Dave Brubeck, 1920-2012

1959 was almost certainly the biggest year in jazz history. Beyond the justifiably beatified Kind of Blue, it featured the true emergence of at least three of its greatest icons, near simultaneously: Ornette Coleman, with The Shape of Jazz to Come; John Coltrane (in his own right), with Giant Steps; and Charles Mingus, with Mingus Ah Um. Often omitted among these landmarks in the purist's histories of the music - yet having outsold nearly all of them, especially then, but even subsequently - is Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Throughout a long life well-lived, Brubeck retained an odd stature with music critics: one in which, seemingly, no matter how many of them put in writing that the man's music had never received its full due, that basic, underlying fact never changed. One reason that Brubeck always remained a consumer's jazzman was his very popularity with those consumers. For many jazz theoreticians, his lack of "true" musical vision was as well evidenced by the continued charting of his albums through the rock-heavy 1960s as by his disinterest in the free structure associated with the avant garde. Another reason is his affiliation with the Cool Jazz movement, one which lacked the political intrigue - and, it must generally be said, the sheer virtuosity - associated with bop.

Finally, of course, Brubeck was white. As with white artists in most other traditionally black musical arenas, white jazzmen have faced an uphill climb towards legitimacy. (Such dubiousness is often justified: for every Eminem there is usually at least one Vanilla Ice, and for every Elvis Presley a Pat Boone.) Unfortunately, this incredulity by association has tended to overshadow Brubeck's role as one of jazz's most forward-thinking bandleaders. His quartet, after all, became integrated at nearly the same time as the higher-profile addition of Bill Evans to Miles Davis' quintet. (He had also led an integrated band in Europe during his service in WWII.) Brubeck continued to cancel appearances that protested the presence of his bassist, Eugene Wright, until such protests finally stopped. Perhaps the most poignant evidence of the impact racial affairs had on Brubeck emerged 40 years later, during the filming of Ken Burns' Jazz, when he broke down in tears as he recounted his thoughts following the war:

You know the first black man that I saw, my dad took me to see on the Sacramento River in California and he said to his friend, "Open your shirt for Dave." There was a brand on his chest. And my dad said, "These things can't happen." That's why I fought for what I fought for.

Like Davis, Coleman, Coltrane, and Mingus, Brubeck released great albums both before and after his 1959 masterpiece; more than any of them, though, Brubeck's album has singularly defined his career. Time Out can more than stand on its own musical merits. The success of its pioneering experimentation with strange time signatures lies less in the act itself than in its unobtrusive execution. It's also impossible to deny the catchiness of the immortal "Take Five," or the beauty of "Blue Rondo à la Turk." The album is timeless, though, on account of its mood, and here it stands apart from the other landmarks mentioned above. The Shape of Jazz to Come and Giant Steps are opening salvos, and they continue to resound, first and foremost, with the air of great artists announcing themselves. Mingus Ah Um, by contrast, is a refinement of that which preceded it - the sharpening of the sweep and fury of Pithecanthropus Erectus that would ultimately culminate in The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Predictably, among the five, Time Out is closest in spirit to the sublime Kind of Blue. Yet where the latter's magic lies in the otherworldly nature of its perfection - drummer Jimmy Cobb famously argued that it "must have been made in heaven" - the calm of the former is decidedly of this earth. The effortlessness of the performances throughout seem to owe more to comfort than to confidence, and it's no coincidence that Brubeck was the only man of the five (save possibly Coltrane) who could accurately have been described as a "gentle soul." With his passing, jazz does not lose the last of its titans, but it does bid farewell to the one man among them who more than any other survivor represented calm amidst the storm. In the end, more than his undeniable chops or monumental output, Brubeck's legacy will rest on his basic decency, which as both a person and a musician made him a man truly worth admiring.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (9) Sign "☮" the Times - Prince

