Siding with Vinyl
This is about records you can either no longer buy or that would cost Warren Buffett’s arm and leg. Not all are LPs. A couple are lost CDs – one can’t be found under its original title and a couple have just vanished.
Michael Garrison’s Prisms comes from the early ‘80s electronic “space” music, as introduced to me by “Stars’ End,” the late-Saturday-night program on dear old WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania station back when it actually did interesting things.. Garrison wasn’t so much spacy as bouncy and loopy, hopping around the sonic room on one synthesized leg, even while reaching for the stars. A couple copies float out of the ether now and then.
For real space music of that era, there were the Nightcrawlers, a synthesizer trio from, of all places, Camden, NJ, Murder Capital USA. Two brothers named Gulch, can’t recall who the third was. I saw them at St. Mary’s church on the Penn campus, wandering around the stage twiddling knobs on various blocks of equipment to turn out hypnotic rolls and lumbering carriages of sound. My daughter Morgan gave me a tape of I guess their only album for my birthday; it’s now ensconced digitally on my iMac. Try finding them on the Internet. Unh-uh.
The Horsies: It mystifies me that they have vanished from consciousness. We got the CD at our weekly the Welcomat in the early '90s and Pete Brown, the music editor, handed it to me to review. From Austin ,TX, the Horsies blended Western swing with South African mbaqanga (popularized by such albums as The Indestructible Beat of Soweto). The wholly unlikely combination worked beautifully. Wacky, friendly, a little sloppy in their singing, the Horsies had more energy than a fire siren, a true love of their instruments and a great sense of akimbo songwriting. Run right now to Amazon and you can get Trouble Down South, used, for a single penny (plus shipping). But I can guarantee you’ll never find anyone else who reviewed the CD when it came out.
Finn Viderø (how do Danes pronounce ø?) was a master organist of Baroque music in the '50s. Some of his Bach recordings are more or less available, but he also put out the complete organ music of Buxtehude in three volumes. I have vols. 1 and 3 on vinyl, which migrated to tape and now nestle in my computer. Oh, damn, was he good. And you can buy the original set, new, for only $95.95! Good old Finn (our cat’s named Finn, but for Finn MacCool, of Celtic fame).
The most marvelously lugubrious album of all time may be Music of the Gothic Period and Early Renaissance Vol. 1. A knock-together group calling itself the Vielle Trio played ancient tunes of German pain and suffering as though trapped in an underwater cavern and threatened with slow asphyxiation. It’s genuine as few things are genuine, a call from the tired, aching heart of music. I loved it from the first lament of the strings and have long wished for vol. 2.
Paul Knopf played a different kind of jazz piano. His hands bopped and stopped and seemed to wonder where they would go next, then go there, with lots of pauses that weren’t quite syncopation, more a kind of Easter Bunny anticipation. It’s enlivening and lovely, with no trace of self-consciousness. As far as I know, Enigma of a Day, from 1959, was his only album; $69.99 will get you a used copy on Amazon. But there’s a DVD-on-demand documentary about him that came out just last year. Apparently he’s been performing right along, without wide recognition. I should order that. I should.
In the early '60s I would occasionally find dollar classical albums that claimed to be monaural but that played stereo if you had the equipment. Double Chorus Motets of the Old Masters was one. With my limited knowledge of Renaissance composers, I recognize few of these “old masters,” but as sung by the Windsbacher Boys Choir, it’s one of the most beautiful choral records ever. I’m swept up to and into it every time.
Purists will kick my butt for the next double-chorus recommendation. “Canticum Trium Puerorum” by Michael Praetorius is a penetrating blast in an early Westminster recording, partly because 300 voices gathered in Paris to boom it out against a rambunctious brass background. No, this isn’t what Praetorious had it mind and it gets knowing snickers from commentators online, but I find it a delightful wallop of sound.
If you’re looking for Gold Coast Saturday Night from the early '60s, by Saka Acquaye (and you are, aren’t you?), it’s available on CD but hard to trace down because it’s now called Explorer: Ghana - High-Life & Other Music. Weirdly, the CD packet copies supposedly “original” liner notes from a 1969 re-issue under yet another name. This was the music Ghanaians listened to at their local hangouts 50 years ago. It had a mystical, back-of-the-mind hold on me for decades until I was able to locate it again. You don’t want to lose your friends.
And we did, for too long, lose our tape of Playmates by Mike and Michelle Jackson – fell out of the car during a trip to Michigan. We’d seen the Jacksons perform at the U. of P. during one of the Annenberg Center’s children’s festivals, still the best music and theater gatherings I’ve ever been to. A (then) husband and wife team from Australia, they performed a mix of original and Aussie traditional children’s songs, often no more than a half-dozen poetic lines, that captivated both kids and parents.
I lamented the loss in an article in the NY Press 10 years back that ended up online, where Mike Jackson latched onto it back home. Playmates was no longer available, but you know what this wonderful man did? He ran off a CD and sent it to me. A few tracks are always in the shuffle/jumble on the car mp3 player. Stop by and listen to “Piggy on the Railway” – 35 seconds of a broken-bones tale that would never make it to a U.S kiddy album.
One last entry – not an album but a single cut. Again in the early '60s, I’d picked up a Folkways international sampler, which, like most of my Folkways, came from a shop in NY for $.94. These cutouts sat in bins without dustjackets, just a craft paper sleeve, with a little hole drilled through the label of each. The current Smithsonian Folkways site claims it has every single Folkways album ever issued, but this one I can’t find, no matter what keywords I use in the search.
As for the album itself, I don’t care. I want that cut of Eskimo water drums. You know the term “roll on the floor laughing.” This was the only time it has ever happened to me. And to at least two other people listening with me. I can’t recall the actual sound, I can only say that Eskimo water drums produce the most hilarious burbling racket ever created through human intervention. We laughed till we ached.
It’s disconcerting that I can find no current indication that it is more than a residual figment of my oversick mind. Bring it back. Please. I need to laugh like that again.
by Derek Davis