Now reading...

[BillF]

Been reading Brigid Brophy, Anglo -Irish critic, novelist, journalist, crusader for animal and author rights, open marriage, bisexuality, vegetarianism. A sharp mind, a neat wit, a puckish sense of humor, an elegant sensibility. Her praises are as satisfying to read as her skewerings (love her take-downs of "Lucky Jim" and Henry Miller). Turns out she was also an intimate friend of Iris Murdoch, in what was a fraught friendship. Recently, over a thousand letters from Iris to Brigid were made available (Brigid's letters to Iris were destroyed at Brigid's direction). "Hackenfeller's Ape," the tale of a zoology professor and a caged Hackenfeller Ape (a fictitious species) having a meeting of minds; the book won the 1954 Cheltenham Prize for best first novel; Murdoch's "Under the Net" came in second, certainly a misjudgment, although Brophy's book is fun to read. Brophy is one of those minor talents who are often more fun to read than their more esteemed contemporaries.

Thanks for getting me on to this author, Leeway. Have just read Hackenfeller's Ape, which I would describe as a moral fable, rather than a novel, akin perhaps to Orwell's Animal Farm - and I don't say that merely because of similarities in the subject matter. Beautifully written - there's a quality to mid-20th century English literary prose which we have now sadly quite lost. Also on my "to read" shelf is Brophy's The Finishing Touch, but first I'm going back to jazz autobiography with this:

[Head Man]

Finished this on holiday recently.. well plotted and written, as ever by him...recommended.

Now part way through this....

... lots of very interesting (to me) background to the London folk scene in the 60's and 70s. In fact not a great deal about Bert Jansch after reading a third of the book. I guess that will come later, although he does seem to be a rather enigmatic figure.....

[BillF]

Finished this on holiday recently.. well plotted and written, as ever by him...recommended.

Yes, a good read.

[jlhoots]

Jo Nesbo: Blood On Snow

[HutchFan]

[Simon8]

[BillF]

Long time since I read it, but I recall it as one of the best of the Greenes

[A Lark Ascending]

Now part way through this....

... lots of very interesting (to me) background to the London folk scene in the 60's and 70s. In fact not a great deal about Bert Jansch after reading a third of the book. I guess that will come later, although he does seem to be a rather enigmatic figure.....

Excellent book. Harper is very good on wider context - his McLaughlin bio is probably even more slanted towards background over individual biography.

[ejp626]

Ivan Vladislavic The Restless Supermarket

I've been meaning to read this for ages. It's about a man in Johannesburg who has retired from proof-reading telephone directories. He spends a fair bit of time in and around Hillbrow. He is sort of struggling with all the changes that happened to South Africa over that period. I'd say he reminds me a bit of some of Nadine Gordimer's characters (the ones that were less politically active naturally). There seems to be a bit of wordplay, but I've just started. Anyway, so far so good.

[Leeway]

Yeah, that's pretty much it. As far as her work on it's own, I consider her to be a lousy writer with morally bankrupt ideas, but probably wouldn't have made the comment if that was all there was.

About 200 pages in now, and I'm still not sure how it is offensive.

I guess the knock on Rand is that the plot is contrived, the characters wooden, and the philosophy a paean to utter selfishness. OTOH, she has many acolytes, so I suppose you'll have to read through and decide for yourself.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Alec Wilder’s ‘American Popular Song: the great inventors 1900-1950’

I started reading this yesterday. I’ve given up now, after half a dozen pages of chapter two (which is about Jerome Kern).

I’ve never, ever, read a book so obviously intended for an audience of 647 real people, fifteen hundred music students and thirty thousand designers of academic curricula. I never want to read another one. A small excerpt from the Kern chapter will serve to illustrate the point.

“There were, indeed, occasions upon which he reverted to his enthusiasm for English and Viennese musical manners, and he never could have been called a truly ‘swinging’ writer of songs. One can’t imagine him being excited by Duke Ellington’s music, let alone the experiments of Gerry Mulligan with a ten man group (a “tentet”). But there stand those melodies, straight and healthy, and ever green.”

Well, thanks to Alec Wilder for that last sentence. It’s always a great pleasure to read a beautiful sentence, and that’s definitely one. But in the next paragraph, he really hits you in the face with a pile of dogshit.

