An Embarrassment of Riches

Ways of Listening by Sara B Is your iPod at capacity? Mine is. And when I download songs to my computer, I never do anything with them. Add to that a shed crammed with CDs I can’t bear to part with, and it’s too much music to handle.

Library CDs broke my cycle of pointless song-hoarding. The music they hold is ephemeral, passing through my life like fragrance. Newly liberated, I scaled way back on listening to my iPod. Overuse was making me numb to its charms. These days, I only listen to it while walking on lunch break. Reducing iPod visitation hours has made me fall in love with a few bands all over again.

Like The Misfits and the anthology Static Age. It’s a collection of songs they recorded during graveyard hours in New Jersey, but it plays like tinny transmissions from a cave in outer space. Cruddy recording never sounded so right, and neither did the words “Her omelette of disease awaits your noontime meal/ Her mouth of germicide seducing all your glands.”  It was 1978, and they were young enough to pull off lyrics like that with punky-sincere sneers. In my book, Static Age is all the Misfits you need.

I look like a mom and a library nerd lady who wears knitted ponchos, because I am. But on my walks I am listening to THE MISFITS, and therefore a bad-ass! And no one knows, unless I am pumping my fist and muttering some ridiculous mock-Satanic chant along with Glenn Danzig under my breath.

Today on my awesome bad-ass walk I saw a crusty old dude walking from the opposite direction. He had a puffy coat and a black eye and carried a little boom box like the one our youth librarian has in the meeting room. I paused my Misfits and heard Sam Cooke’s velvety voice blasting out of the boom box. I smiled at the puffy coat guy and he smiled back. And for a happy moment, our private music worlds intersected.

Astaire Therapy - by Katie Do you have a case of the winter blahs? The sparkle of the holidays has passed, but the winter weather remains. Spring and summer seem a long way off, know what I mean? Well, never fear. Cue Fred Astaire! You can't go wrong with his singing and dancing charms. Check out the film A Damsel in Distress, based on the novel by P.G. Wodehouse and recently released on DVD. This lighthearted movie is heavy on talent, featuring the music of George & Ira Gershwin and co-starring George Burns and Gracie Allen. You won't find Ginger Rogers in this one, but the story involves the usual plot suspects (romantic complications, mistaken identities, etc). And the musical numbers are fantastic! An Oscar-winning fun house routine features Astaire, Burns, and Allen dancing on and around turntables, tunnels, slides, and distorting mirrors. A Gershwin gem, "Nice Work if You Can Get it", highlights Astaire's incredible rhythm and musicality, both as a dancer and as a drummer.

If you'd like to learn more about Fred Astaire, check out his engaging autobiography Steps in Time. In his conversational, easy-going style, Astaire relates the story of his life and work, at least up to 1959 when the book was first published. In a more recent publication, Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz, author Todd Decker describes Astaire's contributions to the art of jazz music and his collaborations with a variety of musicians, arrangers, and performers.

Sit back, relax, and let Fred Astaire tap your troubles away!

Taking Back Christmas Music - by Sara B I love Christmas music, and I am not embarrassed. I love to sing Christmas songs and I love to play the Christmas records my Mom played when I was growing up, especially Johnny Mathis’ Merry Christmas.

 But years of retail work spoiled too many Christmas songs for me. In retail, hearing bubblegum cover versions of “Wonderful Christmastime” multiple times a day for nearly three months straight is an inevitable occupational hazard.

I’m not about to let the season’s rabid consumerism ruin all my fun. You don’t have to, either. Take back Christmas music by creating your own holiday programming at home with offbeat selections from the library’s extensive selection of Christmas CDs. Here are some of my favorites.

The Original Soul Christmas, a compilation originally released in 1968, offers funky delights aplenty, especially Clarence Carter’s “Back Door Santa,” whose opening riff many of us will recognize from the sample in Run-DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis.” It’s both Christmas-y and groovy all at once, and great for parties.

