[Dixielandjazz] Interpreting vs. Re Creating.

[Steve Barbone]

Interesting article about the difference between the copying, and
interpreting that applies to OKOM as well as the Beatles.

As the article points out:

"After all, if you don¹t have a distinctive perspective. . . . why should
someone listen to your version instead of just playing the original?"

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Interpreting the Beatles Without Copying

NY TIMES - By ALLAN KOZINN -January 13, 2007

Lately I¹ve been wondering why, as a more than casual Beatles fan, I¹m not
interested in note-perfect covers by Beatles tribute bands, even though, as
a classical music critic, I happily spend my nights listening to
re-creations ‹ covers, in a way ‹ of Beethoven symphonies and Haydn string
quartets. What, when it comes down to it, is the difference?

Obviously, this is something of a comparison between apples and oranges: we
first heard the Beatles¹ music on their own recordings, whose sounds are
imprinted on our memories and are definitive. Our first encounters with,
say, Beethoven¹s Ninth Symphony were through performances that, however
spectacular, have no direct link to Beethoven himself. Yet Beethoven¹s score
of the work is a detailed blueprint of how he expected it to sound, and any
performance will be governed by that, allowing for interpretive leeway that
may be subtle or dramatic. A cover band, hoping to reproduce the original
recording, has less flexibility.

But a new album by the Smithereens shows how much interpretive leeway a rock
band can have, even when it intends to perform faithful covers. The disc,
³Meet the Smithereens!² (Koch), which comes out next week, reproduces the
track lineup and, to a great degree, the original arrangements (at the
original tempos and in the original keys) of the Beatles¹ 1964 American
breakthrough album, ³Meet the Beatles!² But it does more: the 12 songs are
filtered through the Smithereens¹ own crunchy New Jersey bar-band sound, a
quality likely to come through even more strongly when the band plays the
album live at the B. B. King Blues Club and Grill tonight.

The Smithereens made their name playing their own material, but they have
recorded Beatles songs before, and they have always had a soft spot for the
concision and zest of British Invasion bands. So they approach this music as
fans who know it intimately, but also as composers who know what makes a
great song durable.

They are hardly the first to cover a complete Beatles album. Big Daddy
recorded a doo-wop version of the full ³Sgt. Pepper¹s Lonely Hearts Club
Band² in the early 1990s. Phish released a live performance of the complete
³White Album² in 1994. In the late ¹80s, the Slovenian art-rock band Laibach
released ³Let It Be,² a ponderous, reordered version of the Beatles¹ album
of the same name, albeit without the title track.

What makes ³Meet the Smithereens² unusual is the degree to which, like a
good classical performance, it balances fidelity to the original with a
projection of the interpreter¹s style. Typically, Beatles covers and pop
covers in general are an interpreter¹s art and emphasize the performer¹s
vision. After all, if you don¹t have a distinctive perspective, even one as
off the wall as Laibach¹s, why should someone listen to your version instead
of just playing the original?

Tribute acts, by contrast, are purely recreative. Their goal is to reproduce
a band¹s music rather than to make their own mark on it. The Smithereens
acknowledge this world without quite joining it. These days, everyone from
the Grateful Dead to R.E.M. has its own shadow specialists. But Beatles
tribute bands have long been a global industry.

Many, though by no means all, borrow a page from the Elvis impersonators¹
playbook and turn their performances into theater pieces. They dress up in
period costumes, changing from short to long wigs, moving from collarless
jackets to psychedelic outfits and affixing paste-on beards and mustaches as
the show progresses. And they imitate the Beatles¹ accents and jokey patter.
(A band that takes this approach, 1964 the Tribute, is playing at Carnegie
Hall on Jan. 27.)

I¹ve never understood the appeal. When I saw ³Beatlemania² on Broadway, in
the late 1970s, I admired the stage band¹s skill, but left the theater
feeling I¹d have been better off listening to the records and paging through
old Life magazines. And watching other faux mop-tops trading on Beatles
nostalgia over the years, I¹ve always felt a little embarrassed for the
musicians, who had clearly devoted significant effort to learning
arrangements that in some cases were too complex for even the Beatles
themselves to perform live, yet who were sublimating their personalities
(and musicianship) to the business of role-playing.

