William Dart goes globe-trotting, sampling ska from Melbourne, the almost indescribable Korean band SsingSsing, rap and punk from Russia, and ending up in Scotland for folk-singer Karine Polwart's gorgeous new album.
SsingSsing Photo: The Kennedy Centre, video still
You don’t get much more upbeat than Peggy Lee singing this standard by John Rox, maintaining laudable vocal control against some pretty busy trumpet and flute. And although attaining the status of a gay Santa Claus tweaks my interest, you don’t necessarily have to be in love to realise that, yes, it is a big, wide wonderful world.
This week, we indulge in a bit of a global trot, starting off across the Tasman, and going wherever the music takes us.
As one might suspect from their name, The Melbourne Ska Orchestra isn’t afraid of a little bit of cultural diversification. Or, if you’re not so taken with good time music, the word that you might come up could be appropriation.
Whatever, these Australians certainly like challenges and their new album, One Year of Ska, catches a remarkably ambitious project. Last year they recorded a weekly ska-take on songs ranging from a handful of Caribbean classics to such alarmingly middle-of-the-road flimsicles as the themes from Hogan’s Heroes and Family Guy.
The ska classics are the best of the 52 tracks and top of the baker’s dozen on offer is this song, written by Dandy Livingstone and famously covered by The Specials back in 1979.
'A Message to you Rudy' was more than a decade old then, and its message to the unsettled youth of Jamaica — the Rudy or rude boys — adapted well for the various social issues and unrest as Britain tottered into the 80s.
When The Melbourne Ska Orchestra picks up the tune, it’s jolly spirits time with nothing to get it in the way. And you have to admire a trombonist who takes on the unforgettable slide-work of Rico Rodriguez on both the Dandy Livingstone and The Specials versions.
I’m finding these days that it’s not difficult to get a taste for late night Linda Ronstadt, even if we’re still waiting for the Melbourne Ska Orchestra to put 'Blue Bayou' into their song satchell.
But, as it happens, a recent Rhino release gives us the chance to hear Ronstadt herself with the song, before a Hollywood studio audience on the 24th April, 1980.
Listening to and watching her performance on line makes one appreciate even more the understated artistry of this American singer. She’s cool but never cold, with an ability to move from the utmost tenderness to a real cry of the soul, when she releases her full vocal cut in the choruses. Best of all, she’s backed by a band that’s about as close to Californian musical heaven as you’re going to get, with names like guitarist Danny Kortchmar, drummer Russ Kunkel and the sighing strains of pedal steel man Dan Dugmore, featured prominently, as he should be, on the video.
Linda Ronstadt would continue for the next three decades to sing everything from Gilbert and Sullivan and Philip Glass to Tin Pan Alley standards with Nelson Riddle.
These days, suffering from Parkinsons Disease, she’s silent as a singer, but very happy to reflect on her life as it has become and how music fits into it.
Talking to the New Yorker earlier this month, she admitted to watching a lot of opera on YouTube and enjoying the Korean band SsingSsing.
Her description of them was enough to have me board a metaphorical plane and fly straight to Seoul. She described them as being like David Bowie bass and drum with really wild South Korean traditional singing. Polytonal, with a lot of gender-bending. Which you can hear, and certainly see, when they give us their 'Cheongchun-ga'.
Moving across the Sea of Japan from Seoul to Vladivostok, this time in a metaphorical ferry, and dipping into the New York Times during the voyage, I find out that Vladimir Putin and his government are not very happy with the new generation of Russian rappers.
Artists like Big Baby Tape, an insidiously popular phenomenon, despite the difficulties of releasing CDs in that country, and considered to have a very worrisome way with words, in numbers such as 'Gimme the Loot'.
While Big Baby Tape’s political intents remain something of mystery to non-Russian speakers, the staunch young women of Pussy Riot put their musical placards in front of the world, in English with a clarity that would have pleased the Council of Trent.
Their most recent single, 'Bad Apples', has nothing at all to do with the Osmond Brothers, although American producer Dave Sitek is the man who’s wrapped it all up with some pretty impressive boom and gloom.
Unlike Big Baby Tape, these women are sparing with expletives, although it’s difficult, listening to their very forthright delivery, not to imagine them as the daughters or more probably granddaughters of that weird rapper of the 1960s, Napoleon XIV (the man that gave us 'They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha Ha').
All of which takes me back to those palmy days of the late 80s, with Soviet Union poised on the brink of Perestroika.
