Easy Listening and ---- Marcus Borg!!!

The other day I searched YouTube for a recording that my Father-in-law had, and which I listened to when visiting. I was fascinated with the arrangement of this orchestral version of a pop song. Couldn’t remember the song. What I did remember was that it was a Longines Symphonette LP, a best hits of ‘68 or some year around there.

I found the album on ebay. Greatest Hits of 1969. The first track was Soulful Strut. That was it! It isn’t on YouTube (I should buy the album and upload it!), but here is Billy May from the same year with a similar performance.

I don’t think Billy May was as good as the Longines Symphonette on this number. This judgment requires some explanation, because if it was one thing I (and all my cohort) hated in the ‘60's and ‘70's was this “Easy Listening” sort of usually mushy music. Remember Mitch Miller? OMG, he played oboe on the Charlie Parker with Strings album! Remember those Readers’ Digest LP’s? And the ever present Longines Symphonette and other collections? I remember riding in cars to Presbytery meetings with old men who listened to the local “Easy Listening” radio station. (I think those are gone and I haven’t even heard a “Smooth Jazz” station for a few years.)

I searched for info on this mystery orchestra with the name of a watch company. It’s identity was not given, nor the conductor. In recent years a few music lovers have said, “Hey, this was high quality arranging, performance, and recording. What was going on?” They uncovered the secret: It was Neil Richardson and the BBC music studios.

Neil was a great arranger who wrote and produced theme music for BBC radio and TV shows. The back of the albums often told great detail about the latest electronic technology used to produce the recordings while saying nothing about Neil or the musicians, many of whom were from the London Philharmonic. BTW, we could say the same about Mantovani, also recording in London. (If it's been a while, you need to hear Charmaine, the theme for distribution of meds in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

Here is my thought about all this: Easy Listening was a way for my parents’ generation to come to terms with the new rock and roll of the ‘50's and ‘60's, and all of the cultural change they were forced to live through. This was the soft landing for them. Soulful Strut was something they didn’t want to hear, but a dynamic arrangement played by a small symphony – they could handle that. It served the grand cultural purpose of helping people through disturbing and disruptive change.

When I first went to work for The Jesus Seminar, I was asked if I knew about Marcus Borg (who was a fellow, but mostly absent from the Seminar.) I replied, “Yes, I had read three of his books.” “Well,” I was told, “He is our soft landing specialist. People who can’t handle what we are doing can read Marc and learn to accept what we are doing.” And I am sure that some people learned to like jazz through popular songs and bebop from Charlie Parker with Strings.

I am not making it well through the current musical transition. Walmart today was not playing the old elevator music (which until recently was the softened hits of the ‘80's). This was screaming soul and heavy metal. I had to get out of there. When my generation is gone, the youngsters can move on, with music and with religion.

Remembering Frankie Trumbauer, Bix, and Some Jazz Age Songs

I’m confessin’ that I got real deep into music of the ‘20's this summer. I was preparing for a musical of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1920's Style, playing tenor sax. It occurred to me that I should be playing a C Melody sax, like they did in the period. So now I’m overhauling one of those 90 year old things. The Buescher is sort of a baby tenor; the Conn is a long neck alto. But I digress. I started listening to C Melodies.

What won my heart was this recording from the ‘90's of Scott Robinson bringing to life a tune, Singin' the Blues, that Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer made in ‘27.


 Turns out Frankie made a lot of platters, and a lot of them with Bix. So I started listening to their stuff on YouTube. One that caught my ear and stuck there was No One Can Take Your Place, dated 1928. It seemed to epitomize the era.

 
It bounced around my brain for a week and I had to find out more about it. But nothin’. No sheet music. Not on any list of pop songs of any year. It was lost. Where’d it go? Prolly (a word I learned from Sinclair Lewis) lotsa songs got written and recorded, but never were published cause they didn’t catch on. First I found several newer songs with the same title, even one by Lynnerd Skynnerd, not so good. This must mean that even the title had disappeared over the decades.

Then I went back to the video where I had seen the Odeon record label. (BTW, Odeon, a German company seems to have turned out the best fidelity on those 78's. They recorded in London and New York, as well as Berlin and Paris.) The label identified the composers: lyrics by Gilbert and Melbeck and melody by Frank Signorelli. Turns out they wrote lots of tunes together, and scored with Stairway to the Stars and A Blues Serenade, later recorded by Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. What really lit me up was a different version of a 1945 song I grew up with about my home town: Sioux City Sue (1924). Can’t find the lyrics to Signorelli’s version, but it’s not much to write home about.

No One Can Take Your Place was Bix’ last recording session with Frankie in the spring of ‘29. Bix was probably sick, and the tune lacks much that would make it “jazz.” Bix does have a couple of short breaks, and the ending. Otherwise, just another pop song. And the story it tells is a little “off.” This guy is telling this doll how he still loves her even though he’s got a new gal. I don’t think anyone wanted to be singing about that scenario. But I like the melody, so I picked it out and guessed at the chords. This feels like a real contribution to the world's accumulated knowledge! It will be in the next post.

A Lost Pop Song from the '20's

This song is explained in the previous post: I have posted this on Google Drive as a public document, but I have no idea how you can copy it or open it. It is a PDF file.

What He Said - A Hymn about Jesus' Teachings

This hymn is explained in the previous post.

