From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V8 #63 Reply-To: precious-things@smoe.org Sender: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "precious-things-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. precious-things-digest Tuesday, March 11 2003 Volume 08 : Number 063 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Steve Mcqueen/Father Lucifer [JulieAnneS78@aol.com] tori on isaac mizrahi reminder [noam tchotchke ] Re: Tori in Texas [noam tchotchke ] Looking for anaheim tix [Linner317@aol.com] Re: tori sighting [Brian K Tanaka ] Re: NYC RCMH Night 2 Review [Brian K Tanaka ] Re: tori on isaac mizrahi reminder [Natashacwallace@aol.com] Re: NYC RCMH Night 2 Review [Richard Handal ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 10:44:50 -0500 From: JulieAnneS78@aol.com Subject: Steve Mcqueen/Father Lucifer Hello everyone, Does anyone know the word to the Steve Mcqueen bridge during the performance of Father Lucifer in NYC?? Please email the lyrics to me, if you do? I am dying to know the words! Thanks, Julie ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:32:02 -0500 From: noam tchotchke Subject: tori on isaac mizrahi reminder just a quick reminder that tori will be on the isaac mizrahi program on oxygen tonight. it airs at 10:30pm et/9:30pm ct (not sure about mt and pt - -- check your local listings). details about the show are at its website: http://www.oxygen.com/isaac/ the site's not very clear, but it looks like this program *might* be repeated on thursday, march 13th as well. just to confuse matters, rockontv.com only has tori scheduled to be on the show on march 20th and does not mention either airing that oxygen.com indicates. i suspect that they are wrong since mizrahi reports that patti lupone will be on march 20th. if someone who gets oxygen can watch and let us know what's up, that would be cool. thanks, woj ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:39:45 -0500 From: noam tchotchke Subject: Re: Tori in Texas one time at band camp, Sarah Bowman said: >I was wondering if anyone knew the presale details for Tori in Austin and >Dallas (if that info is out there yet). nope -- those details haven't announced yet. in fact, neither of those shows are even confirmed at this point. tori's rumored to be in austin on (i think) april 26th at the backyard, but it's just a rumor at this point still, i think. dallas is even less concrete. >I know the Houston and San Antonio presales are on the same day (march 15)... actually, houston and san antonio are probably going to on sale to the public on march 15th. presales for both shows will probably happen on march 13th, if the previous pattern of presales taking place two days before the public sale holds true. i imagine we'll have some information about those shows tonight or tomorrow whenever fanscape/toriamos.com get around to announcing this week's presales. incidentally, clear channel is listing the san antonio show as "on sale now" but that's likely a boo-boo on their part since the majestic sells tickets through ticketmaster and ticketmaster doesn't have it listed at all yet. woj ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 15:26:00 -0500 From: Linner317@aol.com Subject: Looking for anaheim tix ok i dont ever do this but if any of you guys are willing to sell me your extra tix to the anaheim show i just might take them off our hands. i'm looking for 3 tix. hopefully all together but i'd also buy one pair and one individual. i'll keep looking on tix master but everything thus far has been super far away. i know it's tori and i've seen her a bunch and i'd just go to listen. but the people i'm taking might apreciate a closer look u know. i'd sit in the back if they could have closer. so anyhooz - i just thought i'd put that out. and a word of warning those of you on exit 75 will get a similer email if i can ever find the email addy. lol. thanks for listening. hugs and pumpkins. peace linner out. -z- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:32:34 -0800 From: Brian K Tanaka Subject: Re: tori sighting On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 10:50:19PM -0500, Cyndi S Crawford boldly wrote: > > >...my sister was reading the contestants interviews on the American Idol > performers for last night and she told me that one of the girls said her > favorite album was Tori's "Boys for Pele".< > now what I wanna know is if any of the contestants are singing > Tori songs.. I know I would if I tried for AI. :D I've been known to watch dumb things on tv, but AI doesn't happen to be one of them. However, that said, I did watch one of the audition AIs and judging by that I think you can be certain, Cyndi, that no one will be singing any Tori songs on that show. The accepted scope of musical material and presentation is ludicrously narrow. The goal seems to be to shed any ounce of individuality you may have and instead try to emulate as closely as possible some recently commercially successful pap. Hrm... I'm shooting fish in a barrel, aren't I? Next time they do it, you should try for it, Cyndi. I would pay good money to see you do, oh say... Professional Widow on AI. - -- - - Brian Tanaka - - Thunder Wishes, Fire Thought: http://www.well.com/~btanaka/tori ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 16:00:02 -0800 From: Brian K Tanaka Subject: Re: NYC RCMH Night 2 Review On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 01:01:05PM -0500, Richard Handal boldly wrote: > > Brian posted: > > > The more I followed her singing, the more the comparison with the > > great jazz musicians like Coltrane, Monk, and Parker came to mind > > unbidden. Timing. Phrasing. > > Absolutely, but let us include Frank Sinatra, too. Sinatra had a way of