Category Archives: Desert Island DIscs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbykygLXH6Q

The Wolf was a big man, with an even bigger head, from which emerged this taut, elemental voice, and boy, could he howl. Raises goosebumps every time. There’s a live version from 1964 here, but it doesn’t have the same tension:

Webern, Webern gives you space.  Much though I love Beethoven, I often feel I know where he’s going, and he’s taking a long time to get there.  Webern’s music is quirky, but deft and uncluttered, usually giving you no more time nor notes than needed to get the idea across, and can do more gear changes over a greater range than you thought possible.  And sometimes fewer notes than you need to be sure of what he’s doing — and then you have some gaps to fill in for yourself, or just leave open.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14fSu98F3pw

Been a while since an edition of DID. I came over with an overwhelming earworm last night(*), and this is it. From ‘Frankly a cappella’, it’s The Persuasions covering a Zappa classic.

You are what you is — Amen to that.

(*) [I think because something I was listening to from
Whistle Test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq6fCOGyVJg)
had a sort of Peaches riff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGQxI0G6mKk) ]

D

[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=mgpesiHWTbQ]

In the Second World War, my dad was flying in the arse end of bombers around Europe and North Africa, a hazardous career choice for a teenager. Once Europe was liberated, musical events were staged in celebration, and he always spoke with great affection about hearing some of the great singers and orchestras at that time. I don’t know if he heard Kirsten Flagsted during that period — seems unlikely — but her singing this was his favourite.

In my own teens, I was listening mostly to the late Romantics, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. That was where I discovered that music without lyrics could be about something, and perhaps something you couldn’t express well in words, but which could make emotional sense, being thrilling or tragic or consoling. But the piece that really grabbed me by the collar and belt and threw me out of the back of the ‘plane was this one. A slow avalanche of sound, in which the voice is an instrument and the instruments say things… Love and death and the climactic structure of orgasm, a heady mix for a teenager, let alone an old fart like me.

I caught on a TV documentary a story, of which I remember: a professor of music once confessed a cheerful ignorance of jazz to a colleague, who promptly frogmarched the sinner to an office where he could be introduced to this record. He listened in frozen silence to whole thing, then said, ‘play it again’.  After the second hearing, he remarked, ‘That is the most perfect piece of music I have ever heard’.

Amanojaku “Soul Beat” (Taiko)
[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=lQPNu83q4LU]

For all the drummers out there.

I don’t know much music from other cultures than the West – I don’t know how to get started. But every so often I come across something whose power and importance is more or less visceral. I caught this mob in Edinburgh with Paul Teasdale, to whom I owe at least half my musical education and resources.

D

Dimples
[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=MNY0K82A7Ac]

Just life-affirming. John Lee Hooker’s drive and rhythm gets you somewhere your brains maybe haven’t visited for a while. He never seemed to be a big fan of size zero models, and neither am I.

D

Monk – Nutty
[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=LsDHcm0JJms]

I’ve listened to more jazz than any other sort of music, but however far I wander in the jazz jungle I keep coming back to quirky, awkward, funky, bluesy Monk. It’s music with everything in it, and often not in a way you expect, so even when you listen to it again, it’s not what you remembered.

This is a version with the great John Coltrane, before anyone knew he was great. Going to school with Monk played a big part in making him that way, I believe. Eventually Monk got lost in his own head and wouldn’t come out, but his legacy is immense.

D

Tom Waits – Get Behind the Mule
[youtube http://youtube.com/w/?v=l7yuTR8r6QM]

I was introduced to Tom Waits by a college friend, now sadly deceased, during long drinking sessions in Cambridge one summer (sometimes beer, but often tea). At that time Waits was in a sort of amusing drinking piano blues groove with a bit of jazz or country flavour, then he must have dropped acid or something and did a few weird but compelling albums with a bonkers marimba orchestra, then in later years got back to the bluesy feel. I like all his stuff as a rule but this one rang a chord: there’s something about coming from an area dominated by agriculture that city kids don’t get, about seasons and obligations to the land and to nature, and your impotence before them. This is an anthem for life.

D