The Poverty of Hymns and One of My Own

Where are the hymns that tell the teachings of Jesus? I ask this because of a dispute this past month about the new Presbyterian Hymnal, Glory to God. The hymnal committee decided not to include a decade old praise song, “In Christ Alone.” This hymn actually does a good job of clearly stating a particular theology of the atonement. That was the problem. Presbyterians recognize that there are a variety of metaphors for how God reconciles the world to Godself (as some of us have said it).  Al Moeller, leading Southern Baptist and neanderthal theologian, is outraged that any Christian would deny the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement: that God sacrificed His Son on the Cross as a payment to satisfy the debt of sin that humanity had built up since we emerged from Africa. All of us collectively owed something to God for all of our wrongdoing, so God decided to pay it Himself. (He is “Father.”)

(I should state here that atonement concerns me not at all any more. Having abandoned belief in the supernatural, I see our problem as needing reconciliation with each other, period. God gets in the way of this, and often becomes the impetus for hating and annihilating each other. Jesus, I think, had other ideas.) Myths and metaphors are helpful, as long as we are clear that they are myths and metaphors, and not literally true.

The hymn controversy reminded me of why I dislike most hymns. They are about the Christ and doctrines, and rarely about the historical Jesus. As I look at the list of hymns in the new Glory to God, I do see a few newer hymns that may be about what Jesus taught. “A Woman Broke a Jar,” and “A Woman and a Coin” are two obvious examples. Different ways of singing about Jesus, other than spiritualizing and glorifying him as divine, are possible. The Disciples of Christ have a wonderful hymn speaking of Jesus as “Holy Wisdom.” That didn’t make the grade for Presbyterians, and I guess Avery and Marsh hymns or songs are verboten now in the PCUSA. (They were Presbyterian ministers in Port Jervis, NJ until not too long ago.)

About 15 years ago, a Jesus Seminar scholar wrote but did not publish a paper analyzing what the Methodist hymnal said about Jesus. I do not remember that the human Jesus did more than “call us” and “die.” Somehow the bit about his death does not connect with his teachings about power, empires, and violence. Of course there is a lot about how Jesus loves us, but that is inference, not directly found in his sayings. OK, maybe I will do an analysis of Jesus in Glory to God.

A friend on line suggested that I write a Jesus hymn, so the file that follows displays it: “What He Said.”

I had recently presented to my local Unitarian-Universalist congregation the teachings of Jesus from the Jesus Seminar. I looked at The Essential Jesus, wherein Dominic Crossan translated some of Jesus’ teachings into free verse of the simplest and direct language.

The tune had to be irregular, a necessity when working from other than metrical poetry. Maybe someone else can suggest better language and a better tune. I tried to produce a simple, singable tune, but may have failed in that. There are a couple of nice “hooks.” I would have liked a blues form, or a pentatonic melody. The chords are simple for guitar players. The chords could be enhanced. Maybe others can write in other ways about what Jesus taught. I think it’s time for another “Not Alone for Mighty Empire,” (not in Glory to God), or another hymn of the Social Gospel, or a revival of some hymns of the ‘60's. But today we are heavily into personal, individual praise and traditional, doctrinal divine man hymns. Even the topical hymns are not very realistic. So it goes.

Missing in Action

What is missing here are posts about my Yom HaShoah sermon in April, my thoughts about the Heidelberg Catechism, and lots of other deep thoughts about many other important things. This spring I joined a big band at SUNY ADK, which made 4 music groups. Kinda busy.

Love over Law in Les Miz

As a sophomore in college I struggled with third year French. I couldn’t get it conversationally. I could read it and the prof had me read a history of France in French because history at least used to be written in a fairly consistent and simple tense. The prof said I should go to France and that he could get me a Fulbright to study in Grenoble, a university well known for its history department. I was so frightened of the prospect of going so far from everything I knew (in Iowa!) that I turned away from it.

This was one of those turning points in my life that could have led to an alternative reality today. If I could have seen into the history of revolutions (mostly French) that attracted me then, I could have gone to Grenoble and made a career in French history. Instead I went on to study Russian and spend two years studying the Russian revolution. (Later I traded it all for study of Church history.) What I didn’t see was that the Russian was built on the four French revolutions (1789, 1830-1832, 1848, 1871).

Now I can see this merely reflecting on the great symbolism of covering the body of Lenin with a flag from the failed 1871 Commune of Paris. I wrote in a post last year about how many in France and elsewhere believed “Socialists who seek to reform the human race, but without a revolution are scorned by communists and conservatives alike.” The French army executed as many as 30,000 Parisians within a week to put down the Commune. Lenin knew that if the Bolsheviks didn’t aggressively eliminate their enemies, their enemies would eliminate them.

Les Miserables is an impossible fiction about real events that speaks to the need for social change without violence leading to totalitarianism.

Hugo said:
“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

Let’s be blunt. Hugo saw terrible injustice, inequlaity, and suffering around him all his life. The entire century and more was about the dismantling of divine right monarchies and the price paid by working people for industrialization. In 1832 he dodged bullets in the brief uprising, in 1848 he opposed the revolt and helped dismantle barricades. But he became a strong Republican and by 1871 he was able to support the Commune, if from a distance, with poetry. He spent 17 years writing Les Miserables to change the world.

Hugo explained his ambitions for the novel to his Italian publisher:
“I don't know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone. It addresses England as well as Spain, Italy as well as France, Germany as well as Ireland, the republics that harbour slaves as well as empires that have serfs. Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind's wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: ‘open up, I am here for you’.”

I think that the musical and film does great justice to the massive novel, which few will read. The score has wondrous riffs, hooks, and modulations. The lyric is superb. The final scene of the world – the 99% – at the barricade, always seeking justice and progress, freedom and egalite, gives us his purpose. Ultimately, Hugo’s answer to violence is personal love, always pushing progress to its next level in the next generation. The story, called the greatest novel, lifts liberalism from our own sewer of tea party shame. It will do so again for each new generation.