This is an offshoot of the jazz thread. I and others found that we could not talk about jazz without discussing other musical genres, as well as the philosophy of music. So, this is a thread in which people can suggest good music of all genres, and spout off your feelings about music itself.
I will definitely listen to Richard Thompson. I've never heard of him.
I agree with you on balance. What I think my research has taught me is how incredibly imbalanced we are. Almost all, if not all, of our thinking is from males. If you studied philosophy, you studied males for the most part.
The Greeks and Jews, upon whom our thinking is based, were both misogynistic societies. And that misogyny is built into our culture, our language, and our male think.
To take it a step further, I believe that females were more inherintly powerful before the patriarchal takeover around 7 or 8 thousand years ago. Why? Well, we can see the results, that's for sure. In my writing, I want to make this plain to the reader without writing philosophy.
In music, I think it will take a while for women to bring a strong influence unless they are slapped back as they have always been. If we cannot incorporate a feminine view as voiced by females not male interpreters, I thinked were screwed.
What a bunch of nonsense! Sorry but I dont see too many impediments for women who would like to let their thoughts be known. As if there existed some form of gender based, universal trend in thought. The supposition that masculine and feminine perspectives are very different is essentially a misogynistic one.
I've been studying this subject for 15 years and I promise you, you don't have any idea about what you don't know. Your reaction, however, is helpful to me. I like to know what readership I'll be facing. And you're probably on the far extreme of defensiveness.
In regards to my overall thoughts being misogynistic, you are so, so wrong. When I begin to explain what I'm writing about to women, they just get it right away. Not a hint that they think I'm misogynistic. My grandaughter came over with a few of her girlfriends and they couldn't have been more interested. If it makes you feel any better, your on the opposite end of things when it comes to GenZ women.
It is a dead end to listen music only by nostalgia and it is a dead end to listen music with no nostalgia at all ...
Why ?
Music understanding and feeling are developed in different stages in each of our life...
It is then normal to be nostalgic and listen again "Moondog" i discovered at 20 for example as i do times to times...I listen to him differently now...
It is normal to discover new musical languages too ...
But the more we internalized a new experience, the more it will have a growing meaning in later stage in our life and then we will listen to it differently with nostalgia and sometimes surprise about what we missed or what we overvalued......
« I am nostalgic only about the woman i did not love anymore.»-- Groucho Marx
Richard Thompson was originally with British folk-rock band Fairport Convention; if you like this kind of music made by some really superb musicians and singers, I would recommend checking them out. When Richard left the Fairports, he also made a number of excellent albums with his then-wife, Linda Thompson. Any Richard and Linda Thompson album is well worth a hearing....
I am listening to Richard Thompson now. He reminds me more of Gordon Lightfoot than Van Morrison. Kind of a north country sound with Celtic rhythms thrown in. I will listen to him with his wife Linda next. BTW, I watched the documentary on Gordon Lightfoot. It was 11:30 and I wanted something I could turn off in 15 minutes and go to bed. I stayed up past one to finish it. A fascinating story.
On the assumption that most of you don't know Van Morrison's range, I'm posting a song off "Veldon Fleece," an album most of you have never heard of. For those who will indulge me, please listen to the band's setup. It's basically a jazz band. And Van Morrison's voice is another jazz instrument. He does things with his voice that are far beyond what I've ever heard with a rock singer. Maybe a jazz singer?
You don’t like genre classifications. That’s your prerogative. I don’t mean to come across as hostile but when you continue to make assertions like: "it’s basically a Jazz band", (speaking of Van Morrison), you sound like you’re intentionally trying to jerk peoples’ chains. The fact is, many of us still find genre classifications, in spite of their admitted limitations, useful. Let’s not argue about something not worth arguing about.
On another topic, here’s a great example of R. Thompson.
What's really called for is that citizens of the world unite in the cause of affecting music's DNA. That's what is actually behind the appearance of any truly new music. It happens in waves. It may be about to happen once again.
I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight and Pour Down Like Silver for earlier in their career. Shoot Out the Lights from later on. The duo tune in the link is from Pour Down, a record heavily influenced by their involvement with Sufism.