[This is the second in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Though few would ever have mistaken Prince's music for something other than the work of the man himself, all of his albums beginning with the breakthrough hit 1999 were co-credited to his backing group, the Revolution. By 1987, Prince had run out of patience with the band. In the beginning of a series of challenges to his established identity - one which would notoriously culminate in replacing his name with a ubiquitous, unpronounceable symbol - Prince disbanded the Revolution and embarked upon a mission to demonstrate the all-encompassing nature of his virtuosity. In the tradition of all great double albums, Sign "☮" the Times is a sprawling hodgepodge of genre and mood which eschews continuity in favor of glorious mess. The low-key foreboding of the title track abruptly gives way to the rollicking psychedelia of "Play in the Sunshine," and before the album is finished, Prince has touched upon every facet of black music that predated him. As ever, The Artist's refusal to be pigeonholed is more than musical: the genuine, austere gospel of "The Cross" lives alongside the bedroom funk of "It" primarily because both, incongruously, are important parts of the man's identity. Indeed, the many sides of Prince's personality are perhaps more prominently on display here than anywhere else in his vast discography. Sign "☮" the Times includes songs from the abandoned Camille project - which was to feature Prince vocals treated to sound (even) more feminine than usual - and as such, it's hardly a surprise that the album has Prince pushing the already exaggerated boundaries of his androgyny to confusing new heights. What is unexpected is the degree to which these tracks manage to transcend their novelty, and moments like the disarmingly (if unsettlingly) insightful "If I Was Your Girlfriend" speak to the quality of his songwriting at the time. Of course, as with all of his classic albums, they bear the distinct stamp of their time: the spartan electronica of "Housequake" is certainly a mark of the 80s, while lines like "Your face is jammin'/Your body's hecka slammin'" smack of 1987 worse than a Mötley Crüe music video. Beyond his ordinary, remarkable range, however - be it on guitar, vocals, or almost any one of the other instruments heard anywhere on the album - Prince imbued the proceedings with the energy of a man who finally felt free to express himself fully. This air of reckless freedom liberates the aptly-titled Sign "☮" the Times from its temporal anchoring, elevating what would otherwise have been simply another great Prince album and making it timeless.

Out of Print Gems: Sidney Bechet - Days Beyond Recall

Sidney Bechet led a remarkable life. Like many other turn-of-the-century New Orleans Creoles, he was born into a family that considered music a reprehensible profession (outside the opera) but a highly respectable vocation. Sidney played in his brother Leonard's band during his youth and quickly proved his superior; while his brother would settle down, Sidney continued playing full-time, eventually becoming perhaps the most famous of Dixieland clarinetists and a pioneering jazz saxophonist. Bechet's musical career spanned five decades, the last of which he lived as a celebrity in France - a country he adored as much for its relaxed attitude on race as for its appreciation of hot jazz. He played, among others, with Louis Armstrong and Freddie Keppard, and tutored future Ellington standout Johnny Hodges. Among these notable career highlights, an often overlooked landmark was a series of recordings Bechet made in the late 1940s and early 50s for Blue Note. Though the label would shortly become legendary as the preeminent home of hard bop, Bechet's recordings for Lion, Wolff, and co. were, if somewhat out of place in retrospect, nonetheless among the finest of his career.

Among the many Bechet Blue Note titles sadly languishing out of print was Days Beyond Recall, a collaboration with New Orleans contemporary Bunk Johnson. Johnson - a colorful character whose life was little documented, but whose trumpet prowess had been advertised by Armstrong and others - had been rescued from obscurity only three years earlier, when donations had enabled him to purchase the new dentures and horn required to resume playing and begin recording. Days Beyond Recall also included bassist Pops Foster, and the three Dixieland greats are in terrific form throughout. The band sounds lively as they stomp through "Blame It on the Blue" and album opener "Milenberg Joys" (written by Jelly Roll Morton, whose last recording session Bechet had already contributed to), while allowing themselves ample time to stretch out on the title track and "Weary Way Blues." The carefully-controlled vibrato that had made Bechet famous is on full display, and his interaction with Johnson suggests more familiarity with his musical personality than should have been allowed for by this (lamentably) one-off recording. With any luck, Blue Note will someday compile and reissue the many 10" records Bechet recorded for them, as they're truly deserving of reevaluation. Until then, Days Beyond Recall can be downloaded here.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (10) Swordfishtrombones - Tom Waits

