Ensemble Modern / Heiner Goebbels – Black On White

Heiner Goebbels’s music-theatre work “Black on White” was put together during several months of rehearsal with Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt’s Theater am Turm in 1996. Its flickering, erratic musical surface combines elements of composed music, improvisation, musique concrete and spoken text, reflecting the composer’s previous work as an improviser and theatre director.

“Black on White,” a masterful if sometimes frustrating concoction of chaos and discipline, was built around the astonishingly flexible Ensemble Modern, whose members play in constant motion. They wind through a stage full of debris, set up a triumphant arch made of ladders, take up their horns and march in formation across a phalanx of benches. When a proscenium arch is sent keeling to the ground, nobody flinches.

The backbone of this motley score is jazz, all kinds of jazz: the jagged, glassy rhythms of be-bop, the baroque frenzy of Ornette Coleman, the stately quiver of a New Orleans funeral. But Goebbels drapes a great many other sources on that solid frame. In one especially haunting episode, the plaintive sound of a Jewish cantor recorded in the 1920s floats above an accompaniment of hard-edged chords.

“Black on White is also an affectionate and curiously moving tribute to the German playwright Heiner Muller, whose taped voice is to be found reading parts of Edgar Allan Poe’s parable, Shadow, at various points in the piece. Ensemble Modern are not only called on to speak and sing while playing their normal instruments, but to form impromptu ensembles of saxophones and brass instruments and what sounds like a group of toy violins in the eerie coda. Other sonic delights include a toccata for teapot and piccolo, a gargantuan fantasy for sine tone and didjeridu, and a surreal concert aria for six sampled Jewish cantors and a contrabass clarinet.

You may have guessed by now that I enjoyed listening to this CD. It is true that the recorded sound can be a little dry in places and there were times when I missed the visual element of the musictheatre piece in performance. Nevertheless, Black on White is a powerful and imaginative statement, humorous and intense in equal measure. Great credit is due to Ensemble Modern, Südwestfunk and RCA themselves.” –  Martyn Harry

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Ensemble Modern – Heiner Goebbels – Black On White

(192 kbps, front cover included)

Heiner Goebbels & Ensemble Modern & Josef Bierbichler – Eislermaterial

Versatile German composer Heiner Goebbels conceived this tribute to Hanns Eisler, combining some of his most famous chamber music and songs with jazz-inspired improvisations and audio collages.

The songs, mostly to texts by Brecht, are expressively interpreted by actor Josef Bierbichler. The recording is based on a “staged performance” that has introduced a new generation of music lovers to Eisler‘s music.

“Don’t illustrate your feelings but comment on them musically. Be objective” (Eisler). This is precisely what Heiner Goebbels provides with his uplifting “Eislermaterial”, one of the musical high points of the late 1990s and one of my favourite Eisler interpretations. “Eislermaterial”combines the best elements of music theatre with an inward brand of drama normally associated with chamber music. It’s a genuine class production, a concept album of the highest order, superbly performed and vividly engineered. I cannot imagine that any sensitive listener will fail to respond.

Goebbels takes Eisler at his word, “commenting” by allusion, gesture, violent musical juxtapositions and some ingenious sound painting. Nothing is tawdry or gratuitous and the texts, mainly by Bertholt Brecht, have a biting, straight-to-the-heart quality that cries out for the sort of tangy treatment Goebbels gives them. Eisler-Goebbels switches from Twenties-style ferocity to understated melancholy, often segueing on the back of instrumental squawks, shudders or scrapes. Think in terms of Kurt Weill visited by Michael Nyman and Uri Caine, then refined and refashioned in a style that is very much Goebbels’ own. Rather than employ a trained singer for the various songs Goebbels opts for an actor, Josef Bierbichler, whose tender but frail vocalising invariably suits the mood.

Heiner Goebbels was born in Neustadt, Germany, on August 17, 1952, relocating to the Frankfurt area at age 20 to study music and sociology. He first achieved notoriety in 1976 upon premiering a number of works, including “Rote Sonne,” “Circa,” and “Improvisations on Themes by Hanns Eisler,” most performed in conjunction with the “Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester”.

