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Lest we Forget
The Train
Yesterday was a very unusual day for us in that we watched two films. We saw Skyfall at the cinema, and late last night, we watched The Train on television. The train is a 1965 film directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Burt Lancaster and Paul Scofield. It’s set in France in 1944 and it’s about the attempt by a Nazi Colonel to steal a trainload of paintings – French national art treasures – and transport them to Germany. Scofield is the Colonel and Burt Lancaster is the train man who also happens to be part of the French underground.
Can paintings be worth dying for? What if they’re really really good paintings or really important paintings? Would it matter if the paintings were antiquities or modern? In The Train, the paintings appear to be mostly modern or at least painted within the last century. What if those paintings are symbolic of a world free of fascism? The German Colonel claims to have some special appreciation for the paintings even though he acknowledges that to the Nazis their value is only in their cash value to Germany. Labiche, the Lancaster character, initially is not interested in saving the paintings. He doesn’t know these paintings and they hold no special meaning for him. He’s much more focused on helping the allies blow up a train yard full of armaments. However, along the way he changes his attitude and resolves to save the paintings.
The Train is beautifully shot in black and white. Without all the technical wizardry we saw in Skyfall earlier in the day, Frankenheimer created a film as visually satisfying as it is riveting. Performances are very solid throughout. It’s really a fantastic film. Last night was the first time I watched The Train. In fact, I knew nothing about it going in. We happened to see the teaser for the film earlier in the evening on TVO and resolved to try to stay up for it. It had a late start (for us at least) and I was tired after a long and difficult week. I’d love to watch this one a second time to take in more of the detail. Great film.
Skyfall
Skyfall is jolly good fun. Great chases. Lots of stuff gets exploded. Plenty of gunshots. A couple swell-looking babes. The bad guy is the same guy who played the bad guy in No Country for Old Men so right away you know he’s a really evil dude. The plot is more interesting than the usual bad guy seeking world dominance (but still, in this kind of movie, the plot is just there to connect the action scenes). For a chunk of the movie, Bond is plugged in, being helped out by phone. That reminded me of guys you see in grocery stores talking on their blue-tooth devices while they shop. “Um, there are four different ones…which one did you say you want?. Oh OK, got it”. Ah, but the message is it is the bad guy who is the master of the plugged in world. We learn that at heart, Bond is old-school, remaining in the shadows.
I think this film does a great job of reinvigorating the Bond franchise. Maybe it’s the best one of the whole bunch. If you’re in need of a stylish, fast-paced, action romp, go see this one. I’ve never been a big James Bond fan, but I had a great time watching this movie.
Tennessee Stud
The first recording I heard of this song was by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. For some reason I think I was 17 at the time but I could be wrong. I heard it once and it stuck to my brain and didn’t go away. I heard that Ramblin’ Jack version a couple more times over the years but didn’t hear anyone else perform the song until Johnny Cash released his fantastic American Recordings in the 90s. Here’s Mr. Cash…
Doc and Merle Watson played this one beautifully as well…
I’m not sure but I think the song may have been composed by Jimmie Driftwood. Can anyone confirm or correct?
Finally, here’s an unusual instrumental version by Harlow Wilcox and the Oakies. This one is interesting in that Wilcox inserts the Bo Diddley or Shave and a hair cut – two bits rhythm into the tune.
The Broadcast
This is a smallish (a couple feet wide) recent diptych called Broadcast. It’s an oil painting, created over quite a number of sessions. Although it is difficult to photograph well (for a bad photographer with a point and shoot camera), I think you can get an idea of the textures coming up from earlier iterations as the image developed over time. Some readers may recall seeing an earlier version of this painting in which the left panel was much different but the right panel largely mostly similar.
Fortune my Foe
The Sun’s Gonna Shine
Tonight’s Daily Dose features a bit more blues, but blues with a much different flavour than last night’s hit of Wolf. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee played together for about a million years before they finally got sick of one another. They played a brand of blues from the Carolinas known as Piedmont Blues or sometimes East Coast Blues. When I was growing up they had some kind of public service announcement on Canadian television supporting workers with handicaps. I recall it started out showing the two of them, Sonny first and then Brownie and the voice-over said something like this man is blind and this man is lame but they’re two of the best loved musicians in the world. That’s all I remember of it. By that time, I already had one of their records, which was simply blowing my mind. You didn’t hear this kind of material on the radio. I went to see them with a friend from highschool (I know you’re out there somewhere RB…drop a comment in and say hello). It was at the old El Mocombo and there we were, kids really, sitting at a table steps from these music legends. It was impossibly good.
Now let’s go back down the road a little…
As a sidenote, Brownie had a younger brother who was also a musician. He was known as Stick McGhee. He was apparently called Stick because he used to push Brownie around in a wagon with a stick. He died in 1961, still in his 40s. Stick was what you might call a one-hit wonder, but what a hit it was. Here’s Stick McGhee performing Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee from 1947….
