Under the Boardwalk...

February 1st and recovering from six weeks underground in the basement studio working on a set of new songs....I'd descend in the morning and reappear in the early evening realizing I'd just missed daylight... But today I sang through 19 songs for a small invited crowd and I got the thumbs up for 14, a question mark for 4, and a thumbs down for only one... which I think is pretty good.

I've been trying to find some new ways into old songs. Swopping back and forth between a mic and recording and arranging software... trying new sounds, new tempos, new orchestrations...singing them, playing with them, trying to make them work.... I'm not sure if I can say I've found new ways, maybe I've found my own way into them. Standards. What a strange name for a set of extraordinary songs. Standard.

from Websters:

CRITERION, GAUGE, YARDSTICK, TOUCHSTONE ; a means of determining what a thing should be. STANDARD applies to any definite rule, principle, or measure established by authority <standards of behavior>: something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example :

but if you go the etymology it makes a bit of sense:
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French estandard rallying point, standard, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English standan to stand and to Old English ord point -- more at ODD
1 : a conspicuous object (as a banner) formerly carried at the top of a pole and used to mark a rallying point especially in battle or to serve as an emblem

They are 'rallying points': where the army gathers their forces and says 'we stand here' in support of this belief, this king, this faith. Then, for me, the word works better... as I see it: sheet music was the money maker in the first part of the 20th Century, and songs and ditties - comical/ballad/dance numbers/ethnic/'race' songs etc etc etc - were churned out by the thousands and thousands.... people like Gershwin got their start sitting in music shops and playing through the new compositions: they were called song pluggers.... and so we have this incredible legacy of smart, sad, funny, witty, good, terrible songs and somehow, after years of winnowing, we've all reached some kind of concensus that these one hundred, or five hundred or one thousand songs have something more, something worth re-interpreting time and time again... so they're standards... they're places we've decided are worth revisiting and redefending time and again..

The funny thing about singing these songs is that I'm realizing how hard it is 'do your own thing' with them. These songs are tough. They were made to withstand a battered piano and a tone deaf singer in small town America in 1932.... in some way, they know what they want, and they know how they're supposed to be sung. You kind of have to sneak up on them, and take a word or a phrase by surprise to see if you can pull some new sense out of the song... and then they realize what you've done and push you back to singing them they way they want to be sung... they way they're 'supposed to be sung'...

I'm trying to discover what my 'standards' are. I'm singing the Chemical Brothers side by side with Gershwin, and Ron Sexsmith beside Cole Porter... and I'm not sure what defines one from the other. There's a harmonic depth that the older songs have that is totally lacking from the basic chords of a pop song. The older songs are filled with puns and double entendres and complicated rhythmic grammer that is a joy to decipher... But, nevertheless, a great pop song can have a totally different power that the early standards don't. Sometimes, great pop lyrics have the beauty that is the flatness of everyday speech put to music... a sort of joyous, cynical lack of art..... and the hook... the sweet pleasure of the hook of a pop song, that blend of slurs of speech with a simple melodic jab that can pull your heart out of your chest.... whether it's Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Drifters or Brittany Spears... There is something magically powerful and beautiful and empty about great, great pop songs...

"Pop is a means to perfect liberation from meaning...anyone who believed differently, who believed that rock n’ roll could support concepts more complex than yes or no, or tell stories more intricate than ‘I want’ or ‘leave me alone’ would be destroyed by the form itself -- punished for betraying it. You might get a hit, he said, and then take the response to the sound you made as proof you had something to say, but it isn’t true. and anyone who believed otherwise would end up as a shabby old man with a a tin whistle standing in the rain trying to make himself heard, to get someone to listen, to get one more hit."

from the great book: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, by Greil Marcus

a new year end

January 1st, 2006,

Nice number 2006... The year of the Dog.

The New Years party was at our place, and it finished at midnight with everyone burning their lists of regrets for 2005 and resolutions for 2006 in an impromptu fire in our back yard. We're thinking of using the ashes to pot a plant on... wonder what kind of fertilizer that will be? Now, the morning after, the house is littered with champagne bottles and even the dog has a hangover.