Concurrently, Goebbels also collaborated with Alfred Harth and beginning in 1982, he served as a member of the longstanding art rock trio “Cassiber”.
He further expanded his growing oeuvre with a series of theatrical, film, and ballet scores and during the mid-’80s began writing and directing audio plays of his own, seeking his initial inspiration in the texts of Heiner Mueller.
Beginning in 1988, Goebbels also turned to authoring chamber music with the Ensemble Modern, and in 1994 completed “Surrogate Cities,” his first major composition for symphony orchestra.

Heiner Goebbels & Ensemble Modern & Josef Bierbichler -Eislermaterial
(192 kbps)

Woody Guthrie – Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)

Sixty years after the recordings were first released, Woody Guthrie’s odes to the Dust Bowl are presented in their third different configuration.

RCA Victor Records, the only major label for which Guthrie ever recorded, issued two three-disc 78 rpm albums, “Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 1” and “Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 2”, in July 1940, containing a total of 11 songs. (“Tom Joad” was spread across two sides of a 78 due to its length.).
Twenty-four years later, with the folk revival at its height, RCA reissued the material on a single 12″ LP in a new sequence and with two previously unreleased tracks, “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “Dust Bowl Blues,” added.
Thirty-six years on, the Buddha reissue division of BMG, which owns RCA, shuffles the running order again and adds another track, this one an alternate take of “Talking Dust Bowl Blues.”

But whether available on 78s, LP, or CD, “Dust Bowl Ballads” constitutes a consistent concept album that roughly follows the outlines of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath”. (Indeed, “Tom Joad” is nothing less than the plot of the book set to music.) The story begins, as “The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)” has it, “On the fourteenth day of April of 1935,” when a giant dust storm hits the Great Plains, transforming the landscape. Shortly after, the farmers pack up their families and head west, where they have been promised there is work aplenty picking fruit in the lush valleys of California. The trip is eventful, as “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” humorously shows, but the arrival is disappointing, as the Okies discover California is less than welcoming to those who don’t bring along some “do[ough] re mi.”
Guthrie´s songs go back and forth across this tale of woe, sometimes focusing on the horrors of the dust storm, sometimes on human villains, with deputy sheriffs and vigilantes providing particular trouble. In “Pretty Boy Floyd,” he treats an ancillary subject, as the famous outlaw is valorized as a misunderstood Robin Hood. Guthrie treats his subject alternately with dry wit and defiance, and listeners in 1940 would have been conscious of the deliberate contrast with Jimmie Rodgers, whose music is evoked even as he is being mocked in “Dust Pneumonia Blues.”

Sixty years later, listeners may hear these songs through the music Guthrie influenced, particularly the folk tunes of Bob Dylan. Either way, this is powerful music, rendered simply and directly. It was devastatingly effective when first released, and it helped define all the folk music that followed it.

Woody Guthrie was born on July 14th, 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, so this year we can celebrate his 100th birthday!

Woody Guthrie – Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)
(192 kbps, front cover included)

Country Joe McDonald – Thinking Of Woody Guthrie (1969)

During the reigning years of San Francisco headband Country Joe and the Fish, singer and songwriter Joe McDonald took some time out to head to Nashville and record a pair of solo albums with the city’s top session men.

Released on the iconic Vanguard Records, these two albums saw McDonald take a broad left turn, away from psychedelia and deep into the traditional folk and country music that had helped inform his earlier years as a radical-political folksinger.

Indeed, the first of these two albums, Thinking of Woody Guthrie, was a heartfelt, play-it-straight tribute to the daddy of them all (the radical-political folksingers, that is). It is an album that does justice to the man who wrote all of the songs on it. Joe McDonald conveys all of the ranges of Woody’s line of sight, from the migrant’s resigned take on life (“Pastures Of Plenty”), to the dust-storm-beset people of Gray, Oklahoma (“So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh”)to a guarded endorsement of the (then) major strides in technology for the greater good (“Roll On Columbia”). McDonald sings all of them with conviction and is backed by Nashville pros with talent to burn. Even “This Land Is Your Land” gets a vitality to it that’s totally unexpected but great to hear.

 

Country Joe McDonald – Thinking Of Woody Guthrie (1969)

(256 kbps, front cover included)