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We’ve posted about Béla Fleck before, but this album is different. Fleck refers to Throw Down Your Heart as “the most ambitious and complex project” that he had attempted. He decided to learn more about the banjo’s African origins and go to Africa.

In doing this, he made a documentary with Sascha Paladino (which we have a copy of in the main library). Traveling to Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia, and Mali, Fleck visited many musicians and recorded 250 hours of film and over 40 pieces of music.

The result is an album filled with a large variety of wonderful pieces that are both traditional and novel. This piece is Zawose, from Tanzania, performed by Fleck, Chibite, and the Zawose family. This is one of my favorite albums, so stop by and check out the whole album yourself!

A few weeks ago on Philip Glass’ birthday, I noticed we had a shockingly low number of his albums in CD format. Since most computers don’t come ready to read our LPs, we filled in the gaps and have several new CDs.

This one is one of my favorites, the Kronos Quartet (David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, and Joan Jeanrenaud) performing Glass’ String Quartets 2-5 (Nonesuch, 1995). Glass’ compositions are often recognized most as film scores, although not all were initially planned to be for films.

However, String Quartet no. 3 (pt. 1, the “award montage,” is playing here) was written for Paul Schrader’s American/Japanese film Mishima (1985). Glass used radically different instrumentation to illustrate parts of Mishima’s life, dramatizations of his writing, and his final day in the movie - the string quartet was used to characterize his life and those in it. Glass believed the string quartet felt the most personal and would be able to convey changes in character and emotion more easily.

I’ll post another Philip Glass in a week or so, but come and check this out in the meantime.

Although this CD is new for us, the content is extremely old. Folk Music of Palestine, from Smithsonian Folkways, consists of Hebrew/Yemenite/Persian/Arabic and Bukharin folk music recorded in the 1940s. Extensive liner notes are available on PDF through the Folkways website.

This piece is called Song of the Ramadan for the Month of Fasting, featuring a male soloist with a female chorus, and ‘ud (a kind of lute) and durbakki (drum) players accompanying. While a 4/4 meter is maintained throughout, the rests on “strong” beats give the rhythm a syncopated feel. The piece is in the Phrygian mode with an augmented third degree.

Most pieces on this album are fairly short, but you won’t hear them in other places. The liner notes give intricate analyses on all the pieces, and include some music notation. Check it out!

If you didn’t get to see banjo-player Tony Trischka and his band perform at yesterday’s music Tuesday, don’t worry! We have a couple of scores and CDs by Tony that you can check out at the Music Library.

This CD is called Bend (Rounder Records, 1999), and although it’s over 10 years old, it’s still great. Trischka is a phenomenal banjo player, and you can hear his prowess in the music. He easily combines jazz with bluegrass and country to make a great sound.

This piece is called Moonlight Trail, and was written by Trischka and guitarist/singer Glenn Sherman. In Bend, Trischka and his band are interested in taking electricity and using that to enhance their music so you can hear various effects used on the guitar and an electric bass in this piece.

Stop by and check out the whole album! We’ll also have a recording of yesterday’s show up soon, so stay tuned for that.

Today’s CD is a little more country than most of our folk CDs, but is a treat to listen to. The group Hem produced Eveningland in 2004 and it’s a beautiful album. Singer Sally Ellyson’s voice is incredibly good at evoking emotion, which works well with songs that have a bit of melancholy behind them.

This track is My Father’s Waltz, which might be perhaps the most mournful song on the album. It’s a lot quieter and softer than the rest of the songs, but carries more emotional weight than most albums have.

This is not to say every song on Eveningland is sad, but the sadder ones stick out to me more. The steel guitar, fiddle, piano, and mandolin that often accompany Ellyson’s singing complement the style perfectly. The album is different enough from their earlier album Rabbit Songs to provide a new listening experience.

Check it out!

In honor of Valentine’s day, today’s featured new CD is the Wiener Symphoniker’s recording of Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues). Giulietta is sung by soprano Anna Netrebko and Romeo by mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča.

Bellini’s version of Romeo and Juliet is extremely different from the Shakespeare - entire roles, like Mercutio and the Nurse, are completely cut out, and Romeo is sung by a woman dressed as a man.

However, the passion and emotion in Bellini’s opera resounds just as much as Shakespeare’s play. This piece is the final in the opera, and features a beautiful duet between Romeo and his Giulietta. It occurs after Romeo sees Giulietta in her tomb, and poisons himself (“O tu, mia sola speme”). To watch this scene in a different production with Joyce DiDonato and Anna Netrebko click here.

What better way to spend the day than to listen to a beautiful bel canto opera full of love and heartbreak? The CD comes with a booklet with lyrics in Italian and English. Check it out!

It’s been a while since we’ve had a good old-fashioned mp3 post, what with all the books we’ve been getting in (more on those later).

We at the Music Library are big Handel fans (check out our Handel mug below) and were very pleased to receive this new(ish) recording of Handel’s oratorio Theodora (HWV 68) from Deutsche Grammophon (2000).

