I hid her in soft gardens

A short piano piece I wrote as a gift for my wife.

I hid her in soft gardens (download in PDF format).

Hans Reichel

Honk, belch, grunt, moan, screech, wail, bellow or snort if you've ever heard the music of Hans Reichel.

The work of this German guitarist and instrument maker is difficult to come by. I managed to find a copy of the CD Lower Lurum on Amazon a couple of years ago, before it got too expensive. I just ordered a new CD, Yuxo, and may write about it later in this space.

Reichel invented the Daxophone, an instrument consisting of a thin wooden tongue in a wooden resonator, mounted with contact mikes. It's played with a bow, like a violin, and stopped with another wood block, as you can see in this demo. The word "animal" usually comes up when people write about the sound of the instrument:

Telling the Truth About K Minor (excerpt) - Hans Reichel, from the album Lower Lurum

Reichel's music is weird, but it's also warm and funny, in a way that weird music rarely seems to manage.

(A link to Reichel's Daxophone site.)

Minimalist highways

I don't listen to a lot of country music, but today on a whim I downloaded an album by a country singer I had never heard before named Gillian Welch. The album, Time (The Revelator), is a somber and pretty thing, and it ends with a very unusual song.

"I Dream a Highway" has a sixteen-bar verse - no chorus, no bridge, no other musical material. The song begins with solo voice and guitars; some way in, a harmony voice enters. What makes the song remarkable is that these sixteen bars are repeated for seventeen verses. The whole song is nearly fifteen minutes long.

It must have taken a huge amount of gumption to write and record such a slow song, with so many verses, all set to the same melody. It ought to be the most boring thing imaginable, but it's pulled off beautifully. Throughout, the melody is subtly ornamented, and there are low-key fills and counter-melodies in the guitar. It's a lovely piece of music, and a nice illustration of how, under the right circumstances, small gestures can be enough.

Ninety-five, at least

"Virtuoso" is often used to mean a musician who can play a lot of notes, fast - like a pianist navigating the shoals of a Chopin etude. But there are other kinds of virtuosity. In 1953 and 1954, the clarinetist and band leader Artie Shaw recorded sessions with the last incarnation of his quintet, the Gramercy Five. In the slow numbers, Shaw's playing exemplifies the virtuosity of turning a beautiful phrase.

Yesterdays (excerpt) - Artie Shaw, from the album Self Portrait

In these ballads, Shaw spins one long, winding, nuanced line after another. To play this way requires having ideas about how to place every note in the phrase, how to get from one note to the next, how to shape individual notes, all while attending to the mechanical details of realizing these plans; and all while maintaining an illusion of elegant, effortless spontaneity. Shaw manages to make it sound as easy as breathing.

Shaw quit playing clarinet after making these recordings. As Gary Giddins relates in his book Visions of Jazz:

"...it began with a recollection of hearing Heifitz play the Bach Chaccone during the period when Shaw himself was mostly touring with symphonies and chamber groups. Shaw found the performance astounding, but when he congratulated Heifitz, the violinist said: 'Really? I thought I was a little off tonight.' Shaw then said:

I realized, he's aiming at a hundred. He hits ninety-four regularly, so he hit a ninety-three that night. Nobody hits ninety-five regularly. There's not much difference, but he can hear it, and it's the same with clarinet. We had one night off a week at the Embers, and I'd come in the next day and I wasn't happy until about halfway through the evening. If you play really honestly, if you're cursed with that, even with one day off you can't hit the ninety-four. That's why I quit, it's too tough. There comes a point at which you say, Holy Christ, that's all you can do on this instrument. 'Yesterdays' was the last time I ever played. There was no point after that."