Music Doesn't Smell

Don't know why this crossed my mind, or if it's even true, but it seems to me that music doesn't smell. For such a powerful, visceral, emotional art form, that's a strange thing. But I think it's true.

Name me a music that smells - cause I can't think of one.

Oh, there's music that stinks out loud, but I'm not talking about judgments of taste.

I go to a museum, somehow a painting has a smell to it. Sculpture? I can smell it. Pencil shavings, charcoal, they all have an olfactory component.

Theatre - I can smell the actors.

Movies - well, there's popcorn isn't there?

Poetry, books, that musty smell, that inky smell.

Various musical instruments have their smell. Woodwinds, brass have metallic smells, their cases have slight moisture in them, slightly mildewed. Guitars, violins, etc., they've all got that old wood musk, old varnish tang to them. Pianos with their polish and their wool felt smells. The musicians themselves? Sure, they smell.

But once the music is in the air, the notes themselves don't carry the smell. The notes are super-fresh, clean, devoid of smell. It's not bad. It's just profoundly curious.

Profoundly curious to me :)

Do I chill to Barney?

What do kids' musicians listen to when we're not on the job?

Do we worship the Wiggles? Boogie down to some Barney? Relax to Raffi? Sip some Chardonnay on Sesame Street?

Get real. We're grown-ups. We like all kinds of music (including, in my case, some Sesame Street).

Still, even I was stunned when fellow kids' musician Tito Uquillas (of Hipwaders fame) and I got into lengthy talks about Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. I mean, I know I grew up with that music, it's part of my musical heritage, but somehow I didn't think any other kids' musicians were hip to it. Man, Tito knows his music, he's way into getting the groove right, and his tastes stretch into the far cobwebby corners of pop. It's really exciting talking with him, like high school days when my friends and I would sit around all afternoon and discover new music.

I recently did an interview with musician and blogger Eric Herman. We went on and on about about Zappa and other influences from our past. (I can go on and on when it comes to music...) Can you hear Zappa in either of our 'canons of work'? I doubt it.

I've sat with Justin Roberts in his apartment, digging some mid-60's Wayne Shorter. He spun some Kurt Elling and some new stuff I hadn't heard. Now, Justin's music for kids bears little outward signs of his appreciation of Jazz. But, the music that a songwriter listens to informs his music in ways that usually have more to do with quality and depth.

Do the Hipwaders sound like Beefheart? No, but you can hear the attention to groove and musicality. The appreciation of music is evident.

Lately I'm listening to mainly classical music. A ton of Mahler. Did it make me go all classical on my latest CD? No. Perhaps it did get me to pay even closer attention to orchestration/arrangement and interplay of voices. Or maybe not. The main thing is, I'm still thrilled to listen to music. Just about any music (except Barney or the Wiggles). You dig?

Touch the Sound - What a film!

I saw the most beautiful film the other week. It's called "Touch the Sound", about the soulful and amazing percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who happens to be deaf. She lives and breathes music, and she has learned to hear with her body. The film is drop-dead gorgeous, remarkable footage that is stirring and evocative and so fresh. It reminded me of the great Chinese cinematographers of the past decade in its attention to color and movement.

The movie, by filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer (RIVERS AND TIDE: ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WORKING WITH TIME), takes its time - if you're in the mood for an action pic tonight, this probably won't fit the bill. But when you're ready for something in a thoughtful vein, you've just got to see this.

It features a lot of duet work with guitarist Fred Frith in a huge abandoned factory in Germany, and includes solo snare drumming in Grand Central Station, a fantastic jam session with Taiko drummers in Japan, a visit to Evelyn's home farm in Scotland.

Don't miss the scene where Evelyn teaches, via a bass drum, a young deaf girl how to hear with her body. It's powerful and wonderful. Our bodies and minds are capable of SO much. This movie is affirming, of both humanity and art.

Evolution of a musician - Part 1

Before I saw/heard the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show along with the rest of America in 1964, music was not a passion of mine. There were no musical instruments in our house. My parents had a slim collection of LPs. Our record player was a strange sleep-teaching device with a clock built into it that my dad had bought to try and learn more via sleeping.

