, for you movie snobs, is whether you view the Oscars in a similar way. Do the Oscars represent the artistic pinnacle of moviemaking? Do they reward worthy films? Are they a waste of time? Somewhere in between?

My guess is that true film buffs view the Oscars a little more kindly than music snobs view the Grammys, primarily because there are fewer films on which to focus, and it's a little more difficult for truly worthwhile films to pass under the radar. But I could be wrong. I'd like to hear from you.

Scout Niblett -- The Calcination of Scout Niblett

When you employ Tibetan singing bowl as a lead instrument, and when your drumming makes Meg White sound like Art Blakey, there is a chance that you will never duet with Beyonce on the Grammy Awards. So don’t look for Scout Niblett to show up on your TV screen anytime soon.

In a world where “weird” is defined as smearing your face with eyeshadow (see Lady Gaga on the aforementioned Grammy Awards for reference), Scout Niblett is a whole different kind of weird. For lack of a better label, think of her as Sad Weird. Or maybe just Sad. When she isn't wearing one of her cheap, gaudy wigs (okay, that in itself is odd), Scout looks relatively normal; the girl-next-door waif who could be working behind the counter at 7-11 in an alternative life. But then she opens her mouth:

Why would you think that you make me drink?
I'm a drunk, reasons I don't need
Just like you
And I'd be in my car if I weren't in this bar
Taking pills
Take my keys
I might drive me to Mexico

When you accompany that with an overdriven electric guitar and an off-key banshee wail, you end up with a sort of Grunge Dark Night of the Soul, and the resulting philosophical and musical tsunami can leave you breathless. Think too much about it, and it might actually keep you awake at night.

Scout’s latest album is called The Calcination of Scout Niblett, “calcination” in this case referring to the chemical process by which metals are refined and purified. Yes, there are spiritual overtones to the metaphor, and Scout plunges headfirst into the fray, engaging in the kind of incriminating self doubt and confessional malaise that has characterized poetic navel gazers from Joni Mitchell to Jolie Holland. But there's nothing pretty or precious about the music. What it sounds like is a suicide note from a Mississippi Delta juke joint, distorted guitar crackling through a cheap amp, and it's a uniquely and sadly harrowing listening experience.

I don't like this album. But I can't stop listening to it. It's the musical equivalent of driving by a six-car pileup on the freeway.

Perhaps there's hope. I would like to think so. There is, for instance, this:

Welcome to my self-made sweat box
This is where I take it all off
I've got to sweat it out,
I'll cook those monsters out
I'm not coming out of here until my soul appears

However long it takes, babe. Just come out.

The rawness of the music fully matches the rawness of the words. "Cherry Cheek Bomb" starts with a proto-Led-Zep guitar riff that is equal parts Jimmy Page and Son House. On the epic finale "Meet and Greet," an incredibly weary recapitulation of life on the road, night after night, Scout recounts meeting a fan who asks, "Hey, when you gonna learn to play that thing?". She answers the question with a guitar solo that doesn't so much build as erupt, a great, squalling splat of noise that serves as a giant Fuck You to the world. I can only hope that it isn't meant too literally. This woman needs to keep making music, and you need to hear her.

Barry Dransfield

There is a lot of music out there, far more than even the most dedicated fan can take in. That inevitably means that good and sometimes great music goes unheard and unrecognized.

Take the case of one Barry Dransfield. I knew Barry’s name. I had read of his music here and there, probably in Dirty Linen, the kind of niche music rag that focused on English hippies who played the traditional music of their forefathers. I even owned a bit of his music. Barry’s grinning visage stares out from under a top hat on the cover of Richard Thompson’s 1972 obscurity Morris On, a collection of bizarre little dance tunes and in-jokes so distinctly British that they are utterly baffling to anyone not well versed in 16th century rustic English culture. That would be me, for one. So much for Barry Dransfield.

That is, until a couple weeks ago. I’ve been listening to a 4-CD box set called The Acoustic Folk Box, a surprisingly generic name for a compilation that is, essentially, a bunch of English hippies playing the traditional music of their forefathers. And there was Barry Dransfield again, this time playing and singing with his brother Robin. Their particular contribution is a song called “The Rout of the Blues,” which has nothing to do with feeling happy, and everything to do with an early 18th century tale of the muster of British soldiers. Their singing was so stirring, their sibling harmonies so bracing, that I needed to hear more.