[This is the first in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

At least as early as 1982, in an article reporting on his involvement with the soundtrack to the Francis Ford Coppola film One from the Heart, Tom Waits was referred to as a "Hobo Laureate." The honorific has followed him throughout his career, and must be among the most appropriate in all of popular music: everything about Waits' stage persona, from his appearance to his voice, mannerisms, and subject material, suggests either a personal history of homelessness, or else a consistent fascination with the subject. In 1982, Waits found himself at a crossroads, having been dropped from Asylum Records and seeking a new musical formula. Coincidentally, 1982 also marked the last recorded output of the closest thing American popular music had to a Waitsian precursor, Captain Beefheart. Waits and Beefheart had always held much in common: beyond the bottom-of-the-ribcage growls heard throughout their catalogs, both artists had shared an interest in the blues in their most brutal and elemental form, as well as a fondness for spinning musical yarns about the dwellers of societal margins. Prior to signing with Island Records, the music accompanying Waits had always been fairly conventional. The result had been albums like 1975's Nighthawks at the Diner - strong showcases of a highly original talent that nonetheless sounded as though they'd been produced by a peculiarly unhinged Billy Joel.

1983's Swordfishtrombones fulfilled all of Waits' promise in one fell swoop. Abruptly, the bed on which Waits' music rested was found to be as attention-grabbingly bizarre as the artist himself. The result was an exotic exploration of the world’s castoffs, from members of a subterranean society (the lurching stomp of "Underground") to a man who snaps under the pressures of suburban mediocrity (the painfully funny "Frank's Wild Years," later expanded into a concept album). Appropriately, most of the proceedings are very percussion-heavy. Waits sounds invigorated on the album's title track over the marimbas, whose ringing cadences provide an intriguingly shifty soundscape without sacrificing the atavistic sound integral to the artist's appeal. Elsewhere, melodic instruments serve a similar function. The bagpipes of "Town with No Cheer" and the Gary Lucas-esque guitars that ring throughout the album certainly echo latter-day Beefheart, but they also help announce Waits as a musician who's finally perfected accommodating his own eccentricities. Indeed, Swordfishtrombones represents perhaps the pinnacle of Waits' songwriting: his ballads, such as the superlative "Soldier's Things," maintain the sterling quality found throughout his Asylum years, while songs like "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six" show him to also be uncompromising on harder-edged material. The critical acclaim of Swordfishtrombones and its outstanding follow-up, Rain Dogs, would reinvigorate Waits' career, and he has scarcely released an album over the last three decades to anything less than universal acclaim. Swordfishtrombones, however, continues to mark the boldest jump of Waits' career - an album that propelled him permanently into the vanguard of popular music, and one of the most impressive, cohesive statements of the decade.

(A) Man on the Moon

On August 25, the world lost one of its titans, Neil Armstrong - a man singular in his defining accomplishment, as well as his refusal to live his life on anyone else's terms. His stark refusal to be caught in the spotlight for most of the last three decades of his life seems especially striking in an era of internet-driven overexposure of erstwhile celebrities. (It should be noted that refusing to take credit for his feats in space hardly set him apart as an astronaut: one would be hard pressed to find one who doesn't automatically credit his accomplishments primarily to countless engineers, mission control, and the other members of his crew.) Yet to call his list of accomplishments staggering would, if anything, be an understatement. Needless to say, he was the first man to set foot on the moon, and his deeply touching (if erratically delivered) "one small step for (a) man" quotation was heard live by 450 million people - more than 12% of the population of a world that was still widely devoid of radios and television sets. Often forgotten following what he did once on the moon, though, was his manual landing of the module on a site he had deemed safe on the spot while flying with less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the tank. His legendary eight days aboard Apollo 11 also overshadowed a career in which he logged nearly 2500 hours in experimental aircraft for the Air Force and flew in both the Gemini 8 and 11 missions to space.