For R. on his own, try his Live From Austin Texas for a start. It’s half acoustic, half electric. Or, from the same tour: Semi Detached Mock Tudor. A nice all acoustic disc is Celtschmerz. He has quite a catalogue at this point. His most intense electric playing is live, for sure. And he is one hell of a guitar player.
As has been suggested, check out Fairport Convention. I’d suggest you start with Liege and Leaf. Full House is just the boys, without Denny.
Also Sandy Denny solo albums.
Steeleye Span is in a somewhat similar vein.
John Martyn is another very gifted British singer-songwriter. Try Bless the Weather, Solid Air, and for a jazzier flavor, One World.
Then there is Pentangle. The Pentangle, Sweet Child, Basket of Light.
And... Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, together and apart.
You might like LA Turnaround by Jansch.
The UK has produced so many incredible musical talents.
RT covering J. Mitchell at a J. Mitchell dedication show:
So you have been researching this subject for over 15 years. No doubt many have done research for this period or longer just to discover their basic premise was wrong. Lucky though that now I dont think any metric is really checked and any theory can find it's followers.
Also just because a perceived slight exists among some for a certain period of time, doesnt mean that this perception is anything more than a creation of media or aggressive propaganda.
In the future you should avoid phrases like "slapped back". Who knows you may be correct, but your post betrays I think what may be a number of preexisting biases.
Kind of like when someone told me the other day that over 800 people die per day in the U.S. from poverty.
Anyway if anything ever comes of your research then good for you.
Actually, I researched my way into this subject. I never meant to write about it, but one book led to another. I have researched back to the caves, and there is strong evidence that women were cave painters and shamans. A number of books suggest this.
Women were equal to men prior to about 7 or 8 thousand years ago. If you read the second Adam and Eve story in the Torah, that slaps women back pretty badly. Adam becomes Eve's master, so to speak. And the symbols of the tree and serpent that become tabboo were the symbols of the goddess culture that reigned for at least 30,000 years. How do we know? Archaeologists have found carvings that only portray women assumed to be goddesses. No male gods until at least 10,000 years ago.
In the caves they found special burials. 40,000 years ago a woman was buried in the back of a cave in a small boat with thousands of black beads that took thousands of man hours to carve. Women have been found in other special burials in the upper and middle Paleolithic. Not men. I think it's clear that women had inherint powers. I think they were more sensitive to their intuition, but whatever they were the shamans and special people.
So, obviously things changed, and that change was supported in writing, something men took control over.
So, I'm going back to the beginnings of humanity. And women have been slapped back many times. By religion. That's documented. It's not perceived slights that happen in our culture that I've spent 15 years studying. It's the history of humanity.
I'll take a look at some of the ones I haven't heard of. I have Pentangle albums, and I know Sandy Denny and John Renbourn. You need to give me some time, though, to listen to all the music you've suggested. I'm still working my way through the Bluegrass list. It's fun.
Any reaction to the Van Morrison post? Did you hear anything special in his voice that you hadn't heard before? I think a lot of people peg him as the Brown Eyed Girl commercial singer.
I discovered and fell in love with Fairport convention about 25 years ago or so. It was a natural offshoot of my passion and love for English folktales and late medieval studies. I wasn’t alive when they were setting the tone for everybody from Kate rusby to Hank dogs to Steeleye span to even Jethro Tull and Mumford & sons, but something in their music and Sandy’s delivery just resonated. I still teach "Mattie Groves" in just about all my classes and the kids usually love diving into the power dynamics and the tones of each character. Plus, one kid even pointed out that the song has "massive remix potential".
I own Veedon Fleece, so Cul de Sac is a familiar track. Perhaps because it’s familiar, I’m not hearing as as freshly as you are? Sounds to me me like he’s channeling his old school R&B influences.
Didn't mean to overwhelm you with suggestions. ;o)
Much conflict is the result of generalizations. Big ones make for big misunderstanding.
Here a real issue is how general equal is without specifics. It means the same... but unspecified it is a grenade. So, use the word and one person thinks power one thinks intelligence... or one height and one strength... etc. Women are clearly not the same... just look at a man and a women... do they look the same? Do they both bear children. So all this discussion is about specific generalized attributes. Power, leadership, etc. I would imagine one could have more meaningful... obviously not here... discussions on individual attributes.