This particular recording is by the Gabrieli Consort & Players, performed on authentic instruments, directed by Paul McCreesh. Theodora is about Saints Theodora and Didymus, Christian martyrs and lovers.

In this piece, titled To Thee, Thou glorious Son of Worth, Christian noblewoman Theodora (sung by Susan Gritton)  and the Roman officer Didymus (sung by Robin Blaze) sing a farewell to each other, knowing it will most likely be one of their last earthly meetings. The duet is full of sorrow, but beautiful. The rest of the oratorio is equally beautiful, so check it out!

Those of you who didn’t attend last semester’s mbira performance by Caution Shonhai and Erica Azim may not be aware of our mbira collection. This year we added 6 actual mbira from Zimbabwe to our collection, which can be checked out by any SLC student, along with several CDs and a couple of DVDs that help teach how to play mbira (pictured below: three of the SLC mbira).

Caution Shonhai, along with other musicians, is featured heavily in the mbira CDs we have. On Nyamaropa Tuning Mbira 2005, his brother Renold Shonhai also performs.

Mbira music consists of a basic cyclical pattern with various melodies and rhythms, which vary based on the performer and the performance. This piece is called Mahororo, which means “Celebration.” Come by and check it out! 

Yoko Ono is well known for having attended Sarah Lawrence, but have you listened to any of her music? Probably not, since our box set of her CDs has been missing for several years!

Well, Onobox is back and ready to be checked out. Containing 6 CDs and a comprehensive booklet, Onobox contains just about all of the published and a significant amount of previously unpublished music from Ono on her own, as well as with the Plastic Ono Band.

This piece comes from volume 2, titled New York Rock, and is called”I felt like smashing my face in a clear glass window” (recorded 1972) and is an oddly peppy, upbeat song considering some of the lyrics (which you can read in the booklet):

I never had the chance to choose my own parents / I’d never know why I should be stuck with mine / Mommy’s always trying not to eat / Daddy’s always smelling like he’s pickled in booze.

Much of her music was heavily influenced by Feminism and world music. Some of her later music is a lot more accessible, but her influence on so many great musicians cannot be denied. Listening to this, it’s easy to understand why. Check it out!

It’s a new semester, and we’re back! Today’s new album is pretty far out. For those of you who haven’t heard of Alexander Scriabin, he was a mid-19th/early-20th century Russian composer and pianist. Much of his work verged on atonality, while not entering it.

His piece “Preparation for the Final Mystery”, also known as “Misteriya”, was never finished, as Scriabin died first. But Misteriya was supposed to be a week-long multimedia event in the Himalaya mountains that would bring on the end of the world, so perhaps it’s for the best that he was unable to finish it.

Scriabin had synesthesia, and linked color with music, which greatly influenced his work. This particular recording was realized by Alexander Nemtin, and is performed by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. The CD includes a booklet explaining the Mysteriya, so check it out!

nprmusic:

‘Why?’: Remembering Nina Simone’s Tribute To The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Three days after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, performer Nina Simone and her band played at the Westbury Music Festival on Long Island, N.Y. They performed “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” a song they had just learned, written by their bass player Gene Taylor in reaction to King’s death.

Today we have another guest post from SLC Reference Librarian Kate Angell:

I sometimes wonder why Fifth Column has received what I perceive as such little attention in works chronicling the history of women in punk. Hailing from Toronto, they were together for around twenty years and released three albums.

My personal favorite album, 36C, was released in 1994 and features ten amazing feminist, queer-positive songs. Today I’m going to profile Don’t, a powerful song which takes historical fear tactics used against women and completely subverts them.

Speaking to a universal “you,” the song describes a woman making lists (e.g. shopping, love) only to be warned of what she cannot do (e.g. “don’t go in the underground parking”). Don’t ends by portraying this woman as a subject fully capable of defending and living for herself (“she’s got a knife/she’s got some scissors/she’s got a life”). In contrast, the narrator sets this woman against the universal “you,” snarling “and that’s more than I can say for you.” A listener can only imagine that she is singing about an oppressor whose status as the dominant inhabit of a binary has either been or is able to be toppled.

All in all, Fifth Column truly excels in taking sexist language and norms and inverting it to both critique and reclaim power. I wish I was in a band like this! Make sure to listen to 36C when you get the chance.

Earlier this semester we bought a really beautiful box set of jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker’s Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Recordings from 1944-1948. This time period was one of Parker’s most fruitful, and this 8-disc set contains recordings from some of the great names in jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Curly Russell, and more.

This immense album has alternate takes of many of the pieces that helped make Parker’s name so widely known, as well as live material. This track is the ever-famous Now’s the Time, composed by Parker, and featuring Miles Davis on trumpet, Dizzy Gillespie on piano, Curly Russell on bass, and Max Roach on drums. This is the third take of the session, after a couple of false starts, which was recorded on November 26th, 1945 at WOR Studios in New York.

The boxed set also includes interviews and commentary on the recordings, so it’s a thorough resource. Check it out!