[Dixielandjazz] Interpreting vs. Re Creating.

[Marek Boym]

Except one!
Anyway, it was for the popular market, and nobody would know the difference. 
Sounded like carbon copy to me in those days (but was lauded as "a gem of 
jazz" in Brian Rust's and Rex Harris' "Recorded Jazz: a Critical Guide."
Cheers
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
To: "Marek Boym" <nmboym at 012.net.il>
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Interpreting vs. Re Creating.



Hello Marek:

If that is the case, then Sunshine's version was indeed different from all
the Bechet's except one. :-) VBG.

Cheers,
Steve


on 1/15/07 4:44 AM, Marek Boym at nmboym at 012.net.il wrote:

> Hello Steve,
> Hardly.  It was almost note for note, except that Sunsine plaued it on
> clarinet.  Bechet's renditions - I have a few - were all different.
> Cheers
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Steve Barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
> To: "Marek Boym" <nmboym at 012.net.il>
> Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 2:42 AM
> Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Interpreting vs. Re Creating.
>
>
>
> Wasn't the Sunshine version different from Bechet's?
>
> Cheers,
> Steve
>
> on 1/14/07 4:56 PM, Marek Boym at nmboym at 012.net.il wrote:
>
>> May be so - but in the UK it was the Monty Sunshime version of Petite
>> Fleur
>> rather than Bechet's that made the charts!
>> If you've heard the excellent Katrina CD issued by the University of New
>> Hamphsire, you could hear Bob Wilber complaining that it was that version
>> rather than Bechet's that was played all over the world in 1959, when
>> Bechet
>> was dying; while this is not true - the latter version was issued in
>> Europe
>> (and in Israel) as a single, and played more than once daily on our Light
>> Wave (Sunshine's was played as often on the army radio, but was not 
>> issued
>> in Israel, and in the UK it was issued on an EP).
>> Cheers
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Steve Barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
>> To: "DJML" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 14, 2007 5:10 AM
>> Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Interpreting vs. Re Creating.
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
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>>
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