JB – Page 11

Aly Bain + Phil Cunningham | The Jig Runrig

“Fiddler Aly Bain and accordionist Phil Cunningham are two of the most celebrated musicians on the Scottish traditional scene,” (Compass Records). “By the time they began working together in 1988, they were already renowned for their previous accomplishments. Bain was a founding member of the Boys of the Lough, a group whose repertoire includes both Scottish and Irish influences. Cunningham became a member of the infamous Silly Wizard at the age of sixteen, launching a prolific and diverse musical career. The duo first worked together on a television series in 1988, and embarked on their first tour shortly after. They were so well-received that they have been touring together ever since. Their two previous duo recordings, The Pearl (1996) and The Ruby (1998), have been met with high acclaim.”

“Having toured together since 1986 to packed concert halls all over the world, Aly and Phil continue to charm audiences with their stunning music and on-stage charisma that defies description,” (PhilCunningham.com). “Witty and humorous banter sits alongside tunes that tug the heartstrings, and joyous reels and melodies that have feet tapping along at their ever popular concerts. The pair have recorded many highly acclaimed albums in their thirty years together including two ‘Best Of’ collections. Aly and Phil have won numerous awards, including the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards’ BEST DUO Award, and have been nominated in the Scottish Traditional Music Awards for ’Live Act of the Year.’”

The duo’s piece “The Jig Runrig,” performed here in 2019, modulates several times, starting with a shift up a perfect fourth at the 0:30 mark. The duo’s phrasing is uncanny, with the fiddle and accordion often sounding like a single instrument during the unison sections!

Bunny Sigler | Sunny Sunday

“Walter ‘Bunny’ Sigler—a songwriter, singer, and producer … helped pioneer soul music’s ‘Philly Sound’ along with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff in the early 1970s,” (Pitchfork) … “Sigler was best known for songs such as ‘Let the Good Times Roll and Feel So Good’ and ‘Girl Don’t Make Me Wait.’ He began his recording career in 1959 and went on to work with numerous acts, including Patti LaBelle, The O’Jays, and Lou Rawls. He often performed with the funk/disco group Instant Funk.

Later in life, Sigler collaborated with the Roots on their Game Theory track ‘Long Time.’ His songs were sampled by Jay-Z, OutKast, Nelly, Kelly Rowland, and many more. ‘He wrote classics that stood the test of time,’ Questlove wrote in a remembrance … ‘He was the DEFINITION of cool, man.'”

“Sunny Sunday” (1967) starts in G minor, then shifts to Ab minor for the second verse at 0:45. A brief bridge touches on Ab major before transitioning to the next verse, this time in A minor. The tedium of the workweek and and the relative shortage of leisure time with loved ones never sounded so good!

The Box Tops | The Letter

(The Box Tops had) “never been in a studio before ‘The Letter,’ but they knocked it out,” (Stereogum). “Producer Dan Penn added in a plane-taking-off noise that he’d pulled from a sound-effects record that he’d checked out of the library. Given all that, ‘The Letter’ should be a sloppy and amateurish record, which wouldn’t necessarily prevent it from being great. But ‘The Letter’ is not that. It’s a two-minute epic.”

Despite being not even 20 years old at the time, frontman Alex Chilton “sounds weary and ravaged. He’s stuck somewhere far away from his baby, and he’s got to go see her right away. We don’t know where he is, why he’s separated from her, or what she wrote in her letter … But Chilton’s voice absolutely pops off of the record, and it’s all the band needs to tell the story. ‘The Letter’ is a tight, hard, compact piece of white-kid soul. (It’s the last #1 song ever to come in under the two-minute mark.) But it sounds big and cinematic anyway, with Chilton’s voice fighting its way through nervous organs and melodramatic strings and horn stabs … There’s nothing lo-fi about the record; even if it was recorded on a low budget, it’s got the sweep of a James Bond theme.”