Best known as the original vocalist for Judas Priest, Rob Halford might seem an unlikely musician to record a Christmas album. His Winter Songs offers a mixed bag of classics and originals, but it’s worth listening to just for the mighty metal glory of his uptempo yet appropriately majestic “We Three Kings.”

My most beloved of the library’s Christmas CDs is Mario Lanza Sings Christmas Carols. The Italian-American tenor from Philly with the bombastic pipes (he was the Josh Groban of the 1950s) died in 1959, the same year he recorded this collection of secular and sacred classics; it’s borderline cheesy, but I love the deliciously dated way he enunciates “fa la la la la.” Its old-timey charm sets my heart aglow with transmissions from yore.

(And a here’s a bonus! You can download the aforementioned “Christmas in Hollis” from our Freegal service. Thanks, Library Santa!) 

ChrisSingles - by Dana

This post is a follow up to Dana's previous post on Christmas albums. Below Dana heps us to some of the choice singles in our Christmas Music collection.

Elvis Presley, "Merry Christmas Baby". Like most of his albums, Elvis' many Christmas albums are largely filled with dreck (you can thank his manager, Col. Parker, for that). But left to his own devices Elvis sang Charles Brown's Xmas blues with pure delight. Mix tape gold.

Otis Redding, "White Christmas". Available on various Christmas compilations, which all seem to have "Soul" in the title. And rightly so, this is what soul music is supposed to be -- proof that everybody's got soul, but some people just make you feel it more. The key lyric here is "dreaming", but definitely not expecting, that all his days will be "merry and bright". 

Willie Nelson, "Pretty Paper". Many new songs are written for the holidays each year, but precious few are added to the canon. This one should be, if it hasn't already. It's the tale of a down and out guy reduced to trying to sell wrapping paper to holiday shoppers too busy to even notice him. Willie sings it like he's been there. There, but for the grace of god, go you and I.

It's a Hard Knock Life - by Joanna While I love watching a good stage musical, I have always been more fascinated by the view behind-the-scenes. From the initial writing and composing to the auditions, rehearsals, staging, set and lighting design, and costuming, a Broadway production involves a lot of people spending a lot of time together for months on end, creating drama well before the curtain rises. Two recent documentaries did a brilliant job of bringing me backstage.

If you were a 9-year-old girl sometime between 1977 and 1983, the odds are good that you wanted to be an orphan. The musical Annie was a huge hit on Broadway, plus there were four touring companies and a film version; that’s a lot of little girls getting paid to sing and dance. The documentary Life After Tomorrow revisits those “orphans” 30 years later to get their firsthand accounts of sudden fame, stage parents, rehearsals, rivalry, and the devastation of puberty when you are a child actor. Those interviewed include some still-famous women (actress Sarah Jessica Parker, MSNBC anchor Dara Brown) and others who have distanced themselves from show business as much as possible. The film ends with some sweet and funny reunions where the now all-grown-up women find that they remember much of their choreography 25 years after their last performances.

Every Little Step  is a documentary about the auditions for the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, the celebrated musical about auditioning for a Broadway musical. (Meta, anyone?) We get to know some of the young men and women moving through the increasingly difficult process; interspersed with their stories are interviews with, and footage of some of the original participants in the workshops that led to the writing of the play. Like the play itself, this film is heart-wrenching, suspenseful, and hysterical.

For a behind-the-scenes look at plays that were not so successful, check out Kate’s entry on Broadway flops on the library’s Furthermore... blog. 

Creedence and the Art of Chooglin’ - By Sara B

Please welcome our newest blogger, Sara B.! She has this to say about herself: I’m a former arts and entertainment reporter who loves to root out common threads running through the books and media I happily stumble across daily. At the library, I feel like a kid in a candy store where everything is free.  

Hippies, punks, jocks, rednecks, preps, heschers -- everyone loves Creedence Clearwater Revival, and even those who don’t can’t be bothered to hate them. CCR songs are such a part of our collective pop culture that their hooks have become part of our bodily being, inhaled through accumulated listenings on classic rock radio, worn-out copies of Chronicle, and blaring stereos at beery gatherings.

