“A Bunch of Small Sparks”: The Feelies Reunite — An Interview with Glenn Mercer
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I had no good excuse for discovering the Feelies too late, but by the time I fell in love with their albums (The Good Earth and Only Life, in particular) they had already broken up. As the years went by I assumed they would always remain atop my personal list of bands that I hoped would reunite, even as others, like the Pixies and the Police, got back together.
And then last year the group reformed, playing several shows in the New York area last Summer. I saw them on night two at their old stomping grounds at Maxwells in Hoboken, where they looked and sounded like they hadn’t lost a step.
As always, John Pareles describes them best: “they pushed the rock ’n’ roll basics — two or three chords, an unswerving beat — toward the ecstatic. They defined those few chords with intricately interlocking parts, bearing down on them to turn repetition into a frenetic rave-up.”
This weekend the group will be playing in Philly and DC and are a must see. I recently spent a bit of time with guitarist and vocalist Glenn Mercer and asked him about the band’s reunion and their plans for the future.
Howard: What sparked the reunion that you guys had last summer and that is now continuing into the year 2009?
Glenn: Basically a small bunch of small sparks really. It wasn’t one particular incident that brought it about. I guess the first thing was making contact with Bill again. I was talking with him after quite a long time just kind of dealing with some business stuff and the topic of playing came up — that was probably around 2001 maybe or 2002. And I guess we would get offers here and there a couple of times a year and I would always present them to Bill and he seemed interested but he had a lot of things that kind of prevented him from doing it — personal. And we really didn’t want to do it unless we could do it with 100% focus and he didn’t feel he could do that at the time. Finally things worked out where he could do it so we had the offer from Sonic Youth to do the summer stage in New York last summer and just everybody was available and it sounded like a lot of fun so we rehearsed for that, did that show, a couple of warm-up shows and it all went well so we just kind of continued from there.
Howard: And what has it been like playing together last year and then since then? Is it like riding a bike you just get back on or is it different?
Glenn: Well I have always been playing. And I have been playing with most of the people [in the Feelies] on and off over the years, Bill being the exception. It felt comfortable. It’s pretty easy to get back in to the groove. It wasn’t a big stretch for any of us I don’t think.
Howard: And now you have an upcoming show in Philly and an upcoming show in Washington. Any other plans to tour more widely?
Glenn: Probably not a tour. We get a lot of offers so we just kind of take it a little bit at a time. Each time we play we do a little bit more. We traveled up to Boston and did a couple of shows up there. It is kind of like I said just taking it a couple of steps at a time really.
I can’t foresee us getting back to where we were where it was a full time career. We’re just basically really doing it for fun and for being able to hang out with each other and stuff.
Howard: And are you guys recording at all?
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Time is Right (new song)
Glenn: I did demos of some new songs. I have kind of been recording all along. I did a solo record, had everybody from the Feelies except Bill play on it. We are kind of looking toward that as a goal. But not knocking ourselves out with it either. We never were really that prolific anyway so…I can’t foresee us having albums with this stuff any time soon but we are working towards that.
Howard: And you guys have re-issues coming out this year?
Glenn: Yes, The first 2 albums Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth. On Bar None.
Howard: Are those the two that you own the rights to or the first of two that you expect? How is that going to work?
Glenn: They are the two that we have the rights to. Apparently some company put out Only Life fairly recently without our involvement through some arrangement with A&M or through Universal.
Howard: That must be sort of a strange thing to find somebody putting your album out without your input?
Glenn: Well it happens. I mean there are two ways to look at it. It is not what you want but it is getting the music out so…
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Let’s Go (Original on the Good Earth)
Howard: Did you all re-master the songs for the reissues in Bar None? And are there going to be any extras besides or cuts or anything?
Glenn: Yes, they have been re-mastered. We didn’t have a lot of bonus stuff though. We might put a couple things out as downloads, as an incentive for someone to buy the whole album to get a couple of extra songs that way but not on the actual hard copy CD. They are just going to be as they were when they originally appeared with extended liner notes, booklet kind of thing.
