The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, la”
The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’
What’s that? A Maypole going up in the courtyard in front of the Green Man Pub? There can be no surer sign that summer’s ‘acumin’ in!’ It looks like the denizens of the pub’s Neverending Session may be lured outside, along with staff members tucked away in offices in the most unlikely places.
Yes, spring has burst out all over, and some of the folks around here seem to be feeling the effects of the impending May Day. Who was that slipping into Oberon’s Wood just now? Well, spring is as good an excuse as any, I suppose.
We’ve got spring greens in our salad, and some of the winter vegetables roasting on the grill, along with some tender lamb steaks, braised with mint and garlic. Are we starting early? I suppose, but this is the Green Man Staff, after all.
So pull up a chair, fill your plate, get Finch to pour you a pint, and feast your eyes on this week’s set of reviews, mostly about Anthony Bourdain, along with music selected by Gary as usual, and ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ performed by The Band.
We’re looking back at some of the late Anthony Bourdain’s productions that we’ve covered, starting with Denise’s review of The Nasty Bits. ‘I’ve always heard that cooks would use “the nasty bits” — pieces nobody else would want, unpalatable to most — to make the most amazing things. Sausages, soups, stews … everything goes in, and the end result is mouthwatering. So it is with The Nasty Bits, a collection of older bits and pieces that have been given new life, and are all the more delectable for being blended together into a single volume.
Joseph praised Medium Raw, in which Bourdain spends more time with those nasty bits. ‘While crassly dropping names and telling foodie stories with an amazing braggadocio, Bourdain’s memoir reveals him to be much more than a superstar chef with a hit show. At heart he is a satirist, whose life requires no exaggeration to act as a mirror to society. Bourdain skewers the foibles of the culinary world with William Thackeray’s surgical precision.’
Mia was less than impressed with Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour. ‘The real problem with this book lies in Bourdain’s choppy narrative; one would expect the chapters to follow his journey chronologically, but scenes in Vietnam are interspersed throughout the book. Did he return to Southeast Asia repeatedly, or did he just need a good editor? Impossible to tell, and the book suffers from the nonexistent continuity.’
In addition to reviewing Bourdain’s book Medium Raw (see above), Joseph took a look at a DVD of the Iceland Special Edition of the cook’s show No Reservations, which shows Bourdain warts and all. ‘Whoever chose to create and release this DVD is a genius. By showing the misery of his job (albeit with funny commentary and cutting remarks), Bourdain reveals his human side. He becomes one of us with good days and bad.’
While Gary was pulling Calexico reviews from the Archives for the Music section, he came across a review of an excellent performance DVD. ‘Calexico is one of the most interesting bands performing right now, both aurally and visually, and World Drifts In captures the band in all its glory during a festival at London’s Barbican hall in November 2002.’
Our reviewer J.J.S. Boyce found Masufumi Yamamoto’s The Manga Guide to Relativity to be ‘muddled.’ It’s part of the well regarded Omsha Manga Guide series, but he thought it didn’t reach the standards of their other guides. ‘It’s also surprisingly clumsy at times, both over- and under-explaining its thought experiments, and failing to make use of numerical, graphical, or visual approaches any experienced teacher of this topic ought to be familiar with.’
Gary here, with music. First up, Daryana reviews another outstanding recording from Siberia, Diva Ethno Future Sound’s third album Şăltăr Vitĕr Şol Korănat. She says: ‘DIVA reimagines tradition. Drawing from the songs of Chuvash recruits across the vast geography of the Chuvash people — Turi, Anatri, Anat-Enchi, and others from Samara, Bashkir, Orenburg, and even Siberia —this album breathes new life into folk expressions from the 18th to 20th centuries. Through the group’s signature fusion of haunting vocals, earthy acoustic textures, and shimmering electronic elements, the past is not only remembered, it’s relived and reframed for the future.’
I was inspired to write up Sudeshna Bhattacharya’s Mohini, which presents three lovely ragas. ‘Bhattacharya plays the sarod, which looks rather like the more familiar sitar, but its neck is made of smooth wood or stainless steel and it has no frets, which requires greater precision on the part of the player and also allows more flexibility in playing microtones. She’s an internationally recognized master of the instrument currently residing in Norway, where she has taught advanced students at the Norwegian Academy of Music — and thus her appearance on this recording by Norway’s Motvind label.’