My mom was the one that played records or listened to the radio. She would sing while vacuuming, and I thought she sounded pretty good, like Barbra Streisand.

When my mom and I went on errands in the car, the radio was always on. AM Radio, circa 1960-1963. With my mom. Her stations...I liked Nat King Cole ("Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer") and Barbra Streisand.. Maybe I liked them 'cause they were on TV a lot at the time, and I liked their personalities. I didn't like Sinatra or any of the Rat Pack. "High Hopes" really bugged me - Sinatra sounded stupid singing about little kid stuff, I did not trust him. He seemed vaguely mean.But Bobby Darin, Mack the Knife? I liked when that song came on.

I had a teenage Aunt, who played the radio around my grandparent's pool. Top 40 radio. It didn't grab me. "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny", Elvis, Beach Boys, it just didn't do it for me. Elvis seemed old-fashioned and corny. I remember seeing a Beach Boy record at a neighbors' house, and even though surfing and all was cool, something about the cover made me feel that they were 'uncool', out-of-date. Before the Beatles arrived, music in general felt stale to this 7-year old.

Still, since I remember all that earlier music, it must have some kind of influence on me. Here is what music looked like in my house in 1963 (our entire record collection):

Keeley Smith? - A nice record, but I didn't love it.

 

 

 

Spellbound - I hated when my mom put this on. Very spooky music, scared me like crazy.

 

 

 

 

Tito Puente - Not something I ever requested to hear, but it did have a good party atmosphere to it.

 

 

 

 

Harry Belafonte - Love is a Gentle Thing. I loved this record. Harry's voice was so comforting to me.

 

 

 

 

Barbra Streisand. I thought her voice was SO pretty. I had a 6-year old crush on her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Allan Sherman - A funny record. Harvey and Sheila? I didn't quite get all the jokes, but I knew it was funny. I puzzled over the cover a lot. What is a celebrity? Why are those people standing in a field?

 

 

 

I loved this record - recorded live, so that even if I didn't get a grown-up joke, I knew it was funny 'cause the audience was laughing. I laughed right along with them. It was a special treat when years later I got to appear on their show. And yes, Tommy is very smart and organized in real life, he seemed to be the one holding the show together.

 

 

 

 

The Limelighters - Like the Smothers Brothers, recorded live, so I could clue into what was supposed to be funny.

 

 

 

Kingston Trio - I actually borrowed this from my parents a couple years ago, to revisit. I can see why I liked it as a kid - some humor, some good songs and singing, high energy. But some of the humor is really racist and distasteful. It doesn't hold up so well over the decades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Porgy & Bess Soundtrack. This one was a little scary to me - the overture is very dramatic and big and dark in a way. But I did love the music very much, and Gershwin remains one of my favorite composers. This LP is deep in me.

 

 

 

The Music Man - "Marian the Librarian" was a favorite tune. I loved the way the long note is held out on "Maaaaaaaaaa-rian". And I loved the way Robert Preston sang. There are a lot of good songs on that record.

 

 

 

 

 

Glenn Yarborough - I never put this record on myself. When my mom played it, it was okay, just not my thing.

 

 

 

Dinah Washington. I loved her voice. More than Barbra Streisand's (although I didn't develop a crush on Dinah). Some of the record goes awash in Nelson Riddle-style arrangements (which I've never cared for), but some of it swings hard and true. And her voice is ALWAYS good on it.

 

Gershwin for Moderns - Ted Heath. While this music has been re-released, I couldn't find a picture of the original cover art. I don't remember anyone playing this record when I was young. I think it was my dad's record]. Since he never listened to music, that would explain why this record never got played. He claimed to like Stan Kenton, but his record collection was all on 78's in the garage.

 

A huge, wonderful memory of my early years was when the whole family went to the record store one night. Only that one time, never before or since, we just got up after dinner and went to the music store, where you could listen to records in listening booths. We each got to pick out a record to take home. Wow! I got this Huckleberry Hound story LP.