The track sticks to A minor for most of its length, but jumps up to C# major at 1:33 for its tiny instrumental outro. The horns have made their exit, leaving the strings to lead the fast fade-out.

Brooke Parrott | Persuade Me

“Growing up, (Portland’s Brooke Parrott) played music and wrote stories incessantly, eventually pursuing a degree from Berklee College of Music in Boston,” (BrookeParrott.com). “The years after found Brooke in London, living in a disused pub rumored to be an old haunt of Charles Dickens and Karl Marx, where she wrote songs on a disintegrating grand piano in the parlor. She began working for a small live music startup company that grew up to be a big one, and learned a lot in the process.

When the siren call of the Pacific Northwest became too loud to ignore, Brooke returned and found her place touring and recording music with Portland darlings Loch Lomond. She released a second studio effort, an EP called Buried, that was written between contrasting worlds—part hectic city and suffocating winter in London, part hinterland yurt in the Oregon woods.”

Starting in D minor, Parrott’s 2008 release “Persuade Me” shifts at 0:52 into a chorus in C minor. From 2:24-2:56, an angular bridge built around chromatic bass motion holds sway before a return to the chorus. The final chorus ends by hanging in the air, unresolved.

The Chimes | Once in Awhile

Lenny Cocco, the founder and lead vocalist of the New York City-based doo-wop vocal group The Chimes, “was deeply influenced by his parents and motivated by his father, Leonard,” (TheChimesMusic). “A professionally accomplished accordionist, (Leonard) advised Lenny to focus on Tommy Dorsey’s 1937 number one hit, ‘Once In Awhile.’ Lenny arranged the standard to work itself well with his vocal quintet. Standards were their passion!

In 1960, they visited the Brill Building in Manhattan, New York, to record a demo. The engineer during the session introduced them to Andy Leonetti, of TAG Records. Within minutes their lives were changed.” In 1961, the tune reached #11 on the US pop charts and #15 in Canada. “As a result, their major bookings, in the beginning, were in intimate theaters, such as The Howard in Washington, D.C., the Regal in Chicago and the Apollo in Harlem, New York. The intimate theater setting bonded people together like never before … The group made two appearances on ‘American Bandstand’ with Dick Clark” and had several other minor hits during the early 1960s.

The 12/8 tune could easily serve as an example of the doo wop genre as a whole. After beginning in Eb major, there’s a shift to G major for the bridge (1:08 – 1:35) before the track returns to the original key.

Led Zeppelin | The Wanton Song

“With Led Zeppelin, there was no break-in period, no ‘early phase’ where they figured out what kind of band they wanted to be,” (Pitchfork). “They were fully formed from the first repetition of the ‘Good Times Bad Times’ riff, and they powered along through their first half-dozen albums crushing everything in their path. Zep never had their Sgt. Pepper’s, their Exile, their Who’s Next, because every album was more or less that good — for a while, anyway.

This was a band that knew the music it wanted to make and executed it with ruthless precision … Physical Graffiti … found the band inhabiting what Neil Tennant once described (and Tom Ewing fleshed out) as their ‘imperial phase’ … everything they tried during these years somehow worked. Physical Graffiti … (is) Led Zeppelin’s White Album, the one they made when they were at their creative peak and had a million ideas, but were also under a tremendous amount of strain and saw the end starting to come into focus.”

After barreling along in G minor through the first verse, the Physical Graffiti track “The Wanton Song” (1975) next features a multi-key interlude (0:58 – 1:23) before returning to G minor. The surprisingly contrasting interlude is back at 2:03, but this time we land in an F major instrumental section at 2:28. At 3:03, we’re back on the express train of the G minor verse — with a quintessential Zeppelin guitar riff at its heart.

The Boys of the Lough | Farewell and Remember Me

“A fun-loving approach to Celtic music has made the Boys of the Lough one of folk music’s most influential groups. Since they formed in the 1960s, the Ireland-based band have been instrumental in the evolution of traditional Irish music,” (Qobuz).

