The Sound of Flutes ...

...does go way back, as I began to discover (with the rest of the world) over a decade ago. Live Science posted an article in May of 2012 citing the discovery of several 40,000-year-old bone flutes from the Swabian cave system in southern Germany; this discovery is not even controversial, given that those who crafted the flutes were likely early modern humans, rather than Neanderthals. Music has been with us for much longer than 40,000 years, I'm sure; it's a fundamental part of our human journey.

(First post in a long time, yes, and posts may continue to be rare in this era of social media. We'll see!)

Cage's 4.33'

All the versions of Cage's 4.33' I've, er ..., heard have been for solo piano, perhaps because Cage was a pianist himself. I've sometimes wondered what a full orchestral version would sound like. Now I know; the BBC Symphony has done it. And, so, here it is for your delectation:



(A tip of the hat to Ryan Wasoba at Crawdaddy)

Sometimes you get THE show ...

Sometimes not. While I enjoyed Steve Kimock Crazy Engine's session at Asheville's Orange Peel on November 12th, and the friends with whom I went, both of whom had seen Kimock in various bands before, had a good time, not everyone was ecstatic. Long-time fan David Riddle, for instance, decidedly was not:

Musically, this was probably the low point in my Kimock career. That's not to say that it was bad...because it didn't feel bad, per se, but there was pretty much no emotion whatsoever. It was as unimpressive a band performance as I've seen in a long time. There was just no energy at all. Kinda weird really...but whatever, better luck next time right?
...
... there were absolutely no IT moments. Regardless of my past shows and interest in Steve's career, the one thing that has always been a constant is some moment during the show where he takes you on a trip that melts the flesh, and has you floating in a sea of sonic bliss. This show didn't get close. That's a first for me personally...
...
The weirdest part of the night was probably whenever Steve took the mic and said, "Well...normally this is the time of the night where we say goodnight and walk offstage." They'd played 8 songs and had been on stage for roughly 75 minutes. That was a true "what the fuck" moment for everyone there. Trevor and John were standing up and looked to be thinking setbreak...then looked entirely confused. Steve then said something like, "we're just gonna play a little more and then walk off". Somehow they stretched it til maybe 10:45 and got two hours out of the set, but the whole scene after that was just weird....and I don't think that's subjectivity either...it was palpable confusion. The venue's curfew was 1am and people were just starting to wake up. We were on the street looking for something to do by 11pm.

The relative shortness of show was weird for me, too, since every Kimock show I've ever been to, aside from festival sets, has raged on for a good hour longer.

So maybe the band had an off-night. Bands do that. That's one reason that, back in the day, even I, not a tour rat, would try to catch a couple of shows when the Dead were nearby; and the Dead, during the later stages of their odyssey, made it easy to catch multiple shows by playing two and three night stands in major cities. You were almost certain to get a few IT moments, as Dave calls them, out of the run.

And the Kimock band seems to have taken things up a notch the next few shows, and got rave reviews on the Kimock list for their performances in Charlotte and Atlanta. I'll keep an eye out for them on the Live Music Archive; so far there's no recording there of the Charlotte show, and the Atlanta recording is missing the second set. Oh, well. Hopefully another will turn up.

And, for now, I'll just wait for next time.

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Photo: Steve Kimock Crazy Engine at the Orange Peel. L to R: Steve Kimock, John Morgan Kimock, Trevor Exter, Melvin Seals.

Steve Kimock: Further Adventures

Before this March, it had been over three years since Steve Kimock had hit the road to tour with his own band. Fortunately for those of us who lurk in this part of the world, he closed out the last tour of the Steve Kimock Band in 2006 with a series of gigs in North Carolina, one in Asheville, and the last, a few days later, in Carrboro, only three and a half hours east by interstate. As I mentioned in a post at the time, they were excellent shows.

Since then there have been many sit-ins and one-off gigs, jams and shows in various repeated configurations, more shows, up until the death of horn player Martin Fierro, integral to Zero's sound, with his old band Zero than any time since 1998, and lots of good playing. Very little of it, though, occurred in the context of Kimock's own material, which is, for me, where he best displays his gift for the architecture of sound.