Howard: When are they coming out?
Glenn: Well we are still working on it now. Pretty far along with it so we are kind of hoping by the summer I think.
Howard: Any plans to release any of the shows now as sort of a live disc or anything or DVD or anything like that?
Glenn: We don’t have any plans to. We have been recording a lot of stuff and filming some stuff but really not the definitive plan for doing anything with it besides just for our own archives for now.
Howard: Do you hear much of a difference between your sound playing live now and 20 years ago or 30 years ago?
Glenn: No not really.
Howard: So, for the uninitiated what is the difference between the Feelies, the Trypes, and Yung Wu and the Willies?
Glenn: Well let me take them one at a time. The Trypes was pretty much basically the Feelies with some other local friends of ours that was the material of the key board player John Baumgartner primarily, and the Willies was sort of an instrumental version of the Feeliess. Yung Wu was basically the Feeliess with some local friends again; most of the people that were in the Tripes as well — that was Dave Weckermans’ material. So basically it was the same core group of people with a handful of extra friends doing either Johns or Dave’s songs. And the Willies had sort of an instrumental kind of ambient, open ended sound. Each time we played it would be a little different.
Howard: And of the 4 Feelies albums and other albums you have made since then do you have a favorite? Is there one that sort of stands out for you? Anything that works better now live? Are you playing more stuff from any one of the albums or is it sort of equally distributed?
Glenn: I like each of them for different reasons. When we play live we do at least a couple from each record and some of the covers that we used to do. So it is pretty fairly balanced I think between the whole tenure of the band.
Howard: You did the soundtrack to the movie Smithereens. Any thought of having that come out on its own?
Glenn: I don’t think so. We are not in contact with the company that put the movie out so…And it wasn’t the sort of the material that you would listen to without the film. It wouldn’t work without the film. It was just short little pieces.
Howard: Biggest change that you see now in the New York area music scene and sort of music business in general between now and when you started?
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Away (original on Only Life)
Glenn: That is a tough one. There are a lot of things different. A lot of things are the same. You definitely see a lot of people holding up their cell phones and stuff now.
Howard: Are you finding that your fans are your contemporaries — people who were following you when you were active 20 years ago or is it a new generation of fans who are discovering you now?
Glenn: It is a pretty good mix between the two. A lot of old fans but definitely some younger people that didn’t get to see us the first time.
Howard: Thanks so much for your time – I look forward to seeing you in DC
Glenn: Take care then. Goodbye.
“Britney Into My Heart”
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In 2008 Brooklyn singer songwriter Alina Simone released a passionate and compelling album of modern Russian folk covers that was one of the year’s best. Now she has turned her attention a little closer to home and is completing a new album of her own material in English (which is previewed below) — but not before she dabbles a bit by playing a Britney Spears cover or two. I asked her about all this and found the line from Yanka Dyagileva to Britney is shorter than you might think.
Howard: Okay, so, you have gone from Russian Folk Music to Britney Spears.
Alina: Well let’s not get carried away. I was kind of joking with that. Like I’ve done a little, a few Britney Spears covers but, the new album isn’t Britney Spears covers or anything –
Howard: I bet all the Britney Spears fans will be very disappointed to hear that.
Alina: Probably, but you know I just have to follow my own path (laughing). The new album is more Sinead O’Connor than Britney Spears I have to admit. But I am trying to bring a little Britney into my heart and not be so sad and dark all the time. I think that would be a good step for me.
Howard: But you have played some of her stuff live, right?
Alina: Yeah, yeah. Oops I Did it Again has been a favorite; and I’m working on a mandolin version of Toxic, and I’ve had one rehearsal of the Britney Spears cover band that I’m putting together here in Brooklyn, which is a lot of fun.
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Alina Simone covering Oops I Did It Again
Howard: And what is it about Ms. Spear’s music that attracts your interest?
