From: owner-onlyjoni-digest@smoe.org (onlyJMDL Digest) To: onlyjoni-digest@smoe.org Subject: onlyJMDL Digest V2007 #163 Reply-To: joni@smoe.org Sender: owner-onlyjoni-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-onlyjoni-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk Archives: http://www.smoe.org/lists/onlyjoni Websites: http://www.jmdl.com http://www.jonimitchell.com Unsubscribe: mailto:onlyjoni-digest-request@smoe.org?body=unsubscribe onlyJMDL Digest Wednesday, May 30 2007 Volume 2007 : Number 163 ========== TOPICS and authors in this Digest: -------- Lord Jim's in B.C. [] She's everywhere! [Chuck Eisenhardt ] I have inspired another! [Motitan@aol.com] Re: I have inspired another! [Bob.Muller@Fluor.com] New York Times ["Gerald A. Notaro" ] Re: New York Times [Motitan@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 00:04:44 -0700 From: Subject: Lord Jim's in B.C. Great Joni riff, as always, Patti! Funny you should mention that gin drink. One of the testimonials on the resort web page comes from an elderly couple who celebrated the husband's 80th birthday there and they particularly commended the bartender on an "excellent martini." LOL I almost imagined they were those rockin retirees that barged in on Joni way back ;-) I look at the photos and they all look straight off the album art on FTR. Yes, it is as beautiful as it looks - even more so. I have some photos of the place and area and maybe can post them at some point. Now if we fill up the whole place, the overflow can always stay down the road at another Joni story place - the Jolly Roger Inn. I don't know if they have renovated, too, but the place also sits right on a gorgeous cove. "I'm lookin way out on the ocean - love to see that green water in motion..." Kakki ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 07:56:18 -0400 From: Chuck Eisenhardt Subject: She's everywhere! Recently the Boston Globe ran a story about an increase in coyote' sightings around the city neighborhoods and the region. Coverage included a picture of a concerned resident of Roslindale searching the neighborhood with a baseball bat (presumably to dispatch this animal and her pups.) Several readers seem to feel this response, and indeed the tone of the coverage to be inappropriate, and wrote letters to the editor. These letters were published under the headline "Regrets, Coyote" ChuckE ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 11:30:09 EDT From: Motitan@aol.com Subject: I have inspired another! By talking about Joni's music and quoting lyrics here and there I have inspired a friend of mine to get a bunch of her albums. He was telling me he was getting some Joni albums today and I asked him, why the sudden interest? And he said, "well you always talk about her..." This brings me joy as I just want to spread the joy! What's wrong with that? More Joni in the world makes it a better world.....! - -Monika NP: Banquet-Joni ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 13:29:29 -0400 From: Bob.Muller@Fluor.com Subject: Re: I have inspired another! Congratulations, Monika - it is far easier for you to influence your generation than old fogies like me. Speaking of more Joni in the world, I just heard "Conversation" at lunchtime - it played on XM's "Deep Tracks" channel. It's not exactly ideal music to lift weights by, but it was still pretty cool. Bob NP: Elvis C, "Pay It Back" - ------------------------------------------------------------ The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain proprietary, business-confidential and/or privileged material. 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In the age of the sample, the remix and countless YouTube parodies, entire songs and sometimes entire albums are still being recycled and reclaimed, and musicians are presenting themselves as critics, curators and -- above all -- fans. Among a wave of tribute albums released this season, ''A Tribute to Joni Mitchell'' (Nonesuch) does just about everything right. Immediately recognizable performers -- Prince, Annie Lennox, Bjork, Emmylou Harris -- take on Ms. Mitchell's idiosyncratic songs with a balance of humility and chutzpah; they are fans who won't reduce themselves to disciples. On tribute albums, musicians show the world the songs they care about. But with the narcissism that every artist needs, they assert that they see themselves reflected in their idols. When a tribute album works best, musicians reveal both what they learned and how they made it their own. Tribute albums have always been exercises in memory and continuity, mapping connections of sound and style. They trade on familiar songs or famous names, but what they promise is not an oldies experience (or for that matter, the experience provided by tribute bands that mimic name-brand acts). They aim for relevance, not nostalgia. And now, in the era of the isolated MP3 download and the randomly shuffled playlist, tribute albums aren't just homages to musicians. They are also tributes to the vanishing idea