I greatly enjoyed Erlend Apneseth’s Song Over Støv, played with a large ensemble of top Norwegian musicians. ‘This album is a deep, complex and engaging exploration of the borderlands where Norwegian traditional music meets chamber folk, art song, and avant garde minimalism. We’re in good hands with Hardanger fiddler and composer Erlend Apneseth at the helm.’
I don’t review much vocal jazz, but I very much enjoyed two recent releases, Gary Smulyan’s Tadd’s All, Folks; and Alfie!’s The Songs of Burt Bacharach. ‘American baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan’s project Tadd’s All, Folks brings a batch of Tadd Dameron’s lesser known compositions into the light, assisted by a top-notch combo of pianist Pete Malinferni, bassist David Wong and drummer Matt Wilson, and a new voice sure to make waves in the future, singer Anaïs Reno … Stina Ágústsdóttir, an Icelandic singer who’s one of the top jazz vocalists in Scandinavia, fronts the Stockholm-based quartet they call Alfie!, after that well known Bacharach song. With a repertoire that consists solely of these timeless Bacharach melodies (and lyrics for the most part by Hal David), they’ve captivated Stockholm audiences and now have releaed a debut album.’
From the Archives, a sojourn in the Southwest inspired me to pull out some reviews of my favorite Arizona musicians including Calexico and Giant Sand.
First up is what remains one of my desert island discs. ‘In Feast of Wire the Tucson, Arizona-based Calexico has made the most overtly political statement in its brief but prolific history. Their fourth full-length CD offers a cohesive vision of the collision of cultures in the desert borderland between the U.S. and Mexico. It also rocks.’
Next, a live show from around the same period. ‘It was a night of sublime “desert noir” for the fans of Calexico at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. The seven members of this road-tested Tucson, Arizona-based combo seemed relaxed but energized as they performed nearly 20 songs old and new in a one-hour and 45-minute show.’
Follow that with Convict Pool, an EP that contains some songs the band still features live more than 20 years on. ‘The prolific desert-rock combo Calexico, after touring for a year behind their latest CD Feast of Wire, offered this EP as a sampler of what’s new in their live show. It features three cover songs that showcase some of the band’s diverse influences, and three originals that show off frontman Joey Burns’ continuing growth as a songwriter.’
Calexico’s Edge of the Sun was one of my favorite albums of 2015 and remains high on my list. ‘To me it’s one of Calexico’s more successful albums in quite a while. The songs have strong melodies – both on the catchy upbeat numbers and the more pensive ones – and deeply felt lyrics that lean frequently toward the melancholy, with glimmers here and there of hopefulness. In the time that I’ve been listening to this album, just about every one of its songs has at one time or another been my favorite.’
My first reviews of anything by the genius behind Giant Sand was a two-fer: Howe Gelb’s The Listener and The Band of Blacky Ranchette’s Still Lookin’ Good to Me. Of the latter, I noted, ‘It’s a lost Marty Robbins classic album, if Marty had been influenced by The Beatles, Captain Beefheart and the Meat Puppets, instead of the other way around.’
The first time I saw Gelb live he was touring behind his 2004 release, Giant Sand … Is All Over the Map, which I said. ‘ …has all of the elements Gelb’s fans have come to expect from another excursion into the world of Giant Sand. There are acoustic ballads, punk rave-ups, punkabilly romps, loping blues-rock, a tango, and piano instrumentals that range from rags to Phillip Glass style prepared piano works. And lyrics that range from heart-rending poetry to absurdist non-sequiturs.’
Gelb parlays his admiration for Thelonious Monk into an idiosyncratic style of piano playing, as evidenced on Ogle Some Piano. ‘It’s a curious disc, even by Gelb’s eccentric standards — 19 tracks of piano meanderings in a variety of styles: jazz, rock, pop, tin pan alley and experimental avant-garde weirdness.’
Also from Tucson comes Naim Amor and his Soundtracks Volume II. ‘This is his second volume of Soundtracks music, the first he’s released on Howe Gelb’s OwOm label. It’s a delightful and quirky instrumental recording that blends jazz, lounge and experimental rock in what Naim calls “avant-French pop.” ‘
Giant Sand’s Danish members have their own band, The DeSoto Caucus, and I reviewed their fourth release, called simply 4. ‘They play a kind of laid-back desert rock that owes a lot to the sound of Giant Sand, but on this album they’ve added a major country-soul vibe, in addition to occasional elements of psychedelica. The lyrics of their songs are mostly co-written and co-sung by Anders Pedersen and Nikolaj Heyman, and this new approach now finds the music closely matching the lyrics.’
Another band with Tucson roots is XIXA, and I latched onto their EP Shift and Shadow. ‘The real treat here is the opening title track “Shift and Shadow.” After a squalling, feedback-drenched distorted guitar noise intro, we hear a catchy melody played on a woozy electronic keyboard that’s made to sound like a cheesy ’80s Casio on its last legs. The dry baritone vocals and lyrics on the verses reflect Gelb’s influence, before the song shifts into a cumbia chorus with Topanga Canyon multi-part harmonies.’
Matthew got what he considered a choice assignment, reviewing a couple of classic Folkmanis character puppets: Troll With Hedgehog, and Pinocchio. ‘Some general features of Folkmanis puppets: They are made from a mix of fibers, mostly nylon. The construction shows the greatest care, with areas of high stress being double-stitched and reinforced to withstand multiple uses. Each puppet also comes with an identifying tag, telling you what the puppet is. On the inside of the tag are facts and stories about the character.’
Anyone here remember The Band? My favourite song by the is ‘The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’.
it’s a story about the American Civil War told in the first-person voice of a losing side farmer as written by The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson, and sung by The Band’s southern drummer Levon Helm, which bthe chronicles the final days of the War Between the States through the eyes of a southern farmer and Confederate soldier named Virgil Caine.
Robertson in Testimony told the origins of the song, discussing the fact that he, like everyone in the group but Helm, was from Canada and admitted he was not at all that familiar with the story the Civil War.
So here is The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’.
I'm the Librarian for the Kinrowan Estate. I do love fresh brewed teas, curling, English mysteries and will often be playing Scandinavian or Celtic music here in the Library here in Kinrowan Hall if the Neverending Session is elsewhere.
I'm a violinist too, so you'll me playing in various contradance band such as Chasing Fireflies and Mouse in the Cupboard as well as backing my wife Catherine up on yearly Christmas season tours in the Nordic countries.
More Posts
What’s New for the 13th of April: Anthony Bourdain in print and video; Calexico, Giant Sand and related music; new recordings of ragas, Nordic songs, and vocal jazz, ‘The Night They Drive Old Dixie Down’ performed by The Band
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, “Na, na, la, na, na, la”
The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’
What’s that? A Maypole going up in the courtyard in front of the Green Man Pub? There can be no surer sign that summer’s ‘acumin’ in!’ It looks like the denizens of the pub’s Neverending Session may be lured outside, along with staff members tucked away in offices in the most unlikely places.
Yes, spring has burst out all over, and some of the folks around here seem to be feeling the effects of the impending May Day. Who was that slipping into Oberon’s Wood just now? Well, spring is as good an excuse as any, I suppose.
We’ve got spring greens in our salad, and some of the winter vegetables roasting on the grill, along with some tender lamb steaks, braised with mint and garlic. Are we starting early? I suppose, but this is the Green Man Staff, after all.
So pull up a chair, fill your plate, get Finch to pour you a pint, and feast your eyes on this week’s set of reviews, mostly about Anthony Bourdain, along with music selected by Gary as usual, and ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ performed by The Band.
We’re looking back at some of the late Anthony Bourdain’s productions that we’ve covered, starting with Denise’s review of The Nasty Bits. ‘I’ve always heard that cooks would use “the nasty bits” — pieces nobody else would want, unpalatable to most — to make the most amazing things. Sausages, soups, stews … everything goes in, and the end result is mouthwatering. So it is with The Nasty Bits, a collection of older bits and pieces that have been given new life, and are all the more delectable for being blended together into a single volume.