Alina: You know, now let’s not overstate this, let’s not get carried away here. I was in Russia, and the song Toxic was completely inescapable, and I hated it, and I was so annoyed, I was like, Fuck there’s that song again! But then when I got back, whenever I heard it I found it strangely comforting. It was like that experience of being in junior high and having all of those eighties hits just drilled into you until you know every word and it’s all vaguely comforting, and you just want to be surrounded by this cloud of mainstream pop all the time. That’s how it started.
Howard: I’m having this experience myself because as a parent you listen to a lot of that kind of music and my daughter is becoming obsessed with Hanna Montana slash Miley Cyrus and when we are in the car she insists on listening to her songs over and over and over again. And so over time I’ve actually come to like some of it.
Alina: Yeah and I actually think that in terms of having kids. I definitely want to be the kind of parent that can listen to what their kid is listening to with an open mind without a knee jerk reaction against it. I want to be able to evaluate it on its own terms. Like, the Britney Spears songs I like the most are the ones that Britney Spears had very little to do with, they were written by other people, and those people really know what they’re doing. They’re incredible craftsmen.
Howard: Have you heard the Ryan Adams cover I Want it That Way? It’s awesome.
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Ryan Adams covering I Want it That Way
Alina: Well actually it’s funny because I did a reading from a chapter of my book, and my publisher asked me to do Britney Spears covers after reading. At the Russian Samovar in Midtown and so I sang Oops I Did it Again.
Howard: Awesome.
Alina: It’s making the rounds.
Howard: Alright, so let’s talk about the book. What’s it about?
Alina: There’s a lot of stuff about my family, my Russian family, my family in the Ukraine, my family here. There’s a chapter about religion, about sort of choosing between being Russian Orthodox and being Jewish, because my family’s kind of half and half. There’s a lot of stuff about trials and tribulations on the lowest rung of the Indie Rock Circuit here in the States.
Sinead O’Connor comes up because that’s who I wanted to be. I wanted to be the one pop star who I loved who was really rebellious and didn’t care about being pretty, even though she was really beautiful and who really sang with passion, and emotion. And you know she just didn’t sound horribly over produced like everyone else.
I grew up in a family with pretty, you know pretty conservative values in terms of what their child was supposed to do when she grew up. Like with a lot of recent immigrants. I was actually born in the Ukraine and my parents struggled a lot in order to give me all the opportunities of being, middle class American kid growing up here. So, I always wanted to sing but I was really scared of disappointing them, and so I actually didn’t play my first show until I was twenty six years old. So, you know, slowly just because I was just so terrified and I just thought that I would fail and my parents would be really disappointed in me, everyone else would be disappointed in me, I wouldn’t be good at it. And so I was really full of a lot of anxieties and insecurities and depression and so the book is kind of about, like overcoming that to be honest — how I just kind of forced myself to do it. I’m still doing that.
Howard: So, you were born in Ukraine, you came here, and then you went back as an adult after college, right? Is that when you decided to record the last album?
Alina: No — I’ve been listening to Yanka Dyagileva’s music before I ever went back to Russia. I was listening to it when I first moved to New York, like in my mid twenties, and someone in Brighton Beach who I met on the street, a performer on the street, gave me a cassette tape, just like her music was circulated when she was alive. I just fell in love with it and I played it endlessly on tour. It never left my car — I was totally obsessed and people would make fun of me. And I would tell people I really want to cover this woman’s music, but I thought it was the kind of thing I could only do if I became, you know, super successful and self indulgent because that’s just the kind of thing you do after you’ve peaked and say, ‘Well now I’m on the downswing and so I can do that self indulgent project and not do a very good job of it.’ And so I was waiting for that moment, but then a friend of mind convinced me to apply for this little emerging artists grant in the meantime, and I just a wrote one page thing about wanting to make this record, and I ended up getting it. And it came with a deadline of nine months. All of a sudden I really had to do it. To get the record in the hands of these people within nine months. So I –
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Half My Kingdom — Alina Simone
Howard: And you did it and it was fabulous. And now that artistic moment has passed and you are back singing in English?
Alina: Yeah, much to your dismay. I am singing in English.
