Don't Be Concerned

I was dimly aware of Bob Lind's one big hit 'Elusive Butterfly' - but had probably heard Irish crooner Val Doonican's version rather than Lind's original. Nine or ten years ago I caught Jarvis Cocker interviewing Lind on his radio show. Lind's was a story of brief success in the mid-to-late '60s, followed by years struggling with addiction, and a longer period out of the limelight, including a stint where he worked as a writer for tabloid 'newspapers' in Florida.

At length he returned to music, releasing a live album in 2006 and his first album of new material for decades in 2012. A few years after hearing about him, I found a copy of his debut album Don't Be Cocerned at the 'Serendipity' junk-shop in Chepstow (sadly long-since closed). It's a record very much of its time, doubtless one of many post-Dylan releases by poetically-inclined singer-songwriters.

The arrangements and production are courtesy of Jack Nitzsche, who also wrote the sleeve-notes. These include such some jocular disparagement of the artiste: "Bob Lind is, without a doubt, the worst pool player I have ever known. He is afraid of airplanes and can't stay alone in the dark." A few of the songs come across as discount Dylan - 'Mister Zero', for example, but there are highlights too - 'Cheryl's Goin' Home' is lovely, as is 'Elusive Butterfly'.

Comments

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog