Theresa Andersson is an impossibly talented multi-instrumentalist and singer who’s lived in New Orleans for a couple of decades. Her music exemplifies the value of a particular relation between an artist and a tradition, in this case the enormous tradition of New Orleans music. This tradition is both rich and daunting; it contains everything from the invention and development of jazz (and all that flows from this astonishing, epochal revolution in music) to the expression of inimitable ethnic and cultural musics to the role song plays in New Orleans culture: the jazz-funeral, the Mardi Gras parade, etc.

French Quarter, February 1981. Photo by Tom Haggerty. From Backatown.

A tradition can choke aesthetic and artistic innovation, typically by inclining audiences to measure work against a congealed history; in other words, a tradition can fall into backwards-facing aesthetic conservatism, whereas all arts require for their vitality some degree of novelty and a sense of futurity, too. Humans acclimate to meanings and forms; they stop “working” as experiences and instead become perfunctory expressions of mannered habit. Rather than opening the hearts or minds of audiences or reacquainting them with the reality in which they live, the reality inside themselves, moribund traditions allow audiences to go through motions without attention. Even a great tradition can lull us into semi-cultured sleep (or sleepwalking dance).

On the other hand: without a tradition, the arts have little orientation; every artist must invent not only her formal, aesthetic, artistic innovations, but the entire constellation of justificatory or explanatory ideas, cultural meanings, and purposes on which her art relies. Art apart from tradition requires the artist, before painting an apple pie, to invent the universe, with its possibilities and constraints. Perhaps worse, or more consequential for audiences, traditions sum the knowledge of the artists and thinkers and audiences who have come before; without tradition, we must continually rediscover what previous generations knew intuitively, knew from tradition, while discarding solutions that worked and which could have been developed, extended, combined with novel phenomena or filtered through a new artist’s self to make art that extends tradition, rather than childishly pretending not to care about it.

Andersson has a multi-loop-pedal setup to perform without a band.

All of that is to say: Andersson —on both Street Parade and Hummingbird, Go! and probably elsewhere— negotiates the tension between tradition and invention perfectly. If one is attentive, one hears the syncopations and swings and shouts of raucous New Orleans street music; one hears, too, the melodic and harmonic beauty that music from the birthplace of jazz should  possess. Orchestrations and instrumental performances are likewise given reach and depth by their relation to the great musicians of the city’s past and present.

Thus: some of her music has a swing to it that few contemporary artists can hope to achieve, since their rhythms are the basically-dull 4/4 rhythms commercial pop-rock has been reduced to; and there is an historical scope to her music’s aesthetic that makes its regular lyrical profundity seem natural, unaffected, appropriate. Against the larger tapestry of aesthetics and meanings, it’s easier to be serious. Connected to tradition, experiments can be bolder: there is less of an explanatory burden for deviations since foundational elements remain familiar.

But the lightness of her touch makes her music a bit like New Orleans for me: deeply moving in reflection, touching at moments, but always, always, always fun. Happiness is the point; New Orleans understands that, and that’s why its musical tradition is so wonderful. It’s insanely exciting to hear someone who seems to be as much a part of that tradition as, say, Louis Armstrong or Allen Toussaint, while still being a contemporary, recombinant, adventurous artist, singing not about dear, departed characters like Junko Partner but about love and life as they are now.

I didn’t know what song to choose; I recognize that this one is perhaps sweet for many, but I love it; other tracks may be more to your liking. Thanks a lot for the tip, Erin!

“Feuilles-O,” by Simon and Garfunkel. Abby liked this song when it played a moment ago, quite by chance; I like almost everything Paul Simon has ever done.

Ms. Odradek posted Robert Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen, op. 132, II. Lebhaft und sehr markiert and the delightful analysis that follows below:

“Schumann’s Fairy Tales: Music, Literature and Painting

This is the second of four pieces in a cycle composed in 1853. It is, in the words of Peter Ostwald, “almost futuristic music” made of “dark melodies, nervous rhythms, and subtly contrapuntal texture”. At the same time it also has, paradoxically, an ancient quality that could recall an intoxicated Carnival parade or a medieval Death Dance:

—Alfred Rethel, Dance of Death: Death the Strangler (1850?). (The hypothesis of a connection between Schumann’s Märchen pieces and the works of his friend the painter Alfred Rethel has been proposed, writes Nicholas Marston, by Leon Botstein.)

Fantastic tales, both newly created and versions of traditional stories, were one of the fixtures of German romanticism, and since the very beginning, writers spoke of them in relation to music:

One striking instance of the evocation in music of a fairy-tale ambience can be found in the late chamber music miniatures of Robert Schumann, in particular Märchenbilder, op. 113, for piano and viola, and Märchenerzählungen, op. 132, for piano, clarinet, and viola. (…) The music ranges from rhapsodic to epic, melancholy to nostalgic, with the listener left free to establish the nature of the relationship between such music and the fairy tale. It is perhaps in this stimulation of the imagination, coupled with the mercurial quality of the music, that we can locate Schumann’s own attraction to the tales.

(…) The question of whether fairy tales could be said to be like music was raised briefly toward the end of the eighteenth century, in the early years of German Romanticism. Responding to the Kantian notion that, left free to roam, the imagination produces only nonsense, authors such as Novalis and Ludwig Tieck explored the idea of a mode of imaginative writing unconstrained by the demand to make sense. The fairy tale seemed fit for the purpose because of its lack of conventional characterization, disregard for motivation, and uncannily repetitive plots. It was in the perceived dreamy incoherence of the fairy tale that a link could be established with music (…)

—Stephen Benson, “Music”, in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, ed. Donald Haase, Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 649-650. Bold mine.