More recently, two years nearly to the day before his death, Armstrong made a rare decision to broadcast his feelings when he criticized the Obama administration for its decision to surrender the forefront of American space exploration to private firms. Speaking before the Senate, he described the contemporary state of NASA funding as one that "presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere." It is curious that spaceflight has been so thoroughly neglected over the past (precisely) forty years. For a government so long committed to profligate spending - the best record of any American president over the last 70 years in providing balanced budgets was Dwight Eisenhower, at 3 years out of 8 - what was once perceived as a tenet of national (and indeed, earthly) pride has been reduced to only 0.5% of our larger-than-ever national budget. I hope that Neil Armstrong's greatest legacy may one day be his having taken part in the resumption of American predominance in manned space exploration. For now, as a small tribute to a man I admire as much for his few, well-chosen words as his grace under fire, I have digitized the long out-of-print CBS LP Man on the Moon, which was narrated by Walter Cronkite and documents the history and journey of Apollo 11. It's a beautiful reminder of man's all-too-fleeting capacity for genuine, transcendent accomplishment. You can download it here.

In Memoriam: Jack Bennett

My dear friend Jack Bennett was killed on the afternoon of June 24 in a boating accident on Stillwater River, just south of Columbus, Montana. He was 31 years old. He died attempting to help others on the river whose raft had become wrapped around a bridge pylon.

Few of the handful who regularly read this blog will have known Jack, nor are many from among his family and friends likely to ever find this post. Instead, I'm throwing these words out into the void of the internet just so that they'll be there, and so that I'll have at least said them. Jack was a kindhearted man with a tremendous sense of humor: a pleasure to shoot the shit with, a capable conversational partner in discussing the heavier aspects of life, and a willing and talented participant in countless gif wars on Facebook. I bonded with him over movies, music, beer, and the joys of the internet. We helped each other through our postbac science marathon, and he was one of the few whose natural grasp of physics (in particular) positively dwarfed my own. He returned the infinite love of his delightful dog with an affection that came as close to a matched level as surely any owner could muster. Though I was just under seven years his junior, he treated me with the respect of a peer in both science and life - an honor, it was clear, that he was much more sure I had earned than I was. I'd always been looking forward to another beer with him, and now it seems there can never be one. I wish I'd gotten to know him further, but I'm very grateful for the time we did spend together. I'll leave this video here for him: a song we'd discussed before as one we both held dear, and one whose bittersweet sentiment seems to perfectly capture both the terrible waste of his death and the celebration of a life that was truly well - if all-too-briefly - lived.

10/27/1981 - 6/24/2012

זכרונו לברכה

May his memory be a blessing

8-Bit Radiohead

There exists a small but devoted world of musicians who produce 8-bit covers of popular music. One of the most well-recognized such projects was 2007's 8-Bit Operators, a major-label, full-length compilation of Kraftwerk covers. Surely, even among the lofty company of Brian Eno and Kraftwerk's krautrock associates, there is no band more synonymous with the rise of electronic music - and so, more deserving of the NES treatment. Yet among contemporary bands, no one has been more singly responsible for pushing electronica towards the forefront of popular music than Radiohead, particularly on their initially controversial 2000 masterpiece Kid A. Appropriately, then, YouTube user QuintonSung has produced full-length 8-bit covers of both Kid A and its equally astounding predecessor, OK Computer. His attention to detail is amazing, and the overall quality of the production is embellished with delightful 8-bit touches, thrown in clearly for good measure, but never gratuitously (witness the particularly ingenious Super Mario coin effect at the end of "The Tourist"). Both the OK Computer and Kid A cover albums have graciously been offered for free download by their creator (available here), and you can listen to them in their entirety below.

My Bloody Valentine - "We Have All the Time in the World"

The first James Bond theme song came in the second outing, From Russia with Love, and it was in part indicative of the series' still-maturing formula. It appears in instrumental form throughout the film and is played properly over the end credits, rather than accompanying a vibrant opening credit sequence, as would later become the pattern. However, the song is a telling, if embryonic, precursor to the theme songs to come: though it doesn't quite match the sheer bombast of the Shirley Bassey themes (among others), instrumentally or vocally, it's nonetheless a sweeping affair that complements the outstanding film nicely. The question of how any given one of the other Bond themes measures up is largely a question of individual taste. "The Living Daylights," for instance, is a quality entry assuming a tolerance for the über-80s stylings of a-ha; by the same token, someone must have enjoyed Madonna's appalling "Die Another Day" for it to have reached the Top 10 on both sides of the Pond.