“Shelton Brooks had no European cage to escape from, though he grew up in Canada and loved Victor Herbert’s songs. Irving Berlin fought his way up out of extreme poverty and had no time to indulge in “culture”. As for George Gershwin, by the time he became culture-conscious, he was so indelibly labelled an American product that he risked his identity by slipping into European musical mores. Let’s say he [who? Gershwin? Berlin? Brooks? Kern?] settled simply for French harmony [!?!?], as did most arrangers of the thirties, excepting the driving Negro swing band arrangers.”

So what the buggering hell is “French harmony”? No clue. No footnote even to refer to. Does he mean harmonies frequently utilised by Debussy, Faure, Satie, Ravel, Franck, Hindemith, Berlioz, Poulenc, Alkan or Saint Saens? (And which? They’re certainly not all the same.) Or was he referring to older musicians, like Couperin, Rameau, Leclair, Boismortier, Marais or Lully? Or to a bunch of composers of French pop songs in the first third of the century? Well, does it make a difference? To which the response has to be, how would one know?

I readily admit to not being a musician. Further, my music education ended when I was fifteen. Most people would, I think, say the same. So I find the entire basis of Mr Wilder’s book completely impenetrable. This is set out in the introduction, by James T Maher.

“Early in the preliminary research that led to this book, the author decided to devote its content to the popular song per se. He also decided to emphasise the music, and to touch only incidentally, with respect to analysis, on the words of the songs. The two elements, as the text makes clear, cannot be separated. One may talk about words, or one may talk about music, but one cannot talk about song and mean anything less than the combination of the two.”

Well that’s common sense. So this unpromising statement means that Wilder knowingly attempted to half do a job that couldn’t be half done. And more, because almost every time Wilder includes the musical notation that illustrates the point he’s making (well, I have to assume it illustrates it), he avoids putting the relevant words above or below the notation. It’s right to say that, for me, the one time he did that, for ‘St Louis blues’, I got the point straight away. So Wilder’s decisions have deliberately made it impossible for the average music lover to get anything meaningful out of his book. Well done, Mr Wilder!

So if, after reading this, anyone in Britain (or Paris - I'm visiting Paris next month) would like a copy of the book, I’ll send it to them, for nix. Just PM me an address. However, I’m not paying foreign postage rates for something that I’d otherwise sling in the recycling.

Yes, I know I'm a heathen.

MG

PS - when I was looking for the correct cover of the book, I noticed this one

Good Lord, what an inimical-looking guy! I had to look at what songs he'd written and the only one listed in Wikipedia that he wrote the music for that I can ever remember hearing is 'I'll be around'. A good song but one I can do without, especially after seeing the above photo.

[paul secor]

Calling Jeff.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Calling Jeff.

Oh yes

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Allen Lowe recommended a couple of books on the history of recorded sound, which I bought from Amazon. They were 'America on record' by Andre Millard,

and 'Sound recording'; by David L Morton Jr.

I was attempting to find out why vocals became so much more popular than instrumentals in the mid twenties. The issue was that a big change seems to have occurred between 1925 and 1927. I can’t remember what prompted me but, in 2007 or 2008, I looked through that Whitburn Pop Memories book (which I know has its serious faults, but which can be useful if one treats it as a dated list of records that were pretty or very popular) picking out bands that had goodish careers through the twenties and into the thirties and counting the numbers that were instrumental or vocal. I’ve set out the results in this table.

Well, I've deleted the table, because it just comes out rubbish on the board. But in summary, these were the bands:

Benson Orch of Chicago

Ben Bernie

Carl Fenton

Fletcher Henderson

Isham Jones

Roger Wolfe Kahn

Sam Lanin

Ted Lewis

Vincent Lopez

Ray Miller

Leo Reisman

Ben Selvin

Nat Shilkret & Victor Orch

Paul Specht

Frankie Trumbauer

Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians

Ted Weems

Paul Whiteman

Of 363 early hits by those bands, only 37 were vocals. Of 562 later hits, only 36 were instrumentals.

Obviously, I picked bands because only bands have the capability of making vocal or instrumental records and I wanted to find bands whose policies had changed at some time. I didn’t, and still don’t, think these bands changed their tack because they were driven by aesthetic considerations; I think they changed to reflect what their audiences were looking for, maybe even asking for. So the results reflect a genuine change in audience preference.