Joseph praised Medium Raw, in which Bourdain spends more time with those nasty bits. ‘While crassly dropping names and telling foodie stories with an amazing braggadocio, Bourdain’s memoir reveals him to be much more than a superstar chef with a hit show. At heart he is a satirist, whose life requires no exaggeration to act as a mirror to society. Bourdain skewers the foibles of the culinary world with William Thackeray’s surgical precision.’
Mia was less than impressed with Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour. ‘The real problem with this book lies in Bourdain’s choppy narrative; one would expect the chapters to follow his journey chronologically, but scenes in Vietnam are interspersed throughout the book. Did he return to Southeast Asia repeatedly, or did he just need a good editor? Impossible to tell, and the book suffers from the nonexistent continuity.’
While Gary was pulling Calexico reviews from the Archives for the Music section, he came across a review of an excellent performance DVD. ‘Calexico is one of the most interesting bands performing right now, both aurally and visually, and World Drifts In captures the band in all its glory during a festival at London’s Barbican hall in November 2002.’
I was inspired to write up Sudeshna Bhattacharya’s Mohini, which presents three lovely ragas. ‘Bhattacharya plays the sarod, which looks rather like the more familiar sitar, but its neck is made of smooth wood or stainless steel and it has no frets, which requires greater precision on the part of the player and also allows more flexibility in playing microtones. She’s an internationally recognized master of the instrument currently residing in Norway, where she has taught advanced students at the Norwegian Academy of Music — and thus her appearance on this recording by Norway’s Motvind label.’
I greatly enjoyed Erlend Apneseth’s Song Over Støv, played with a large ensemble of top Norwegian musicians. ‘This album is a deep, complex and engaging exploration of the borderlands where Norwegian traditional music meets chamber folk, art song, and avant garde minimalism. We’re in good hands with Hardanger fiddler and composer Erlend Apneseth at the helm.’
I don’t review much vocal jazz, but I very much enjoyed two recent releases, Gary Smulyan’s Tadd’s All, Folks; and Alfie!’s The Songs of Burt Bacharach. ‘American baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan’s project Tadd’s All, Folks brings a batch of Tadd Dameron’s lesser known compositions into the light, assisted by a top-notch combo of pianist Pete Malinferni, bassist David Wong and drummer Matt Wilson, and a new voice sure to make waves in the future, singer Anaïs Reno … Stina Ágústsdóttir, an Icelandic singer who’s one of the top jazz vocalists in Scandinavia, fronts the Stockholm-based quartet they call Alfie!, after that well known Bacharach song. With a repertoire that consists solely of these timeless Bacharach melodies (and lyrics for the most part by Hal David), they’ve captivated Stockholm audiences and now have releaed a debut album.’
From the Archives, a sojourn in the Southwest inspired me to pull out some reviews of my favorite Arizona musicians including Calexico and Giant Sand.
First up is what remains one of my desert island discs. ‘In Feast of Wire the Tucson, Arizona-based Calexico has made the most overtly political statement in its brief but prolific history. Their fourth full-length CD offers a cohesive vision of the collision of cultures in the desert borderland between the U.S. and Mexico. It also rocks.’
Next, a live show from around the same period. ‘It was a night of sublime “desert noir” for the fans of Calexico at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. The seven members of this road-tested Tucson, Arizona-based combo seemed relaxed but energized as they performed nearly 20 songs old and new in a one-hour and 45-minute show.’
Follow that with Convict Pool, an EP that contains some songs the band still features live more than 20 years on. ‘The prolific desert-rock combo Calexico, after touring for a year behind their latest CD Feast of Wire, offered this EP as a sampler of what’s new in their live show. It features three cover songs that showcase some of the band’s diverse influences, and three originals that show off frontman Joey Burns’ continuing growth as a songwriter.’
Calexico’s Edge of the Sun was one of my favorite albums of 2015 and remains high on my list. ‘To me it’s one of Calexico’s more successful albums in quite a while. The songs have strong melodies – both on the catchy upbeat numbers and the more pensive ones – and deeply felt lyrics that lean frequently toward the melancholy, with glimmers here and there of hopefulness. In the time that I’ve been listening to this album, just about every one of its songs has at one time or another been my favorite.’
