Portico Quartet - Isla

I read about this album while perusing a list of top albums of 2009 on Rate Your Music.  Inspired by the beautiful album art and a perpetual hope that there can still be good new jazz, I took a chance and was pretty well rewarded for it.  To sum up the band's general style, I'd say it's a very modern type of jazz with ethnic elements not unlike those found in places on Robert Wyatt's most recent albums, and owing a pronounced debt to the type of minimalism that Philip Glass pioneered in the 80's.  While this blend will probably do little to satisfy modern hard bop traditionalists or jazz fans hoping for something really avant-garde, it's reasonable to say that the band manages to maintain a delicate (precarious, even) balance within their chosen style and produce a work that avoids most of the obvious pitfalls that style entails.

Sonically, the most distinctive marker of this band's sound is the presence of hang drums played by either or both of the quartet's two drummers.  The instrument's timbre (like a more subdued steel drum) lends an immediately perceptible atmosphere to the music, and the deceptively simple sound of the shifting, pulsing melodic/rhythmic fragments the arrangements call for immediately tie the music to the type of cell construction that the aforementioned Glass and other minimalist composers have now been purveying for decades.   In spite of the obviousness of the influence, the band manages to individualize the concept to their style and the album has a satisfying consistency because of it.

If I had to predict a negative critical assessment of Isla, it would probably be that the band's alto/soprano sax and hang drum sound is too consistent and that the band's style, though incrementally distinctive, is homogeneous within the entire album.  And yet, even listening closely with this criticism in mind, I'm impressed with how often the band manages to surprise and subvert their own formula, even if it's in small and subtle ways.  Every time things start sounding too genteel, some noisy free-leaning squawking like the end of "Su-Bo's Mental Meltdown" comes to break up the niceness (the band uses delay and reverb--uncommon production effects in a lot of traditional jazz--to great effect).  When the melodies on tracks like "Life Mask" get a little too syrupy (many of these melodies owe more to indie rock and pop than they do to anything closely jazz-related), something like "Clipper," with its Latin rhythms, skronking saxophone and kick-ass bassline remind that this is still jazz...at least in some way. 

In some ways, the songs here aren't as melodic as they could be--"Dawn Patrol" and "Line" seem solely focused on the tension-release dynamics reminiscent of bands like Explosions in the Sky--which makes me wonder why it's necessary for the hang drum and sax noodling to sound quite so tonally-centered; couldn't the absence of a domineering melody be a little more freeing?  When the group does focus on melody though, the results can be beautiful, as on "Paper Scissors Stone," which twists quieter late Coltrane moments with minimalistic repetition, or the swelling emotion of "The Visitor," where it's disturbing how a track that verges so closely to smooth jazz can be so enjoyable and dense with details.  If there's something I'd like to see more of without changing the band's core mission, it'd be more looseness and less rigidity in the rhythm section--the saxophone seems to be the only instrument that's allowed to play around, which only adds to the smooth jazz impression.  You know something's wrong when a jazz band has to self-congratulatorily title one of their songs "Improv No 1" in parentheses, especially when that song sounds virtually the same as the composed pieces!

All in all, I'm looking forward to the next Portico Quartet release--I can see them filling a niche really well and making inroads beyond the European market--but I hope their sound continues to develop, just not too smoothly.  It's interesting to me that a group can create a unique sound purely by combining a couple of well-established genres.  If that's the future of music (and especially jazz, where it's "developed" by being cut with every other musical style out there), we could have much, much less enjoyable music to listen to than Portico Quartet's melancholy dreamscapes, but I'll always hope that there's somebody out there whose imagination stretches beyond merely rearranging pre-existing puzzle pieces.

Get it here.