“Boys of the Lough are one of the masters of celtic music, combining members from several celtic traditions with a long history (Ceolas.org) … Like that other long-running act, the Chieftans, their music tends to the formal; impeccable technique and sensitivity, with large, sometimes classical-style arrangements, and very tight ensemble playing. They lack the fire and roughness of other groups; the overall feeling is of a group of skilled, well-integrated musicians playing together for the pure pleasure of it.”

“Farewell and Remember Me,” from the group’s 1987 album of the same name, is a ballad largely built in F# major. Accompanied by piano and fiddle, the solo vocal line takes center stage for several verses, each ending on a suspended tonic chord. At 2:12, the final verse shifts to F# minor, closing the tune without resolution on a wistful VI chord.

Tori Amos | Happy Phantom

An extremely overdue MotD debut for Tori Amos: “‘Happy Phantom’ was written and recorded during the first phase of creating Little Earthquakes. … (It) was included on both a cassette tape Tori submitted for copyright in June 1990 and the original rejected version of Little Earthquakes in December that year,” (ToriPedia). “In the Little Earthquakes songbook, Tori noted that ‘when the songs began showing up I wrote their names on separate envelopes and made a faery ring in the middle of the house. I’d sit in the middle of the ring to focus on a song’s direction. All of the songs seemed to work toward the completeness of the other. They decided we needed to hang out with death for awhile.'”

Amos’ first major-label release, Y Kant Tori Read, saw her fronting a synth-pop band of the same name during the late 1980s. The album “sunk without a trace; she had to dig deep inside herself, in her search for her true identity,” (Songfacts). “She told Rolling Stone this meant killing her old self: ‘To talk about death was really important on Little Earthquakes because there was a part of me had to die. The image that I had created for whatever reason, had to die.'”

“Happy Phantom,” is largely built in Bb major, but erupts into a surprising instrumental interlude in G major (1:45 – 1:57), then pivots around a bit more until returning to familiar territory at 2:14. Wrapping up by returning to Bb major, the tune then falls off the edge of the earth during a few formless closing bars.

The Offspring | Self Esteem

“The Offspring is perhaps the quintessential SoCal punk band of the 1990s — survivors of the 1980s hardcore scene who revamped themselves for the heavier alt-rock era … ” (AllMusic). “The group released their second album, Ignition, on Epitaph in 1992 but it was 1994’s Smash and its accompanying singles ‘Come Out and Play (Keep Em Separated)’ and ‘Self Esteem’ that pushed the band toward blockbuster national success.

Shortly afterward, the Offspring made the leap to the major labels and continued a streak of snotty, satirical alt-rock hits such as ‘Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)’ and ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’ that kept the group squarely in the hard rock mainstream through the 2000s.”

“Self Esteem” spends most of its runtime in A minor, including its “snotty” wordless a capella intro, verses, and choruses. But a bridge (1:59 – 2:35) suddenly jumps up to D minor before reverting to the original key. At 3:39, the D minor section repeats, seemingly falling back into A minor only for the last beat (the tune cuts off abruptly on the first beat of a measure).

Jamiroquai | Two Completely Different Things

“There was a time when you could rarely set foot in a public place without being reminded of the omnipresence of UK funk-pop sensation Jamiroquai,” (abc.net.au). “The band, led by constantly behatted frontman Jay Kay, were a dominant force in the music of the late-90s and early-2000s, their blend of acid jazz, funk, disco and house a constant on radio, in nightclubs, at cafes and parties the world over.”

“… You can’t shake the feeling that pop is a giant feedback loop, in which Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield begat Jamiroquai and Pharrell, and the influence of Jamiroquai must have fed, consciously or subconsciously, into the aural landscapes of both Daft Punk and Pharrell.” (HeyMusicOfficial).

The intro of 2010’s “Two Completely Different Things” alternates between D major and D minor. At 0:23, the verse shifts into F major, remaining there for the chorus. 1:06 – 1:17 brings an interlude which echoes the intro (D major and minor). The pattern continues throughout.