Howard: Not just to my dismay. You have a huge fan base out there who was expecting the follow up in Russian and now they’re going to have to adjust to an English language CD from you.
Alina: Believe me there are just as many people who are going to be relieved that I’m not singing in Russian any more. A lot of them are Russian.
Howard: And what is the direction of the new album? It’s not in Russian, but is it political in the way that your last album was?
Alina: It’s about Obama. No, just kidding. It’s, it’s like, I wish that I had this awesome story for it because I feel like that’s what really sold the Yanka album, having this amazing story, but I feel like it’s just twelve good songs. It has nothing to do with one another. Some that are literally like dance fever type jams, some I play auto harp as the lead instrument, some are slow, and some are like very heavy and just abrasive rock. So I don’t know, I mean I haven’t sequenced it yet, and it’s really, we’re literally mixing the last song tonight. And I think the hardest thing will be to sequence it – I did a concept album – the Yanka album was a concept album, it was all of a piece, and this one isn’t.
Howard: And when will it be out?
Alina: Oh Howard, I don’t know. I don’t know who’s going to put it out and the world is so weird right now.
Howard: Presumably the economy is not making it easy for people who are looking for music labels to put their music on.
Alina: Yeah I mean it’s like I’ve never made any money, ever, so — for me it’s not really about the money. But I also just would want it to be done well, you know, if it’s put out. For it not to be botched basically. I may end up just doing it myself. I’m not ruling that out. So I don’t know. I guess I have to talk to my people, which will take about eight minutes, and then make a decision.
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Beautiful Machine — From Alina Simone’s Forthcoming Album
The other thing is that it’s been two years since I started writing these songs, and I’ve lost all ability to judge how good they are or how good the album is because I’ve heard them all so so many times. So I think at this point I really need to get it out to some people who haven’t heard any of my new stuff at all, and get some feedback about what they think and what the possibilities are for it, because I know that I’m weird, and I’m under no delusions that I’m a good judge.
Howard: I don’t know, I think your last album was probably the best selling album of that genre last year, wouldn’t’ you think?
Alina: Yes, the huge niche I occupied in Soviet cover music, only released in the U.S
Howard: If Tower Records still existed you would have your own little section all to yourself. Russian folk music covers.
Alina: Right, yeah, maybe I should just keep building on that.
Howard: No, no, no, I’m sure it will be great. Well, thanks for doing this.
Alina: Thank you.
“Little Tinge of Melancholy”: An Interview with Martin Hayes
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On March 9 fiddler Martin Hayes and Guitarist Dennis Cahill will play at Joe’s Pub, touring behind their most recent album Welcome Here Again. Their music is Irish, and traditional, but it is beyond genre. The New York Times aptly called their playing “a Celtic complement to Steve Reich’s quartets or Miles Davis’ ‘Sketches of Spain.’” Their work is deep, soulful, and transporting. I caught up with Hayes a few days ago.
Howard: So I figured I would start with your new album which I thought was one of the best albums of last year. It was a great album. Do you see it as a departure from your previous work or more a piece?
Martin: Well it was something of a struggle in the sense that I started it years ago and there were a number of interruptions that happened for one reason or another that we needn’t go into. But, I didn’t get it completed. I liked the first few tracks we had recorded and I liked the mood. I gauge everything on mood and feeling for the most part. I had the hardest time getting everything up to that level. I operate with a kind of a gut response to the feeling of things. I’m incredibly cruel with pieces of music. I just chop them down, and start them over. I might have put a lot of work into tracks and then I still chuck them out. I had a certain kind of mood and feeling that I wanted to retain throughout the album. Each tune was my attempt to achieve it. In the end I just looked at all the pieces to see whether they actually hung together in some way or other, and they did. As it turns out, you could put the tracks anywhere on the album and it wouldn’t make any difference.
Howard: That’s right, to me it had sort of a little bit of a melancholy feeling, in a very beautiful way, and maybe a little slower than some of your earlier work.