Chained and Bound

I know you make a little money—but you owe it faster than you can
‘Cause you’ll buy anything if it fits into your little plan

You like and tell me that I’m better than anyone you’ve found
You’re gonna have to do it all yourself as soon as I’m not around

I know that you only want to keep me where I am
You don’t even notice you’re chained and bound

I know you’ve got expectations ‘cause you think there’s some things that you know
And you want me to shut up and agree there’s just one way to go

I can’t hear the words ‘cause I don’t like the way that they sound
When you tell me that I’ve crashed before my feet have stopped touching the ground

All you can talk about is money and what makes it grow
You forgot what it was like before you were chained and bound

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If one of these 11 songs is the “single,” it’s got to be “Chained and Bound”—concise, punchy and accessible, it’s even got a couple of hooks! If I ever describe myself as something like an “experimental singer-songwriter,” it’s not because I think I’m creating something that’s never been done before, but more that most songs are experiments—attempts to do something specifically musically, lyrically or both that I haven’t done before. When composing the guitar parts for this song, the idea was that the song would combine more aggressive proto-punk-style (out of my comfort zone) power chords with some more progressive elements (right up my alley). The moody, faux Graham/Frith (80%/20%) intro gives way to power chords with additive rhythms and between the verses is a loopier instrumental section. I’ve never played this song live—I probably can, but it’ll be a challenge to keep the wonky changing riff lengths straight with the vocals. It was pretty fun to finally hear the ideas come to life when I assembled everything together in one day of recording—probably some of the most efficient work I did during this whole project. I’m pretty happy with this one, although the progressive elements aren’t quite as noticeable audibly as they were in my brain.

The lyrics are pretty aren’t meant to be too poetic on this one—more economical and attitude-oriented, not to mention extremely personal. This song is an aggressive “fuck-you” to the forces within and without that try to break concerted resolve. The first verse addresses the issue of imposed inertia and the second addresses the sort of reasoning used to talk people out of pursuing more important priorities in favor of safer, more mundane comforts—a kind of sneering affront thinly disguising a desperate plea for acceptance. See you tomorrow.

No More (In the World of Men)

I come from a home where the guns are cocked
The book is open and the safe is locked
Wide open spaces are holes to be filled
Babies just breathing await to be billed
Diseases and difference just need to be pilled
Everyone pays when the black stuff gets spilled

You don't need to ask questions when the answers are wrong!
You just get us excited when you talk about change
Can you really change a habit when you've had it this long?
We think we need ideas, but we need something strange...

I see what you're pushing and I've seen it before
NO MORE!

I come from a home where the end is near
The walls are thin and the pace is fear
I live in a place where the past is a tower
The purpose is fluid and the illusion is power
Senses are gods and they won't be ignored
Your rights and your wrongs will be tallied and scored
Life is one exit and it's got to be doored
The food chain got topped and we're really just bored

You don't need to ask questions when the answers are wrong!
You just get us excited when you talk about change
Can you really change a habit when you've had it this long?
We think we need ideas, but we need something strange...

I see what you're pushing and I've seen it before
NO MORE!

NO MORE
NOT AGAIN
UNREPEATED
AGAIN-LESS
NO MORE TIMES
NE PLUS PAS
FREE FROM REPETITION
NON-MORE
IRREPEATED
UNMORELESSLY
NEVER ANOTHER EXTRA TIME IN THE FUTURE MORE AGAIN

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Get ready for Elliot 2.0, the guy who actually updates this blog regularly. This surge is what we need! This is a favorite of my newer songs--in my endless questing after good music, I've come to realize that the songwriters with the gravest messages come across more effectively when their seriousness is not all-encompassing and is sometimes leavened with appropriate doses of irreverence or, at the very least, scornful mockery. So, I try to keep the humor principle alive, especially since it's a large part of my non-music life.

Looking back on my past postings, I realize I've tried to write too much after every song, mostly in fear that nobody really reads poetry analytically these days. That may be so, but it's probably best to explain less and hope someone can appreciate the serious brain sweat I've put into this stuff just from reading (or later hearing) it. Henceforward, I'll strive to annotate less.