And so the past few weeks have been devoted to hunting down music that is old, very obscure, and absolutely wondrous. Most of Barry’s and Robin’s music is long out of print, so my first discovery was the 1997 2-CD compilation Up to Now, which assembles a goodly portion of the brothers’ recorded output. In true sibling fashion, Barry and Robin didn’t always get along very well, and so there are multi-year gaps in their catalogue. But this 2-CD set is a superb summation of why they mattered, and matter. Most of this material was recorded in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but these songs – both originals and trad covers – sound fresh, and the harmony singing is revelatory, and elicits the kind of sparks that only great brother duos such as The Everlys and The Louvins achieved before them.

Barry recorded solo albums in the long interims between gigs with Robin, and his eponymous solo debut from 1972 remains one of the great milestones of the trad revival. At one time Barry Dransfield had the distinction of being labeled the “rarest folk album,” and fanatical, aging English hippies paid upwards of 400 pounds for the privilege of owning a vinyl version. It has since been re-released on CD, and if it’s not worth 400 pounds, it is surely worth the $20 I paid for it in a local used music store. I suspect I got a bargain. It’s still going for over $50 on Amazon.com. In any case, it’s a perfect trad folk album, split equally between lusty singing on the covers of ancient tunes and sprightly instrumental jigs and reels (Barry is a world-class fiddler).

Fast forward a couple decades. Barry retired from performing in the ‘80s and set up shop as the proprietor of a violin and cello restoration business in his native Hastings. Aside from occasional work scoring television shows and films, infrequent gigs with Robin, and a brief but memorable appearance as a blind fiddler opposite Mel Gibson, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty, the era of Barry Dransfield, Folksinger appeared to be at an end.

Which makes his two late-career albums all the more delightful. There’s music I’m missing in between, so I can’t really comment on his entire career, but the ‘00s were a very good musical decade indeed. Wings of the Sphinx and Unruly – both recorded during the past ten years – show absolutely no diminishment of vocal powers, and, if anything, a more nuanced and impressive instrumental prowess.

I’m especially enamored by the warmth of the singing and the dexterity of the fiddle and guitar work. Many trad folk revivalists come off as a bit studied and reverent, caretakers rather than the embodiment of the men and women who had to face the prospect of Johnny marching off with King George, or Napoleon laying waste to half of Europe. Barry Dransfield remembers flesh. And blood. He’s a marvelous, soulful singer, and I’ve experienced the same pleasure in hearing his voice that I encountered when I first heard Richard Thompson or Sandy Denny.

I love it when this happens. Several decades after the fact, old music has been made new. Those are the best kinds of surprises.

J.D. Salinger

Like most American kids, I read The Catcher in the Rye in high school. Even back then, not all that many years after its publication, it was assigned reading for an English class. But no one had to force me to read it. It was funny, profane, and irreverent. That’s usually a recipe for success in the adolescent world, and it worked for me as well.

J.D. Salinger, who wrote the book, and precious little else, died yesterday at the ripe old age of 91. For all intents and purposes, he quit writing in 1965. He lived the last four and a half decades of his life as a virtual recluse. Perhaps no other author’s work has been simultaneously so influential and pervasive – some 65 million copies of Catcher have been sold – and so skimpy. This was a man whose life’s work essentially rested on a book of 200 slender pages. Two pages per year, more or less. It’s nice work if you can get it. Or if you want to call it work.

Looking back on it, it’s hard to understand what all the fuss was about. Catcher is the most banned/censored work in America by a wide margin. To this day, every time it’s taught in school you can count on one or more parents making a stink about it. I taught it in a suburban Columbus high school in the early 1980s and, sure enough, a few parents were outraged. Didn’t I know there were cuss words in that book? Didn’t I know that it was filled with filth and immorality? It turns out I did know that, and I wanted to teach it anyway, even as a God-fearing Christian. Go figure. That’s because a) I figured that little Buffy and Skip were already familiar with cuss words and immorality, b) I honestly thought it was fairly wonderful literature, and c) I had already read Shakespeare, who basically covered the same territory. Zounds.