Martin: I have a habit of recording at night. I have my own studio, so things get pretty quiet and I tend to start working at that time. When I get that close to the music late at night I always see it in a delicate and melancholic kind of way. I think the music inherently has a full range of capabilities. I mean it can be wild and fiery and it can be joyful and flippant, but that little tinge of melancholy seems to draw me in.
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The Wind Swept Hill of Tulla
Howard: Now didn’t you go off for a little while and play rock music?
Martin: Yeah I did. It was a good experience but it really made me want to come back to this more subtle music. I mean the thing about the rock n roll band that I was in, it was louder than God. It was the loudest thing, you know. I remember playing at a club in Chicago, and there were complaints from the neighbors about the volume, and this was a club that played a lot of heavy metal. It was a lot of fun, you know. The excitement of a good drummer and bass player and electric instruments and amps on stage – that’s a very powerful feeling. And acoustic musicians don’t necessarily get to experience that, so it was nice to at least, maybe nice isn’t a good word to describe it but, it was useful, it was fun.
Howard: What instrument did you play in the band?
Martin: Well I had an electric five string fiddle but to tell you the truth I never knew what to do with the extra string. It was just there. In the end it was a band that never went anywhere and just played clubs in Chicago, and didn’t really have much of a following either. So, after a few years we fizzled out.
Howard: You know you’ve been with Dennis Cahill as a duo for so long, how does that work in terms of composition? Do you compose together or is most of the, most of the work yours and he comes in later on in the process?
Martin: Well I’m probably the initiator. I bring a lot of the melodies and ideas, maybe initially and then we start shaping it out together. I have rough ideas of what I want, and Dennis starts shaping, adding things and changing things. It’s a consultation over the whole thing. You’re often waiting for moments of lucky accidents. And you’re hoping that you’re alert enough to recognize them as well. Gradually the melodies take a shape we like, it’s a collaborative process. The tunes grow over a period of time — even while we’re performing. And then they reach a point where they’re not growing anymore. There might be another bit of life left but pretty soon they have to be retired.
Howard: Right.
Martin: But they kind of have a little trajectory, a little life cycle in each piece .
Howard: There’s such a tremendous sympatico between the two of you in terms of your playing, which you know is always remarked on in the reviews of the albums and the shows, and it’s so true. Is that something that you had developed instantly or did that take a while to develop? Is it still developing? Was that like snapping your fingers or did it take a little while?
Martin: No, that took a while and it’s still developing. We spend a lot of time talking about music and what we’re trying to achieve with it. There are two things we do after we get off a plane and into a car: we discuss music and then we discuss politics. But anyway, we talk about music a lot.
Howard: Sounds like what I talk about with my friends.
Martin: That’s what I talk about. Music and politics all the time. We are always trying to decipher the musical process. For any musician there are moments when things happen. A feeling begins on stage, and we may start playing in a way that is beyond the technical and mundane. Suddenly you have extra ideas and you also feel you have the extra time to implement them. So that’s a kind of a place in the performance of music that you’re always trying to get to. And so, any musicians who can get in there will have something equivalent to a telepathic connection when that happens. It’s a bit like sports. Michael Jordan always knew where the ball was going to be somehow. Music is the same way. You read the intentions of the musician that you’re with, and you can feel that it’s heading in a certain direction, when you’re really tuned in. So, a lot of what we do or try to do is to kind of just be there, as present as possible, in the moment. And so a lot of the work really is about getting into that space. It’s not about a tune, or the playing even. When you get in there, you don’t mind playing the simplest things in the world, or you can play complicated things. It doesn’t make any difference.
Howard: It’s quite remarkable to see you two live. I mean it’s almost like telepathy. The way that the two of you are in sync.
Martin: We’re trying anyway. There are good nights and bad nights. You can’t lock it down too tight. You want to be feeling it, observing it and responding.
Howard: How much does the set vary from night to night? You know so many songs and you play so frequently, how often does the set list change?
Martin: Every night is different, even if you didn’t intend it to be. Each gig takes on its own life and you had better respond to it and try not to play last night’s gig even if last night’s gig was great. So that’s the first thing I’ve learned over the years. We may have one set at the beginning of the tour and it ends up being different at the end of the tour. It’s a slow evolving thing. I take out things and put in things. Okay, so that’s one method of change that happens. The other level is that each tune itself has the possibility to change. For example, how fast I play it, how many times I play it, whether I come up with new variations or improvisations on it. That’s something that happens also. The other thing that happens is that we actually will have little sections in the show that are free improv where we take away the safety net for a little while. It helps us be more present. You just have to rely on mood and feeling to get you through these segments. So we use these little techniques to help get us where we need to be.
Howard: You play in a lot of different kinds of venues, at festivals where there are thousands of people, in clubs where there are dozens. Is there a certain kind of venue that you enjoy playing in more than another? Is it more fun to play for fewer people or more people? Does it not matter?
Martin: It kind of doesn’t matter. It would only matter if you kept doing one kind of venue the whole time. Then you would lose something because each environment creates a different atmosphere. A club is different from a theater. We’re doing a number of club gigs now like Joe’s Pub and the Iron Horse and the World Café Live in Philadelphia, that kind of thing. We played a small village hall on an island off British Columbia recently, before that we played the Sydney Opera House. In a good club like in Joe’s Pub, there’s a kind of energy in the room. It’s kind of tight and contained, and the music is up close and just right there.
Howard: Do you notice a difference, comparing a crowd in Ireland and an audience in the States? My assumption, maybe it’s wrong, but my assumption is that an audience in Ireland would be more familiar with the music from the get go. Is there a difference in playing to an audience that may be more familiar with the music, and grew up with the music, as opposed to one that hasn’t?
Martin: Well probably there’s a little bit of a difference, but I don’t change what I play for the audience, whether they’re in New York or whether they’re in County Clare, where I grew up. I’ve always thought that enjoyment of the music shouldn’t be dependent on any inherent knowledge of it. It shouldn’t become dependent on having an academic, intellectual knowledge of the piece of music. You can get lost in the whole minutiae of it. You can start chasing down these rabbit holes explaining, understanding, comparing and analyzing. And very often you lose the whole point of it. My intention with the music we play is that it should be understandable to anybody without us having to compromise it. I don’t want to water it down. I have found that, in fact, contrary to watering it down, the less I compromise, the more accessible it becomes. People nowadays are listening to all kinds of things. People are listening to Middle Eastern music, they’re listening to avant garde, modern classical music, they’re listening to Indy Rock and so forth. People’s ears are so much more open now than they were a number of years ago. One doesn’t have to water it down, change it or alter it or make it into something more accessible. Because I think people are ready to hear things as they actually are at this point.
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Paddy Fahy’s Reel
Howard: That’s a great segue: how much are you influenced by all of those things that you’re hearing and how do all those influences find expression in the music?
Martin: The way they work for me is that the more I can comprehend, listen to, respond to, and feel other forms of music, the more I meet musicians from other genres, the more I interact with them and talk with them, and play with them, the more I learn and the better and more precisely I can understand the music I’m playing and where it fits in the world. It helps me interpret what I’m doing to make it speak to a wider world. It’s not so much that I would grab something from another music genre and attach it to the thing I’m doing. I don’t really do that. In fact there’s very little of that going on. It’s more, like listening to, let’s say, Jordi Savall. There is such attention to detail in his bowing. The absolute tiniest minutiae of sound are given the fullest attention. That immediately had an impact on me. It made me want to investigate my own minutiae and detail. Listening to Arvo Part gives you a sense of the power of that can be achieved with the minimum of complication. The impact of Miles Davis holding a slightly flattened note can create a powerful tension. All these kind of ideas have influenced me.
Howard: Right.
Martin: Many of the ideas that I embrace from other forms of music aren’t necessarily ideas that I grew up with, but I try to use ideas that do not conflict with the integrity of the tradition but rather add to it.
Howard: And this is music that you grew up with at the earliest possible age, right?