While it would be a few years before Paul McCartney played Red Square, there was Russian rock and roll coming out into the west, which I was happy to cover on New Horizons at the time.
This new liberation even created a media star in Boris Grebenshikov, who was able to exit Russia in 1989 to record an album with CBS.
The album, titled Radio Silence, was lionized at the time. Today it comes across as a weird mixture of quaint and clumsy. Production by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics makes it a period piece, but did bring the bonus of Annie Lennox contributing backing vocals on a number of tracks (joined in this song by Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders). Stewart, playing what’s facetiously described in the liner notes as a million guitars, pumps up the 80s freneticism.
Maybe it’s the presence of Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox that has me skipping to Scotland on the final leg of my journey.
Scottish singer-songwriter Karine Polwart’s new album, titled Scottish Songbook, is a gentle reminder that Britain and the world shouldn’t overlook the strength and character of the music that comes from north of the border – that bands such as Deacon Blue and Big Country deserve to be recognized as Scottish rather than generically UK.
Polwart has been on my short list for a programme more than once before getting bumped.
Most recently, she turned up on a tribute album to Ewan MacColl that I covered, but I couldn’t bear to cut into her six-minute version of MacColl’s 'The Terror Time', a powerful song about the persecution of gypsy folk.
Sometime before that, when I was enjoying Linn Records’ marvellous recordings of the complete songs of Robbie Burns, I was tempted by the grace and almost Mozartian turns of phrase that she and harpist Corrina Hewat brought to the ballad 'As I was Wand’ring'.
Karine Polwart's new Scottish Songbook doesn’t hedge around and there are no Mozartian turns of phrase in it, but it searches out its substance in what might seem unlikely places.
Who might have thought this woman, who won the BBC’s Folksinger of the Year award in 2018, would have a soft spot for Strawberry Switchblade? They were the Glaswegian duo who came up with this piece of arrant catchiness in 1984, moving, in just a few seconds, from a blast of Sibelius to toe-tapping 80s pop.
Karine Polwart transforms the heartless pop of 'Since Yesterday' into a heartrending commentary on the darkness of dementia and Alzheimers.
Once we’ve heard a home recording of her grandfather Peter, singing at his Ruby Wedding party, it’s very much a piano ballad, although blurring chimes are used I think to symbolize loss and retreat. And when a young voice joins in, we’re reminded that this is, for many, an inevitable cycle of life.
Karine Polwart ends her new album with a song from the grand old man of the Caledonian alternative, Ivor Cutler.
His 'Women of the World' doesn’t mince words and uses only a few of them to get its message across in a mantra that sobers and chills.
Polwart gives the song over to Louis Abbott at first, as her stalwart harmonium progressively swells out and brings her and other voices into the song. She tells us that this is a special tribute to the Scottish mill-worker and political activist, Mary Brooksbank.
A fierce advocate of women’s rights, Brooksbank, who died in 1978 at the age of 80, was also a musician, writing songs that she would sing in the street for sustenance.
Brooksbank knew the power of song through her family singing at home, and Polwart speaks with unswerving conviction of how the act of community singing is physically, emotionally and politically restorative. And I’m sure she would agree that we need a lot more of it in this big, wide, wonderful world.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'It's A Big Wide Wonderful World!' (Rox) – Peggy Lee
Mink Jazz
(Capitol Jazz)
'Message To Rudy' (Livingstone) – Melbourne Ska Orchestra
One Year of Ska
(ABC)
'Blue Bayou' (Orbison, Melson) – Linda Ronstadt
Live In Hollywood
(Rhino)
'Cheongchunga' (SsingSsing) – SsingSsing
Ssingssing – EP
(Leeway Music)
'Gimme the Loot' (Rakitin) – Big Baby Tape
Dragonborn
(Warner)
'Bad Apples' (Tolokonnikova) – Pussy Riot, Dave Sitek
Single
(Pussy Riot)
'Real Slow Today' (Stewart, Grebenshikov) – Boris Grebenshikov
Radio Silence
(CBS)
'As I was Wand'ring' (Burns, Trad) – Karine Polwart
Burns: The Complete Songs, Vol 7
(Linn)
'Since Yesterday' (Bryson, McDowell) – Strawberry Switchblade
Strawberry Switchblade
(Korova/WEA)
'Since Yesterday' (Bryson, McDowell) – Karine Polwart
Karine Polwart's Scottish Songbook
(Hegri)
'Women of the World' (Cutler) – Karine Polwart
Karine Polwart's Scottish Songbook
(Hegri)