It was a good year. The fall featured Lisa working intensely on a novel and finishing the final drafts for her poetry book that will be launched in the spring in Calgary and Toronto. She's also considering doing a theatrical adaptation of it with a wonderful canadian actress Emily Pearlman. My Jaques Brel went very well. I certainly had a great time and the audience...well, they seemed to love it, and besides: it took place on a little theatre built on a barge floating right beside Notre Dame Cathedral, there were windows looking onto the river and the buttresses of Notre Dame, so I imagine if anyone wasn't into the show, they couldn't complain about the view... The final night I had the immense honor of having Leslie Caron come to the last show and meeting her afterwards... If you didn't grow up with a Mom obsessed with music theatre (Mom only likes movies with happy endings and music theatre generally guarantees that) then she's the woman who's the female lead of an American In Paris, dancing around the city with Gene Kelly, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen when I was 12. And at 77 or so, she's still pretty beautiful... Ironically, the dance scene that's always stayed in my head, one of my first ever movie memories and also basically the only thing I knew about the city before I washed up here, is set on the Quai of the Seine, by a set of steps leading down to the River, and those steps are just a few hundred feet from where the barge was moored.... Some kind of synchronicity involved here..

After the fringe it was a real pleasure to have a gig where I just turn up and do my thing and someone else worries about all that production/money/profit/organization thing... Although, also after the fringe, I'm constantly having to stop myself from getting involved or giving 'advice' (wanted or not)... been practising not getting involved as I watch various panic attacks hit various people on the production end.. though I did have the pleasure of getting to act like a Diva when an inexperienced house manager tried to throw out Lisa because the house was overbooked, (he came down ten minutes before the show and told me she couldn't have the seats that had been reserved for her since he needed them for a larger group and he'd maybe let her stand at the back) To give me credit, before telling him I wouldn't go on if she didn't have the seats, I did spend five minutes trying to talk rationally to him... (she got the seats...)

I replaced a sick friend for four days at Disney, so I got my taste of the Magic Kingdom... I'm thinking of it as an innoculation against ever working there again (unless they pay me way, way, waaaaaaay more money). The people involved are all quite wonderful, but the disney worldview gets me down.....very, very down. I still go down on weekends with a friend and sing opera arias in a beautiful renaissance square in the middle of Paris (Place des Vosges). I'll never sing these things professionally again so it's a pleasure to have the chance to get up and exercise my voice in that style that I spent so much time training in. A while ago I had one of those moments that makes me so love France: my friend got bored of the usual Opera favourites, so she pulled out her backing track of Schubert songs that she had using earlier to give lessons with. Within minutes she had a crowd around her and people smiling and nodding their heads (and throwing money in the hat). Where in North America could you walk out on the street and start singing Schubert and have dozens of people recognize it and love it. And it's not like a knowledge of schubert implies any sort of superiority ... it was just so nice to see that some people aren't only, only familiar with pure pop culture...

Oh yeah, the new dog... we now have a muppet for a dog... a ragamuffin cross breed of a french hunting dog (a Griffon) and something... she's a raggedy assed enthusiastic 8 month old with a shaggy silly head that we got from the pound this weekend. She looks like a close realtive of Animal from Sesame St. She's kind of timid and hand shy so we think she was beaten around a bit, but she seems to be quickly gaining confidence...

2006... a very even and calm number.... we'll see what kind of irony that plays with..

Throwing myself at Brel

Four songs solo. Amsterdam, Fanette, Next (Au Suivant) and Statue. Amsterdam is the star... it's a simple song, but yet, not... like many of Brel's songs, it's a combination of a certain poetry with a simple chordal structure that drives the songs: repetition and rhythm and accelleration. At the end of the song you throw yourself over this cliff and you're left with.... with what? Perhaps as a listener you're left with the sense of a long silence as they fall into the next song.

Been watching DVD's of the man himself (mostly his goodbye performance at the Olympia). Brel in performance is fascinating. I've never seen a singer like him. Apart from a great voice and the belief in the song he also created these extravagant gestures to illustrate the songs. Normally I avoid any representation... if the song is good, if the words and music succeed in meaning something, then the song is going to work by itself: I shouldn't need to point out the stars when I'm singing about the night sky. However Brel's gesture's are grand, theatrical movements. Even with the sound turned off he's fabulous to watch. OK, sometimes (the DVD had a whole bunch of TV appearances that were less successful) I found myself thinking 'just sing the bloody song', but that was mostly under strange 'live' studio conditions when he seems less inspired.

We have two shows left and then we'll see what happens with the producers in the new year. Hopefully we'll be performing into the spring....

thanks John

Just returned from a tiny cafe poetry reading by John Giorno. Must have been fewer then 20 people in the audience to see this giant of performance poetry. Thank you John Giorno. I go on stage tomorrow night and sometimes I wonder if what believe about performing is shared ... is somehow on the right road...that you have to give and give and give, and you have to take chances, and you have to expose yourself, and you have to be there, all your faults and attributes making you what you are... that generosity and daring count and technique is the smallest portion. And there was John Giorno, who I remember from his Giorno Poetry Systems record: "Sugar, Alcohol and Meat" with Kathy Acker, Ginsberg, Burroughs... and I lay in the dark and played it over and over and wanted to be some kind of artist of words and ideas.... and there was John Giorno, older, silver haired, pot bellied, handsome, strange, eyes closed, eyes shining, dancing as he sang and spoke his way through his poems and texts. Believing. Being there.

