Music Monday

Somewhere along the line it seems that I stopped writing about concerts we have attended, and although I have thought about writing about things I was listening to and thinking about, I never quite managed to get around to it.

Then, on Friday, I took M and grandson Owen to LaGuardia.  On the way home I listened to my own music pretty much for the first time in a week and it struck me that no matter how much I loved the company, and no matter how nice Owen’s music was, music for a 2 ½ year old is still rather simple and repetitive, and I really missed playing my own music.  Luckily for me I had a 2 hour drive home, alone in the car with my CD changer,  allowing for a perfect bit of musical indulgence.

I had intended to listen a couple of new albums, new to me at least.  We now have one of those little tape jobbies that allow you to connect your Ipod to the car stereo, which had been used to play Owen’s music in the car, and I was looking forward to listening to some new sounds on the way home, but the new album was grating in the car: the base rumbled, the high notes were shrill.  I have a pretty decent car stereo but a car stereo, combined with road noise is not the best music venue; it is not as good as an Ipod with headphones, which in turn is not as nice as a really good stereo with decent speakers, and it was not suitable for the album in question.  I will report on that another time

What did I listen to?  Old favorites in my CD Changer.  Hazmat Modine’s Bahamut and a CD reissue of two Delbert McClinton albums:  Victim of Life’s Circumstances and Genuine Cowhide.  Both are old and familiar, and yes, repetitious.  I have listened to them more times than I can count, and will continue to listen again and again.

I’ve had Bahamut a couple of years now (it came out in 2006) and I absolutely love it.  It makes me profoundly happy every time I listen to it.  In the car, it perks me up and I sing along and bounce (very subtly) in my seat as I drive.  I learned about the group from an e-mail conversation with several friends revolving around Tuvan throat singers, who perform on three of the songs, accompanied by drums, tuba, and Hawaiian steel guitar.  As you can see, it is not quite what you would expect.  In fact the whole album is not quite what you would expect and yet it is also completely accessible and comfortable, somehow bridging that gap between surprise and familiarity in a way that seems perfectly natural, at least to me.   

I really don’t know how to classify this album although I tend to think of it as heavily blues based. I’d describe it as gritty delta blues with a heavy dose of harmonica and New Orleans jazz, with a touch of calypso, klezmer music, Native American, and other influences.  Just writing all this makes it seem so pretentious and “arty” but that is not the effect I get.  I love Wayne Schuman’s vocals, he is marvelous on the harmonica, and I suspect that he is the glue that ties everything together.  “Lost Fox Train” is a fabulous harmonica solo which made me wish I could share it with Owen (maybe someday) who is fascinated with harmonica right now (and drums).  There are moments of pure Blues, and moments that kind of hazily merge word fusion with blues and traditional forms.  It is pure happiness, but happiness tinged with knowledge of the darker edges of the world. 

As for Delbert McClinton, he is something else entirely; although there are definitely blues influences in both of these albums. I guess I would call it kind of a rockin' country/blues hybrid.  I discovered Delbert McClinton in college in New York, even though he is Texan and I am Texan. At the time McClinton’s music seemed amazing to me, music I certainly had never encountered in the traditional country music world where I grew up or in the art-rock, big band swing milieu of my college “set”. I spent my summers in Texas searching out his older albums in record bins and used record stores, and when half of my record collection was stolen (including Delbert) the summer after graduation, I was heart-broken.  Gradually Delbert drifted to the back of my mind.

When I discovered that Victim of Life’s Circumstances/Genuine Cowhide and been reissued in a single CD I was eager to give it a try and I was thrilled to learn that the music speaks to me as much now as it did 30 some odd years ago.  If anything I am more impressed now at how really remarkable the songs are.  McClinton wrote all the songs on Victim of Life’s Circumstances, and they are just marvelous.  The album’s hard-stomping, rocking country music shows deep influence of blues, R&B, and funk and fits McClinton’s Texas twang perfectly.  When I listen to these albums today, I can see why they were so hard to find at the time; they are like nothing else I remember. The second album, Genuine Cowhide, is a mixture of a couple of original songs with a collection of some of the great R&B and Blues covers.  It must have seemed outrageous in 1976.  McClinton makes each song work, and he makes the entire album seem of a piece.  Each song is recognizable for itself and yet each one is also perfect McClinton.  This album was my introduction to Blues and R&B and it lead me to explore these genres further, and yet it still stands on its own.    There is more R&B and Blues here than probably any Texas White Boy could have been expected to pull off, and it smokes and rolls. 

It is definitely not music for a 3 year old.  But it is music that speaks to the heart of a 50 year old, perhaps even more so than it did to her youthful former self.