LYL Band

Print the Myth

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A few posts back I mentioned that the Parlando project keyboardist and alternative reader, Dave Moore had visited Native American mound sites along the Mississippi river this year. He’s working on a series of pieces*  about the largest of the mounds, Cahokia in Illinois. Here’s one of them.

In that August post about William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairie” I said that when Bryant wrote a poem about Cahokia he borrowed from “from some 19th century mythologies.” For focus and brevity, I left those myths out then, but I wanted to come back to this, because it’s important. In the 19th Century as US exploration and settlement moved westward from the eastern seaboard and these elaborate earthworks were viewed by folks like Bryant, there was a lot of unexplained mystery about them. And explaining mystery is the work of myth. Sometimes poetry joins in that work.

When poetry joins in that, explains mysteries, it faces great dangers. One danger is simple: their explanations can just be wrong. After all that’s another way we use the word “myth,“ to mean something that has been shown to be untrue. Bryant and a host of 19th century explainers of the North American mounds and their builders almost certainly fall into that trap.

You see, when these worthies saw the mounds they thought that they had to have been constructed by some people who were not Native Americans, or at least not the Native Americans who were soon to suffer occupation and displacement from those Eastern settlers. That’s another problem with explained mysteries. Sometimes the explanations are a little too convenient. You don’t have to think much to see the subtext here:

“Why, we don’t have to worry about displacing or even killing the folks who are already here, they did the same to those disappeared builders of these great earthworks.”

Myth gets complicated. We can see the ignorance, prejudices and racism that helped feed these 19th century settlers, but that doesn’t mean we can see our own current ones more clearly than they could see theirs. I often think of the title of the beautiful and wry Leonard Cohen’s first collection of poems “Now Let Us Compare Mythologies,” the title poem of which includes the line “I have learned my elaborate lie.”

One of the virtues of music is that it cannot explain mysteries, though it can sometimes help you experience them.

Now, back to Dave Moore’s piece “Print the Myth.” Dave wrote the words for “Print the Myth,” and he concisely goes into these issues. Dave is also the voice on this one. It was only my job to supply the electric guitar part. This is a live first take, spontaneously exploring how to present Dave’s words about the explanations for the mounds. As such, there are a number musical mistakes. My tastes allow for that. Dave himself thinks his performance wasn’t up to snuff, and I disagree thinking that the energy of the discovery overcomes the rough edges.

So if you want to hear a couple of poets and musicians constructing a way to tell the story of how the mounds were misinterpreted by Bryant and his contemporaries, click  the gadget below to hear “Print the Myth.”

 

*Dave published these pieces in a chapbook Rhythmic Stories & Prehistoric Mythteries  later in 2016. This book is not generally available alas. I don’t know if Dave still has copies, but if anyone interested could contact him through this blog.

Home Fires

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Previous Parlando readers and listeners will know that a few years ago I renewed my appreciation for the poetry of Carl Sandburg. Here’s another Sandburg selection from his powerful Smoke and Steel collection of 1920.

Sandburg excelled in portraying his modern age, the early 20th century in the United States. His best known poem is the title piece of his Chicago Poems, the “Hog butcher to the world/city of the big shoulders” paean to Chicago, and Sandburg remains associated with Illinois in many minds because of that poem and his birth and youth spent in Galesburg, but even before that Chicago poem Sandburg had traveled widely around the US observing closely the work and lives he crossed. This poem is not set in Chicago, but instead in the fabled Lower East Side of New York City where generations of American immigrants first settled. Immigrants who often came from rural and village backgrounds to the most intensely urban section of America.

Sandburg can compress so much into a tiny portrait such as this. I’ll let you look at Sandburg’s picture without further explanation as you listen to the piece.

Two coincidences interesting to me are attached to “Home Fires.” A few years back I was able to visit the Tenement Museum in New York City and took a walking tour that leaves from there and crossed the Rivington Street mentioned in the poem. I highly recommend the Tenement Museum to anyone who visits New York. Coincidence number two: when another childhood hero of mine, Harry Golden, first visited with Carl Sandburg in the 1950s, he reported that Sandburg read this poem to him.

Musically this is fairly rich setting for me. The core tracks are the LYL Band with Dave Moore supplying one keyboard part (that’s the breathy flute sounding part in the right channel) and I am playing bass guitar and electric guitar. After the initial tracking I added some orchestration using a swelling synth patch, some clarinets, and (of all things) a bassoon. The clarinets and bassoon are synthesizer approximations of the real instruments, but I liked how those colors worked out.

To hear “Home Fires,” use the gadget below to play the audio piece.

The School Year Begins

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Tomorrow many US schools begin their school year, so here’s an audio piece about a child going through that first week back in school after what seemed to be an infinite summer.

The schools in Iowa, where I grew up, began a week earlier than the “day after Labor Day” start that is more common elsewhere in the US. I’m not sure why. Maybe farms needed kids more in the spring to summer transition weeks than in the summer to fall interval. Maybe it was an advance allowance for the inevitable “snow days” that would cancel school during the winter, days that if made up in the spring would move the end of the school year into June. Maybe it was, in some way, a gesture to say Iowans cared more about getting down to education than slacking neighbor states.