Martin: Yeah it is. I’ll tell you it’s a little bit of a sociological study in a way because I grew up first almost only hearing this music. So that by the time I was ten, for example, the only music I wanted to hear was traditional Irish music. It really says that whatever you’re exposed to, whatever it is that’s piped at you, that’s what you’re going to be into. So by the time I was fifteen I was trying to figure out this rock n’ roll thing. I didn’t understand what it was about at all. That sounds weird, but I kind of didn’t get it. I actually had to work at it a bit, pursue it somewhat to get the whole point.
Howard: You actually recorded an album with your dad, right?
Martin: I did. I’d been living over here for a while and he fell ill. This was many years ago. When he recovered we realized we had never recorded together. We spent three hours at a friend’s home with a porto studio or something like that, and recorded these tracks, so that we would just have them. It was only released locally as a cassette. My dad and I added a few more tracks to it some years later on with Dennis on guitar. It’s the bones of an album which needs to get released at some point.
Howard: A couple of years ago I actually made some inquiries to some of the record stores in Ireland to see if it was available. I can tell you that it is not commonly available.
Martin: How on earth did you get into this music?
Howard: You know, it’s funny. It’s nice of you to ask that. No one in my family is a musician, but my grandparents have an eastern European Jewish background and they had these old klezmer albums when I was growing up. And I started, you know, listening to old time Klezmer and then there was a Klezmer revival that I started listening to when I was in high school – the Klezmatics and Andy Statman and people like that. And from that hearing the Irish music, the traditional music, it sounds similar enough to me, or sounded similar enough to me that I could begin to appreciate it. And –
Martin: The Klezmer and the Ceili bands have a lot in common.
Howard: And so I got into your music because it seemed familiar, and then you listen some more, and begin to appreciate it on its own terms, outside of genre.
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The Clare Reel
Now there was a long, long gap between this record and the last one; any plans to record again soon?
Martin: Well I’m going to try and keep moving forward here. Let’s hope it doesn’t take as long next time. The lesson for me is that when you start something, you should keep going until you finish it.
Howard: Two more questions and then I’ll let you go. Any sort of plans to either record or play with a larger group or in a larger group setting?
Martin: Yeah, I have a number of things coming up. I’m getting together with a string quartet from Brooklyn called Brooklyn Rider. Do you know those guys?
Howard: No.
Martin: They work with the Silk Road Project so they’re used to playing with musicians from different ethnic backgrounds. We’re trying to do something in the next couple of weeks. And then there’s another friend of mine, Thomas Bartlett — he plays with people like The Frames, Yoko Ono, David Byrne and Antony and the Johnsons, people like that. We’re going to do some jamming sometime later on in the year and maybe record it. I’m planning to do an album with Frankie Gavin. Are you familiar with Frankie Gavin?
Howard: Yeah, yeah.
Martin: Just a traditional fiddle duet album with two fiddles and a piano. Straight up, nothing fancy.
Howard: How did your concert with Bill Frisell go?
Martin: Oh that was the best one of all. That was so much fun from the beginning to end. I really loved it. I’d like to do some more again. He is just a treat to be on stage with, to be around. We spent three days in a house in West Clare, jamming and then we went on this Irish tour. We played the material differently each time. We didn’t even know where the end of these pieces were. Bill is just so tasteful, he’s kind of beyond genre. He can’t be categorized. I could do it again — that’s for sure.
Howard: Maybe soon, that’d be great if some recordings come out, were to surface someday.
Martin: I think it was recorded, but I don’t know what has become of it.
Howard: One final question, you know, if somebody comes to the site and they see the interview and they listen to some of the tracks that are up there and they say, you know I want to listen to more of this great music, what would you recommend?
Martin: Well there’s an album by this fiddle player, Tommy Potts. The thing with him is that it’s a bit like recommending John Coltrane. The first listen through you may not get it, you may not even get it after ten listens. But by God when you get it, you will know it. There’s only one album of his, its called The Liffey Banks. It’s still for me the defining album of how the fiddle can be played in Irish music. The recording is so sincere and emotionally present from beginning to end. It’s just solo, unaccompanied fiddle. The recordings of the pipers Willie Clancy and Seamus Ennis are very important. There’s another album too which I like a lot, which is Tony MacMahon and Noel Hill – In Knocknagree. Have you ever heard of that one?