A rare exception to the debate is "We Have All the Time in the World," a lovely song penned by longtime series composer John Barry and sung by an ailing Louis Armstrong in his final recorded performance. The song accompanies a superb and unfortunately maligned entry in the Bond canon, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The film is, of course, the only outing as 007 for Australian actor George Lazenby, replacing a Sean Connery that producers Saltzman and Broccoli deemed too old to return for a 6th time. OHMSS is nonetheless tautly constructed, and it serves as one of the rare films in the franchise to provide some character development for Bond via the cruel murder of his recent bride - an event whose scars remain with Bond forever after, particularly in the hands of the series' more adept screenwriters. The weight of a love submitted to by an emotionally distant man and subsequently shattered prompted Barry to seek out a vocalist he considered capable of delivering both aspects of his bittersweet theme. Though he was too weak to play his trumpet at the session (leaving a tepid sounding substitute in his place), Armstrong's wistful vocal registers every last note. The result is certainly the most profound piece of music associated with the Bond franchise - and perhaps the best - but also one of the highlights of Armstrong's storied career, and an astounding (if tragically premature, even at age 67) note for him to leave the world on.

24 years later, in the wake of their masterpiece Loveless, My Bloody Valentine released a cover of "We Have All the Time in the World," recorded for Peace Together, a 1993 charity compilation devoted to ending sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The song is, in fact, one of only two new tracks the band has ever released post-1991 (the other being a cover of "Map Ref 41°N 93°W" for a Wire tribute album). It's an odd choice, but a logical one: the ethereal wash that raised songs like "Soon" to such heights is equally appropriate here, though it's decidedly scaled down by comparison. The arrangement is virtually indistinguishable from that of the Armstrong original, striking a particularly strong contrast to the guitar tsunamis with which the group is primarily identified. The song is nonetheless an artistic success, and given the contemporary state of the band's affairs - on the heels of the disintegration of guitarist Kevin Shields' relationship with bandmate Bilinda Butcher, and the release of an album that was, after all, called Loveless - may have served much the same purpose for the artists as had the original. The rest of Peace Together is, as one usually finds on charity albums, pretty middling stuff, featuring a bland cover of "Satellite of Love" by U2 with a croaky-sounding Lou Reed and a fine cover of "Oliver's Army" by Blur. All of the songs are available for download from Peace Together itself, on a site whose awkward Flash design makes them difficult to extract. "We Have All the Time in the World" can be more conveniently accessed here, while both versions of the song can be heard below.

Sounds for the Moon

George Méliès' classic, pioneering 1902 science fiction film Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) first caught my eye as part of a Bill Nye the Science Guy VHS that I owned as a child, on the subject of the moon. Hardly any of the footage was shown in the episode, but along with the strains of Debussy's Clair de lune played elsewhere in the show, it found a recess in my mind and never left. I first saw the entire 14 minute film in high school, this time on a rented VHS. It wasn't until Air announced that they would be soundtracking a newly restored edition of the film that I found out a color version had ever existed. In fact, Méliès had hand-painted his film, frame by frame, when he had first produced it. The DVD release, remastered from these hand-painted original frames by Lobster Films, proved a remarkable change from every version of the film I'd ever seen. The eccentric (and understandably inconsistent) coloration nicely compliments the film's bizarre imagery, and it adds an added layer of vitality to a piece of art celebrating the 110th anniversary of its release. Air's enjoyable soundtrack also inspired me to try to sequence my own to accompany the new print, with the unauthorized help of musicians more gifted than myself. You can watch the results below; with or without the music, it's a fascinating spectacle.

In Search of 3D

On April 19, 2004 I abruptly lost all vision in my right eye. Among the consequences (which include the name of this blog) was that as the ensuing weeks elapsed, I lost my capacity for depth perception, and my definition of "three dimensional" rapidly became difficult to put into words. I still do perceive shape, particularly in high-light/ strong-shadow conditions, but most shapes carry an outline that makes them look partially flat, at least around the edges. The bottom line is that I am now unable to perceive the world in three true dimensions, as I could growing up. On March 5, the gif file seen below was uploaded to imgur; it was the first time I had seen an image in 3D in almost 8 years.