All I know is that as a kid I thought this terribly unfair. A whole week! My cousins in Minnesota got a whole week more of summer! That next week was always going to be the best week of summer, the one that you got to do whatever you hadn’t done, or done enough of, during the rest of the summer vacation.

Now my son goes to school, and the school yard the kids are walking across to get to the first day of school is like my schoolyard was. Maybe all schoolyards are like this. The grass is still a little beaten down from every independent path the kids have taken too and from, still worn from every recess outside last spring.

To hear the spoken word/music piece “The School Year Begins” as performed by the LYL Band, click on the gadget below this.

 

August Moonlight

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I promised last time that we’d move on from Emily Dickinson’s church of the August crickets to another take on something like the same thing. Dickinson’s words are set in the afternoon, but this one, “August Moonlight” moves on to August nighttime.

I knew nothing of this poem’s author, Richard Le Gallienne, before I found these words looking for some material on the end of summer. I still know little about him. He’s from Liverpool England, but his lifetime only overlapped the Beatles a little at the end, and besides he’d moved to France by then. In his youth he wrote for The Yellow Book, a short-lived but influential periodical of the ‘90s. No, not the grunge ‘90s, though the thought of Husker Du, Nirvana, or The Replacements being drawn by Aubrey Beardsley (the Yellow Book’s art editor) gives me pause to think. No the 1890s, the “yellow decade,” when using art to throw light on difference, and difference to throw light on art was all the rage.

I’ve always loved the visual art associated with The Yellow Book and the circles surrounding it, but frankly, I’m not a big fan of most of the writers associated with that movement. There’s a kind of dead-end romanticism about a lot of it. Even in my youth, when such things might have been attractive to me, the writers, taken as a group, seemed stilted, like it was a paint-by-numbers picture of a Keats poem.

The visual art however gets past any of that, because it’s just so beautiful in line and color. 70 years afterward, the art of The Yellow Book circle was one of the chief influences on San Francisco rock poster art. So I could have thrown Le Gallienne’s words in with my take on a slinky Grateful Dead space jam or maybe some Beatley folk-rock. I did neither. Instead I paired it with the night-time side of the Velvet Underground, the representative New York City rock group of the 60s.

While I’m at it: Grateful Dead, The Velvet Underground. They’re supposed to be in complete opposition. Sonically there is a bit of a gap there, I’ll admit, though nothing that music couldn’t bridge. But nothing alike? Each band is fronted by a guitarist who has a problem with heroin. The bass player (and sometimes the keyboard player) is really an avant-garde classical composer. They both start out playing to dancers swimming in colored lights at events heavily associated with and promoted by a non-musician guru. Both bands had trouble selling records, at least at first, but those who did buy the records started forming bands beloved by cliques of college students. Both bands are known for an un-compromising poet maudit stance. Of course, one band hangs out with gangsters leading to a well-publicized incident of an audience member getting killed at a show. One wanted to call to call an album “Skull F**k.” One band put a drug kingpin in charge of its sound system. The other band hung out a lot with artists in lofts and had girl-germs for letting a woman be their drummer.

Seriously folks, I kid. I think it was John Keats who said that great artists must be capable of liking both the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground. He called it Negative Capability. Coleridge was always reminding him of that whenever Keats couldn’t clamp onto a good ground when trying to jump-start Coleridge’s rusty Borgward sedan.

Alas I’ve run out of time. You could have been reading “William Morris and Andy Warhol, pretty much the same thing.” Feel free to use the rest of your time listening to “August Moonlight” as Richard Le Gallienne thinks about what it all means out behind the barn. The gadget to play it should be right below this. And you know, that rhythm guitar part might have been a little influenced by the Beatles “Rain…”

Further In Summer Than the Birds

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

William Blake wrote “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” Brothers and sisters, it’s time to testify, and I want to know: are ready to testify? I give you a testimonial:

Emily Dickinson!

Okay, that’s a metaphor. The poem that provides the words to this piece “Further In Summer Than the Birds” uses a similar trope. Dickinson starts with a joke, yoking the language of a high church Christian service (instead of the rock’n’roll revivalist call I supply above) with–what? Late summer, the laziest time of year, before harvest. And worse yet for the comparison, she leaning down to the grass and hearing not mighty choirs or church organs, but those famous orchestrators of silence: crickets.

Dickinson, like Blake, was a religious rebel. Many members of her family were swept up in the 19th century religious revival, while she, an otherwise dutiful family member, actively resisted this. I think the poem starts off drawing us in with satire of religious services, but then we get to the mysterious last stanza. Dickinson’s syntax is so abstract that I (and other readers) are tempted to just let the sound of the words flow over the ear without need to extract meaning. Perhaps this was effect Dickinson wanted, as my best understanding of that last stanza is close to that. That line “No Furrow on the Glow” sounds great, but is also seems to say: no easily extracted message can be “farmed” or “gardened” from this church of the crickets.