Like the blue jeans and flannel shirts favored by John Fogerty, Creedence’s catalog is so comfortable it’s easy to take for granted. Stumbling on a copy of the 2001 box set simply titled Creedence Clearwater Revival reminded me not only why Creedence matters, but how visceral their music is. It also reconnected me with a period in the mid-1990s when, young and rootless and unhappy, I was a Creedence maniac. The working-class aesthetic of songs like “Willie and the Poor Boys” and “Don’t Look Now” helped me feel grounded, and the mythical rural South they painted was a soulful place to escape to.   

Then I moved to California, and I just didn’t seem to need CCR as much. Ironically, I was living just miles from El Cerrito, the band’s quiet and unremarkable hometown. Like many, I’d always assumed CCR sprouted from some Louisiana swamp, and discovering their actual suburban roots perplexed me.

Creedence started out as a run-of-the-mill teenage garage band, playing rock’n’roll and devouring R&B songs. The story of how they morphed into America’s least assuming blockbuster rock group is lovingly outlined by critics including Ed Ward and Robert Christgau in the fat and juicy liner notes accompanying the Creedence box set. Lacking earthiness in sleepy El Cerrito, Fogerty and his bandmates simply manufactured it, most audibly in Fogerty’s meaty drawl.

My husband noticed the sudden abundance of CCR in our lives and quoted from The Big Lebowski, in which the band’s music is a leitmotif for The Dude’s ideal headspace (note how, once The Dude’s Creedence tapes disappear, the movie’s plot really careens into un-Dudeliness).

When was the last time you actually listened to a Creedence song? Do so and The Dude’s headspace can be yours, my friend. Times for us are tough; many people are suffering and unhappy. That our divided society can find unity in CCR’s music is not only a pleasure, but a solace. They give us the strength to keep on chooglin’.

Again, the Coming of the Light - By Dana

Welcome to Dana, a new blogger for EOR, who has this to say about himself: I've worked for Multnomah County Library for fourteen years.  I play C-melody sax and plan to blog some about our great sheet music collection. I also worked in record stores here and in the Twin Cities and wrote about music semi-professionally in a former life.

At most branches they only come out once a year, and fly off the shelves once they're on display. Given the constraints of a (largely) set repertoire and seasonal appropriateness, how many Christmas CDs does one need for a truly Happy Holidaze? Yet, IMHO, great Artists have no problem putting their personal stamp on shopworn seasonal fare. And there's still plenty of time to place holds and get things right on time without having to revert to the Orthodox/Julian calendar. So here are a few suggestions to help you explore some of the many approaches to music making found in our libraries under the call number CD Xmas.

Phil Spector's Christmas Album, a/k/a A Christmas Gift to You (1963). Yes, I know he's nuts and in prison and deservedly so. Nonetheless, this is arguably the greatest rock 'n roll Xmas album ever, indisputably the most imitated. It was pulled from its scheduled release (in 'the States', not the UK) because of president Kennedy's assassination, which no doubt blunted its initial impact (by the next year, everything had changed in popular music). The infamous Wall of Sound is applied to standard seasonal fare and one original, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)", which got Darlene Love in the Hall of Fame and on Letterman every year forever. Crystals, Ronnettes, Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, not to mention the Wrecking Crew and various hangers-on, were roped into playing sleigh-bells so they could have enough on the track without having to overdub.

Brothers of the Baladi, A Time of Peace (1999). At first blush it may strike your ears as strange to hear these oh so familiar tunes done up in Middle Eastern instrumentation.  But last time I checked, that's where that Little Town of Bethlehem was. You know, where all this Christmas stuff started.  And after you get used to it, it just sounds good.

John Fahey, The New Possibility (1968). The late steel string guitar guru had any number of holiday platters on offer, but he got it (most strikingly) right with this, the first one. definitely a different perspective -- stark, austere, bracing as a blast of cold air, traditional carols are here made new again by taking them back to what was presumably their original sense of wonder and awe.

Boston Camerata, Medieval Christmas (1975). When you get good and tired of the usual mall muzak, set the Wayback Machine for your favorite century/era/epoch and there you go. Everything olde is new again. If this is nostalgia for you, someone needs to call the Guinness Book.