Presumably, most viewers' experiences looking at this funky drawing won't feel as portentous as my own. However, today I discovered the artist's name, Dain Fagerholm, and a gallery of his Where the Wild Things Are-like work online. As a small token of my thanks for the temporary gift of 3D, I thought I'd throw out a link into the near-infinite void of the internet, and hopefully get him an extra view or two. As an added inducement, here's my favorite so far, "Asylum":

Stormy Applause

Rostislav Dubinsky (1923-1997) was the first violinist, musical director, and a founding member of the Borodin Quartet. The group was one of the few leading lights of Soviet classical music - named, like all the others, by the government and forcibly whittled down to only one full-blooded Jewish member (Dubinsky) before it became a success, but nonetheless talented enough that it toured abroad, both east and west of the Iron Curtain. Dubinsky defected in 1975, and in 1989 published his lamentably out-of-print memoirs, Stormy Applause. The book is a marvel. Dubinsky's English education only began in 1955, yet in the ensuing 44 years he accrued sufficient mastery of the language to write an entire book in charming prose that rarely, if ever, suggests that the author might be a non-native speaker.

Dubinsky's portrait of life under a totalitarian regime is a harrowing one. Certainly, the preconceptions held in the free world regarding Soviet power structure are shown to be true - and the book is a pointed rejoinder to anyone who would suggest that life in the United States, whatever its shortcomings, is not free. Dubinsky provides numerous accounts of the suffering inflicted upon those designated enemies of the state (no matter how arbitrarily), from a vocal Jewish actor who was run down by a government truck and whose entire family was sent to the Gulag, to a Canadian socialism enthusiast who immigrated to the USSR following the Revolution, only to be arrested with his family and shot as a Western spy during the Great Purge. A daughter of the latter man, Olya, was released following Stalin's death and met Dubinsky in Moscow, soon teaching him English and assuming an overarching importance in his life; years of malnutrition suffered in prison left her frail and underdeveloped, however, and she shortly passed away while he was on tour in Siberia. The threat of governmental brutality hung over every aspect of Soviet life, and those who didn't follow the party line were severely punished. For instance, after violinist David Oistrakh refused to sign a letter denying that Israel was a true homeland for Soviet Jewry, agents ransacked his apartment and stole only the least valuable and most  irreplaceable of his personal artifacts. Word of threats like these traveled fast, and was enough to keep the vast majority of public figures in line.

Yet Stormy Applause isn't the story of a political regime that "corrodes people the way rust eats into iron," so much as one of those people who lived under it. Inevitably, the paranoiac pressures enforced from above took their toll on all Soviet citizenry, leading to a world in which in addition to one's affairs being in order, one's neighbors' affairs also had to be bad, for the sake of "complete happiness." Following in a grand Russian tradition, the strains of day-to-day living were magnified for Jews, for whom anti-Semitism was so much a fact of life that its manifestations had an astoundingly casual air about them. In the midst of an internal passport check - an inconvenience by no means restricted to Jews alone - policemen would regularly pause at the "Nationality" line (decided by the government) and offer "curious expressions, as if they were wondering, What are you doing in the Soviet Union?" Even among the more socially progressive friends a Jew could make in the Soviet Union, in all likelihood it would only be a matter of time - or in the case of Dubinsky's musician friend Andrei Gorbatov, one heated game of chess - before "strangle [the king]" became "Strangle the Jews."

