The Retrographer, Issue 95 (October, 2 0 2 2)

November 29, 2022

Sam Gendel, Marina Allen, Alvvays, Wilder Maker, Lil Yachty, Burna Boy, Goon, Nick Hakim, Ian Wayne, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Cannonball Adderley, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 95 (October, 2 0 2 2)

Bulletins

Ten Songs for October, 2 0 2 2 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Vertigo”, Nick Hakim (Spotify / YouTube) – Hakim’s partnership with Andrew Sarlo continues convergent paths for each: Hakim’s blunted soul with the loopy, nostalgic indie Sarlo explored with Hovvdy. It feels as Hakim sings: “Spinning fast as hell, can’t tell what’s moving.” 

“Kōshi (格子, checks)”, Sam Gendel (Spotify / YouTube) – RIYL dusty Wu Tang loops or Ka’s shaded samurai palette; Gendel and the great Craig Weinrib gain steam until the perturbations give rise to an oni that screams and rages before disappearing into the haze.

“My Stranger”, Marina Allen (Spotify / YouTube) – Allen’s arrangements couldn’t be sparer, nothing obscuring her crystalline voice and gimlet melodies. Drums are dry as bone, vocals are never strained, bass plucks just where they need to be.

“After the Earthquake”, Alvvays (Spotify / YouTube) – Like “There She Goes” was sprinting from its high school the day after finals, all fingerpicked electric guitars climbing ever upwards to its chorus’s wide-open view. Molly Rankin’s command of pop songwriting is something to behold.

“Scam Likely”, Wilder Maker (Spotify / YouTube) – Gabe Birnbaum rocks this riff extremely hard while contemplating police violence amid chaos inside and out. One of the best live outfits working today, absolutely worth catching if you can.

“Poland”, Lil Yachty (Spotify / YouTube) – Fewer than 90 seconds of a simple, yet mysterious concept. Boat took the wock to Poland. Lean in eastern Europe. Farther than he ever thought he might get. One verse, two choruses, a lifetime lodged in your brain.

“Common Person”, Burna Boy (Spotify / YouTube) – Damini, one of the biggest rising stars in the world globally, imagines a simpler life where things aren’t quite so grand. He puts food on the table, takes the bus, follows god, holds down a job, finds love and satisfaction.

“Emily Says”, Goon (Spotify / YouTube) – Kenny Becker’s music is full of a kind of beautiful doom, like plumes of dust from a collapsed building or the vibrant, Don Delilo sunset of polluted sky. It makes you sick and a little dizzy, but somehow in love too.

“Hallway of 50 Bridge Stilts”, Ian Wayne (Spotify / YouTube) – Ian made this album in 2016 as CEREAL, you can still hear it here. But he revisited it again, giving these songs new dimensions with his elevated command of the studio. This song’s awe at the interrelated architecture of life is rendered beautifully in the gorgeous structure of these new recordings.

“Astroturf”, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (Spotify / YouTube) – The Gizz puts out a ton of music. If you’ve felt curious but not sure where to jump in, Changes is the right place to see if they’re right for you. Melodious, groovy, rambling yet focused, funky and hooky yet loose. It’s a joy.

One Album for October, 2 0 2 2

“Cannonball Adderley's Fiddler on the Roof”, Cannonball Adderley (Capitol, 1964) (Spotify / YouTube) 

By the time Julian “Cannonball” Adderley released his rendition of Fiddler on the Roof, he had released 31 albums as a bandleader in less than a decade in recorded music. His exploding discography was by then already marked by a fascination with the American Songbook: Takes on Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin. Jazz was born from the possibilities of this music. The first 1930s swing bands played the day’s popular Broadway hits to please audiences, and in so doing provided a fertile bed for fledgling jazz musicians to grow a new harmonic language in through arrangements and improvisation. Adderley – like Lester Young and Charlie Parker before him – made an indelible mark on the burgeoning art form he mastered. He changed the genre, and it transformed him, leading him from his childhood in Jim Crow Florida to immortality in the country’s greatest art form.