The most interesting of his various recurrent gigs, for me at least, Grateful Dead fan that I am (or was; I have to admit that I've put their work aside for the last few years. So much music to explore, so little time), have been his performances with various former members of that band. He was an integral part of the Rhythm Devils during their tour in the summer and fall of 2006, along with Micky Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mike Gordon, and during the summer and fall of 2007 he toured with Ratdog, Bob Weir's band, filling in for Mark Karan, who was undergoing treatment for cancer. He toured again with Hart in 2008.

Hart appreciated Kimock's strengths as a player, of course; they've played together in various configurations through the years. The context of the Devils, though, with its emphasis on percussion, didn't often give him room to stretch out.

Ratdog proved a more congenial context. In fact, Kimock sometimes transformed that band's sound. Weir said that he found himself astonished five or six times every show, and if you listen to the shows, you'll hear why.

In the summer of 2008, the Mickey Hart Band included more players on strings and keys, and proved a fine context for Kimock's style of extended playing. Their July shows are still worth a listen.

Curiously, before working with these post-Dead bands, Kimock had little relation to the Dead's material. He wasn't a Deadhead; he had his own work to do. And when he helped form Zero, it wasn't to play Dead material. The Zero songbook was much less rooted in Appalachian Americana, more bluesy, and their playing, initially driven by the guitars of Kimock and Quicksilver Messenger Service veteran John Cipollina, sounded very little like the Dead's, even if both groups explored the boundaries of small band improvisation.

During Mark Karan's convalescence, Blair Jackson interviewed him and relayed this recollection at Dead.net:

Kimock's been playing the Dead material now for years, and has played with almost every band that's emerged from the Dead family, from Missing Man Formation, The Other Ones, Phil Lesh and Friends, to the current incarnations of the Rhythm Devils and Ratdog. He may not have been so well versed in the material initially; Mark Karan said awhile back that Kimock often got credit for his work when they were both in The Other Ones.

That tour with The Other Ones went down in 1998. By the next year and the 1999 incarnation of Phil Lesh and Friends, though, there's no disputing that Kimock's playing on Dead classics was magisterial and magnificent. Listen, for instance, to the version of the Dead standard "Terrapin Station" from 10/23/1999 (but give yourself plenty of time, since it's forty-five minutes long - and worth every minute. If you're too busy for the whole song, hang in through the twelve minute mark for an extra-tasty ensemble transition ). The jamming is sharp and tight, and offers a richer development of the song's motifs, especially the later, Terrapin-proper, ones, than any other version I know - including, even, any ever played by the Dead. Paul Barrere (of Little Feat) plays wonderful counterpoint to Kimock's "anti-gravity guitar"- that's Phil's description - and Bill Payne (also of Little Feat) complements the guitars with powerful and tasteful playing on keys.

Still, the material in which Steve Kimock is most at home is his own, and the tour with his new band, Crazy Engine, featuring Melvin Seals on keys, Trevor Exter on bass and vocals, and John Morgan Kimock (Steve's son) on drums, gives those of us who are his fans new cause to rejoice as we prepare for transport on the waves of sound Kimock generates with his guitar.


Steve Kimock and Crazy Engine play the Orange Peel Thursday, November 12. Doors at 8:00, show at 9:00 PM. Tickets are $15 in advance, $17 at the door.

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The video features a Crazy Engine version of Kimock's composition "A New Africa" from July 25.

Further Studies ...

Sorry, Bill*: more evidence has surfaced that music was part of the modern human cultural world from early on. Last week Nature published an online article about the discovery of "the oldest instrument in the world," a flute made from griffon vulture bone. It dates to 35,000 years before the present. Other flutes made from mammoth ivory were retrieved from the same site, Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, in southwestern Germany.

The AFP article also mentions the possibility that our cousins the Neanderthals made music as well, though it doesn't specifically mention the Divje Babe flute, which is ~10000 years older than the newly discovered instruments, but is often dismissed by paleontologists who hold that its finger holes were created by "a carnivore's bite."
~~~~~

Sometimes astrology can be perilous. (via Kos)

~~~~~

Update: The New York Times has an article by John Noble Wilford about the new finds , and John Hawks now has a post up on the flutes from Hohle Fels Cave as well. Hawks provides these details from the original Nature publication about the making of the ivory flutes:

The technology for making an ivory flute is much more complicated than that for making a flute from a bird bone. It requires forming the rough shape along the long axis of a naturally curved piece of mammoth ivory, splitting it open at the interface of the cementum and dentine or along one of the other bedding plains in the ivory, carefully hollowing out the halves, carving the holes and then rejoining the halves of the flute with air-tight seals along the seams that connected the halves of the flute.

Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and his colleagues, who made the finds, believe that these flutes establish that this early European culture had already developed an actual musical tradition. Similar flutes have been discovered at nearby caves also occupied by early modern humans.

~~~~~

August 1, 2009: Updated again to replace the link to the AP article the post originally cited, no longer online, with a link to an Agence France-Presse article, which is.

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* A little dig at Bill Knott, who doesn't much care for music. More here.

Update: Note that Bill has now moved his blog (it's now here), and deleted all the content at his previous site; the links to that content in the posts I've linked to here are thus quite dead. One of these days maybe I'll go through the new blog to see if he's re-posted any of his old material. In the meantime, I'll leave that task, Dear Reader, to you.

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Photo: "Professor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009." AP Photo.

50 years ago today, in an Iowa cornfield ...

... the Beechcraft Bonanza carrying Buddy Holly (as well as Ritchie Valens and "The Big Bopper", J.P. Richardson) crashed in a snowstorm, killing all aboard. The story of the crash, and of his death, is one of the first newspaper stories I remember reading; there's still an eidetic complex that merges the image of the story with the disbelief and loss I felt when I read it still rolling around my brain. I'm amazed now to realize that he was only 22 when he died, and had already written songs that would become rock standards - "Not Fade Away", "Peggy Sue", "That'll Be the Day", "Rave On" among them - and pioneered an approach to the guitar that would make him one of the most influential popular musicians of his era.

He'd just be 72 now, were he alive, and had had a much longer career. Not so old.

Rave on, Buddy, on the other side.

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Image from the Buddy Holly Photo Gallery.

The Song of Love, Part 249

A nice small article by Henry Fountain, in the NY Times online for Friday, 9 January:

A mosquito may not be anyone’s idea of a hopeless romantic, but the insect does produce a love song of sorts — the whine of its beating wings, resonating in a part of the body called the thoracic box. A female’s whine, at a fundamental frequency of 300 to 600 hertz, is enough to make a male mosquito swoon.But Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species that transmits the viruses that cause dengue and yellow fevers in people, carries the love song concept to new aural heights, according to a paper published online in the journal Science. Lauren J. Cator, Ronald R. Hoy and colleagues at Cornell University report that A. aegypti males make a duet of it, by matching whines with the female.

Dr. Hoy said both male and female raise their whine to about 1200 hertz, which is a harmonic of the fundamental frequency of both the female (about 400) and male (about 600). It’s the first time that such “harmonic convergence” (as the paper dryly puts it) has been shown to occur.

He noted that the finding also disproved what scientists had long believed about mosquitoes — that they can’t hear above a certain frequency. “We all believed the ceiling to be 800 to 1000 hertz,” he said.

Dr. Hoy said that the behavior was probably a part of the sexual selection process. “Females are particularly picky,” he said. “A female is going to require of a courting male that he be able to match her flight tone.”

"Match her flight tone" - very nice. The music for the dance.

The research will be used to help efforts to eradicate the bugs, of course. It'll be interesting to see what strategies its genome will devise confronted so, within the behavior that defines the process of sexual selection, and whether it can develop them quickly.

Wordplay this week: Rare Birds

If you're a fan of jazz and contemporary classical music, you're most likely to really enjoy this show. Thomas Rain Crowe and Nan Watkins dropped in to talk about their new book Rare Birds, published late last year by the University Press of Mississippi. It's a collection of interviews with some of the great composers and players of the last three decades.

And if you’re going to talk about music, you really should play some, right? So the show features full tracks by the artists from whom Thomas and Nan elicited the insight and information gathered in their book's pages. You'll hear:

Eugene Friesen on cello with Paul Halley on piano performing Friesen's composition "Cove", from the album The Song of Rivers;

Charles Lloyd on "The Blessing", from his album The Call;

Philip Glass performing music from his soundtrack for Kundun;

Sathima Bea Benjamin singing "A Nightingale in Berkeley Square" from her album A Morning in Paris;

and the Abdullah Ibrahim Trio performaing "Barakaat" for their album Yaroma.

Enjoy.

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2/6/2009: Updated to include titles of musical numbers, and to update the link to the show.

Another Goodbye: Merl Saunders, 1934-2008

