Dave Brown

I blame my iPod

This night, my iPod decided to present me the following sequence of music:

1. Loreena McKennit: The Mask and the Mirror
2. Nigel Kennedy: The Four Seasons
3. Tom Waits: Mule Variations

Let me tell you, sandwiched between Loreena McKennit and Tom Waits, poor old Nigel Kennedy suffered. One of the big things that leapt out at me was that as his obligato instrument, despite all of the choices available to Nigel Kennedy in the science fiction year of 1999, he still chose, out of all the possibilities available to him, a harpsichord. He could have chosen an organ, or a piano, or for crying out loud, a synthesizer. Heck, he could have gone with an accordion. The obligato instrument is entirely up to the arranger, and deliberately so—when that music was written, a lot of stuff depended on what musical instruments happened to be available at the time. But despite the deliberately-open choice available to him at the tail end of the 20th century, he chose a harpsichord.

As far as being compared to Loreena McKennit, her biggest hit is a song called “The Bonny Swans” which was written in approximately 1564 by someone so thoroughly forgotten to history that the song is ascribed to the ever-prolific “Traditional”. One of the appealing features of her rendition of this song is that it features some seriously-understated, but still vital to the song, flourishes on that well-known 16th-century instrument, the electric guitar. Indeed, without the electric guitar bits, her song would be significantly diminished, even though they, at best, at embellishment to the material.

On the other hand, Tom Waits’s “Mule Variations” is an album that is highlighted by the Grammy-Award-winning song “Hold On”, which is quite obviously a song recorded in the dead of night, which is according to the liner notes from The Black Rider, Tom Waits’s preferred recording time. It’s pretty obvious from the recording that it was recorded at, if you go from Waits’s preferred hours, about 5:30am—Tom Waits himself sounds tired, and his backing band sounds worn out. The instruments are more-or-less improvised at this point, and the recording is obviously much lower-tech than, say, Nigel Kennedy’s harpsichord-and-caffeine recording of The Four Seasons.

For all its primitiveness, Mule Variations manages to sound much more vital than Nigel Kennedy’s Four Seasons. And I do acknowledge Kennedy’s Four Seasons as being the best recording of the work in the last twenty-five, and possibly fifty years.