Similarly, I don’t know exactly what “A Druidic Difference” is. Might be more satire. Or it might be that this glowing August sound which can’t be used to raise crops of meaning, is the meaning. The Druidic difference may be the isness of nature itself. But that’s me attempting to cultivate the experience, furrowing my brow to plow another furrow on the glow.

I think this speaks to the heart of something the Parlando project seeks to highlight. Poetry is not merely meaning, Poetry’s sound. It’s statements, its way of saying, has the structure of music; and music, it has the beautiful structure of thought and the human voice without the burden of specific meaning. That is why music and words meet here.

The music for “Further in Summer Than the Birds” shows a little of my Velvet Underground influence, and specifically with this piece, their eponymous 3rd album. Later this month we’ll visit another set of words about August and crickets along with some louder Velvets influenced music.

To hear the “Further in Summer Than the Birds” as played by The LYL Band, use the gadget below:

 

 

Angels In the Alley

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This piece tells a true story of a remarkable coincidence that I don’t think has been noted before. We’ll start with William Blake. Blake evidenced lifelong faith in his art. Near the end of that life he was still laboring to complete a set of illustrations for Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”, even though he was in even more dire poverty than was the norm for him, even while he was deathly ill with liver disease that may have been brought on by the chemicals his engraving process required.

I recently had a chance to visit England, and one of the must stops for me was the Blake room at the Tate Gallery. The room is deliberately kept in dim light to protect the fading inks and watercolors, and I needed to get very close to the small pamphlet-sized prints of Blake’s work to see the detail. This room was so filled with contrasts. A dark room to protect what had been bright colors. Small prints filled with gods, angels, cosmic events. The work of a man who lived in poverty and general disregard that now has his own room in one of the great art museums of London. Sadness, triumph.

Back to this audio piece now. The first part re-tells an account from one of Blake’s friends of his death in a tiny apartment off an alley in London. You can’t quite visit the site of Blake’s last work and death. The area was later rebuilt. Looking at what was there now, I noted that the replacement building was The Savoy Hotel. That’s when the connection light went off in my mind, something that my twin interests in music and poetry was bound to see, and that’s told in the second part of “Angels in the Alley.”

You see, the Savoy Hotel was a major setting for “Don’t’ Look Back,” the documentary film about Bob Dylan touring England in 1965. And in that film is the famous film clip of Bob Dylan flashing hand lettered cards with key words as his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” blares out. Where was that filmed? In the alley next to the Savoy Hotel. One of Dylan’s Beat Generation older siblings, Allen Ginsberg, is standing in the background as this plays out. Just before the song winds down and everyone walks off, Ginsberg gestures grandly, raising both his hands over his head. It’s like he’s trying to show some kind of mind expansion. Or strike a ballerina pose. Or shape his arms like upraised wings, like an angel.

The gadget you should see below will let you play my audio piece, “Angels In the Alley” performed with the LYL Band.

 

Proverbs of Hell

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’ve talked enough (or too much) about William Blake. It’s time for some of Blake’s own words.

If you’ve read other early posts from this Parlando project, you know William Blake was a childhood hero of mine. As a young person I was attracted to the romantic, mystic Blake, the man who insisted on seeing the world his own way. As an adult, I grew to more admire the persistent Blake, the writer, artist, and printmaker who learned and redeveloped all the techniques he needed to continuously publish his work. This piece features yet another Blake, the social and political radical of the late 18th century.

There are many ways we can see the once singular figure of William Blake in our modern world. I’ve already compared him to the independent “indi” musicians who simply ignored the conventional entertainment world’s structure and gatekeepers, making their own forms of music, making their own venues and recordings, without waiting for permission–a natural thought for me who looks to musical arts—but specifically, Blake was combining words and art, so perhaps he was the first indi comic book creator?

If you want to see how Blake himself presented the work in which the “Proverbs of Hell” appeared, with his own words, lettering, drawings, printing and hand coloring see here.

Social and political radical? As an Englishman, Blake wrote this in a world in which one of England’s chief colonies (the USA) and its greatest historical enemy (France) had both undergone revolutions—revolutions that had instituted democratic republics, something unheard of in an age of monarchy. Tom Paine himself, was part of Blake’s social circle. And Blake was raised in a dissenting religion, as a Swedenborgian, a system of beliefs that fundamentally questioned official religious doctrine. By the time he wrote the “Proverbs of Hell”, he had begun to question if Swedenborg, the religious rebel, had been rebellious enough.

The resulting work has been memorized as the proverbs they are, but lines from it have also appeared as graffiti, bumper stickers and t-shirts. I have heard that one proverb, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” is engraved in gold letters on a wall in Donald Trump’s penthouse library. Oh my! That would be a long post in itself.

The music for this piece has a basic rock band core: drums, bass, guitar and piano; but then I’ve added a little orchestration: bassoon, flute, and some strings. The orchestration may first sound like a repeating loop, but it’s not, each repetition changes subtly as the timing and relative volume of each part vary.

To hear this reading of Proverbs of Hell, use the gadget that should appear below.