Every1's a Winner

Every year on around Thanksgiving for the last decade or more, I determine the winners of the Ehmke(e) Awards, my own personal (okay, imaginary) year-in-music review. (Long story behind the parenthetical e; don't feel like sharing it at the moment.) Unlike most best-album honors given out by more legitimate bestowers, mine focus on the listener as much as the producer of the sounds: for me, picking an "album of the year" has more to do with the year I listened to the record than the year it hit stores. (Favorite example: Gram Parsons was my very first Artist of the Year, about two decades after he bit the dust.) I also don't feel compelled to narrow selections down to a single winner. Hell, I just plain don't like awards, period. In a nutshell, the two features of entertainment writing I find most boring are:
1) the annual year-end wrap-up of top ten CDs/movies/whatever, and
2) the annual column where people guess who's going to win the Grammys/Oscars/Emmys/etc. (particularly when they post actual odds, like 20:7, which make no sense to me and only trigger my math anxiety).
But somehow I can't resist the urge to combine these two ultra-boring concepts, albeit on my own terms.

Most years, the Ehmke(e) Awards are a purely hypothetical affair (except in 1997, when my list happened to make its way into The Berkshire Eagle's annual year-end wrap-up for reasons I ... won't go into here, in keeping with tonight's theme of Teasing the Reader). But now that I got me this here blog, I can share the results with ... all five people who read it. The virtual envelopes, please:

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Brian Wilson, Smile. Hell, it's the least I can do to acknowledge such a monumental musical achievement and cultural event. And I've said more than enough about the album itself already. I'm just happy to see that it's been making a dent "at retail," as they say, and in the CD players of people around the world, some of whom may not even be obsessive megafans.

SONG OF THE YEAR: Outcast, "Hey Ya." And didn't Missy Elliot have some super-catchy single like "Work It" out this past year, too? It's getting so hard to remember which year is which as I approach my dotage. Anyway, those two top my list, for reasons that should be perfectly obvious.

ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Caetano Veloso. Another no-brainer, given how much of the music he has written and/or performed that I've surrounded myself with of late, to say nothing of the many happy hours spent reading his memoir.

CONCERT OF THE YEAR: A tie...
João Gilberto (Nob Hill [I think], San Francisco, June)
Brian Wilson (Massey Hall, Toronto, October)
Wrote about the first of these here already, and one day I will actually get around to finishing the post I started and abandoned about the latter.

If I were a more ambitious sort, I'd look up past winners and list them here--except I don't think they're all written down anywhere. (Face it: honor is such an ephemeral quality sometimes.) I do recall that the 2003 concert of the year was a three-way tie between Robbie Fulks, Don Lennon (both at Mohawk Place here in Buffalo), and Super Furry Animals (at the Continental in Bflo--but how could I possibly have left Patti Smith's unbelievable 3-hour show at the Sphere out of that list??? Perhaps it was actually in 2002?). D Lennon got artist of the year, and album of the year was a threeway tie between The Postal Service's Give Up, Mr. Lennon's Downtown, and My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves. And I know that past album-of-the-year winners have included Mull Historical Society, The Twilight Singers, and Mark Eitzel. Oh, and Radiohead, but something tells me they don't need the extra sales bump which inevitably follows such a prestigious distinction.

(Y'know, anytime I write stuff like this, I can't help suspecting that I sound exactly like the protagonist of American Psycho, who spends his time between murders reviewing the history of the band Genesis, album by album. Is this not the worst fear of all bloggers?)

Any contests of your own to list here? Be my guest. Believe me, I'd way rather hear about the winner of the Bradley Q. Fakename honors than speculate about the Recording Association of America's next Best New Artist.

They've Got a Lot of Coffee in Brazil

According to this Reuters story, the country of Brazil wants to produce a "TV documentary" (read: infomercial?) promoting the healthlicious joys of drinking coffee.

"The United States already is the world's biggest coffee market but Brazil thinks Americans can drink more," the item reads.

Okay, okay, I'm drinking as fast as I can...

Speaking in Tongues

Spent much of this evening editing a transcript of an interview for work; as part of the necessary distraction process, I found myself at the download section of Sigur Rós's website, which contains a pretty remarkable and rather large collection of mp3s by the band and their various side projects. I'd lost my copy of their wonderful album Ágætis Byrjun for a while and found it again just a few days ago, which sparked a whole new wave of listening. (I never picked up its followup, (), though the site has a few sample tracks that tempt me to hear more.)