Fiddler on the Roof was adapted from Sholem Aleichem’s 1894 Tevye the Dairyman and set in the significant year of 1905. Tevye told the stories of the brutal oppression Ashkenazi Jews faced in western Russia, and in particular the anti-Jewish pogroms. In 1905 alone, thousands of Jews were killed in Odessa by gangs and Tsarist police. Millions of Jews fled, emigrating to the United States and fundamentally changing American society. Yiddish theater was banned in Russia starting in 1883, and so when artists moved west through Europe and often to America, they brought their exiled art with them, starting vibrant scenes like the Yiddish Theater District and the Borscht Belt. Jews entered American culture and entertainment. Groucho Marx began his life in vaudeville in 1905, and within decades he, his brothers – as well as Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen – and so many other Jewish immigrants and their children entered American popular culture and changed it forever. In this way, Jews were present at the birth of jazz, and African-Americans gave Jews’ music life far beyond their stages.

Jerry Bock wrote the music for Fiddler; Sheldon Harnick the book, Joseph Stein the lyrics. It debuted in 1964, less than two decades after the end of the Holocaust, an atrocity that dwarfed the tragedies and hardships Tevye told. The musical set out to explain the Jews to America in a form it could palatably digest, one not defined by centuries of persecution but by humor, family, and ambition. One it could love. It set out to soften the edges of a hard-edged story. Rather than devastated or exterminated in the Pale of Settlement as so many Jews were, Fiddler’s Tevye closes the story by emigrating to America, his family intact, seemingly bound, through time and space and cultural transformation, for the very Broadway stage audiences beheld it upon that year. Many American Jews felt pain sacrificing their historical reality in exchange for assimilation, acceptance, and safety, a stung that persisted even as Fiddler racked up Tonys, became the first musical to surpass 3,000 performances, and, for a time, stayed the longest-running show in Broadway history, as planted in the Great White Way as the Lyceum.

Cannonball Adderley’s Fiddler on the Roof was Adderley’s first release after signing with Capitol. The original Broadway production opened on September 22nd, 1964; Adderley held his sessions less than four weeks later, on October 19th and 21st. The LP jacket says he “chanced upon the lead sheets” and, “[s]ensing a ‘natural’, he decided to research the subject further by catching one of the show’s performances.” With Adderley on alto saxophone, his brother Nat on trumpet and cornet, Charles Lloyd on tenor and flute, Joe Zawinul on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Louis Hayes on drums, Cannonball selected some of Fiddler’s big numbers: “Tradition” (called “Fiddler on the Roof” here), “Matchmaker”, “Sabbath Prayer”, “To Life”, “Chavaleh” (listed as “Cajvalach”), “Now I Have Everything”, “Do You Love Me”, and “Sewing Machine”, which was cut from the show’s Broadway opening.

Cannonball’s arrangements of Fiddler feel so natural, there are many passages of the album where listeners may think they’re listening Somethin’ Else or Sophisticated Swing. The score takes easily to swing; songs like “To Life” amble like “Love For Sale” and “Sabbath Prayer” flirts with the modal jazz Adderley helped make iconic on Kind of Blue. Even so, the musical’s angular, minor klezmer brogue has an inextinguishable piquancy that melds beautifully with the sextet’s sound. Hayes in particular shines, leaning hard on the beat below the horns' sophisticated harmonies, crashing across the toms and ringing constantly on his ride. Bock’s voice can be heard throughout Cannonball, Nat, and Lloyd’s solos, and in Zawinul’s comping, anchoring the screaming horns on “Chavalah” or skipping through “Sewing Machine”’s waltz. Lloyd’s flute beautifully dates the music to the 60s; It trills through “Now I Have Everything” and “Matchmaker” like a cartoon bird in a PBS after-school special.

To Adderley, Fiddler on the Roof was another hit musical, like My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music before it; fodder for jazz’s great expansive exploration. But in its beautiful performances is an unspoken victory, a symbiosis of black and jewish art so natural as to be par. Credit Adderley, for the brilliance of his arrangement and the sharpness of his ear to choose it; Credit the ensemble, top-call musicians with years of tenure together, playing at the peak of their powers; Credit Bock, Harnick, and Stein for writing music with such fecundity; Or perhaps find credit deeper, further in the past, in intertwining traditions whose respective hardships joined in conversation to enliven the other. To toast, together, to life.

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