Fascinating Features - by Katie

Welcome to our new blogger Katie, who has lived in Portland most of her life and never thought her high school library job would evolve into a lifelong (hopefully!) career. She worked as a news writer and reporter in a previous life and especially appreciates efficient, powerful writing. She also loves music, documentaries, quirky characters, stories of triumph over adversity, dogs, and tap dancing.

Produce clear, concise copy - that was my task as a college intern in a radio news department. I spent several hours a day rewriting news wire content. Like many aspiring journalists, I dreamed of writing feature stories – genuine human interest pieces that allowed the freedom to tell a story or make a point in more than one to two paragraphs. These are the kinds of stories you will find in The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten.

Weingarten is a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and humor columnist for The Washington Post. The Fiddler in the Subway collects some of his best work into one not-to-be-missed volume. The book’s title comes from one of the pieces for which Weingarten won a Pulitzer. The idea behind the story was to conduct an experiment. Place a world-renowned violinist, Joshua Bell, in a busy Washington, D.C. subway station, with some loose change in his nearby violin case. How would passersby react? Would they recognize this top-notch musician in his jeans, t-shirt and baseball cap? More importantly, would they know and appreciate the quality and beauty of the music? The story reveals much about the power of context and the way in which people move through their busy lives, often oblivious to what is happening around them. Joshua Bell, who plays a Stradivarius violin worth more than three million dollars and fills concert halls the world over, made about $32 dollars that day. Of the 1,097 people who passed by Bell that January morning, seven of them stopped to listen for at least a minute.

Now, I suppose you could draw some doom-and-gloom conclusions about the state of humanity from this story. But Weingarten doesn’t do that at all. He doesn’t do that in any of his pieces. He simply observes the human condition in a variety of settings and circumstances, and writes about it, completely engaging and entertaining the reader along the way. Weingarten is a humor writer after all, and the way he describes many of his subjects will have you laughing out loud.  Take “The Great Zucchini,” the story of a much sought-after children’s entertainer who commands $300 per birthday party and does things like pour water on his head and eat toilet paper. What is it about this college dropout with no fancy costumes or props that has him booked solid months in advance? Weingarten is determined to find out, and he does, revealing a somewhat complicated but entirely human character who relates to children on their own level.

The Fiddler in the Subway offers many other gems, including the story of the ghost writer of the Hardy Boys novels, a profile of the intensely private cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and the search for the city most deserving of the official “Armpit of America” title. Weingarten’s diverse collection of well-written stories proves that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, and just as entertaining.

You can listen to Joshua Bell playing Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” one of the pieces he played in the subway station, on his Voice of the Violin CD.  You can also download Joshua Bell’s music through Freegal, a free music service available to library card holders.  

Head to the Future - by Sarah

Welcome to our new guest blogger Sarah, who says this about her interests:  I read a boatload of non-fiction, mostly about ancient science/archeoastronomy, physics, and human social behavior/culture. I love bizarro and cult fiction, live for Fridays when a new issue of Entertainment Weekly arrives in my mailbox, have never met a cartoon I didn’t like, and actually have that drinking problem from the Airplane! movies (does anyone have a towel I can borrow?). 

Your feet are dragging. It’s the end of a long week and you’re spent. Your mind is beginning to draft that clever excuse to your body explaining why you won’t be in the gym tonight. If only there was some way to get SUPER PUMPED-UP RIGHT NOW! Well, you’re in luck. Listening to The Chaos, last year's release from The Futureheads should do the trick. A frenetic, euphoric, (and yet strangely, not chaotic) album produced by Youth (aka Martin Glover) of Killing Joke fame, The Chaos is packed with enough post-punk energy to launch you into interstellar flight, as promised by singer Barry Hynde in the titular track, “5,4,3,2,1...Let’s GO! Let’s travel at the speed of light, in a split-second we’ll be out of sight.”