Merl's MySpace page has some good tunes. I saw him just a couple of times with his Funky Friends, but both shows were dance marathons and extraordinary fun. He loved to engage his audiences and share moments from his lifetime of experience in music with fans, and emanated a generosity of spirit from the stage that could hardly have been just part of his act.

As he liked to say, "Save the Earth so we'll have someplace to boogie."

I've borrowed the photo of Merl from his website, which promises a statement from the family in the days ahead.

Another birthday for guitarist Steve Kimock

This clip has Kimock joining old friend Billy Goodman at The Concert Hall in New York, NY, on September 27, on Goodman's "Best Friend."

Happy Birthday, Steve.

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Thanks to Kimock lister (and much more) Charlie Miller for the link.

My Favorite Things

Some classic John Coltrane, from 1961:




In 1962 I started college at "the University," as it was then known - the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. That first year I lived in Craig dorm, at the time brand new, on South Campus; it took fifteen or twenty minutes to walk to campus for classes. Many a morning I'd whistle or hum Coltrane's part in this song, in something close to the arrangement Coltrane used on the 1960 album that shared the tune's name, on my way through the pine woods. No telling what I sounded like to my fellow students! I'd listened to the song so many times I felt I knew it inside out, and still always thrilled to its energy and its rich, complex explorations.

Thanks to Susan Weiand for the link.

A good sounding room ....

National Geographic had an article a couple weeks ago on the acoustic properties of the cave sanctuaries so richly decorated by early modern ancestors of the peoples we think of as Europeans:

"In the cave of Niaux in Ariège, most of the remarkable paintings are situated in the resonant Salon Noir, which sounds like a Romanesque chapel," said Iegor Reznikoff, an acoustics expert at the University of Paris who conducted the research.

The sites would therefore have served as places of natural power, supporting the theory that decorated caves were backdrops for religious and magical rituals.

...

[Paul] Pettitt, [a] University of Sheffield archaeologist [who was not involved in the study], said Reznikoff's research is consistent with other work that suggests music and dance played an integral role in the lives of ancient people.

Instruments such as bone flutes and "roarers"—bone and ivory instruments that whir rhythmically when spun—have been found in decorated caves.

In rare instances, cave images include highly stylized females who appear to be dancing or enigmatic, part-animal "sorcerer" figures engaging in what seem to be transformational dances.

"This is therefore an artistic connection between dance and art. Perhaps in this case the art is recording specific ritual events," Pettitt said. "It is inconceivable that such rituals would have taken place in silence."

MSNBC also had a version of the story that has a little more from Reznikoff.

Wordplay: Nan Watkins presents Yvan Goll

A little over six months ago, in early December, translator and poet Nan Watkins shared her translations of some of Alsatian poet Yvan Goll's work with us on Wordplay. At the time, Wordplay was just a half-hour show, but the station had given us the green light to move to our current hour format beginning in January. I really wanted to hear more about her project, and thought the longer show would provide the room to really explore it, so I invited her to come back to the studio to record some further conversation later that month. She accepted, and this week's show finally airs a more complete presentation of her work with Goll's poems, especially the last volume, Das Traumkraut (she translates the title as The Dream Weed).

Goll really did help define Surrealism, and wrote some stunning poems in the process. If you don't know his work (and there's been little published in English), do click over to hear what the lady has to say.

The show is available 24/7 from the station archive page as both a stream and podcast. [Update 17 September, 2008: Here's a new link for Nan's show, as broadcast on June 29, 2008; it's now up on the ibibio archive]

Mercury always seems to be retrograde at WPVM, and during the live broadcast today, one of the CD players just stopped mid-track; by the time I'd cycled power to the machine and persuaded it to resume reading the disk, I realized I'd have to leave out some of the interview with Watkins to avoid going over our time slot. When I got to the production room to edit, though, I added the track back in, and added another song clip to boot.

Music for today's show included Django Reinhardt, from some 1949 sessions with Stephan Grappelli, playing "Minor Swing" and "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise"; Oscar Allemann, another pre-war master of Paris bandstands, playing "Stardust"; and Maurice Ravel's "Alborada del Gracioso" - all music Yvan and Claire Goll might have encountered when they ventured out to the concert halls and clubs of that great city.

Enjoy.

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The photo of Goll comes from findagrave.com. Yes, there really is a site for everything.