Once upon a time,
these
friends
loved
each other
very much,
and they made a vow
to stay together
until they all
attained
Enlightenment,
and lifetime
after lifetime,
and endless
re-births,
and doing practice,
they all realized
the absolute
empty
true nature
of mind.
They were so
happy
and overjoyed,
they started
dancing,
and dancing,
and danced
and danced,
they were so happy,
in the shocked
recognition
of emptiness
and compassion,
they kept
on dancing,
dancing
and dancing,
and they danced away
all their flesh
and skin,
until there was
nothing
left
but their bones,
and they kept dancing
in their bones,
dancing
skeltons
dancing skeltons.

John Giorno

Cooool

It's cold! Thank god. I've been waiting for the fall to arrive since I had my first tantalising touch of cool at the end of August in Edmonton (where I now notice the weather is going down to -1 this week) and I've been dying for it arrive ever since... and now there are storms and rain and cold forcast for later this week so finally we can break out fall sweaters... There's no real winter in Paris, just months of cool, grey wet weather, but for a taste of cold I'll head down to Burgundy where it drops to -12 regularly. And since I haven't yet insulated the living room I'm often treated to the odd sensation of a cool snowfall sneaking through the roof tiles and falling on my back while the front of me is facing the roaring fire..

I have my head deep in music for both the Brel show coming up in three weeks and for the Standards that I'm working on for early december. The Brel is coming along now, everyone is over the mid rehearsal panic attack ("Ahhhhh! It'll never be ready on time!!!" "How can anyone move and sing at the same time!!!" Ahhhh!") and now we're drifting into getting things into place. The songs are only growing on me... apart from the ever maudlin 'Fanette'.... For the jazz material I'm redeveloping all my calluses after years of being away from the Guitar. It's a great pleasure to be away from working with playback on the tour this summer. It was a necessity from all the travel, but it has nothing to do with real music.

Trying not to read too much of the news right now... which actually means that I'm fixated on the damn news: Deadly pandemics, rogue nuclear arsenals, terrorists under every rock and behind every tree.... at least Canada and France pushed the Cultural Diversity resolution through the UN... perhaps it'll bear fruit in a few years with a little less Jennifer Aniston in the world... and a few more local heroes

Mid October in Paris. Gorgeous late warm days.

We're into the final weeks of rehearsals with the Brel and to be honest we're struggling a bit with some of the choreography that Tracy's giving us: it's not that it's particularly hard, just that the levels of dance training are pretty varied in the cast and Tracy gives very detailed moves. A lot of word painting with gestures and subtle shifts of moves for every verse of a song. I think it will all come together, however we need to run the pieces over and over and over and there's not a lot of rehearsal time left where the whole company is there....

I'm more and more impressed with the solos that I'm singing.... OK, with most of them.... as usual the songs like Amsterdam ( a Tom Waits like text of the bawdy, drinking, dying, whoring Sailors in Amsterdam) or Next (a young soldier losing his virginity in an Army Whorehouse - "it is his voice that I will forever hear, Next! Next! It is a voice of whiskey and of corpses. It is the voice of nations, it is the thick voice of blood"), those songs I find amazing... the songs like Fanette (boy loves pretty girl on beach... girl falls in love with someone else... boy can't get over it) I honestly find pretty dull... I'm sure they will start to grow on me, but at the moment I'm kind of wading through them...

I just came back from some time at the house in Burgundy. The quince tree was ripe so now a box of incredibly fragrant quinces are sitting in the living room and perfuming the whole house. Bizarre and delicious fruits...

First things first

Thursday in Paris, and I'm setting up my new site to make it easier for students to find out about lessons and contact me... The house has just had a spring (fall) cleaning to make up for the months it sat without us and now I'm getting down to my workspace/studio in the basement... months of dust and a cracked pipe have left a fair bit of mould in the air. Hopefully the patch I set in will stop the drips and the space will dry out...

I'm doing a lot of rehearsal for the Brel show that's opening up in five weeks... some amazing songs to sing and the director: Tracy Darin is giving us some simple, and very effective staging for them: some highlights I get to sing are In the Port of Amsterdam, Statue and Next. It's been great to throw myself into a new project so soon after finishing 'Driving Back to Vegas' and the french chanson tradition is so different from the Jazz Standards that Frank sang. Even though 'Jaques Brel is Alive and Well' is essentially a broadway revue channelling the chanson tradition...