Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Tuesday June 21, 2022: Songs from “Porgy & Bess” and other Gershwin classics

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif finds connections and develops themes in various genres. The show is broadcast on CKCU in Ottawa on Tuesdays from 3:30 until 5 pm (Eastern time) and is also available 24/7 for on-demand streaming.

CKCU can be heard live at 93.1 FM in Ottawa and https://www.ckcufm.com/ on the web.

This episode of Stranger Songs was prerecorded at home and can already be streamed on-demand by clicking on “Listen Now” at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/595/56633.html

Theme: Songs from “Porgy & Bess” and other Gershwin classics.

The folk and jazz influenced opera “Porgy & Bess,” composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by Du Bose Heyward and Ira Gershwin premiered on Broadway in 1935 and was based on Du Bose Heyward’s novel, Porgy, published in 1925.

Moore & McGregor- Summertime
Dream with Me (Ivernia)

Ella Fitzgerald- I Wants to Stay Here
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Porgy & Bess (Verve)
Lena Horne- My Man’s Gone Now
Harry Belafonte & Lena Horne: Porgy & Bess (RCA)
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong- I Got Plenty O’Nuttin
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Porgy & Bess (Verve)
Ray Charles- Buzzard Song
Ray Charles & Cleo Laine: Porgy & Bess (RCA)
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong- Bess, You is My Woman Now
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Porgy & Bess (Verve)

Miles Davis- Gone, Gone, Gone
Miles Davis: Porgy & Bess (Columbia/Legacy)

Dave Van Ronk- It Ain’t Necessarily So
Hummin’ to Myself (Gazell)
Cleo Laine- What You Want Wid Bess?
Ray Charles & Cleo Laine: Porgy & Bess (RCA)
Harry Belafonte- A Woman is Sometime Thing
Harry Belafonte & Lena Horne: Porgy & Bess (RCA)
Ella Fitzgerald- Oh, Doctor Jesus
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Porgy & Bess (Verve)
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong- Medley: Here Comes de Honey Man/Crab Man/Oh, Dey’s So Fresh and Fine (Strawberry Woman)
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Porgy & Bess (Verve)

Nina Simone- I Loves You, Porgy
Nina Simone With Strings (Colpix)
Harry Belafonte- Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess
Harry Belafonte & Lena Horne: Porgy & Bess (RCA)
Phoebe Snow- There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York
Second Childhood (Columbia)
Louis Armstrong- Oh Lawd, I’m On My Way
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Porgy & Bess (Verve)

Other Gershwin classics

Samoa Wilson with The Jim Kweskin Band- Our Love is Here to Stay
I Just Want to Be Horizontal (Kingswood)
Willie Nelson- I Got Rhythm
Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin (Legacy)
Billie Holiday- Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Songs for Distingué Lovers (Verve)

Dave Van Ronk- Sweet and Lowdown
Sweet & Lowdown (Justin Time)
Scarlett, Washington & Whiteley- Lady Be Good
Sitting on a Rainbow (Borealis)
The Hot Club of Cowtown- Someone to Watch Over Me
Wishful Thinking (Gold Strike)

Oscar Peterson- Liza (The Clouds’ll Roll Away)
The Jazz Soul of Oscar Peterson (Verve)

Next week: The Folkways Legacy of Sam Gesser.

Find me on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Tom Russell – Aztec Jazz

TOM RUSSELL & THE NORWEGIAN WIND ENSEMBLE
Aztec Jazz
Frontera Records 
tomrussell.com

Leave it to Tom Russell – who has given us such groundbreaking albums as The Man from God Knows Where, a brilliant folk opera about immigration and the American dream, and Hotwalker, an equally-brilliantly conceived and executed audio collage of original songs, poetry, stories, rants and outside voices that pays tribute to forgotten aspects of American culture, and many other great albums filled with some of the best songwriting of the past 30 years – to raise the art of the live album to a whole new level.

A year ago, Tom and guitarist Thad Beckman, his regular accompanist over the past several years, performed a concert in Halden, Norway with the Norwegian Wind Ensemble, a superb chamber orchestra featuring 21 brass and woodwind players as well as a bassist, drummer and two percussionists under the direction of conductor Frank Brodhal. Swedish composer Mats Hålling wrote orchestral arrangements for 11 of Tom’s songs and the concert was recorded.

The results are absolutely stunning. Tom’s singing and Thad’s lead guitar playing are magnificent and the orchestral arrangements, while uniquely faithful to Tom’s songs, variously recall some of the works of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and David Amram, or Gil Evans’ Spanish-tinged chamber jazz arrangements for Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, or orchestrated New Orleans second lines or Mexican mariachis.

The album opens with a lush version of “Love Abides,” a beautiful song that contrasts tragedy with blessings, hope and love. It was a perfect finale for The Man from God Knows Where and is an equally perfect way to begin Aztec Jazz.

“Nina Simone,” another quiet, song, lushly arranged for the Norwegian Wind Ensemble follows. The song is about finding what you need in a voice that understands. For Tom, once in a bar in San Cristóbal, Mexico, it was the voice of Nina Simone on the juke box. I know I’ve heard Nina Simone cut through to my soul when she sings about being “lost in the rain in Juarez” in a way I think Bob Dylan would appreciate. Sometimes my own “Nina Simones” have been Rosalie Sorrels or Billie Holiday or a dozen other singers who understand. Update, June 16: Video of Tom Russell and Thad Beckman performing “Nina Simone” with the Norwegian Wind Ensemble.