of the album itself: that a collection of songs can still mean something as a whole. That is the strategy behind another worthwhile tribute album, ''The Sandinista! Project'' (00:02:59), a song-by-song remake of the Clash's 1980 album ''Sandinista!'' by indie-rock and alt-country stalwarts and unknowns. The reasons for tributes are as varied as the performers, and they are rarely pure. Remaking someone else's music can be a shortcut to surefire material, ancestor-worship, a collegial embrace, an endorsement, a way to rewrite history, a generational rivalry and an attempt at one-upmanship, all in the same song. Collectively, tributes are canon-builders: musicians declaring, with respect and envy, which songs deserve another listen. And musicians will have the last word, since they're the ones who will decide, over time, what's worth learning or cribbing. But lately they've had help and second opinions. Sample-happy producers can push an old song back into the canon with a three-second snippet. And fans who aren't performers are also having their say, as music blogs, recommendation engines, shared playlists and other word-of-Web supply canon fodder of their own. (One kind of tribute album, where stars rally behind a cult favorite like Roky Erickson, Jandek, Victoria Williams or Vic Chesnutt, is disappearing as fewer geniuses remain unheard.) The interaction between songwriter, performer and audience is becoming three-sided again -- almost as it was in the days before recording technology, when a song's only means of survival was to have new people learn it. With tribute albums, musicians have to admit that performers are audience members too. Tribute albums have been part of pop at least as far back as Ella Fitzgerald's celebrated songbook series, each devoted to a particular Tin Pan Alley songwriter. Thematic collections have long since been taken for granted in jazz. Rock has also been developing that kind of self-conscious hindsight. Tribute albums are often benefits for charitable causes, but a second cause also looms behind them: rock itself. Rock is gathering its own repertory movement -- perhaps a sign, as with jazz and Tin Pan Alley pop, of an endangered music consolidating its best stuff as it rallies to survive. Lately, rock repertory has developed some cachet beyond the jukebox musicals on Broadway and doppelganger tribute bands -- from the affectionate and mocking songwriter revues of the Losers Lounge in New York City to events like the Bruce Springsteen tribute at Carnegie Hall in April. Across pop, interpreters are regaining ground after a mere few decades in which performers were generally expected to come up with their own material. The isolated single, not the album, drives music sales, and no one seems to mind if the producer is a song's strongest creative force. Authorship is growing less important and more tangled in a cut-and-paste culture that thrusts all digital information into a public domain, heedless of copyright. Fans project themselves into songs they love; interpreters do the same thing, louder and, presumably, more skillfully. Every interpreter has to decide what the essence of a piece of a chosen song is: the tune? the words? the hooks? the inflections? the textures? And sometimes the way to respect a song is to tear it apart, if only to show that what's left is still distinctive. ''A Tribute to Joni Mitchell'' is what might be called a peer-to-peer collection -- stars covering a star -- and it has representatives from multiple pop generations. Ms. Mitchell's face on the album package appears something like the Shroud of Turin: a revered afterimage, lingering in her absence as the songs' unheard creator. Fine print in the liner notes, which are mostly lyrics, gently directs the curious toward Ms. Mitchell's original albums like a hyperlink. The album welcomes younger listeners without daunting older ones. More important, however, is that the remakes of Ms. Mitchell's songs reach deep and far, complementing one another and extrapolating from her own versions. Each homage illuminates a different thread of Ms. Mitchell's songwriting. Prince finds a torchy R&B ballad in ''A Case of You,'' while Annie Lennox wraps the hippie decadence of ''Ladies of the Canyon'' in lush psychedelia. Caetano Veloso peppers ''Dreamland,'' a song about tropical exoticism, history and globe-hopping, with rhythms from his native Brazil. Sufjan Stevens turns ''Free Man in Paris,'' the complaints of a record-business mogul, into a suite of pop possibilities. Sarah McLachlan carries ''Blue'' into a cathedral of multiplied voices and sustained sounds, while Emmylou Harris treats ''The Magdalene Laundries'' as a plainspoken Celtic-Appalachian ballad. Until the album loses steam in its final tracks, ''A Tribute to Joni Mitchell'' elegantly draws the present out of the past. Beyond each track's individual thrills, a tribute album can illuminate a style and sensibility or reconsider a historical moment, as ''The Sandinista! Project'' does with