As if that weren't distraction enough, the goldmine at SR's online headquarters made me wonder if My Morning Jacket's site might contain a comparable treasure trove. It doesn't, though there are a few songs here and there from most of their albums, and the site has plenty of other features to keep you ... distracted. SR and MMJ, while they're pretty different from each other, also have a lot in common, starting with their generally dreamy, reverb-y sound--which I find enormously appealing. Both groups' lyrics are often difficult or impossible to make out, which bothers me not one bit.

But thinking about the legibility of musical language inspired me to also start assembling candidates for a compilation CD I've long pledged to make for a friend who's intrigued by this whole Brazilian obsession of mine and wants to get his feet wet but can't get past the desire to understand the lyrics. My disc will be called "Brazenglish" and will consist entirely of songs by Brazilian artists (and like-minded offshoots) singing in English. I'll try to remember to post the final songlist here when I'm done. It's sort of a frustrating project, though, because the songs generally don't represent an artist's best work (one notable exception being Marisa Monte's cover of "Pale Blue Eyes," which just might be my favorite of her recordings I've heard so far).

I don't really share my friend's need for complete comprehension. I used to be a big Lyrics Guy in my tormented adolescence many many years ago, when it really seemed like Simon & Garfunkel (for instance) really had something to tell me, but after a certain point that wore off. Might have happened around the time I started seeing friends of mine in bands that were musically really great but lacked a strong lead singer; I kinda wished they'd just go in a purely instrumental direction. (This was a good ten years or so before Tortoise and similar outfits did exactly that.)

These days I guess I feel like vocals are a nice thing for a song to have, but lyrics that I can plainly understand, let alone relate to, don't seem quite so important anymore. (No offense to Iris Dement or Richard Rodgers or anyone else--I still love you all, promise.) The 6 or 7 years I spent working for a singer/songwriter's record label were really what made me turn to wordless music--mostly electronic stuff. I don't mean that as a diss to the artist, more a reflection of my desire to have suitable music to work to--and since my work generally involves language, I have plenty of words in my head already. What I'm looking for is the texture and sheer presence of music.

Which explains why I just spent an evening downloading songs sung either in Icelandic or a madeup variation thereof. Svefn-g-englar, y'all. Everybody join in on the chorus!

A Change IS Gonna Come...

Horrible week for U.S. politics. Pretty damn good one for live music in Buffalo, though: Tuesday night the house band for our little cabaret was the Dixieland Grifters, a Bflo-based instrumental outfit whose name pretty much tells you what they play. And it was perfect for the spirit of the evening: started out jazzy and hopeful, then turned dirgelike, and ended up jazz-funeral-style as the entire audience and cast transformed their sadness into one brief, hopeful dance.

Last night, as I've already mentioned, I saw the magnificent Andrew Bird. And then tonight I had the great treat of watching/hearing the Portland (OR)-based quintet 3 Leg Torso accompany David Greenberger (of Duplex Planet fame)in a live performance of their spoken-word-and-music collaboration "Legibly Speaking" (which is also available as a CD. The show took place in a beautiful, old church, which struck me as the perfect context for Greenberger's words, taken from conversations he's conducted with senior citizens over many years: stories and briefer vignettes about love, loneliness, illness, death, and cats. If that sounds sad, I've misled you; the centerpiece of the work is heartbreaking, but the rest is funny and quirky and full of hope.

Which is just what I/we need right now. The only music I've wanted to hear lately has been that which is quiet yet strong, soulful and hopeful. That's Bird, that's 3 Leg Torso, that's Aretha Franklin covering Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come." And although I'd slipped a little off the Brazilian bandwagon in the delirium of the last month (because I've had to seek out dozens of songs to use in the show), I've been reaching for Vinicius Cantuaria and Joao Gilberto a lot again in the past 48 hours. There is rage in me along with sadness, and I'm sure some Atari Teenage Riot will hit my turntable/CD player sooner or later, but for now I'm going with soothing over seething.

And you? What sounds are getting you through these dark days? Post a comment and lemme know.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place (if it's the last thing we ever do)

(Had real trouble logging into Blogger earlier today; I can only assume it was thanks to millions of other folks attempting to post their thoughts on the election. Now that I'm on, here's my contribution to that multilogue. For now at least, the thing I can't get out of my head is not music but the fucked-up decision my home nation just made yesterday: to retain its appallingly inept leader for another four goddam years.)

