Monday 27 February 2012

EVENSONG. .....GENIUS, UNRULY AND RIGHTEOUS, THIS IS DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE. BOB DYLAN AND GLENN GOULD




18 comments:

P T Barnum said...

I am honoured, Mr. I, and moved. Thank you.

call me ishmael said...

I don't care, mr ptb, too much for his current performances, indeed, if he has friends, they might consider advising him to take up gardening but I found this version of shelter from the storm tender and poignant, even almost well-disciplined, less unruly. It is a favourite of mine, too and I can think of no worthy man who would not find himself, somewhere in its narrative.

I am in awe of all concert pianists but Maestro Gould operated on a different level to most others. I wish I had made the time to have more than a slight knowledge of his work.

Agatha said...

Sorry for your loss, Mr.ptb. There are no happy endings, more's the pity.

Anonymous said...

Very good, Sir.

You'll find me the same anon as the one who made a maiden comment recently, commending your bile and hatred for all the cocksuckers, shitkickers and utter bastards that currently rule this land.

Love and theft was the end of a beautiful friendship. The rest is. I'm so horribly afraid to admit, geriatric shit.

Oh well, so goes the way of all flesh.

BTW I'm only anon because I do not wish to leave a trail. As the dude in charge of the blog, can you tell one anon from another?

If not, I'd like to identify myself to you without doing so to others, is there a way?

I am now, and will always be,


Disco Dave.

BTW Stones, Doors, Hendix, Joplin, CCR (ooh yeah, CCR), Eagles, Doobie Brothers, ELO, Mike Oldfield, Rush, Deep Purple:

You reading me?

Anonymous said...

Hey dude,

Commented without watching. Watched now.

Fuck me, it's terrible.

Google Rachmaninov's third, played by Horowitz.

You want piano? See above, at 8 mins.

call me ishmael said...

As I said in my earlier comment, Yes, love and theft wrapped it up for me, too, but in a one more cup of coffee before I go sort of way, I take a peek now and again at concert footage on the You-thing and felt that this one had a suitably elegiacal metre and tone and that the band held it all together, where, usually, it's all just over-ridden by single-string Bobdoodles. These things on here are often kinda collegiate in authorship and one post runs into anotherl if you rack back one post you'll see what this was about. It was about puttuing a candle in the window for another's loss. You're not to know that.

Horowitz is a bit mainstream, ain't he? Gould gave up performing and spent the rest of his life engineering and recording, he used to mic-up every string. And he sits like that in a chair his father adapted for him, saying that right down there he could really see what he was doing. He's like a one hundred thousand per cent proof Beefheart. You should spend some time with him. No point cruisng cyberspace in the dead of night just to look at stuff you already know, now, is there?

I am an IT sub-Epsilon moron, all these things are an illusion to me, now, but I just know people by their tone and interests. I don't actually JNOW anyone here. The anonymati have their own reasons but I don't think this place is important enough for any tracking to happen.

P T Barnum said...

Thank you Mrs Agatha. It's strange but there is consolation in these curious connections we make here with people we will never meet in the real but with whom we gather together unprompted in a shared communion.

Mr. I., I learnt to love Gould under her tutelege (and in traffic jams with one CD) especially his version of the Liszt transcription of Beethoven's Fifth, which I now prefer to the orchestral version which seems very vulgar and flashy.

P T Barnum said...

Mr Disco Dave, even being 'Anonymous' isn't really hiding your tracks if you are that concerned about such things since if anyone with the right skills were determined they could pretty easily track your posts via your IP address back to you. The remedy lies in coming to the entire internet through an anonymising programme, using such things as proxy servers. Simpler alternatives include using your neighbour's unsecured wireless broadband (and thus their IP address) or only ever posting from public wifi spots (but not public libraries as they will have your name and address).

Paranoia can be very time-consuming!

Anonymous said...

Mr Barnum,

I have no idea what you are talking about, but thanks for trying:-)

Mr Ishmael,

It's true that I should try to expand my mind, but I'm an old dog now, so new tricks don't come easy.

Try Dr John for unbelievable piano. Jools Holland is always worth a listen. Your man is pretty good, too.

BTW, Pound to a penny your name is on someone's PC, somewhere. Blogs like yours will get banned in the future.

Disco Dave

call me ishmael said...

Had you been with us from the outset, mr disco dave, you would have seen and heard, here, some Dr John, long ago.

Unfortunately, Mr holland's ghastly Uriah Heepism, his apparent stranglehold on BBC2's mainstream popular music output and his endorsements of any shitty product which will pay him a few quid, well, these get in the way of a proper appreciation of his musical gifts, slender as they are. Horrible fucking bastard.

I first learned of my MI5 file a long time ago, anything after that is just an irritation but, yes, blogs like this will be banned, all the more reason to keep them going.

It is funny, that, mr ptb; when I was younger I would have preferred the orchestral versions of things but Gould especially, I think, is compromised, as you say.