Weird. Sinatra was the person I originally had in mind and was thinking about during the concert. I didn't site him because I'm not familiar enough with his work personally. Why, then, was he the one who came to mind? Because the first serious jazz person I came into contact with when I was young (the rather intimidating father of a girl I was dating at the time) revered Sinatra's timing and phrasing and, for some reason, that reverence made an impression on me and stayed with me all these years. > singing in concert that even though one might be well used to how he had > sung a song on a studio recording, it would be impossible to sing along in > one's head when hearing him in concert because of how drastically he would > shift phrasing and employ so much fresh nuance. One thing this does is > encourage the concert listener to closely follow on a moment-to-moment Very interesting. I experienced this exact effect that night. Tori, as we all know, draws us in on my different levels (e.g. emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, etc) and in many different ways during a performance, but this was the first time I was clearly conscious of *this* particular way. When considering these various ways she shapes the overall result and how perfectly the various ways fit together and reinforce one another, one's admiration can do nothing but increase. And then, as you add another--such as what we're talking about here--it becomes all the more incredible. > basis what is being sung, because otherwise, when singing along mentally > at a concert one would quickly be at odds with the vocal line. This effect > of bringing along the listener from one moment to the next is one way both > Sinatra and Tori make for such compelling listening. Being an Well, the effect had me deeply in thrall all night. Each fresh nuance binding me closer to each moment. As I mentioned before, there are many ways she draws us in like this, but this is a particularly potent element. I hadn't considered how the tension/contrast between the reflex of singing along mentally and the unique performance itself is a driving force. Is this a widely known thing of which I've been ignorant? What a cool concept. I wonder how much this kind of thing plays into songs now more than ten years old stay so fresh? I've said this before, but I'll say it again: songs like, for instance, SATY sound vital, fresh, and full of life every time they're played. They still live and breathe, and when she plays them they sound as if they're making their way to our world for the first time. I positive that the reason behind this is broader and less tangible than a particular technical music detail such as playing with timing and nuance alone, but that detail must have its place in the phenomena as well. One last thing on this point... there are three ways of singing along at a Tori concert: silently and perhaps even subconsciously, by subvocalizing, and by singing out loud. (Since I mentioned singing out loud, I have to editorialize: please don't do that. ;-) I *think* it's a given that mental activity is different depending on how you vocalize your thoughts. (e.g. Novice car drivers will often say out loud what they are doing to aid in memory recall.) I wonder if, given that and given the relationship between listener expectation and performance variation, singing out loud--because it brings listener expectation disproportionately to the fore--actually decreases the quality of the listener's experience. (I hope so, because then I could make a shirt to wear to shows that says, "It's been scientifically proven that you should shut up." ;-) > instrumentalist, Tori is also doing this with her playing even as she does > it with her singing. The double whammy! > This constant shifting of expression based on how her day went and other > things which combine to put her head in a particular place is what makes > one concert different from another more than the changing setlist does, I agree. All one has to do to prove this point to herself is to listen to, say, ten full-length boots of kickass shows. It'll become readily apparent that the relationship between setlist and overall show quality is tenuous at best. > personalizes it, and places it more in the moment. Someone once quoted me > from a private conversation in which I said, "Screw the setlist." While I > do appreciate variety in the songs from one concert to the next, for me, > the difference in the list of songs performed from one night to the next > takes a back seat in importance to the experience of hearing the variety > of ways in which she inflects some of the same material from night to > night. It's an endless process of discovery, one I find intellectually as > well as emotionally and spiritually stimulating. I confess I used to be more hung up on setlists than I have been lately (Although if I don't hear a handful of specific songs soon I'm going to freak out!) And Friday's show shifted me yet a little more to the "screw the setlist" spirit; there was a point not long into the show where it was crystal clear to me that it mattered not at all what she played next. Of course, that didn't make me feel any better on Saturday when I found out that Gold Dust had been on the setlist but not played! - -- - - Brian Tanaka - - Thunder Wishes, Fire Thought: http://www.well.com/~btanaka/tori ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 20:12:27 EST From: Natashacwallace@aol.com Subject: Re: tori on isaac mizrahi reminder Hello All, I hope it's OK that I am posting to all, but I figured as it was very late anyway...according to the "guide" on my TV when one clicks on Oxygen it says "Tori Amos" when you highlight "Isaac Mizrahi Show"-so I really hope she's on, or that would just be a mean tease to all of us on these lists pondering and investigating this subject! It's also on at 10:30 PM ET. Enjoy the show! Yay! ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 23:26:15 -0500 (EST) From: Richard Handal Subject: Re: NYC RCMH Night 2 Review Replying to Brian, here: Almost like a conversation, eh? That never happens--anywhere. > > This effect of bringing along the listener from one moment to the > > next is one way both Sinatra and Tori make for such compelling > > listening. > > Well, the effect had me deeply in thrall all night. Each fresh nuance > binding me closer to each moment. As I mentioned before, there are many > ways she draws us in like this, but this is a particularly potent element. > > I hadn't considered how the tension/contrast between the reflex of > singing along mentally and the unique performance itself is a driving > force. Is this a widely known thing of which I've been ignorant? What > a cool concept. Right now I'm only passingly familiar with music theory--standard Western Anglo and some semiotics-based theory of the "new musicology," as it's been termed. I'd be most curious to hear if this kind of thing has been presented as known music theory. I never heard of it. I've done a lot of thinking over many years about the psychology of how music affects one in different ways. This is one idea that made sense to me. (I made it up.) I also have some theories on how "psychedelic" music such as of the Grateful Dead and fugal "classical" compositional styles can serve to transport one out of one's head beyond what other types of music typically would, and technically, why that works. The rhythmic shifting of two or more lines against one another--be they vocal against piano (left hand and right hand could create more than a single line of musical thought, too) or guitar against bass and vocal or whatever--can work to sort of unseat the train of conscious thought so as to allow one to dissociate with what one might otherwise have had going on in one's conscious mind. The type of thinking used to follow shifting lines of music isn't used in everyday life except in certain professions or hobbies. Enough of that for now. > I wonder how much this kind of thing plays into songs now more than ten > years old stay so fresh? The songs get almost wholly reinvented each tour, and then many of them further refined over the course of the tours. She rearranges them according to the instrumentation available on a given tour combined with taking a fresh look at the old material and making it as new as if had spontaneously sprung from a puddle of mud. One thing I noticed on the '99 tour was how much the songs she did only rarely were as if unique events unrelated to how they'd been incarnated on prior tours. I even spoke a little bit about this with her once: when I heard her working on Mother for like twenty minutes before the Columbus concert on 4 September 1994 I knew we were in for something special that night. Think about that for a second--she worked for twenty minutes in 1999 to arrange a song she wrote in 1990 and had played hundreds of times. Now, some of that seemed to have pertained to her finding out which vocal notes she had available to her that night, but a lot of it seemed to come from simply taking a fresh approach to the song on that tour, as it was the first time she'd performed it in '99. It was as if she knew the bare essence of what the song was and sought to outfit it for the evening. Don't let anyone tell you that the stuff she says about the songs being girls and going out in different clothes is crap--this is really the way things work. People who complain about that don't understand this or they're hung up on the language. > I've said this before, but I'll say it again: songs like, for instance, > SATY sound vital, fresh, and full of life every time they're played. > They still live and breathe, and when she plays them they sound as if > they're making their way to our world for the first time. One other thing I noticed in this regard which she confirmed in an interview sometime over the past year is that she's gotten some distance between herself and the older songs now, and that also serves to help her take a fresh approach with them. > One last thing on this point... there are three ways of singing along > at a Tori concert: silently and perhaps even subconsciously, by > subvocalizing, and by singing out loud. [. . .] I wonder if, given that > and given the relationship between listener expectation and performance > variation, singing out loud--because it brings listener expectation > disproportionately to the fore--actually decreases the quality of the > listener's experience. Clearly, if nothing else, it decreases the listener's experience of the performer if they can't even hear it that well. And if one has in mind what one will experience one is NOT experiencing it, one is experiencing what one expects one will be presented with, nothing more, nothing less. > > instrumentalist, Tori is also doing this with her playing even as she > > does it with her singing. > > The double whammy! Plus, also as opposed to Sinatra, she wrote the song herself! A triple whammy! Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. "A visitor arrived inquiring about Zen. Master Nan-in (1868-1912) silently poured him a cup of tea and continued pouring until the cup overflowed. "Why do you continue to pour after the cup is full?" asked the visitor. "To show you," replied Nan-in, "that you are like this cup: so full of your own preconceptions that nothing can go in. I can't tell you about Zen until you have emptied your cup." ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V8 #63 ************************************