The emotional release of Stormy Applause comes in the form of music. Dubinsky spent twenty-nine years in the Borodin Quartet, encompassing 3000 concerts, dozens of hours rehearsing for each one spent performing, and very nearly as much time grappling with Soviet bureaucracy over which music he would be allowed to play in public. For composers were subject to the same governmental whims as ordinary citizens, and could, at any time and for any reason, find themselves classified among the Untouchables. Certainly, foreign composers (and especially modern ones) were perennially on thin ice, and such names as "Schönberg, Bern, and Webern were unmentionable words." The stakes were much higher, however, for Soviet composers, for whom official condemnation engendered devastating personal consequences. Dubinsky renders the terror of this kind of life particularly vividly in recounting the life of legendary composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he knew personally. Though Shostakovich twice survived ideologically-oriented "civil executions," Dubinsky noted that the "expectation of violent death... became the main theme in [his] music and was stamped forever on his face." Viewed in context, Shostakovich's music was not merely a scathing criticism of totalitarianism, but a very specific outcry against the effects of the Soviet Union on the minds of its citizens - "the destruction of Russian thought and culture, their gradual ruin, which Stalin began and Hitler only wanted to complete." For Dubinsky, to perform Shostakovich was to "[unmask] evil and hypocrisy," to "risk your life for the truth." In writing about his performances, Dubinsky manages to voice these eternal truths as movingly as the composer whose work he so admired. One performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet (a Borodin studio recording of which can be heard below) proved to be one of the most meaningful experiences of his life:

When we sat down, we began playing at once, as if it were the most natural act in the world. We performed the Borodin Quartet No. 2 in D-major, with the unrestrained music-making it required. In Shostakovich's fourth quartet we didn't hold back our emotions. It was surprising that our conversation [with a chauffeur, Helmut, about what took place in concentration camps] had taken place today, because Shostakovich's music was about that very subject - the so-called right of some people to destroy others. With Helmut we had spoken about Hitler's Germany, but now we were playing a piece about Stalin's Russia. By allowing Shostakovich's music to be played, the Soviet authorities had significantly complicated their lives, because the truth about the Soviet regime, concealed so carefully, began to reach the hearts of people all over the world. Judging by the silent hall, it was clear that his tale about twentieth-century tyranny was heard and understood. We ended the concert with Schubert, who, after the Shostakovich, acquired a special philosophical depth: as if regimes and rulers may come and go but another life, pure and elevated, remains undamaged. 

Ailing Cleveland

In 1893, Grover Cleveland - the US President commonly remembered as little more than the only Commander in Chief to serve two terms that weren't consecutive - disappeared for five days, having boarded a friend's yacht and not returned to shore. Though his term coincided with a burgeoning era of American journalism (in volume, if not universally in accuracy), standards being as they were at the time, his prolonged absence wasn't considered terribly unusual, and the official excuse of a leisurely fishing expedition marked by the extraction of a bad tooth was taken at face value. In fact, Cleveland was aboard that yacht for a then-pioneering surgery to remove a cancerous growth from the roof of his mouth. It had been decided that the surgery had to take place in secret to preserve national faith in the recently-reelected Cleveland - and by extension, the economy, which was faltering under the weight of railroad bankruptcies and a crisis over the question of a Silver Standard. (Oral cancer was a particularly touchy subject for the contemporary American public as it had recently killed Ulysses S. Grant, following an extended battle that had been covered with morbid curiosity in all the country's newspapers.) The story was broken by a single reporter, E.J. Edwards, who would face lasting repercussions for his journalistic daring.

This story is covered in The President is a Sick Man, an outstanding book by Matthew Algeo. The narrative is written in a compulsively entertaining fashion, making for presumably the most entertaining history yet written of an otherwise forgotten President. The book also does an excellent job of providing a succinct, detailed explanation of factors that contributed to the cover-up - Grant's death, and especially the Free Silver movement - and the evolution of modern medicine. The latter is particularly appropriate, given not only the stature of the patient, but the extremely complicated nature of the surgery itself. Despite being only a handful of years removed from the advent of antiseptic surgery, the skilled medical team managed to leave a wound that healed quickly even by modern standards, and to craft an adequate prosthesis to leave Cleveland's speech and appearance (relatively) unchanged by the radical alteration in the shape of his mouth. Cleveland's cancer was also never known to recur: certainly, it never reappeared in his mouth, and though he was too fat to check for certain using the diagnostic tools of the age, his eventual death (15 years later!) was not suspected to be related to cancer metastasized from his mouth. Of course, this alone led interested doctors to question for years the nature of his tumor. The questions were finally answered in March 1980, when studies on the preserved remains of the tumor were published in Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Cleveland was found to have had verrucous carcinoma, a comparatively benign cancer that rarely metastasizes, but one that would have restricted his eating and breathing if left untended. The doctors were thus posthumously found to have been precisely right in their choice of treatment - a fitting cap to an already remarkable feat. The study itself, published by John Brooks, Horatio Enterline, and Gonzalo Aponte, is incredibly difficult to track down, online or otherwise. When I wrote to ask him if he knew where I could find a copy, Mr. Algeo was kind enough to scan all 26 pages and email them to me. On the off-chance that anyone else on the internet was looking, and with any luck to save him the trouble of sending them again, the article can be downloaded here.