This song is pretty recent and was set to music quickly after being written. It's been a favorite of mine because I'm very happy with both the images used to describe our society, and also the way the words flow with the music. This song is a resounding rejection of the same rhetoric, list of problems, ways of thinking, and list of solutions we've been force-fed from every angle for as long as we can remember. Bullshit! Instead of a repackaged version of what we've already heard, seen and done, the only thing that's going to provoke actual """"change"""" is something known to the English-speaking Buddhist world as "expedient means"--a shocking, strange but simple event that grants deep and profound insight. Unfortunately I'm not sure if this is really possible on a large-scale level, since I've mostly seen it happen on an individual basis. Here's hoping. Something like the sudden worldwide absence of electricity or food might do the trick, but it's also likely that by the time those eventualities come around we'll not be in a very efficacious position as a species to act on our new insight.

More incoherent blathering:

The format exhibited in “No More” is a big aspect of my current MO: a bit longer, more of a dynamic range between loud/soft and fast/slow, with a sense of drama, and with the music often attempting to conceptually illustrate the poem. The song’s in an open guitar tuning---DADGAD (thanks Davy, thanks Roy); you’ll get to hear me bust out some lead guitar and also a bit of slide (more of that later).

The words focus on the peculiar state of the modern human condition—I’m not sure we think very often about just how different the experience of our lives is compared to 100 years ago, or maybe even less. I think our arrogant fascination with some of our civilization’s “advances” denies some of the types of favors we’re not doing ourselves in terms of our longevity as a species and the quality of experience we reach as individual human beings.

Revisiting and re-singing these words over and over for recording, I’ve been pretty satisfied with the fulfillment of my vision for this song—the verses start with one poetically-dense stanza where the lines ideally contain layered meaning (“I come from a home where the guns are cocked” is supposed to represent our violent nature, but also the underlying male/penis connections when it comes to aggression and guns, or “I live in a place where the past is a tower” is meant to illustrate one of the primary human characteristics that sets us apart from other animal species—we have a continually-growing collective record of history from which we all [more or less] benefit, but also the fact that our pride in that history and our accomplishments has given us a sense of superiority over our surroundings that is causing us untold problems). I don’t want to insult anybody’s interpretive abilities, and the meaning of poetry is also meant to be determined by the reader/listener, but for those interested I’ll fill in some more blanks further down after the lyrics—I also use these notes as an opportunity to process my work personally.

The second halves of the verses are more direct observations, and the chorus concludes that our inertia is great enough that we won’t be able to use our own tools to solve our problems—to really wise up and overcome ourselves, we need some sort of catastrophe to act as an “expedient means” for immediate understanding. This song is a rejection of the stale political solutions (even attractive, eloquent liberal ones), ways of thinking, and ways of thinking, speaking and communicating that bore me to death on a daily basis. The refrain at the end mocks this repetitiveness with a little bit of humor…something from my personality that doesn’t get a chance to show up quite as often in my more serious songs as I’d like. Hopefully it leavens the heavy message a bit. If you’re still reading, you’re either procrastinating from something more important(!), of maybe you’re my biggest fan…tomorrow I’ll do something a bit…quieter.

More notes:

“The Book is open” is about how the different religious scriptures often dominate our behavior as a species in questionable ways, but also that the interpretation of these texts is “open,” and people will always bend them to their own predetermined rationalizations regardless of the texts’ supposed authority.

“the safe is locked” has to do with the effort we expend on gathering and protecting material wealth, but also that our wealth is inaccessible to a great deal of our population.

“I come from a home where the end is near” details the irony between the perennial crisis many religions have been perpetuating over the past 2,000 years about some god catastrophe being imminent and the more measurable ways that the end of our species and civilization is threatening.

“The walls are thin”—our technological and governmental advances mean that our privacy is sacrificed daily, and also our gross overpopulation means that you can hardly turn around without bumping into somebody else.

“The pace is fear”—find me a more common motivator for human behavior.