You're right. Not the place for it. I could probably start a forum on it since so many people have opinions and reactions, but Audiogon is probably not the place for that either.
I'm going to post a female singer who some of you might not be familiar with and others may be only familiar with her hits sung by her or others, like "Stone Cold Picnic." I have chosen a song that many of you might not have heard of. Try not to reject her off the bat. I went to see her live before she died (at 52, I think), and Madonna and Warren Beaty were in the row behind me. I think Madonna admired Laura Nyro as the real deal. And she was.
I'm going to post one more. I heard about Laura Nyro in the early seventies. I was teaching high school students and a few of the girls came to me and said they'd been to a Laura Nyro concert and she blew them away. I have always listened to women when it came to music and art. It's opened up the other half of the world to me.
Where would you start the forum and what would you call it? IMHO, modern attitudes toward women do not go deep enough. It's as if we're color blind trying to talk about color. Our entire thinking process, the development of our logic, science, and philosopy are all involved, again IMHO.
The book @mahgisterrecommended to me talks about societal perspectives. The lens through which we see things. He says that the reason Cortez was able to conquer Montezuma was because of their mindsets. The Aztecs thought as one and that was conducive to magic and spells. When they tried magic and spells on the Spaniards, who had learned about individual thought, they did not work. He also talks about how art developed perspective during the Renaissance. People did not see perspective prior to that. And so their conception of space was entirely different than ours. Today, we are beginning to see space and time as connected.
We have almost totally suppressed what I call the Feminine Creative Spirit, and it would take a long time to explain why I call it that. Partly it has to do with modern physics. Would you want to go that deeply? And if so, how would that be reflected in what you call the forum?
L. Nyro is too "breathy" for me and this makes her hard to understand. As nice as her voice is, I don't want to have to "strain" to understand the words.
She sounds sort of like a Joni Mitchell but without the lower harmonics and inflection.
"Season of Lights" will probably go to the top of my long list. Although I did hear her live, but that was late in her life. And many years ago in my life. Madonna and Warren Beaty were together and they were there with Sandra Bernhard. Probably in the mid- late-eighties.
Mary Coughlan is considered a "jazz singer." (Not by me, but online.) Her best album is probably "Love for Sale." If you can find it, you might listen. She's damn good.
BTW, Season of Lights was available in several versions as physical media.
One disc added a bunch of tracks left off the original vinyl due to space constraints. I hope you can stream the extended version. I'd be comfortable describing this album as "jazzy".
One of my favorite female singer in one of my best album of songs...
«Persian Love Songs & Mystic Chants" is a collection of traditional Persian music, primarily featuring the vocals of Shusha Guppy.The album, released in 1973, includes songs that blend romantic themes with mystical and spiritual elements.This video presents a collection of traditional Iranian folk music, which is related to the topic of Persian love songs and mystic chants:
The clear and pure voice catch something very grounded in the earth but very spiritual in Farsi a language i recognized as one in my past life so to speak.
The feminine embodied a part of the soul in each one of us, because as the farther past which is always "an ever present origin" , the farther future prepare us making a balance between the feminine and masculine polarities in us, for the need of the present era.
History spoke with a voice which cannot be muted...
Idk if I would peg Mary Coughlan as a jazz singer, or even that jazzy really. She kind of reminds me of a category that would encompass Mary Black, Kirsty McCall, Shawn Colvin, for example. Non-traditional singer-songwriters whose lyrics place them out of the mainstream but not into the jazz standards classifications; e.g. Julie London, Diana Krall, or Nina Simone.
@mahgister - I’m always impressed by how eclectic your music taste is!
OP "...Where would you start the forum and what would you call it?..."
Honestly, I would not start a forum on the subject unless it was by invitation only. Only allow folks that were fairly well informed, thoughtful, and actually curious. Otherwise you get the crazies from both extremes and just becomes chaos.