Again, it’s clear that SOMETHING happened in the midtwenties. But one wonders what. It doesn’t seem to have been the emergence of a charismatic vocal stylist who changed people’s perception of what they should be listening to. The only people I can think of who might have done something like that were Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, but Jolson had been around for over ten years by 1920, and Crosby didn’t get going until about 1930.

So I was reading these books.

The Millard book is very good. He writes about the technology in a way which includes the reader, so that isn’t a problem. He also seems to understand very well what musicians’, singers’, companies’ and indies’ responses to the different technological developments were (though he did miss a point that Morton picked up), though I don’t know whether his comments on Rock and Punk are correct, because they’re pretty foreign to me – like Mbalax is to most westerners He covered a wide range of material and there’s a lot of meat in the book. The subject index is crap – no index entry for electrical recording!!! (OK, part 2 is headed “The electrical era” so it may be too big for an index entry, but Edison gets a whole section of indices.)

In contrast, Morton’s book is a bit lightweight, though he covers the Dictaphone business, which Millard misses. I had no idea Columbia was making cylinder Dictaphones up to 1950, and cylinders for the customers right through to the sixties! And he occasionally makes some telling points that Millard overlooked. For example, though there was no Federal ban on radio stations playing commercial records (as opposed to transcriptions) in the thirties, stations were warned by regulators that licences might not be renewed for those that didn’t provide “high quality material”. But he points out that “use of live network programmes was a business strategy designed to keep the network broadcasters powerful and profitable at the expense of the independents.”

He also notes that, during the Depression, classical music fans were much better heeled than pop music fans and were prepared to pay top whack prices for good recordings, so classical music became one of the mainstays of those few companies left in business (except, I think, Decca, which was committed to low prices, undercutting the other two major companies). Victor introduced 33.3 rpm 10” and 12” LPs for classical music in 1931 and kept them going for a couple of years until times got too bad for the new medium to be sustained.

Well, as I read on, I saw that Morton does a much better job of covering the development of tape recording in pre-war Germany, and the ripping of the technology by the Allies’ firms at war’s end. He’s also somewhat more interesting in dealing with the development of different kinds of tape businesses from the fifties on. And he makes a very good point about piracy – all those transcription discs that were used for albums of airshots by big bands show how prevalent piracy (which it apparently is) was in the early LP era. So I’m inclined to give Morton a pass.

OK, the answer to the instrumentals > vocals transition seems to have been electrical recording. I read it in Millward but didn’t note down the page numbers, relying on a decent index, which neither book has. So it took me bloody weeks to find the stuff again because it’s REALLY boring re-reading something you’ve only just read! So a few pages is about all I could stand at one sitting.

The story seems to run something like this. Following the Civil War, the most popular music was that of large marching bands; the most successful was that of Sousa. This lasted into the 1890s, when opera (!?) became hugely popular. But opera singers were not well recorded acoustically. Millward mentions the ‘squeaky’ voices of Nellie Melba and Adelina Patti. Tenor voices fared rather better because the tenor range fit the frequency range acoustic equipment could capture rather better than sopranos and basses, and some, like Caruso, fit very well into acoustic recordings. Starting in 1902, his recordings were very popular and eventually resulted, in 1907, in the first million seller record - of ‘On with the motley’. Obviously, there were plenty of well heeled classical music buffs who could afford Victor’s Red Seal records at $2 a go (or at least, well heeled people who thought it appropriate to acquire those expensive discs as status symbols – not an unforgivable practice – my wife and I went to Glyndebourne in 1972 or ‘73, when they had vacant seats for ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’ and offered tickets at two quid a go – music not worth my while, but watching the audience was nice, and that was what they were there for).

Despite the success of opera singers with the right voices, and anyway when opera became less popular, voices weren’t as well recorded as instrumentals. The singers who did well were those who had vaudeville experience – like Sir Harry Lauder and Al Jolson – which gave them a strong declamatory style. Of course, the vaudeville stage was acoustic, though I don’t doubt that there were singers about who were able to project more intimately. But there’s an interesting reference in Millward to a little book of instructions, ‘The phonograph and how to use it’, issued by The National Phonograph Company (Edison’s firm) in 1900, which was intended for the use of performers, which tells singers to ‘avoid singing with too much expression’. That‘s a line that just spoke to me, directly and to the precise point.