Steve Kimock: Further Adventures

Steve Kimock is back on the road with a new band - it's one, though, that includes some folks he's played with many times in the past, like Melvin Seals (keys, especially his trademark B-3), Billy Goodman (guitar and vocals), and his son, John Morgan Kimock, who's become a fine drummer. Susan J. Weiand has some nice photos, including the one above, up at Jambase. Like they say, check 'em out.

Here's his last great band playing "Tongue N' Groove", from the 2005 CD Eudemonic, which she likewise shares:

Another birthday for Robert Bly

And his birthday seems as good a time as any to mention that he'll be back in Asheville on the 28th of March, this time performing with the musicians of Free Planet Radio. This Asheville world fusion group includes bassist Eliot Wadopian (just now back from his annual Solstice performances with the Paul Winter Consort, the group with whom, I believe, he won the first of his Grammys), percussionist River Guerguerian, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Rosser.

Bly will be reading from his love poetry in this performance; the program's being titled "Awakened Heart: An Evening of Love Poetry and World Music". It'll be held at the acoustically splendid Diana Wortham Theater downtown.

Marshall's fascinating Prama Institute is once again sponsoring this springtime foray by Bly down from the northern plains, his home country, into the southern Smokies. The Institute brought him down this past spring for his first Asheville reading, which proved to be a fine event, indeed. We featured significant portions of it on Wordplay in June.

More, of course, as we approach the occasion.


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Thanks to the Diana Wortham page for this event for the image.

Some Steve Kimock

(Experimenting with Playlists, still looking for a way to get audio files onto Blogger)

Enjoy!

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Update: Sorry about the autostart "feature"; I'm looking through the Playlist FAQ in search of a way to disable it in Blogger. So far no luck, and there's no apparent switch in the HTML code.

Further update: Fixed; it's a switch in the code generator over at the Playlist site. Not sure that this app will resolve the issue I thought it might, though - at least until I upload the audio files I'd like to offer to another Internet host, so the Playlist search engine can find them; users can't directly upload audio to Playlist.

Lyre, lyric ...

Trekking around the web yesterday I came across a note by Ernest Hilbert on Sappho and lyric at boldtype, which apparently is (or was) a house organ for Random House. Random House now publishes a few poets, but nothing too exciting - these days it's the home of Franz Wright and Billy Collins - so I didn't expect to encounter anything of particular interest there.

I'd been thinking about the connection of lyric to music, though, most recently for the last post on Thomas Rain Crowe and the Boatrockers, and found this part of his note engaging:

Unlike most poets today, Sappho was a musician and singer (this is to assert that few poets are serious musicians and almost no popular songwriters produce what one would feel comfortable describing as poetry, even according the radically diminished standards of our day). She is credited with the invention of a type of lyre, its pick, and the mixolydian mode (according to Aristoxenos via Plutarch; it should be noted, as it is not in the introduction to this book [Ann Carson's If Not, Winter, her translations of Sappho's fragments], that the modes we use today are not the same as those of the ancient Greeks; no record exists of their actual music, which was likely not intended to be transcribed, not unlike today's popular music; the modes used now, though bearing the same names as the ancient Greek, were devised around 1,000 CE in the anonymous Dialogus de musica and Guido of Arezzo's Micrologus; other modes, known to poets for their wonderful names, include the Dorian, Hypodorian, Phrygian, Hypophrygian, and Aeolian). Sappho represents the recorded origins of lyric poetry. This type of poetry was sung.

Notwithstanding the few crotchety parentheses and asides, there's actual information there; I'm sure I didn't know that Sappho had actually invented a lyre. There's more at boldtype, including a link to the new, non-Random House site. I've bookmarked it, signed up for the free newsletter, may even check back every now and then. Give it a look.


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Image found at the University of Texas portrait gallery, originally published in World Noted Women celebrated in history, poetry, and romance for beauty, character, and heroism, published by Appleton in 1881.

Thomas Rain Crowe and the Boatrockers: Rocking Out

Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely nights
Dreaming of a song
That melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
Ah, but that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a song ...