But if you want to hear the human soul, it takes the pygmies chorus to locate it exactly at the center of the earth... nothing moves us so deep out of history in the eternal femine of Mother Earth :
I understood how music is about "time" not physical measurable time but "heart time" listening a pianist genius playing with some false notes on a bad piano, the heart of Liszt music "la vallée d’Obermann" which piece nobody can play really to make felt Liszt heart...( i discovered musical heart/time also with australian didgeredoo but it is another story )
I begun to understand Liszt with this supreme pianist which only Moravec and Sofronitsky and few others rival ; by the way his biography is a stunning incredible book :
If you think i dont know what i talk about, you must read the letter of Arnold Schoenberg to the young Klemperer about Ervin Nyiregyházi playing... He litteraly melt like a glacier facing a volcano about this pianist asking Klemperer to cross Atlantic to hear him ...
By the way what you will hear in this youtube video is a pianist who never played on a piano for 40 years without never practicing...He begun another world career at 70 again to gain money to cure his 10th wife of cancer ...Read his biography...
If you want to know what Rachmaninoff is about listen him playing it not merely beautifully but deeply moving us, he use musical time as a master, he dont play virtuoso and perfectly at all as all others pianists :
Music is about the way to create time anew...(Out of any measurable time ) Music is not about beautiful notes...It is about the heart becoming a volcano ...
I'm trying to set up a new computer, so I was only able to listen to a few minutes of Moravec (I think) playing Liszt. I have Lazar Berman playing Liszt's Annees De Pelerenage and it sounds very different. I'll try to listen over the weekend, but I must spend my mornings and early afternoons writing. And you can't give me any more books until I finish The Everpresent Origin. That is a slow read because I must think about every paragraph and understand how it relates to what I'm writing. Is he supporting my thesis or shooting holes in it?
I was very fascinating by the playing of Liszt, however. I'll see if I can stream what you posted.
If I listened to all the music on this thread, I'd never get anything else done. But I'll try to listen to as much as I can. I am familiar with Marian Anderson. I've been listening to Maria Callas, however, and trying to understand her voice. It is relatively small, but extremely vulnerable.
I don’t know how to classify Mary Coughlin, except to say, from my perspective, she’s not a Jazz singer., which is in no way intended as a criticism. It would be interesting to hear her with sparser accompaniment.
I streamed Mary Coughlan singing Billie Holiday songs and I had to turn it off. I don't know what her problem was. I read that she drank a lot and has had a rough life.
But when I play other songs by her, she's got the feeling that jazz singers need. Her voice sounds like a jazz voice to me because she sounds like she sitting next to me and I can feel her heartbeat.
So, try one more and see if you don't think she has a jazz singer's voice.
BTW, still watching Ken Burns' Jazz series, I got to the part where the better musicians like Parker and Gillespie lose most of their audience playing be-bop. There is a real rift in which the be-bop musicians look down upon the old swing musicians who still draw crowds. The narrator said that the be-bop musicians (almost all black) thought of someone like Louis Armstrong as an Uncle Tom.
So, even among "jazz" musicians, some didn't think others were. Louis Armstrong is shown in the Hollywood Bowl singing a song that makes fun of Parker et al, saying be-bop closes clubs. I think that rift still exists, where some people think that successful jazz players like Diana Krall are not real jazz. I've seen Diana Krall live several times and watched the older jazz musicians backing her marvel at her piano playing. She can do some mean riffs. So can Patricia Barber. If you listen to her piano playing she's as interesting as any jazz pianist I've heard playing today.
Thank you for taking it easy on me. I do get tired more easily than I used to.
I'm going to post a song just for you. Because much of what you post has an esoteric and intellectual component. I'm going to post a song that became very popular among the masses. Perhaps a seemingly simple song. As a poet, however, I think the poetry of its lyrics are masterful because they go straight to the heart and every word belongs. Nothing false. Emotionally, everything in this song is solid and true and deep, in that it's talking about people's most intimate feelings. Bonnie Raitt is the singer, and she absolutely kills this song. If you're prone to weeping, she could make you weep.
I'm watching the Jazz series for the second time and getting a lot more out of it. Ken Burns also did a series on country music I thoroughly enjoyed. And then there was the baseball series that kept me mesmerized.
I can't remember who I was talking to about Sibelius, but here is a poem I wrote about him a long time ago.
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