If you aren’t familiar with this Sunderland quartet, you will love the powerful tension that develops between their herky-jerky guitar riffs, poppy brain-worm hooks, and sugarplum four-part harmonies, as beautifully illustrated on their eponymous debut (The Futureheads, 2004), produced in part by Gang of Four’s Andy Gill. Working with producers like Gill is particularly fitting as the debt owed to bands like Gang of Four, and XTC is on full display in any song randomly selected from The Futureheads’ canon. Plus, they’ve got those lovely extreme Northeast English/almost Scottish accents which come beaming through the music, lending it a special authenticity of time and place (if you like The Proclaimers singing “f-eye-ve hoon-drad my-les” in "I'm Gonna Be", then you're gonna love this.) Several of these tracks also make great additions to your Soundtrack for the Revolution (“I’m gladly watching as the walls come tumbling down, what you pulling out your hair for, let’s dance as it hits the floor” from The Baron), deftly mixing quasi-political lyrics with hip-shaking, head-bopping beats.
So, check this out, pop it in the player and get ready to dance it out. I dare you to sit still.

On warding off the living dead this Hallowe'en - by Alison

Not once a year, but every day,
to keep those nasty brain-eaters at bay;
Fill your greedy little mind
with candy of a different kind:
books on science, works of fiction
vampire films and books on diction.

And where would you get this stuff, primarily?
Find it all at your local librarirly.

Because walking-dead, gray-matter-feeders
turn up their noses at avid readers!

(And here's a little music to go with that.)

You're welcome.

ElecTRONic - by Steve Recently I've been on a bit of a way back kick for my movie tastes. No, not WAY way back. But back far enough to see how films from the 80s have held up over time. I grabbed a copy of the original Tron and plunked down to watch it last week. By today's standards, the graphics and computer animation seems clunky. It was 1982 after all! But what's interesting is that it actually holds up over time. And while it didn't gross much at the box office (the arcade game actually made more money than the film), it quickly became a cult favorite.

Two of the film's biggest fans have a bit of a cult following of their own, the duo known as Daft Punk. I've written of my love for them before, but what's great is that they came up with the musical score to Tron's sequel, Tron: Legacy. Sure, the sequel has better graphics, but the score is a glimpse into the true capabilities of Daft Punk. Working with an 85-piece orchestra, they were able to give the sequel the appropriate futuristic electronic funk for which they are so well known.

An animated series called Tron: Uprising is scheduled to premiere in 2012. Let's hope it will stand the test of time as well as Tron, the first.

"The Only Band that Matters" - by Ross Tired of all the British pomp and circumstance in the news around the royal wedding? I sure am. My antidote of choice: some classic British punk rock, delivered with sneer and two-fingered salute. “London’s burning” by The Clash, perhaps?

Back in their 1980 heyday The Clash were called “the only band that matters,” and maybe they still are. There’s a great new article in the 3/3/11 issue of Rolling Stone by Mikal Gilmore entitled “The Fury and the Power of the Clash” that gives a brief, comprehensive history of their rise and fall. In it he quotes Joe Strummer as saying in 1978: “we’re trying to be the greatest group in the world … at the same time we’re trying to be radical .. maybe the two can’t coexist, but we’ll try.” What do you think, do they still matter? Were they, are they, the greatest? There’s a lot of stuff here at the library to help you decide.

In the last few years, a bunch of new Clash material has been released: a live album of a 1980 performance at New York’s Shea Stadium; a documentary about the life of Joe Strummer; and a 532 page, appropriately epic account of the making of their epic masterpiece, London Calling. Speaking of that album, the 25th anniversary edition includes an additional disc with unreleased demos and songs from that album’s sessions that is definitely worth hearing. And in 2005, all their other studio albums were remastered and re-released. So if you haven’t already, it’s probably about time that you went back and listened to all those, too.

Strummer famously scrawled the slogan “passion is a fashion” on his leather jacket. Passion’s timeless. So is a sneer and a two-fingered salute. Whether or not they’re the only band, the Clash definitely still matters.