Ohhhhhh shit.
I've spent most of the day either cursing my fellow citizens or weeping--though I refuse to abandon all hope. Picked up Caetano's Tropical Truth and found the following passage, which brought some degree of comfort. Substitute the U.S. for Brazil and Bush for "military dictatorship" and you've got a pretty good description of how I feel at the moment:

We the tropicalistas, unlike so many of our more naive leftist friends, who seemed to believe that the military had come from Mars, had always been determined to face the dictatorship as nothing less than an expression of Brazil. That view increased our suffering, but today it also sustains what seems to be my optimism. I think and act as I do, knowing in my bones the truth of Brazil's potentialities, having entered into a dialogue with Brazil's deepest desires--and I do not conclude that we are a pure, ineluctable failure. I learned then to recognize the forces of regeneration, and even being aware of the proposition's very high risks, I am always inclined to double my wager.

Tonight I saw the phenomenal Andrew Bird at Soundlab in lovely downtown Buffalo. I was wiped out after the end of the five-week run of the cabaret show I've been part of all month, which wrapped up with a marathon election-night production, and I really, truly wouldn't have left my house for anyone but Mr. Bird, whose lush, delightful music seemed the only thing I wanted to hear under the circumstances--the aural equivalent of comfort food. His recent solo records are beautiful, and live he's even more astonishing, playing up to four instruments (simultaneously!) and singing. Hate to compare artists to other artists, but anyone who likes recent Wilco or Radiohead albums or Rufus Wainwright would be well advised to check him out. Trust me: the perfect soundtrack for this frazzled moment in time.

Now that the Cabaret is on hiatus for a while, I hope to post more often here, starting with several entries I started and didn't quite finish over the past month.

On one hand, it seems hard to write about music when my nation appears to be heading straight to hell. But what else can I do? The only thing that gives me hope and help in such dire times is art/music/culture. This stuff keeps me alive.

Smile, though your heart is aching...

Update from May 2006: This is a blog entry I never finished; rediscovered the draft of it just now and decided to finish the sentence I left incomplete and just end it there. This show was such a tremendous experience that I should at least leave some kind of marker here. Even today, two years later, I could still go on and on about it... but I won't. You're spared!


I fully intended to race home after seeing Brian Wilson and his band perform Smile in Toronto and write about the experience here while it was still fresh in my mind, but that didn't quite happen. Now three or four weeks have gone by, and if anything the memory has already transformed itself into the stuff of personal legend.

This wasn't the first time I'd seen the group; they shared a bill with Paul Simon at Darien Lake, one of those corporate amusement park amphitheater deals outside Buffalo, in the summer of 2000, and that one had been such a moving experience (I'd never wept all the way through a concert before) that I doubted the second time around could possibly equal it.

Boy, was I wrong. A big part of the power of the Darien Lake show was simply the thrill of seeing this guy for whom I have so much respect and empathy--an artist who'd finally triumphed over his long history of stage fright, mental illness, and fucked-up band/label politics--who had at long last found the ideal ensemble to play his music with respect and careful craftsmanship in front of an audience that could hear it for what it was. And what a band—one part Wondermints, one part latter-day BB touring types, all of whom sound absolutely amazing. [...]

Bossa Nova Baby

If you're one of those readers who shares my fondness for those Brazilian rhythms and you're a Western New Yorker, you might wanna get yourself a ticket (as early as possible, since they're practically guaranteed to go fast) to the first weekend of shows in this season's Real Dream Cabaret, the semi-regular improvisational group I'm a part of. On Friday, Oct. 8 and Saturday, Oct. 9, the brand-new group Bossa Womba Loca, fronted by my very dear longtime friend Heather Connor, will be our house band, and they promise to bring the bossa and the samba along with lots of other Latin sounds. (There's a new show, a new band, and a new theme every weekend through the rest of the month; the first theme is "The Fertile Crescent," which doesn't appear to have much to do with bossa... but I'm pretty sure the connection will be clear enough in its dreamlike fashion.)

There: a blatant plug for something I'm involved in. Hope to see you there. And now back to our regularly scheduled adoration of Brian W, Caetano V, and Aphex T.