My first reviews of anything by the genius behind Giant Sand was a two-fer: Howe Gelb’s The Listener and The Band of Blacky Ranchette’s Still Lookin’ Good to Me. Of the latter, I noted, ‘It’s a lost Marty Robbins classic album, if Marty had been influenced by The Beatles, Captain Beefheart and the Meat Puppets, instead of the other way around.’
The first time I saw Gelb live he was touring behind his 2004 release, Giant Sand … Is All Over the Map, which I said. ‘ …has all of the elements Gelb’s fans have come to expect from another excursion into the world of Giant Sand. There are acoustic ballads, punk rave-ups, punkabilly romps, loping blues-rock, a tango, and piano instrumentals that range from rags to Phillip Glass style prepared piano works. And lyrics that range from heart-rending poetry to absurdist non-sequiturs.’
Gelb parlays his admiration for Thelonious Monk into an idiosyncratic style of piano playing, as evidenced on Ogle Some Piano. ‘It’s a curious disc, even by Gelb’s eccentric standards — 19 tracks of piano meanderings in a variety of styles: jazz, rock, pop, tin pan alley and experimental avant-garde weirdness.’
Also from Tucson comes Naim Amor and his Soundtracks Volume II. ‘This is his second volume of Soundtracks music, the first he’s released on Howe Gelb’s OwOm label. It’s a delightful and quirky instrumental recording that blends jazz, lounge and experimental rock in what Naim calls “avant-French pop.” ‘
Giant Sand’s Danish members have their own band, The DeSoto Caucus, and I reviewed their fourth release, called simply 4. ‘They play a kind of laid-back desert rock that owes a lot to the sound of Giant Sand, but on this album they’ve added a major country-soul vibe, in addition to occasional elements of psychedelica. The lyrics of their songs are mostly co-written and co-sung by Anders Pedersen and Nikolaj Heyman, and this new approach now finds the music closely matching the lyrics.’
Another band with Tucson roots is XIXA, and I latched onto their EP Shift and Shadow. ‘The real treat here is the opening title track “Shift and Shadow.” After a squalling, feedback-drenched distorted guitar noise intro, we hear a catchy melody played on a woozy electronic keyboard that’s made to sound like a cheesy ’80s Casio on its last legs. The dry baritone vocals and lyrics on the verses reflect Gelb’s influence, before the song shifts into a cumbia chorus with Topanga Canyon multi-part harmonies.’
Matthew got what he considered a choice assignment, reviewing a couple of classic Folkmanis character puppets: Troll With Hedgehog, and Pinocchio. ‘Some general features of Folkmanis puppets: They are made from a mix of fibers, mostly nylon. The construction shows the greatest care, with areas of high stress being double-stitched and reinforced to withstand multiple uses. Each puppet also comes with an identifying tag, telling you what the puppet is. On the inside of the tag are facts and stories about the character.’
Anyone here remember The Band? My favourite song by the is ‘The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’.
it’s a story about the American Civil War told in the first-person voice of a losing side farmer as written by The Band’s guitarist Robbie Robertson, and sung by The Band’s southern drummer Levon Helm, which bthe chronicles the final days of the War Between the States through the eyes of a southern farmer and Confederate soldier named Virgil Caine.
Robertson in Testimony told the origins of the song, discussing the fact that he, like everyone in the group but Helm, was from Canada and admitted he was not at all that familiar with the story the Civil War.
So here is The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’.
Iain Nicholas Mackenzie
I'm the Librarian for the Kinrowan Estate. I do love fresh brewed teas, curling, English mysteries and will often be playing Scandinavian or Celtic music here in the Library here in Kinrowan Hall if the Neverending Session is elsewhere. I'm a violinist too, so you'll me playing in various contradance band such as Chasing Fireflies and Mouse in the Cupboard as well as backing my wife Catherine up on yearly Christmas season tours in the Nordic countries.
More Posts
About Iain Nicholas Mackenzie
I'm the Librarian for the Kinrowan Estate. I do love fresh brewed teas, curling, English mysteries and will often be playing Scandinavian or Celtic music here in the Library here in Kinrowan Hall if the Neverending Session is elsewhere. I'm a violinist too, so you'll me playing in various contradance band such as Chasing Fireflies and Mouse in the Cupboard as well as backing my wife Catherine up on yearly Christmas season tours in the Nordic countries.