On a different tack, you may have seen young Tim Minchin here, an astoundingly talented Australian pianist/satirist. Someone bought me a DVD for Christmas in which, at the Albert Hall, he is accompanied on his well-known bits, by a symphony orchestra; his anti-religion raps, his extraordinary barrelhouse/chopin/ hardrock pianistic collisions - he really is a boy Norah Jones - and his to camera asides were all swamped by strings and brass and woodwind. A triumph of ego over artistic sensibility.

That wrapped it up for me and Tim.

I like bands of all sorts, but I could never play in one; some people are just solo performers. Minchin is one and I think Gould was another one.

Where's mr mongoose, when we need a musical perspective, mr the noblest prospect, ms lillith, mrs woman on a raft and mrs narcolept?

mongoose said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mongoose said...

I am hereabouts, Mr I, but too busy for much of the time to make the effort to post anything considered, and so I post nowt. Scratchin' a living, don't you know, just got a tad harder for those of us not taking the Coalition's dollar. Let's hope that one day everything gets repaid which was owed.

The Dylan was not to my taste. The original though is a magnificent triumph. Gould was obvioulsy as mad as a snake but I doubt that one can play the piano like that without being a touch so. Toodle-oo! I shall try to stop by with more regularity.

And BTW, Mr PTB, I was sorry to read of your recent trouble. Take care, Sir.

(Sorry. Not paying the closest attention but am about up to speed now.)

call me ishmael said...

I can play most, well, a lot of Blood On The Tracks in an open G tuning, Shelter From The Storm lends itself to a strident, almost martial treatment, so fond am I of that that I often think, hearing the original studio version, Ah, shit, why didn't he do it like that, kick it along a bit, do it my way, How's that for front? But the thing with Dylan has always been the words and what each of us brings to them. Having said that I think the whole album was a triumph, from the throwaway Buckets of Rain to the brooding and malevolent Idiot Wind.

Mr ptb had mentioned a fondness for SFTS and I thouygh there's no point in posting te original because we will all know that inside out and I thought this version had an ancient weariness to it that we can all embrace, not that it was "better" than the released studio version.

I have felt that same what is it, ennui, lethargy, for a while now - Ruin's servants are just so relentlessly successful in their grim mission that it hasn't seemed worth bothering to record it. I still don't know if it is but, y'know, like Genghis Khan, we gotta keep on keeping on.

I'm glad to see you're still alive, mr m, looking like a saint.

mongoose said...

It is surely the summer of our ruin, Mr I. And, thanks be for it, mine at least are insulated from the worst. I do not know if it is ennui or inattention, or worse. Once one is behind the conversation it seems a trial to catch up. Anyway, a new/old/new-told Evensong chanteuse to light the way.

the noblest prospect said...

It may just be an age thing, but sadly I must confess that despite my older brother's insistence I appreciate the croaky old fucker, I was more intent on squeezing myself into my painful plastic Beatle wig, and if you can't find anything good to say…

Conversely, my early Bach indoctrination was at the hands of a young, enlightened primary school teacher, who played us Gould and that mad, Frog beatnik Loussier. Although Gould certainly interpreted his Bach viscerally, I've become more of a Keith Jarrett man myself.

My inadequate, but sincere condolences, Mr PTB.

My old mum got 22 years out of her new plumbing, Mr Smith. They are indeed all greedy bastards these Jock surgeons, but incredibly skilled.

Very nice Mr Mongoose, a new one on me.

call me ishmael said...

No, I don't appreciate the croaky old fucker, either, except rarely, like on this one. I thought his post-sixties performances, never more than erratic, were going right off at Blackbushe, and that was centuries ago.

You know there's only about eight hours of Beatles music ever recorded? Amazing that it sustains this mythology, much of it is fantastic, although it descends later into tripe but there is just something so fresh and magical about When I saw her Standing There, All My Living, I wanna Hold Your Hand and so on. A different artform entirely to Highway Sixty One Revisited.

Sounds like a lucky childhood, yours, mr thp,I didn't hear of Loussier until my twenties and I was mid-forties before I came across Gould. I don't know Jarret, I'm afraid, but my absolute favourite pianoman is South African, Abdullah Ibrahim or Dollar Brand, as he used to be known. He was absent from Paul Simon's Gracelands - An Introduction To African Music - far too big a talent, I guess, Dunno how I heard of him but he's like a force of nature, a few bars expressing the entirity of human music-making.

Phlegmaic about the surgery, thanks, it'll most likely go well and if it doesn't, well, it probably won't matter to me.

mrs narcolept said...

I for one am never far from here, mr ishmael, admiring or sorrowful according to the tone of your posts, words nearly always failing me.

Loved the Dylan, though I don't usually, and the Bach. My brother used to hero-worship Glenn Gould as well as the Captain, so that took me back a very long way and made me remember that we used to live a few houses away from John Ogdon, who would practise with the windows open.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks for that, mrs n; every one of them words rang true...