That's Hoagy Carmichael, of course - or the lyric, at any rate, to his magnificent old song, "Stardust". Carmichael wrote most of his work before even my time (he recorded "Stardust" in 1927)*, but I came to love his wonderful song through a version that (averting eyes in embarrassment) Pat Boone did back in 1958; I was fourteen, and it stayed with me. Decades later, I could still sing my daughter to sleep to its fluid quavering lilt.

The origins of music, like the origins of poetry, are buried in the dust - make that the strata of dust- of time, but we know that they've been hand-in-hand, or perhaps heart-to-heart, for eons. The lyric voice of poetry is named for the lyre which, an age or two ago and an ocean away, often accompanied it; the term "lyric poetry" has been in use in English since at least 1581, and is used to denote, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, poetry

adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung, pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet's own thoughts or sentiments.

It's the voice of Shakespeare's Sonnets, most of Keats and Shelly, Tin Pan Alley, Irving Berlin, "I Want To Hold Your Hand", a million singer/songwriters - and even Charles Olson's "The Ring Of"; so deeply imbued is it in the project of poetry in our language that poets who wish to work in other modes still have to contend with its voice.

There's something in the fusion of words - lyrics, we call them - and music that makes them more powerful together than either is separately; their combination seems to permit them to insinuate song into the synapses where our deepest memories dwell.

That the lyric is such a common voice of poetry and song, of course, makes the task of anyone who approaches it all the more daunting. How be heard, among so many voices? As always, the answer is to find the new - even if, sometimes, what's new is re-covered from an ancient past, another tongue.

Ever the adventurous archaeologist of imagination, poet and translator Thomas Rain Crowe brings this ancient fusion to life once again on September 7th, when he and The Boatrockers will kick off their fall "Thief of Words Tour" at (where else) the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville.

The band will be performing a mix of material, some of it as ancient as the 14th century Iranian poet Hafez, many of whose lyric ghazals Crowe has translated, and as new as now, with echoes of everything from Chicago blues to New Orleans jazz and Jamaican reggae - including this piece, a poem, as Crowe says, "for voice and band":

The Sound of Light

Music is the blood of the stars.
The laugh of God.
The sound of the breath of the moon
In the child asleep.
The sadness of the earth as it sings.
And the yawn of the
Old man as he gently dies....

Even the ant is listening to the voice of the sky!
Weaving it's way through the grass
In that light.
As Eternity joins in the chorus
Of day as it makes love to the night.

All mankind is singing!

Like gyroscopes in the blood of space.
Or luminescence on thresholds of pain.
In the wind, in the trees, in the rain....

Let the colors become the song.
Then sing!

Everyone is singing.
The shepherd. The clown.
The weaver and priest.
And the ones we can't quite see.

All singing.
All in the same key.

Crowe's fellows in the Boatrockers are an accomplished group of musicians, able to blend, elegantly, the traditional acoustic music of the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Turkey, India) with the sounds of modern electronic technology. Chris Rosser, a nationally known and award-winning singer-songwriter and string-instrument virtuoso, brings the voice of Eastern instruments to the Boatrockers eclectic mix on such instruments as sarod, dotar, jumbush, sitar, and saz, as well as the Spanish guitar and keyboards. An accomplished and much-sought-after studio musician, his solo recordings include Archeology, The Holy Fool, and Hidden Everywhere.

Wayne Kirby, a former member of the Debbie Harry-fronted band Blondie, has composed and performed music for both Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals, conducted small orchestras in Las Vegas on its famous strip, and is an experimental electronic music composer. Currently he is a member of the cross-genre band Jibblin the Frolines and head of the Music Department at UNCA.

Doug Shearer, an accomplished and versatile drummer, plays everything from the trap set typical of rock and jazz, to Middle Eastern hand drums. Originally from Pennsylvania and New York City, he now resides in Asheville, NC.

Nan Watkins, a piano keyboard prodigy, studied music at Oberlin College and the Vienna Academy of Music, and with some of the best teachers in both Europe and America. Now an electronic keyboard performer and composer, her latest solo CD, entitled The Laugharne Poems, appeared on the Fern Hill Records label.

Sal D'Angio, an accomplished tabla and guitar player, has studied with music masters in Nepal and India, and has performed and recorded with world-music bands in both Philadelphia and Denver before joining the Boatrockers and moving to Asheville.

Greg Olson is a recording studio owner and accomplished recording engineer. As a talented guitarist, he has recently released an all-instrumental CD, entitled Speaking to the Water, which was produced by legendary record producer Bill Halverson. He was a founding member of the world-music and reggae band One Straw, and joins Kirby as a member of his current band, Jibblin the Frolines.