“Black or white turn it on, face the new religion
Everybody's sitting 'round watching television
London's burning with boredom now”

A Voice Like Egypt - by Markrid

Here's a rare treat for music lovers, armchair travelers, and those who value the cultural background of current events: the 68-minute DVD documentary "Umm Kulthum: a voice like Egypt", narrated in English by Omar Sharif.

Umm Kulthum was an immensely influential Egyptian classical singer. For decades she performed to sold-out houses across the Arabic-speaking world, reviving and expanding the tradition of sung poetry. She was a patriot and a nationalist -"Music must represent our Eastern spirit", she said -  but she was an artist above all. Learn by ear, play by heart, she instructed her musicians; and like "a preacher inspired by her congregation", as novelist Naguib Mahfouz described her, her hours-long concerts would bring her audiences to a state approaching ecstasy. She has no counterpart in the West. She swayed kings and presidents; when she died in 1975, four million people came out for her funeral; and even now, every day at five o'clock Cairo radio plays a song by Umm Kuthum. This short, well-edited film is a fine portrait of a great singer, but it also provides a remarkably compact, insightful look at the evolution of modern Egypt.

But if You Hum a Few Bars, I'll Fake It - by Alison At this time of year many people are tempted to pull out the tarnished sax hiding under their beds or dust off the old ivories to see if their after-school piano lessons can be resurrected. But what to play? "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" can get a little tired after the second or third time through.

Never fear - Multnomah County Library has one of the best collections of sheet music anywhere around.

For instance, maybe you'd like to know what the kids were singing in the 90's - the 1890's, that is. Take a look at Songs of the Gilded Age, which includes such great tunes as "Elsie from Chelsea" and that old favorite "She is More to be Pitied, than Censured", not to mention "Where Did you Get that Hat?".

Perhaps your instrument is your voice. Then maybe you'll want to check out the American Idol Presents series - complete with sheet music and CD accompaniment. You're sure to be a star in your own living room.

Or maybe you'd like to rock out and take it up to eleven. The Zen of Screaming might come in handy. It's a training program for rock singers "to preserve their vocal cords without compromising their passion."

You say you and your friends would like to present a musical tribute to Lady Gaga? Here's the place to start.

According to Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success, it will only take you 10,000 hours of practice to become just as good a guitarist as Etta Baker was. This instructional DVD might even cut it down to 9,500 hours.

For more detailed information on how to search this fantastic collection, take a look at our Music Guide page.

After all, as the writer, Alexander McCall Smith asked, in a recent New York Times article, "why should real musicians — the ones who can actually play their instruments — have all the fun?"

Your Cup of (Jazz) Coffee or Tea - by Felicia

When I was little, I thought jazz music was pretty awful. My step-dad, who is a huge jazz and blues fan, just couldn't get me to like it. When I went to college, I listened to a live jazz band and was hooked. Jazz encompasses so many different styles, but my favorites are the old stuff — Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Billie Holliday, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, etc.
For many years, I've listened to jazz compilations so that I get a little bit of everything. And nothing beats a compilation of instrumental classic jazz to relax with, do homework or even cook by. I'm not knocking the contemporary stuff at all. But it's just way different in sound and feel. When I was in college, I listened to Kenny G, Gerald Albright, David Sanborn and Hiroshima. They were really my introduction to contemporary jazz. It took me years later to really appreciate everything that jazz music has to offer.

It really does depend on your tastes. Thankfully there is something for everyone when it comes to jazz. As I mentioned before, I do enjoy jazz vocalists, and there are many to choose from such as Al Jarreau, who encompasses a really smooth sound with acrobatic vocals that will blow you away, to Billie Holiday, whose voice is so unique, that once you hear it, you won't forget it. If jazz music isn't something you think you're into, give it a try, and you may find yourself hooked. Why not try to listen to some Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Bob James or Grover Washington, Jr.? You can find a complete list of jazz cds here, or just type the artist's name in the author field in the catalog to find the library's holdings.

So why do I enjoy my jazz music so much? Because for every mood, every activity, every feeling, there is a jazz piece ready to accompany it. And that's pretty cool.