 

 

 

And that's what I was listening to before the Beatles arrived.

 

Economics Lesson for Today

Okay, so it looks like we're headed for a recession. Alright then, we're in a recession. Whaddya want, you want me to say, "this is the worst financial crisis since the 2nd World War"? What was the financial crisis before then? Oh, yeah...the Great Depression.

Well, that's what some say is going on. I'm not a wall street guy. I don't get simple math, let alone high finance. But there was a remarkable interview on "Fresh Air" with a guy who was able to explain the current crisis in simple terms. I mean, it was almost fun, to be able to get my mind around everything that's going on. Almost fun, except that the news is pretty grim.

However, I thought it was important enough, and enjoyable enough, to let you know about it.

"Fresh Air from WHYY, April 3, 2008 · Perplexed by the U.S. economy? You're not alone. Law professor Michael Greenberger joins Fresh Air to explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, credit defaults, the shaky future of other types of loans and what we can expect from the U.S. financial markets."

Happy listening!

Radio interviews this week

Did an interview with KPFA's Dean Suzuki on Sunday night. His show runs from 10-12pm. My bedtime is usually 9pm these days. And Q has been on a night-terrors tear for a couple of weeks, so sleep has been at a super-premium. Still, I figured I always love talking music with Dean (he's a doctor of music, puts his stethoscope to new music of all kinds, from minimalism to pop), and that I could manage to be coherent.

I don't know how it sounded out on the airwaves, but I was struggling to find each word in a sentence. I had things that I wanted to say, but my brain and my tongue had gone to bed a couple hours before. Ah, well...At least we played tons of music, from Fall of Troy, I'm Growing, and even the cut I co-wrote with Richard Bob and sang on from the latest Bobs CD (Funk Shui from Get Your Monkey Off My Dog).

I've got another radio interview later this week - with a Vancouver BC radio station (Brent and Woofy), but that's at 10am on Saturday. Don't know if I'll be any more coherent, but at least it won't be past my bedtime!

And it's rather trippy, going from being interviewed by a doctor of post-miminmalism to a guy with a talking stuffed dog. Is life weird, or what?

How to Find Good Music

Listened to some of an interview/guest DJ spot with Ray Davies on All Songs Considered over breakfast this morning. (Great interview, btw) He recounted radio in the UK back in the 50's, how there were just 2 stations in the UK proper, then the US Armed forces stuff and radio Luxembourg. Got me thinking, reminiscing of my own days in the 60's of twisting the dial on my little AM transistor radio, looking for new music. The mystical, magical activity of twisting the dial slowly back and forth late at night, hearing something great, but fuzzy, trying to tune it in, only to have it disappear into the cosmos again. The local stations were strong and dependable, but finding even them was not completely scientific - the dial just swept across an arc of 160 degrees, there were no presets, you had to listen for what you want.

Fast forward to today, and there are new ways to find new music, or, to put it more precisely, music you haven't heard before. iTunes, iLike, Lastfm. They work, kind of. My favorite so far is Goombah. They really do seem to lead me to new stuff that I haven't heard before. I have my tastes, just like anyone, but I want to be surprised. They seem to deliver.

But I wonder if Goombah, or anyone else out there, could devise a device that simulates an AM or a short wave radio. You sweep the dial, and you hear snatches of music. When you hear something you like, you try to tune it in. Boy, that would be heaven! Perhaps its appeal would only be to a nostalgic older generation. But I think its appeal would go deeper.

Playlists, as they currently are, are intended to be turned on and left alone. Yes, you can skip past songs you don't care for, but the interaction is sporadic. With a radio dial, the interaction is in the moment, intense. You are concentrating on finding something, and only when you find a station that you like do you sit back and see what comes next. It becomes a moment of concentrated musical discovery.

If someone develops this idea, let me know. I don't need credit, I just want to use it!

