New Thing #5: Exorcising Gargamel

I have never learned a single piece of music by Brahms. Not the lullaby, not the requiem, nothing.

The more Brahms I hear, the more convinced I am that he was a Smurf. I keep giving him chances to make me shake my butt, and instead he always brings this tooty-fruity gnome flower festival shit. A few weeks ago, Said Guy took me to see a violin concerto with the Utah Symphony, and the only interesting part was when the violin (a centuries-old Stradivarius “generously on loan” from some foundation, according to the program) broke during the fast part at the end. The soloist snatched the concertmaster’s violin out from under his chin so she could finish the show and we all could finally move on to some kick-ass Shostakovich.

But there is one sweet Brahms intermezzo I’ve always wanted to learn on piano. I started yesterday.

Here is the first line I’ve ever learned of any piece of music by Brahms.

Sorry so tinny. It sounds a lot less bangy and more sensitive in real life. And I’m still trying to work out the pedaling into the second full measure, and how do I accommodate the crescendo and decrescendo in measures 3 & 4 while still making the whole line sound like one unified phrase, and I nearly forgot how much I liked thinking through a new piece of music!

Will update when I’ve got the whole thing down. It might take awhile.

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The New Things

I owe my week to little old Croatian ladies and the jazz cats of Norway

Some years ago, before the Internet, my father embarked on a quest for Croatian dessert bread.

He had tasted it at a food fair and for some reason could not get the recipe from the vendor. So he started contacting Croatians all over the place, trying to find the name of the bread and the recipe. I think he even spoke to someone in the kitchen of the Croatian embassy. He finally was directed to some little old lady in Iowa, who gave him the recipe.

It was in the spirit of Povitica that I launched my own search for Monica Pilar and the Undecided Jazzband.

About a decade ago, I found their CD in a little music shop in China. It features a Chilean singer and a Norwegian combo on some old jazz standards plus a few Latin songs. The singer, Monica Pilar, was especially amazing. She goes chickee rra-rra crazy on “Mas Que Nada,” does the sexiest “Besame Mucho” you ever heard, and now I can only sing “Route 66″ with an adorable Spanish accent.

As would never happen to something I didn’t actually cherish, the CD got lost in my move to Utah.

For two and a half years I’ve been looking for another copy. It is not anywhere online. Neither the band nor the singer has a Web site, it’s not on iTunes or Amazon, and most of the references I could find were on the Myspace pages of scattered fans. I emailed a few, and they all said they got their CDs at shady bootleg stands outside the United States. Kinda like me.

I did see a Web site for a jazz club in southeast Norway, where the Undecided Jazzband was supposed to play. So I emailed the club manager and asked for contact info for the band.

A few days later, I got an email from the trumpet player! He said he was surprised I’d heard of the CD, because they made it as a demo in 2000 to get gigs and just sold whatever copies they had. He did have a couple of extras at his home, though, and he could send one to me as a present from the band.

I got it Sunday.

Totally made my week.

Here are a couple of clips:

Besame mucho

Mas Que Nada

I’ve joined the rest of you

It started while I was waiting for a phone to be answered.

See, I have to call like 30 police agencies at the end of each night for my job. Usually I check Facebook and Twitter at the end of the list, just before I go home. But the other night, I tried something different.

I watched Glee.

I was predisposed to hate Glee. Their “Last Christmas” filled my mouth with bile.

But the show is … likeable. Hey, it’s network television. For the masses. Of course the plot is idiotic. Of course the songs are auto-tuned beyond all personality. Of course the vastly superior black singer will be featured only when the cute white girl can’t hit the big notes.

Still, the cheerleading coach is awesome, and the caricatures of high school types are so over-the-top that they kind of work.

I know because I was one of them.

In the last episode I saw, that white girl is trying to persuade the glee club to be in a yearbook picture so she can have more yearbook pictures than anyone in the history of the school.

Yeah, I was THAT girl in high school.

Oh, I had a 4.0 and reminded people of it almost every day. I was in every activity — and all but fabricated some of them. Those five mornings I made crafts with the church preschool kids so I could skip the sermons? That made me a “Sunday School Teacher” on applications. Other kids actually had me examine their scholarship forms, like an H&R Block guy at tax time, to suggest extra “activities” they could claim.

I was an impossible snot. My friends from high school are clearly some of the most tolerant people ever.

Have I changed? Do I still look for ways to hold myself above others? Do I still cry when I lose at Boggle?

Sometimes. But I don’t take myself quite so seriously anymore.

You learn something talking to 30 police agencies a day: Backstory matters.

They don’t have scholarships for people who stay out of trouble even though their families beat each other with truck parts and hold up gas stations with underwear on their faces. They don’t have yearbook pages for people who graduate even though they had their heads whacked against walls when they were babies.

Those people were the real overachievers. Even if they now watch Glee.

Oh, wait.

Is it your belief that Elvis Costello isn’t cool?

I saw my first Grammy ceremony on Sunday.

Well, it was playing in the background at work after the local news. I didn’t notice the TV was on until Taylor Swift sang and blood started pooling on each of my shoulders.

Then she won a bunch of awards for singing. She even recorded the best album of the year, I’m told.

Here are some thoughts on Zamfir, master of the pan flute.

Covers

My dad is a music arranger. He writes jazz versions of familiar hymns for people to play in church. That way, those of us who didn’t attend 10 summers of Rockin’ Jesus Bible Camp can still sing along in contemporary services (Why do they only print lyrics, and not notes, of hymns written after 1990? How are we supposed to know the melody?).

Maybe that’s a reason I’ve always liked hearing familiar music a different way. Some covers of pop songs are just gimmicky, but a lot of them make the songs better.

Said Guy and I just spent a week and a half on the road: 3,200 miles, from SLC to Ottumwa to Milwaukee to La Crosse and back. Lotta hours. Before we left, I made 24 music CDs, mixing Said Guy’s collection with mine. It was an eclectic soundtrack. My only rule was to begin and end each disc with a song we both know and a cover of it.

I found most of the covers on Blip and put them at the top of my playlist (I only tweeted a few of them). Head over there to hear a crazy bluegrass rendition of Van Halen’s “Jump,” a lounge jazz version of Radiohead’s “Creep” and an  “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” that makes me want to dance like the critters in Whack-A-Mole.

I also included little notes about what I hear in the songs.