Electrical recording changed all this quite radically, but not exactly overnight, because there were still problems with early electrical recordings. A number of small incremental improvements occurred, following the first electrical recordings, which were adopted with differing degrees of haste by the companies and their studio facilities. This is probably sufficient to explain why the various bands I looked into and mentioned in my earlier letter didn’t all change over – just like that (as Tommy Cooper used to say). But by about 1927, the new technology was good enough to usher in the era of the crooner.

And things have never been the same since.

Of course, people have always LIKED singers and vocal music, because they could sing along with them; could learn the songs and sing them out in the fields or on the way to the factories, or in the bath (if they owned one), so I don’t want to emphasise this point too much. And it’s true that a LOT of very good songs were written in the late twenties and early thirties, which certainly helped the vocalists. But it does seem that, in the acoustic era, vocal records were handicapped as against instrumentals by the inadequacies of the technology, and that this handicap disappeared or grew much less with electrical recording. Also, of course, some people are so extremely good at what they do that they can succeed under pretty nearly any circumstances – Al Jolson is an obvious case in point as one who was not made even slightly redundant by electrical recording. But on the other hand it’s hard to believe that, in the acoustic era, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby and Perry Como could have been successful.

Subsequently, since their technological advantage had disappeared, instrumentals have had to become successful on their own merits. As time passed, movies, TV and music videos, together with the technological and marketing power of the market leaders in the record business (owed by the same movie & TV firms), have increasingly made image, not musical talent, the main factor in achieving big sales, and this has served musicians rather poorly. You NEED something to declare other than talent to succeed on a grand scale nowadays.

So, unless someone tells me I’m making large mistakes in this I’m going to be satisfied with this explanation.

[jeffcrom]

Calling Jeff.

I think I'll pass on commenting, other than to say that I enjoyed that book quite a bit.

[Simon8]

Long time since I read it, but I recall it as one of the best of the Greenes

I just started, but there's from the get-go that understated scene and character-setting mastery that really impressed me in The End of the Affair (the only other Greene novel I read).

[jlhoots]

David Fulmer: The Iron Angel

[BillF]

Long time since I read it, but I recall it as one of the best of the Greenes

I just started, but there's from the get-go that understated scene and character-setting mastery that really impressed me in The End of the Affair (the only other Greene novel I read).

Yes, I like End of the Affair too. I've read almost all of his stuff, but the other ones I go back to are Gun for Sale, Confidential Agent and Ministry of Fear and from a later period, The Quiet American.

[paul secor]

Long time since I read it, but I recall it as one of the best of the Greenes

I just started, but there's from the get-go that understated scene and character-setting mastery that really impressed me in The End of the Affair (the only other Greene novel I read).

Yes, I like End of the Affair too. I've read almost all of his stuff, but the other ones I go back to are Gun for Sale, Confidential Agent and Ministry of Fear and from a later period, The Quiet American.

I liked the book, but it's not a favorite.

My Goodreads review: "Duty, duty, duty. It will do you in."

[A Lark Ascending]

The 10 best independent bookshops in the world – readers recommend

The only one I've been to is Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Never even knew about the one in Bath...though there is another excellent independent there as an alternative to Waterstones (http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/)

Love the idea of the bookshop 'somewhere on the London canals'.

Where I just can't be bothered with record CD/shops these days I still love a long browse in a book shop.

Edited June 19, 2015 by A Lark Ascending

[A Lark Ascending]

Polished this off in a week. Very good analysis of the way the 'scandal' was manipulated by the press. The writer is a toff himself and assumes that any opposition to extreme inequitable wealth must be based on envy...but otherwise, very impressive.

Excellent Vietnam based novel by someone who was there. Stumbled on his Profumo era recent novel a few weeks back. If you like Cold War era thrillers, worth a go.

Still on the Blake book but that is proving tough going. Somewhat formulaic with every publication getting a brief description, explanation of the engraving and list of the price of sale at various points and number of copies surviving. Not that analytical on Blake's view of the world....that may come later.

[johnblitweiler]

The 10 best independent bookshops in the world – readers recommend

The only one I've been to is Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Never even knew about the one in Bath...though there is another excellent independent there as an alternative to Waterstones (http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/)

Love the idea of the bookshop 'somewhere on the London canals'.