“The purpose is fluid”—we’re so adept at shifting our reasoning and convictions to suit our wants that we can’t even separate our true wills from our own hot air, and let’s not forget—the whole basis of our tenuous living existence on this planet is fluid—water.

“and the illusion is power”—illusion might produce tangible power more often than physical force (just watch the news, and I’m not only talking about FOX), and also the power we think we have over our lives, over each other, over our actions and over our physical habitat in the long-term, is ultimately a laughable fallacy. 

The Purpose of this Blog

I'm a singer and songwriter who has been prevented from singing by GERD-related esophagus and larynx damage since October 2007. If you know me well, you probably know that my true passion is not tea--it's music. I spend a lot of my time listening to music (a lot of it is from the 60's and 70's) and pursuing different musical personalities is one of my biggest obsessions. Really, though, my goal has been to turn this rather passive hobby into an active pursuit--to make my own contribution to the collection of words and music that continues to grow every day. It was my goal to do this when I moved to Seattle in 2007, but have been waylayed by my continuing health issues.

People have asked me: "Why not get somebody else to sing for you?" or "Can't you just get really good at playing guitar?" Unfortunately--stubbornly?-- (and I'll try not to get too far into this), the answer is no to both. All of my songwriting idols--Roy Harper, Robert Wyatt, Gene Clark, Bob Dylan, etc.--played and sang their own songs. It's about expressing a unique, idiosyncratic personality in the form of music--getting to know one a songwriter through his or her songs means understanding that songwriter on a whole other level. So, what I'm really hungering to accomplish is a similar feat. Here's what I think really appeals about this sort of self-expression: When you open your deepest feelings and passions up for others to see and experience, you pave the way for connection: common ground; shared profound experience; emotional or intellectual companionship in a world that seems to increasingly foster isolation. I'll stop there (too far) on that subject.

So, I stubbornly refuse to compromise my ideals and wait for my esophagus to get better. Why the blog? It's been really difficult to continue writing lyrics and music that I know I won't be able to sing, but the muse hasn't deserted me by a long shot. The primary purpose of this blog is for me to collect and post my lyrics. I think retyping and revisiting my words will remind me to write more often (like how you play a guitar more if it's sitting out, not in its case), and I can start posting new lyrics as they're written. It'll also be something of an academic exercise in humility, too, since I'll probably post some lyrics I'm not that proud of anymore, which will hopefully aid in improvement! Additionally, in case all of my possessions are burned in a fire, my lyrics will survive on the internet! Finally, it's a somewhat restricted chance for me to still put myself out there--if you're interested in knowing what's really important to me, my lyrics are where I spend the time to say it how I really mean it, be it vulnerably, cynically, ecstatically, arrogantly, or hopefully. Maybe you'll find something in my words that reflects your self and what you hold most dearly. That's the (hopeful) goal. I should note that, for the most part, this isn't poetry. I quake at the thought of having to read these words out loud. These are lyrics--they're meant to be sung and heard with all the benefits that come with adding music and a singing human voice. So, please forgive me if they're not poetically sound on their own, and perhaps understand that they could be enhanced by the trappings of song.

I'll post the lyrics with a picture of the original handwritten page--my handwriting is terrible. The typed words may often differ from the page, since I tend to edit each time I write. Plus, there are often multiple potential words or phrases written on the original sheet of each song--you'll get to see the messy machinery at work. I'll also write a brief comment after each song with a few thoughts--I won't be pulling any punches on these (or the songs, I suppose), so don't expect to find only sunshine, flowers and boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl in these words. The title of the blog, "Oh Well," is from a song of the same name. It's an ode to that feeling of spontaneous ecstasy you feel when you know you've got it all figured out, or at least you wish you did. It's also a potential response to the (predominant) absence of that feeling that might help us get along easier through life if we could only just shrug it off. With regards to the blog, if you're interested, great! If not, "Oh well."

Elliot