Josh Ritter show last night in Baltimore. Really amazing. His band has gotten even bigger--huge swinging grooves swelling up under what are essentially folk songs. And he now has so many songs, so many words to know, and just stands at the mic and pours them out in torrents. It's an experience of being near the Source, and you leave looking at things--especially clouds and trees and wind--as more news from the Source. Everything comes out and takes shape for a while.
Looking around the audience, thinking about who I saw in DC last year. There are now young finance guys chatting about old-school video games they can now get as iphone apps, and there are more teen girls with their palms held to the lights. A few hungry swimmers like me, of course, looking reverent and studious. And more than a few shining faces waiting for lines that are close to motherlanguage for them, although they might not think of it that way--faces that wait and then sit in the sweet downbeat of a moment, and maybe look thoughtful for a second and then let the next phrase and the next take them to places they've forgotten again.
Haven't been near the source since that one time. Is there maybe a chance that big bands will come back? I been listening to the Duke again, those '56 live riot recordings, and you can really hear the musicians respond to each other and to the audience and the audience to them, which is a sort of literal ec-stasis, in the Greek sense.
ReplyDeleteYup, that time was alright.
ReplyDeleteI sort of hope so. I've been thinking about the seminal in the Greek sense split between the Beatles and the Stones. The Stones, at least at their sloppy joyful best are an American band where everyone plays at once, whereas the Beatles tactfully surround the melody and pay it compliments. Both great, but I've been longing to be jostled in the musical agora of unwashed omnivorous miscogenated American shouting music.
And here i am going back to all that British polite elbow-room sorta chamber music. Been listening to XX who maybe do it best in its current-moment incarnation, and to Broken Bells, which sounds brit to me though from albuquerque. Not a conversation to have typing on a phone.
ReplyDeleteAre we living in a fools's paradise to imagine that we can both we right about this? Let's assume that the subsequent misfortunes of one or both of us are some kind of manifestation of the misguidedness of one or the other of us's musical tastes.
ReplyDeleteProlly.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I bought JR's latest and am absolutely digging it. I don't hear any big swinging sounds, so I s'pose that's just for the live shows? The band sounds pretty spare, really, happy to repeat and repeat and stay bright and simple. Best lyrics I've heard in a while, maybe a long time. I am especially digging "Folk Bloodbath" with its folksy bloody bathos, and "Long Shadows", which hereby dedicate to Blake, because I git all defensive when she gets scairt.
ReplyDelete