Howard: No.
Martin: It’s just a recording of concertina, accordion and set dancers, dancing in a pub in Kerry. It captures something - there’s a wildness and energy to it that I think you’d love..
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Rileanna — The Humours of Castlefin; Noel Hill and Tony MacMahon
Martin: And one more. A singer by the name of Darach O Cathain, he has one recording on Shanachie records, and if you had that and Tommy Potts, and Knocknagree, I think those three albums would give you a solid foundation.
Howard: Right. Thanks so much – I appreciate your time.
Martin: Alright, thanks very much.
Howard: Okay, bye-bye.
Haunted Bashir
- filed under Misc.
One of my favorite blogs — The Playlist — has an interview with Max Richter, who composed the haunting soundtrack to Waltz with Bashir.
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The Haunted Ocean — Waltz with Bashir soundtrack
Thoughts Upon Seeing Leonard Cohen at the Beacon Theatre
- filed under Misc.
1) It’s nice to be the youngest, rather than the oldest, person at a concert.
2) Leonard Cohen’s voice has aged exceptionally well.
3) His songs are timeless.
4) It’s not just his voice and his songs – I will be lucky to look half as good at 44 as Leonard Cohen looks at 74.
5) If Leonard Cohen were American and not Canadian, we would be using phrases like “National Treasure” to describe him.
6) Leonard Cohen is playing Radio City in May. If you can go, you should.
Racing Presidents
- filed under Misc.
The Nationals held tryouts yesterday for the Racing Presidents. Here’s hoping they find someone faster than last year to wear the TR Roosevelt costume. As far as I know, TR did not win a single race last year.
Loverly
- filed under Music
Cassandra Wilson’s packed run last week at the acoustically perfect Blue Note in New York City was a good reminder of what makes her so special. She is a beguiling performer with a marvelous taste in material and a voice that can wrap itself around whatever song she is singing and make it her own.
On her most recent album, Loverly, Wilson treats St. James Infirmary as a near romp — live she slowed it down to a crawl, drawing out the song’s pathos. (A great website devoted to the song can be found here.) The Beatles’ Till There Was You was a pre-Valentine’s treat, Wilson embracing the melody and investing the lyrics with depth. Caravan was a journey to the MidEast, preceded by a magic carpet ride of a solo by guitarist Marvin Sewall. Her rendition of Dust My Broom, sung from a woman’s perspective, was enough to convince me that Wilson should record an entire album of blues standards.
She didn’t sing Love is Blindness, unfortunately, but I will leave you with it.
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Top Ten Things I Learned from Reading “The Yankee Years”
- filed under Misc.
Here is what I have learned from reading “The Yankee Years”, or “The World According to Joe Torre”:
1) Joe Torre is a great manager.
2) How you manage off the field is apparently more important than how you manage on it.
3) Steroid use in baseball was apparently rampant but not in a way that was apparent to Joe Torre.
4) Derek Jeter is a consummate professional.
5) ARod’s teammates despise him.
6) It’s difficult for some professional athletes — Randy Johnson, Carl Pavano, Kevin Brown — to play in New York.
7) The Yankees waste money on useless, overpriced, and unproductive players.
8) Redsox General Manager Theo Epstein runs a much better organization than Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman because he is able to effectively analyze data and apply it succesfully to personnel decisions.
9) Torre found Cashman untrustworthy and duplicitous. He relied to much on data and not enough on heart in analyzing personnel decisions.
10) Mike Mussina is much more chatty than I remember, especially when it comes to denigrating Mariano Rivera’s performance in the post-season.
Rivera in the post season: 4 World Series Rings, a lifetime 0.77 ERA, an 8-1 record with 34 saves.
Mussina in the post season: no rings, a lifetime 3.42 ERA with a 7-8 record.
11) The Yankees have been harmed by the luxury tax while other teams have benefited from it.
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