The pace picks up with “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam,” in which Tom recalls 1969 when – as the war in Vietnam raged, Neil Armstrong took his small step onto the moon, and 500,000 people sat in the Catskills mud for a three-day music festival – he went to Nigeria as a young academic to teach. Update, June 14: Video of Tom Russell and Thad Beckman performing “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam” with the Norwegian Wind Ensemble.

“Goodnight, Juarez” is a Tex-Mex lament for Jurarez’s descent from an open tourist town to the battleground it’s become. The song looks at contemporary Juarez, remembers when it was a very different place and imagines how it could be so again. “Juarez, I had a dream today/ The children danced, as the guitars played/ And all the violence up and slipped away/ Goodnight, Juarez, goodnight,” Tom sings with mariachi tinges to the orchestral arrangement.

“Criminology” documents a series of harrowing experiences Tom lived through in the late-‘60s and early-‘70s in Nigeria and Canada. The arrangement features some nifty West African guitar fills by Thad and R&B horn punctuation by the Norwegian Wind Ensemble.

“Guadalupe,” done beautifully here with some gorgeous guitar lines by Thad and an orchestral arrangement highlighting the oboes, is a song that reveals more every time I hear it. And I’m not necessarily referring to new layers of understanding of what Tom was thinking when he wrote it. I mean what I hear and understand about my own truths and my own quests filtered through Tom’s words and the gorgeous melody.

“Stealing Electricity,” with the orchestra at full throttle, has a hook that could have made it a hit back when pop music was about real songs. Tom tells us that reaching out for love is like stealing electricity, sometimes you’re going to get burned.

“Finding You” is a beautiful love song written for Nadine Russell, Tom’s wife, and is lushly arranged for the orchestra.

“Mississippi River Running Backwards,” is about a world out of whack – the kind of stuff TV evangelists might attribute to an angry God. It’s a song perfectly suited to the big, New Orleans-style horn arrangement it has here.

While most of the material on Aztec Jazz is drawn from recent Tom Russell albums, “St. Olav’s Gate,” is one of my favorites of Tom’s early songs. It was chosen for this album, I assume, because its setting is in Norway. The song recalls a single night and a broken promise. Most of us have been that drunken man waiting in vain at St. Olav’s Gate, even if our personal St. Olav’s Gate wasn’t in Oslo.

The album concludes with “Jai Alai,” a brilliant, fast-paced flamenco piece about passion: for the game of jai alai – and for love. The Norwegian Wind Ensemble offers a deeply layered and exciting arrangement and Thad’s guitar echoes the intensity of the flamenco masters.

Although these songs might already be familiar to followers of Tom's music, the way they are reimagined and reinterpreted with the Norwegian Wind Ensemble makes Aztec Jazz an essential Tom Russell album.

Aztec Jazz will be released in June but can now be ordered via Village Records. 

Note: Some of my comments about the songs are drawn from reviews I’ve written about the Tom Russell albums they originally appeared on or from my booklet essay for Veteran’s Day: The Tom Russell Anthology.

Pictured: Thad Beckman, Mike Regenstreif and Tom Russell in Montreal (2012).

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Frank London & Lorin Sklamberg -- Tsuker-zis

 
Frank London & Lorin Sklamberg
Tsuker-zis
Tzadik
tzadik.com

(This review was published in the September 7, 2009 issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.)

Frank London – who plays trumpet, alto horn, flugelhorn and harmonium – and singer-accordionist Lorin Sklamberg have been mainstays of the Klezmatics, one of the most essential bands of the klezmer revival, since the group’s inception more than two decades ago.

London and Sklamberg are both musically active in groups and collaborations beyond the Klezmatics and this is the third in a series of the pair’s collaborations on religious songs they’ve adapted from various Chassidic traditions. The first, Nigunim, focused on wordless melodies, while the second, The Zmiros Project, with keyboardist Rob Schwimmer, was Sabbath songs. Tsuker-zis adapts songs and prayers associated with specific holidays and festivals including Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Passover and Chanukah.

London and Sklamberg use a remarkably diverse musical palette in these adaptations. You can hear the influence of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in London’s playing on their deeply contemplative version of “Our Parent, Our Sovereign (Ovinu Malkeynu),” from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgies. A joyous Passover song with an impossibly long title, “Mighty, Blessed, Great, Prominent, Glorious, Ancient, Meritorious, Righteous, Pure, Unique, Powerful, Learned, King, Enlightened, Exalted, Brave, Redeemer, Just, Holy, Merciful, Almighty, Omnipotent is Our God,” has a klezmer-meets-ska arrangement with noisy, but somehow suitable, electronic effects.

In the best folk music tradition, these songs combine something that seems very familiar with something that is somehow wonderfully weird.

Special credit also needs to be given to the superb musicians -– guitarist Knox Chandler, Armenian oud virtuoso Ara Dinkjian and Indian percussionist Deep Singh –- who join London and Sklamberg on this recording.

--Mike Regenstreif