contributions from Amy Rigby, Stew, Jon Langford and Sally Timms and dozens of others. The original ''Sandinista!'' filled three LPs with outsize ambitions: songs about violence, victims, revolution and drugs, delivered in a haze of punk, reggae, funk and glimmers of hip-hop. The remake, like most tribute albums, is hit or miss, but luckily it's anything but reverent. A few Clash imitations show up, but so do multidirectional time warps. Songs skew toward Appalachia with banjos, plunge into psychedelic loops and echoes, unleash theremin on ''The Call Up'' and the Persian wail of Haale on ''One More Time.'' Members of the Clash wanted their songs to reverberate worldwide; ''The Sandinista! Project'' proclaims that they succeeded. And it not only insists that the original album hung together but goes on to take the sprawl of ''Sandinista!'' even further. The Joni Mitchell tribute and ''The Sandinista! Project'' share the tribute shelves with ''Endless Highway: The Music of the Band'' (SLG/429), on which jam bands slavishly emulate the Band's originals, offering only better enunciated lyrics. More tributes are on the way. A two-CD collection of John Lennon songs (with additional songs online), ''Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur'' (Warner Brothers), is due June 12, with major names like U2, Green Day and Christina Aguilera. Aerosmith (joined by Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars) delivers a whooping, raucous version of ''Give Peace a Chance,'' while underdogs like Regina Spektor and the Postal Service quietly make the Lennon songs their own. But unlike the Mitchell tribute, it's a scattershot collection and often a little too worshipful, treating Lennon, the Beatles' iconoclast, as an icon. On ''We All Love Ella'' (Verve), due June 5, R&B and pop singers take up Ella Fitzgerald's repertory -- mostly doing their best Ella imitations backed by a big band. The cozy ''Anchored in Love: A Tribute to June Carter Cash'' (Dualtone), is also due June 5. With Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Brad Paisley, Loretta Lynn and Elvis Costello, it's actually a tribute to multiple generations of the Carter family and their songs about love, mortality and faith. It stays fairly close to its country and mountain-music roots; there's a lot of autoharp, Ms. Cash's instrument. But the album's least-known performer, Grey DeLisle, unearths a June Carter murder ballad, ''Big Yellow Peaches,'' and haunts it with her high, whispery voice over eerie drones. A notable full-length album tribute is due in August: Zeitkratzer's ''Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music'' (Asphodel), which transcribes Mr. Reed's worst-selling 1975 album -- originally an opus of guitar feedback -- for chamber ensemble, followed by Mr. Reed himself with a climactic solo. Played by a live group, ''Metal Machine Music'' sounds even wilder and more frenetic, and Zeitkratzer's act of fandom -- countless work-hours involved in transcribing and orchestrating -- moves ''Metal Machine Music'' into a context where, perhaps, it always belonged: as an avant-garde piece of bristling minimalism rather than a rock musician's bizarre experiment. Tribute albums are proud to be keepsakes and to return nearly forgotten music to circulation. They insist that an old song can stand up against a new one or eclipse it; that cultural progress is not only linear but can loop back and rediscover what was almost missed. Countless music fans now join musicians in doing the same thing, posting their most recondite collectors' items online as MP3s, encouraging links. It is easy to imagine Tribute Album 2.0, sometime around 2027, as a collaboration of musicians and nonmusicians, fans working in tandem. Someone rediscovers a songwriter, a producer or an interpreter who deserves a little more attention: barely remembered figures from the past like OutKast or Arcade Fire. Someone else, by then, will have figured out algorithms that will replicate the latest hitmakers' tone, taste and quirks. And of course there will be a program to apply one to the other for an instant, up-to-the-minute tribute. All that will be left is for yet another fan to post, knowingly and ruefully, the comment that nowadays, they just don't write songs like they used to. [Photograph] Joni Mitchell, above, at her house in Los Angeles in 1970; on ''A Tribute to Joni Mitchell,'' Sufjan Stevens, left, sings one of her songs. (Photo by Henry Diltz); ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 22:06:36 EDT From: Motitan@aol.com Subject: Re: New York Times Thanks for posting this. It was an interesting read. - -Mon ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. ------------------------------ End of onlyJMDL Digest V2007 #163 ********************************* ------- Post messages to the list by clicking here: mailto:joni@smoe.org Unsubscribe by clicking here: mailto:onlyjoni-digest-request@smoe.org?body=unsubscribe ------- Siquomb, isn't she? (http://www.siquomb.com/siquomb.cfm)