But more than that, I appreciated the way Salinger told the truth, and told it in a fresh way that would resonate with anyone old enough to have experienced profound disappointment. Cynical? Yeah, you bet. But sometimes there are good reasons to be cynical. I heard a rumor of Salinger’s death shortly before last night’s State of the Union speech. Then I watched the speech, and listened to the political pundits on two very different networks arguing about the merits of the speech, each driven by their own agendas. Phonies. Holden Caulfield was right. Who wants to grow up to inherit this world?

Salinger captured the heartsickness at the root of the loss of innocence. He was a profoundly sad writer and, by all accounts, a profoundly sad man. But he got the heartsickness exactly right. He captured a life at a crucial turning point – on one side the childhood Disneyland fantasy of “if you can dream it you can do it,” and on the other side the hollow, dispiriting vision of how the adult world really works. You don’t have to be an adolescent to appreciate that conundrum. Sometimes you just have to watch TV on a Wednesday night.

Patty Griffin

My recent interview with soulful singer/songwriter Patty Griffin is right here.

Jaga Jazzist - One Armed Bandit

Once upon a time, "fusion" was not a cuss word. In the ancient mists of time, before Kenny G. roamed the earth, there were musicians and bands who actually managed to merge the best of jazz and rock, classical and funk.

Even in those storied days, however, there were dangers on all sides. Keith Emerson bludgeoned his keyboards with knives, and he and his piano were hoisted out over the audience in a sling, thereby becoming a cross between Peter Pan and Liberace. "Over the top" didn't begin to describe it. Spyro Gyra combined jazz chops with Muzak sensibilities and produced elevator music that was annoyingly hummable. "Jazz Lite" became its own genre, suitable for low-volume listening around the hottub or in the dimly lit bedroom.

But at its best, "fusion" was a challenging and creative merger of the best of two or more genres, and could result in music that sounded like nothing that had come before it. Visionaries like Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Oregon, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Soft Machine, Weather Report, and Mike Oldfield blurred old labels and categories, creating vibrant and fresh sounds in the process. It became stagnant and boring all too quickly. But for a brief moment, it heralded a musical renaissance.

Which brings us to Norwegian band Jaga Jazzist. I couldn't even begin to label the music. I do know that, in the best "fusion" tradition, labels really don't work. Go with prog/electronic/funk/jazz/classical/post-rock if it makes you feel better. I also know that what is here is dazzlingly creative, and that new album One Armed Bandit is a breakneck tour of the musical trends that have dominated music for the past fifty years. Earlier albums from the band could broadly be categorized as electronica/jazz, dominated by intertwined sax and trumpet, Lars Horntveth's serpentine keyboard lines, and insistent beats and tape loops. This one? Even the old fluid boundaries won't work. Consider the song "Toccata" for starters, which has nothing to do with Bach, and which instead hints at Philip Glass minimalism before introducing some tribal drums, and then morphs into a free jazz trumpet solo that is breathtaking. Got a label for that? Go for it.

Across 53 minutes, the nine tracks here bleed into one another, contort, twist and turn in a hundred different ways. And yet the music remains organically rooted, never contrived, always evolving in surprising and surprisingly accessible ways. It's a brilliant, if uncategorizable, triumph. Consider it an early contender for Album of the Year.

Asshole

Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut.

Internet search engines are fearful and powerful things. While googling my name today (look, it's one of the few vain activities left to me; my young adult daughters having, through ongoing ridicule and chortling, stripped me of all other vestiges of self-worth), I encountered the following link: Andy Whitman - Asshole.

My first thought was that the jig was up. I had been found out: utterly unemployable, frequently despondent, and now revealed as a major, miserable whoreson, for all the computer-literate world to see. My second thought was to wonder who had so categorized me, and what had brought about such a dire pronouncement. I clicked on the link.

It turns out that there are websites out there that compile words used on the Internet. This particular website/robot/thingie had been programmed to ferret out the word "asshole." There were pages and pages of links containing the word "asshole." One of them was a link to a recent posting of mine where I had referenced the name of a Martha Wainwright song called "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole."

I am intrigued. For any of you cyber-security gurus out there, who looks at these lists of words? What are they looking for? How do you know if you're in trouble? On one hand, I guess I can understand it . Somebody needs to keep track of the nutjobs out there who write about "as*assi&at#ng Ob@ma" I hope somebody's keeping track of that. But asshole? What possible value does an alphabetically compiled list of postings containing the word "asshole" provide?