U2 - "Please"

In 1997, U2 released Pop, the band's ninth studio album and a continuation of the electronic influence that had defined its sound since the beginning of the decade. Unlike its predecessors, which had been huge critical and commercial successes, Pop fell flat. The production values that had made Achtung Baby and Zooropa such exciting records here lacked the same resonance, and perhaps partly in consequence, most of the album came off as uninspired - a term which for better or worse had never applied to U2 before. Over time it was revealed that Pop had been produced under enormous time constraints and that none of the band members had been satisfied with the final product, even prior to the critical drubbing. Tinkering with the better songs on the album continued well after the release date, both in studios, where the band's career-long fascination with remixes would pay handsome dividends, and onstage, during the infamously elaborate PopMart Tour. Ultimately, many of these songs would only reveal their true caliber in live performances, and many of the resultant recordings were released along with singles from the album.

One such example is the single release Please, which includes fine live recordings of "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "With or Without You," but centers around material from Pop. The CD ends with a live rendition of "Staring at the Sun," which substitutes its clunky in-studio sound for a stripped-down acoustic duet between Bono and The Edge that enhances its previously obscured emotional depth. The true highlight, though, comes from the title track. "Please" was surely one of Pop's strongest tracks, benefiting, in addition to quality songwriting, from an unobtrusive studio production that's retained in the cut that leads off the single. The song, a denunciation of ongoing sanctimony and violence in the fight for Irish autonomy, builds up to a crescendo over the course of its five minute duration, and was allowed to do so in an unassuming way that suits its earnest lyrics. The live version that follows it (see below) is nonetheless a considerable improvement. Bono turns in an appropriately less understated vocal, which comes completely unhinged at the end of the track and speaks to the mounting frustration at the refusal to compromise on both sides of the dispute, in addition to the mounting civilian casualties. Even more effective is Larry Mullen Jr.'s reprisal of the iconic martial drumbeat from "Sunday Bloody Sunday" midway through the song - it not only points ahead to the return to basics that the band would adopt for their next album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, but in invoking an protest song released nearly 15 years earlier, also offers an unsettling reflection on the inevitable cycling of history and war. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, U2 would decide the song was no longer appropriate to play. Nonetheless, Please offers compelling evidence of how good the band could be even at the lowest point of their career, and is perhaps the best place to start for Pop-era material.

Ernst Reijseger - "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

Werner Herzog's 2011 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams was rightfully released to near-universal critical acclaim. It's a lushly filmed portrait of the miraculously well-preserved cave paintings found in a French cave that was hermetically sealed millennia ago by a landslide, peppered with just enough of Herzog's typical eccentrics to lend the film flavor (including a perfumer who seeks out hidden caves in the countryside by smell). Somewhat lost in the mix was the amazing score for the movie, composed and in part performed by Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger. Even for the score of a frequently silent movie, Reijseger's music is an integral part of the film's appeal. Throughout, he contrasts soaring choral parts with the resounding bass of his cello (specially created to support an extra low F string), creating precisely the ethereal sound necessary to accompany a trip that literally carries you back twenty-five to thirty-two thousand years in time. The wordless sound of human voices adds to the peculiar humanity of the individuals who occupied the cave - and they truly are individuals, from a hand-painter with a noticeably crooked pinkie to a child accompanied or followed into the cave by a wolf. Like the film itself, Reijseger's score was inexplicably passed over for an Academy Award nomination, but luckily an extensive soundtack - 73 minutes of music from a 90 minute film - is available here. Herzog also devoted the DVD's only special feature to the music, a 40 minute short film entitled Ode to the Dawn of Man that documents the recording of the soundtrack. You can see an excerpt below, featuring Reijseger and organist Harmen Fraanje performing "Shadow."