Post Reviews Please

Some really fine reviews and notices for I'm Growing have been coming in. Emails of appreciation from people like you, and reviews from newspaper, magazines and blogs. I'm so glad people are liking it and hip to it.

It's especially sweet when a reviewer not only likes it, but seems to understand why I had to make this cd. From zooglobble, the reviewer writes: "One of the things I like most about the kids' music genre is the feeling that artists are following their own muse, no matter how skewed, when they jump in...Which brings me to Gunnar Madsen."

Or this, from KidsMusicThatRocks: "It's incredibly interesting to see how the course of Madsen's life affected the development of these particular tunes: Madsen didn't simply make up and throw together a bunch of songs just to have a kids' album on the market."

Makes me feel all warm and cuddly!

But I still need help getting the word out to more people. Will you help?

Post your own review on iTunes or Amazon or CDBaby. Just click on a link to post your review and/or comments. Add your voice to some of these blog reviews:

"Brilliant arrangements and performances. Period. And funny! And fun! And entertaining for everyone in the family! What more could a kid and his grownups want?" - KidsMusicThatRocks.blogspot.com

"Deliciously good music" - Thingamababy.com

"The best "Beethoven's Wig" piece never written" - Zooglobble.com

"Overall, this one disappoints" - OutWithTheKids.blogspot.com

"Spirited, quirky children's CD" - CommonSenseMedia.org

I am deeply grateful for all your support. Making music is a huge part of my life, and I couldn't be doing it without people like you!

love and peace,

 

Gunnar

Too Good for Kids?

I just had a little email conversation with Bill Harley, about a comment he received after a recent concert. The person told him "You're too good to sing for kids."

Well, that's a nice compliment in its way. I suppose one way to interpret it is "most music for kids is pretty bad, but your music is good." And that's nice. Somewhat true, even.

But, TOO good for kids? It's not like "Well, I got pretty good at writing music for kids. So good in fact that I moved on to writing for teenagers, then I got super good and started writing for college age kids. But I'm SO past that now - I've been writing fantastic music for middle age people, and now my agent says I'm ready to launch into music for the silver set..."

The goal is good music - for whatever age. I was a kid. I still have many thriving inner children, and every one of those inner children inside me wants good stuff. I suppose I have inner teenagers, inner middle aged men...So I write for me, or, uh, them, or, uh...you know. For all of me.

In a recent review of "I'm Growing", the author has a witty interchange with his wife about the 'appropriateness' of the song "Pumpkin Hair" for kids. She maintains that lyrics like "If she will let me be her guy, I'll never go free-rangin" aren't right for young kids. He counters with "But he's talking about marrying a woman and committing himself to her. Isn't that what Mom and Dad have done?" The review (on Thingamababy) has sparked a lot of comments. What is appropriate? Opinions vary,obviously.

Dan Zanes writes that one of his most-requested songs is an old sea shanty called "Pay Me My Money Down", which sings about jail, a bar, money ;the usual concerns of sailors of yore (perhaps of sailors of now, too). He apparently didn't think twice about putting it on his CD "Night Time".

Lately I've been teaching choir to grades 4-6 at my son's montessori school. It's a cool challenge to find songs that will capture them and inspire them. I mean, my childhood experience singing choir was generally snooze-ville. I wanted rock and roll, please. But rock and roll and 60 voices don't really work (except for the intro to "You Can't Always Get What you Want"). Sea Shanties survive the choir treatment well, so we're doing "Drunken Sailor". A song that cannot be done in public schools (see "drunken"). The kids LOVE it, and it's inspired some great discussion. One kid knew of other verses, including one about doing something with the captain's daughter - Why didn't I include that verse? he asked. Because, I said, that verse was inappropriate. We went on to talk about why sailors (of yore) felt the need to get drunk, and how a "dose of salt and water" was to make the sailor throw up and get sober faster ("eww, yuch!").

Kids know a lot about life. Sheltering them from inappropriate things is, well, appropriate, but they're bound to learn of things outside of your control, and then they're going to have questions about that stuff. Are you just going to pretend not to hear? Why not let sea shanties about drunken sailors and jail be a starting point for talking about these real issues? Songs offer a 'safe' way for kids to explore and approach issues that are all around them and can feel overwhelming.