Which is not to say that what they do is without merit; quite the opposite.
For anyone who has listened closely to how the Beatles¹ vocal and
instrumental arrangements work, it¹s hard not to admire the musicianship of
bands that reproduce it accurately. Still, you could argue that at least
some of the Beatles¹ music ‹ recorded layer by layer, carefully polished in
the studio, and using tape loops, backward sounds and other innovations ‹ is
actually electronic music: the recordings are the score and the performance,
self-contained, just as much as a tape work by Stockhausen is.

Even so, those recordings can be transcribed fairly precisely, as Tetsuya
Fujita, Yuji Hagino, Hajime Kubo and Goro Sato demonstrated in ³The Beatles
Scores² (published by Hal Leonard in 1993), and those transcriptions can be
learned and recreated live with startling exactitude, just as the score of a
Shostakovich symphony can. And Glenn Gould¹s manifestos about the death of
the concert notwithstanding, there will always be something electrifying in
a live performance that cannot be captured on a recording.

That live experience is something tribute bands offer that can no longer be
had from the Beatles themselves (although Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr
still perform their old hits on tour). For that matter, tribute bands offer
something ‹ quite a lot, actually ‹ that the Beatles never did. Between late
1962 and the summer of 1966, the Beatles recorded 118 songs. But during
their international touring years (starting in late 1963), they played a
mere 33 songs in concert. The last album from which they played any material
live was the 1965 LP ³Rubber Soul²; thereafter, they recorded another 100
songs on six albums. With technology far beyond what the Beatles had
(sampling keyboards, in particular), tribute bands can play them all.

That said, when a string quartet plays Haydn, it doesn¹t set out to produce
an unvaried copy of what¹s in the score. The players make interpretive
decisions about tempos, balances and tone color; ideally, a quartet¹s
reading will breathe differently from night to night, and will be distinct
from a competing ensemble¹s account. And except for the occasional
misconceived children¹s concert, quartets don¹t don Haydn-era wigs and
costumes, or adopt Austrian accents.

This is what I like about ³Meet the Smithereens!²: it bridges the extremes
of note-for-note fidelity and pure interpretation, offering the best of both
worlds. The band has treated ³Meet the Beatles!² as a symphony, a complete
cultural artifact, to be heard intact. It barely matters that ³Meet the
Beatles!² was not quite the album the Beatles intended, but rather a
compilation made by Capitol Records, using 9 of the 14 songs from the
group¹s British album ³With the Beatles,² as well as three songs released as
singles. For American listeners who discovered the Beatles at the time, as
the Smithereens did, ³Meet² has an emotional resonance that ³With² does not.

The arrangements on ³Meet the Smithereens!² have all the vibrant energy and
directness of the originals, and even minor details like the keyboard
glissandos in ³Little Child² and the overdubbed handclaps on ³I Want to Hold
Your Hand² and ³I Saw Her Standing There² are faithfully preserved.

Yet you wouldn¹t mistake it for the Beatles, as you might with a tribute
band. Pat DiNizio¹s vocals have the dark, slightly flattened quality you
hear on signature Smithereens songs like ³Blood and Roses² or ³A Girl Like
You,² and if his guitar solos follow the contours of George Harrison¹s, they
aren¹t slavishly identical.

Where the Beatles moved to acoustic guitars for ³Till There Was You² ‹ the
only cover on ³Meet the Beatles!² ‹ the Smithereens opted to keep it
electric, with a touch of distortion, and to abandon the saccharine quality
that Paul McCartney brought to the vocal.

The guitar tone and effects, and the way the vocal harmonies are balanced
on, for example, ³This Boy² and ³Hold Me Tight,² are the Smithereens¹ own.
And so are their accents. The album manages to scream Beatles 1964 and
Smithereens 2007 all at once.