Finally, here are Sonny and Brownie singing Brownie’s brother’s tune
Meet me in the Bottom
Tonight’s Daily Dose takes us to Chicago and Howlin Wolf. My fave moment in this performance is when Wolf takes off his glasses so he can get down to business. If I was exiled to a desert island and could only bring the music of one blues performer, it would be Howlin Wolf beyond a shadow of a doubt.
George Gregory RIP
Sheila (known on this blog as Tuffy P) lost her dad this morning. He had been ailing from kidney disease for some time and passed away at the hospital. George and I shared a birthday – he would have been 87 next month. I’m going to miss him greatly and I know the same is true for the whole family.
Some people are storytellers – they can’t help themselves, and George Gregory had the storytelling gene. Like all the best storytellers, he never shied away from telling the same ones several times. Like a fine cheese they ripen with age. He told all manner of stories, but all of them said much about his character. He was a kind and generous man, but he could be tough too, especially when it came to defending something he believed in. George believed in hard work and perseverance. He was the kind of guy who believed in loyalty – at work he thought it best to stay with a company for the long run (and he did that) and he believed it was possible to start at the bottom and work your way to the top (he did that too).
George was also known to break into song at a moment’s notice. He liked Irish tunes in particular. Here’s one of his favourites…
Details of visitation and funeral are available at the Marshall’s Funeral Home site.
Teaching or not
I’ve been teaching a young fellow how to play the triple row button accordion for about a year and a half. He’s doing quite well. That is to say he has all the tools he needs to be a good player. Just add practice. He’s planning to go to university next year and has taken a weekend job to save money for school, and for now he’s stopped taking lessons. I hope he continues to play because it will enrich his life in all kinds of ways. He’s at a point where he doesn’t really need me, if he can build the discipline to practice without knowing he’s got to see a teacher each week who has expectations that he’s applied himself. Video taping himself my be helpful for him. It’s a good way to see your own problems.
I had another student for a while who wanted to learn an instrument I didn’t play and who lived in another country. How strange is that? She would come see me every month or so when she was in town visiting her daughter and son-in-law (She lives in the US). She had learned a few songs from her father, who can no longer play. Her instrument is the C-griff chromatic button accordion. It’s an instrument I know a good bit about, and I understand the fingering patterns but I can’t say I really play it. I play triple row diatonic button accordions. To you maybe they both look like squeezeboxes with a lot of buttons but the differences are night and day. The most fundamental difference is that on the instrument I play, each button produces a different sound when you close the bellows and when you open the bellows, kind of like a harmonica. As well, my instrument is set up in 3 diatonic scales and I don’t have access to all the notes in the chromatic scale. In any case, she made really great progress (as I told her the more you practice the better a teacher I am). Even though she had to develop some of her technical chops on her own, in some ways the situation worked out pretty well. Along the way though, she sustained an injury related to her playing, or at least made worse by her playing, so she’s had to back away from all the practice she was doing and I haven’t seen her in some time. I hope she’s able to continue playing. She is more than capable of advancing on her own.
For a short while, I had yet another student. He wanted to learn to play diatonic button accordion on an instrument tuned to the Continental tuning system and he wanted to play the traditional music of the Minho region of Portugal where he is from. I know of a fellow who teaches this specifically and I attempted to send him to this guy, but he was determined that I be his teacher. I play some Portuguese tunes, but I’m no expert on the regional music this fellow wanted to learn. The different tuning was no big deal. I was able to diagram it out for him. The fingering is only a little different than the Hohner or Gabbanelli tunings I’m used to. He had this powerful 4-reed box, an Italian accordion tuned for Portuguese music. These guys tune their accordions to what we call a wide open musette, the wettest of the wet tunings. Let me try to explain what I’m talking about. Accordions have multiple reeds tuned octaves apart. If the reeds are exactly tuned an octave apart, the tones will sound like one rich tone. That is dry. If you tune the reeds for every note just a little off, say a couple hundredths of a half step, it still sounds in tune, but you get a little bit of a tremelo effect. That is wet or musette. The more off you tune, the greater the tremelo until at a certain point it just sounds out of tune. Many Portuguese players tune their boxes as wet as they can and still sound in tune.
Here’s an example of an accordion with wet tuning:
…and here is an example of much drier tuning…
Anyway, I digress. I explained to this fellow that the only way he was going to make progress was to practice practice practice, and each week, he would come to see me, explain why he had no time to practice, struggle through the lesson, and go off to not practice more. I guess he came to his senses and realized he just didn’t have the time or the discipline to learn this and he just stopped coming. Good thing because I was ready to tell him I couldn’t teach him any more.
All this is to say that I’m not teaching right now, and I’m not looking for a student. If someone tracks me down and really wants to learn, I’ll consider teaching again, but I’m happy to take a break from it too.
27th Street 