Where I just can't be bothered with record CD/shops these days I still love a long browse in a book shop.

I love a good long browse too but browse less these days because of the temptation to actually buy books and read them at home. Re the Guardian article, I've been to 3 of those stores: Strand (I'll go back when I'm in NY next month), Shakespeare & Co. (a purportedly American literary bookstore that [shock!] didn't have WC Williams' Collected Poems) (it has been said that there's a superior English-language bookstore elsewhere in Paris), and City Lights, a disappointment, a tourist trap. As compensation, not far away, there's a very good second-hand bookstore in mid-Berkeley, don't recall the name.

New Yorkers - are any bookstores that specialize in poetry trucked away somewhere in some of the boroughs? How about second-hand bookstores that have a lot of good old noir / hard-boiled / golden-age sf paperbacks?

[ejp626]

The 10 best independent bookshops in the world – readers recommend

The only one I've been to is Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Never even knew about the one in Bath...though there is another excellent independent there as an alternative to Waterstones (http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/)

Love the idea of the bookshop 'somewhere on the London canals'.

Where I just can't be bothered with record CD/shops these days I still love a long browse in a book shop.

I love a good long browse too but browse less these days because of the temptation to actually buy books and read them at home. Re the Guardian article, I've been to 3 of those stores: Strand (I'll go back when I'm in NY next month), Shakespeare & Co. (a purportedly American literary bookstore that [shock!] didn't have WC Williams' Collected Poems) (it has been said that there's a superior English-language bookstore elsewhere in Paris), and City Lights, a disappointment, a tourist trap. As compensation, not far away, there's a very good second-hand bookstore in mid-Berkeley, don't recall the name.

New Yorkers - are any bookstores that specialize in poetry trucked away somewhere in some of the boroughs? How about second-hand bookstores that have a lot of good old noir / hard-boiled / golden-age sf paperbacks?

I wonder if the Berkeley book store was Moe's or Pegasus. To be honest, I usually only go into Half Price Books, which is right near the campus, but I can browse for a long time when in the mood.

It looks like Mercer St. Books is still there in Greenwich Village (206 Mercer), but I haven't been in there in ages, so I don't know if it still holds up. It used to be my 2nd favorite bookstore in New York after the Strand.

[paul secor]

The 10 best independent bookshops in the world – readers recommend

The only one I've been to is Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Never even knew about the one in Bath...though there is another excellent independent there as an alternative to Waterstones (http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/)

Love the idea of the bookshop 'somewhere on the London canals'.

Where I just can't be bothered with record CD/shops these days I still love a long browse in a book shop.

I love a good long browse too but browse less these days because of the temptation to actually buy books and read them at home. Re the Guardian article, I've been to 3 of those stores: Strand (I'll go back when I'm in NY next month), Shakespeare & Co. (a purportedly American literary bookstore that [shock!] didn't have WC Williams' Collected Poems) (it has been said that there's a superior English-language bookstore elsewhere in Paris), and City Lights, a disappointment, a tourist trap. As compensation, not far away, there's a very good second-hand bookstore in mid-Berkeley, don't recall the name.

New Yorkers - are any bookstores that specialize in poetry trucked away somewhere in some of the boroughs? How about second-hand bookstores that have a lot of good old noir / hard-boiled / golden-age sf paperbacks?

I wonder if the Berkeley book store was Moe's or Pegasus. To be honest, I usually only go into Half Price Books, which is right near the campus, but I can browse for a long time when in the mood.

It looks like Mercer St. Books is still there in Greenwich Village (206 Mercer), but I haven't been in there in ages, so I don't know if it still holds up. It used to be my 2nd favorite bookstore in New York after the Strand.

I've never been to Mercer St. Books, but their Facebook page is fairly current, so it seems they're still in business. Looks like a very good and interesting (in the best sense of that word) bookstore.

[jeffcrom]

I visited Mercer St. Books last week. I would have been happy spending a few hours there, but I had a tired wife with me, so I kept the visit short. I walked out with the two-volume Berger/Berger/Patrick biography and discography of Benny Carter and the 1948 edition of Charles Delauney's Hot Discography.

Patti Smith had apparently recently sold them some books - they had a table of books "from Patti's Smith's library."