After the Asheville show the band will hit the studios of WNCW in Spindale for a live version of the station's "Local Color" on Sept. 12; and will be at Lenoir-Rhyne College (in Hickory) on Sept. 13. For more information on these shows, call 828-293-9237.

The festivities will get under way at the Center at 8:00 PM. The Boatrockers' undertaking is as new as iTunes, as old as time - or at least our human time here on this fair orb- and they're extraordinary indeed at what they do, so they should provide us all an evening to remember.

What: Thomas Rain Crowe and the Boatrockers
Where: The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
When: Friday, September 7th, 8:00 pm
Admission: $8, $5 for BMCM+AC members and students w/ID.
For more information: 828-350-8484

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* He lived until 1981, but his work by then had long been eclipsed from the popular eye by Rock and Roll.

L to R in the photo:
front, from left: Sal D'Angio, Thomas Rain Crowe
back, from left: Wayne Kirby, Nan Watkins, Chris Rosser, Greg Olson, Doug Shearer.

This post appeared in somewhat different form in the Rapid River for September. Thanks to Thomas Rain Crowe and the Boatrockers for the photo, band bios, and new poem.

Music and Mirror Neurons

As I mentioned below, some of my favorite blogs are actually science blogs - or, more specifically, anthropology blogs, like Archaeoblog; John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, which focuses on paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolution; Dienekes Anthropology Blog (featuring at the moment a post on "Mating patterns amongst Siberian reindeer hunters" ; you know that's got to be good); and PZ Meyers' Pharyngula.

One of the places their links have often taken me is the online science mag, Seed, which a couple of months ago ran a fascinating interview between David Byrne, the lead singer and songwriter, as Seed says, "of the seminal late 70s band Talking Heads", and Daniel Levitin, "who worked as a session musician, sound and recording engineer, and record producer", but "is now the James McGill professor of behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University, and the author of The New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music".

The interview explores different approaches to articulating the role music plays in consciousness, and its complex relationship to emotion (from, for once, the performer's standpoint):

DB: In a musical performance, whether it's recorded or live, people feel the emotion is coming from the performer, and that's what makes it authentic and true and therefore more upstanding and good. Whereas I would say, yeah, okay, a little bit. But music has attributes that you can objectify. This kind of sound, this kind of rhythm, will generate this kind of emotion even if it's done in a half-ass manner.

Anyone who's ever played air guitar should be interested in their exchange about that bit of human play:

One of the great mysteries in human behavior was that a newborn child can look up at its parent, and the parent smiles, and the newborn will smile. Well, how does it know how to do that? How does it know by looking at an upturned mouth what muscles it needs to move to make its own mouth turn up? How does it know that it's going to produce the same effect? There's a whole complicated chain of neuroscientific puzzles attached to this question.

DB: So when you watch a performance, sports for example, you're not only watching somebody else do it. In a neurological kind of way, you're experiencing it.

DL:Yeah, exactly. And when you see a musician, especially if you're a musician yourself--

DB: —air guitar.

DL: Air guitar, right! And you can't turn it off—it's without your conscious awareness. So mirror neurons seem to have played a very important role in the evolution of the species because we can learn by watching, rather than having to actually figure it out step-by-step.

DB: Yeah, and not only that. You also empathize, you feel what they're feeling.

That, of course, is what drives Bill Knott up the wall about music, its power to inspire empathy:

(that's why they invented music in the first place: to accompany murder)

(that's the purpose of music: to facilitate killing) . . .

(Can you tell from those notes that Bill doesn't particularly like music?)

I may have more about all this later, but just go read it; it's a conversation well worth dropping in on.

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Later 8/7/07: Update: To be fair, do read Bill's comment here, too.

Thanks to Strangepaths.com for the neuron image, and a hat-tip to John Hawks Anthropology Weblog for the link.

Mr. Kimock at work ...

This is actually from long ago 1998, when Kimock (that's Steve Kimock) was playing in Kimock-Vega-Hertz-White, or KVHW (and sometimes KVHHW, if Terry Haggerty was sitting in). The song is "Tangled Hangers", and the video seems to capture most of the initial improvisational section. Keep your eyes peeled, and around three minutes twenty seconds in, you'll see SK demonstrate what it means to play while not-thinking. Tasty.