It's not like I have any songs about jail or drunkeness on "I'm Growing", but still the review on Commonsense Media has a kind of disclaimer, saying that the cd "might require just a bit of discussion or explanation". I would hope! What a wonderful thing to fill a child (or a grown-up) with questions, with a yearning to find out more? That's why I don't dumb-down the words in my songwriting. I want kids running to the dictionary (or the computer) to figure out what "obfuscate" means. I want them to challenge their teacher to use it in a sentence!

I want music that a family can enjoy together. My family all sat around the record player and laughed when we put on the Smothers Brothers. Much of it was over my head, but because my parents were laughing, I wanted to know MORE. And this was something we could share together. My dad didn't like the Beatles, I didn't like my mom's LP of the soundtrack to "Vertigo", but we could all get behind the Limelighters and the Smothers Brothers. (Okay, I'm beginning to carbon-date myself...)

So it is today. I'm writing music for families to enjoy together. That's what Dan Zanes is doing. That's what Bill Harley is doing. Making music that's too good to be JUST kids music.

Welcome to the Blog Spot

Hello friends,

Why blog? I need a way to keep in touch. So I decided to write to you on my website.

It's not as good as sharing a delicious meal together and chatting long into the night. It's not as good as a phone call, hearing each others' voices. It's not as good as a letter, where the words are scratched onto the paper by a hand that you know and love. I know, it's not even like email, where there's a back and forth to it all.

But I had to do SOMETHING, fergoshsakes!

I miss performing in front of living breathing sneezing laughing people. I even miss the part of touring that meant that I came to your town and sometimes had time to share a delicious meal together and chat long into the night (though I don't miss sitting in airports and on airplanes).

But life takes us in unexpected directions. I knew life would change when we decided to have a child 5 years ago. I just didn't know how it would change. That's the whole point of adventure, right? To NOT know where you're going.

Well, it's a fine adventure so far. I had pretty good, concrete notions of what love and exhaustion were about. But then Q was born, and it felt like a piece of my heart lived outside my body, like love was an actual physical part of my body that could be held and amazed over. And it felt so precious! I understood that fierceness that comes with parenting, the need to guard the precious being. And then, there was the exhaustion.

Hey, I know exhaustion. I'm in the performing arts. I've gone weeks without sleep to get a show on its feet, working 20 hours days. Don't tell me about exhaustion!

But let me tell you about exhaustion. When you're involved in a project, say a play, you work long and hard, but there is an end in sight - an opening night, a closing night. There are limits, boundaries to it. This does not apply to parenting. Sure, you can look forward to school starting at age 5, or college starting at age 18, but we're talking years on end of 4-5 hours sleep a night. It's a whole different ball game. And, now that Q is 5 and has started school, it turns out that starting school was an ephemeral boundary. Yes, we're no longer changing diapers, but there are other, new, screamingly important issues that need to be addressed. And, in our case, Q still rarely sleeps through the night. I'm exhausted!

As for my music, much of it was on hold for the first few years of Q's life. I was able to tend to projects that were already in motion, but had no time or energy to do new things. That began to shift 2 years ago, and I now have a sketchbook full of new ideas for instrumental music (Spinning World 2), and was able to write and record and put out a new family CD ("I'm Growing"). That CD took so much longer than I thought it would. But I only have a few morning and afternoon hours when Q's at school to do my work. After that it's childcare, cook dinner, get to bed and grovel for grains of sleep until the sun and Q pop up.

Will I perform again? You betcha. I really do miss it. It's just not the right time now for me to get outta the house. Q needs me, my body needs to rest. So here we are, communing in cyberspace, making a connection that makes sense for the time being. While this blog is currently not set up to take comments, you are of course welcome to email me. Or write to me, a real letter!

What about the guestbook? Well, it was getting spammed hard, and took too much energy to clean up all the time. Sorry I couldn't keep that open.