Schumann lived during a time when the Märchen (fairy tale) developed and flourished in Germany, both the simple, folklike tales of Andersen and the more elaborate ones of Tieck, Novalis, Hoffmann, and Arnim. He read them for his own enjoyment and to his children, and, inspired by them, created several musical counterparts. (…)

Writers of Märchen were quick to note its musical association. Märchen, wrote Ludwig Tieck, need to possess “a quietly progressive tone, a certain innocence of representation … which hypnotizes the soul like quiet musical improvisations without noise and clamor.” Novalis described the Märchen as resembling “a vision in a dream—incoherent— an ensemble of wonderful things and events, for example, a musical fantasy—the harmonic sequences of an Aoelian harp—nature itself.”

—Eric Frederick Jensen, Schumann, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 341-342. Bold mine.

And if you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend you let yourself get bitten by the Schumann bug by reading noxrpm’s fantastic posts.”

I’ve only recently come across this album of Charles Mingus playing piano; a bassist, composer, and bandleader, Mingus was naturally a competent pianist, but I was unaware that he’d released an entire album of largely-improvised sessions. As one reviewer noted, it’s interesting to hear how his mind works; his compositional strategies are apparent even in spontaneous solo play.

Mingus as painted by Bruni Sablan.

Listening to Kenny Garrett’s fascinating Beyond the Wall, an album born from his travels through China and his devotion to McCoy Tyner, I was reminded of this wonderful track. Originally recorded when Tyner was part of the John Coltrane Quartet, “Lonnie’s Lament” became familiar to me first as recorded on the Garrett album Pursuance, a tribute to Coltrane’s music.

Tyner is never better than on the first jazz song I loved, “Olé”; it was introduced to me by my father, whom I blame for my addiction to modal music.

From David Cole’s wonderful mix The Sway —a “trim 35 minutes of old fashioned rhythm & blues from mid-century New Orleans and Texas”— comes this, perhaps the oldest song I know of featuring the f-word.

The profane alternate-take version of “Don’t Play Around with Love” is especially appropriate for a friend of mine today, who’s clever as a fox and should just keep on struttin’ (as illustrated in one of Cole’s essentially perfect works of pixel art).

I’ve been listening to Nico Muhly again lately, and came across an interview in which he discusses the aural and musical influence video games had on him:

Collect a coin, and a delighted glockenspiel sounds. Move from navigating a level above ground to one below ground, and the eager French chromaticism of the score changes to a spare, beat-driven minimal texture. Hit a star, and suddenly the score does a metric modulation. All of these things come to bear in a later musical education; I’m positive I understand how augmented chords change an emotional texture because of Nintendo music. These are private musical revelations that happened in the manic, parched late-night of a sleepover, but then came to bear later in the context of actual chamber music. 

I was reminded of Clive James’ discussion of “mechanisms of influence” in writers:

Mechanisms of influence are hard to trace. Writers tend to think that the way they write was influenced by literature, and of course scholars make a living by following that same assumption. But a writer’s ideal of a properly built sentence might just as well have been formed when he was still in short pants and watched someone make an unusually neat sandcastle. He might have got his ideals of composition, colour and clean finish from a bigger boy who made a better model aeroplane. To the extent that I can examine my own case of such inadvertently assimilated education, I learned a lot about writing from watching an older friend sanding down the freshly dried paint on his motorbike so that he could give it another coat: he was after the deep, rich, pure glow. But for the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie.

Years ago, tracing into the past threads of accidental influences which now inform my aesthetic sensibilities, my creative thought, even my personality, I reflected on how the happenstance technological limitations of old video game systems had shaped my sense of space and motion:

In the games of my childhood there was a sense of space: the vacuum of blackness behind the last drawn sprite was the end of the world, an abyss beyond the range of your bouncing character. Some squared hills, a pixelated building and what seemed to be clouds: these delimited the universe. Infinity of depth coupled with extreme finitude of motion…

In all games there was this loneliness: one’s range of motion stops, one ceases advancing the storyline, and one hurls fireballs at walls that don’t destruct, or jumps endlessly for a platform out of reach, or respawns again and again on a multiplayer map without anyone else… after a while, death is all that is left. Simple games leave us with only extreme options.

A story carries us forward and so long as it does, sketched castles suffice as background. But when the narrative momentum is arrested, when we step off course, the flatness of a videographic topography is the saddest, loneliest thing imaginable: a universe of ultimate inflexibility. [Even] modern games retain this quality: there is a place you can go that is the edge of the world; nothing can be experienced beyond it… 

No matter how engaging a story is, a game’s paucity of meaningful freedom -particularly experiential freedom- means that one will resort to oblivion above boredom. Violence is integral to video games because only acts in extremis can distract us from the finitude of these virtualized worlds; while enabling limits can draw out creativity, they can only be abided for so long before we experience the urge to destroy.

It is a myth that after childhood our experiences stop being “formative”; even now, I can sense how my prose, my speech, my mood are shaped by the changing contours of my mental world: as though influences warp psychological spaces, as though thoughts adhere to points of interest and to one another, forming dense cognitive and emotional clusters which exert gravitational force on the creative processes making their way through our minds. One can be judicious in what one allows as an influence and how one manages influences, but one cannot predict with accuracy how different influences will shape one’s future work, and I imagine that this is one of the qualities that makes creativity cognitively irreducible, an indeterminate phenomenon we cannot simulate.

Amon Tobin - Journeyman

If you have headphones, you might consider using them; this makes more sense as its volume increases, as I think Inky will agree. Should I someday have the time required, I’d like to write a monograph on Amon Tobin; I imagine whole chapters on his allergy to repetition, his structural and textural inventiveness, his novel representation of moods and emotions, his genius for the synthesis of the analog and the digital.

See also the Danny Elfman-esque Nightlife.