David Munczinski // Blog

Indaba Music put on its new suit Saturday and again headed uptown (yeah, again, but this time in a new hybrid cab) for the Italian composer and Godfather of film scoring, Ennio Morricone’s debut concert in the United States. Commanding some 200 musicians, Morricone presented the most memorable and emotionally rousing music from his more than 400 film scores in a two hour concert. To our amusement, our hands were tired after three encores which reprised our favorites from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Cinema Paradiso and Queimada! For a pretty balanced review, read on: http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/arts/music/05morr.html

When Dan presented the idea of getting tickets for a David Byrne show at Carnegie Hall, I jumped at the opportunity. Having never been to this city’s pantheon of classical music, I felt a small subversive joy in my first show being a psych folk showcase curated by art rock iconoclast, David Byrne. Welcome to Dreamland, the show introduced by Byrne last night featured CocoRosie, Cibelle, Adem, Vashti Bunyan, Vetiver, and Devendra Banhart – artists and groups loosely identified as belonging to the New Weird America movement, a ‘00s rebirth of the psych folk tradition of the ‘60s. Influences from the jam scene, electronica and world music traditions add to the freshness and vitality of strong instrumental and lyrical folk foundations. I had no idea where the night would go; I had never listened to the music of any of the performers, although similar folk group and sometime collaborator, Antony and the Johnsons, is on heavy Sunday morning rotation around here. The concert delivered on every level. The technical skill of the musicians and singers was delivered with a lot of unassuming gratitude and a few self-deprecating jokes. But the audience caught on to Byrne’s secret quickly, their patience for innovating music puts their talent well beyond the banging of many of their 20 year old peers. Welcome to Dreamland was an all too fitting title for the meticulously crafted show, and I left the concert eager to hear more from each musician. What struck me as I read over wikipedia articles and music blogs, watched performance snippets on youtube and bought songs from memory on itunes this morning, is the free-form collaborative spirit of these artists. I couldn’t stop the thought that followed: Indaba is the perfect platform for these artists. They travel the world and record in places as distant from one another as Paris, Atlanta, San Francisco and New York. When they come together to play, they sound like intimate collaborators, bringing all those experiences of the folk road together. To capture some of that spirit is what we hope musicians can find here. For a closer look at the concert: The sister duo CocoRosie began the evening with songs from their first and second albums accompanied by film art. They closed with a surprisingly poignant and sexual cover of “Turn Me On”. (For a decent video version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2hoP9CllbI ). I like songs “By Your Side” from their debut album and “K-Hole” from their follow up. Cibelle, a Brazilian influenced by the diversity of that country’s musical traditions and the world of her stage mates continued with her beautiful feminine voice. I kept thinking about what her voice with the dynamic instrumentality of Forro in the Dark would sound like. Check out her album here: http://www.cibelle.net/. Moby look-a-like folk import, Adem came on next, followed by Vashti Bunyan, whom he also accompanied. I found their music the most conventionally folk, which was great book-ended by the others. Vetiver and Devendra Banhart, frequent collaborators, brought the place to life with electric folk rock and Banhart’s modern troubadour songs. Banhart, by far the most familiar and accessible artist of the evening, set out squarely to rock a concert hall used to symphonies and opera singers, and the audience responded in kind. Check him out: http://www.cripplecrow.com/. The evening closed with everyone back on stage together for a final number that featured not only the piano and cello, but the beatboxing of CocoRosie’s backing artists and most notably the harmony of the night’s female and male performers clustered on opposite ends of the stage. Congratulations goes out the onstage engineer, who from our vantage point in the front row, stage left, expertly mixed well over 15 performers simultaneously at points.

This time of year brings out a perennial year-in-review listing bonanza. The top in news events, sports moments, celebrity flashings all delivered by the consummate my-opinion-makes-me-an-expert. And as a culture, we�ve settled these lists on the number 10, not by historical standard (the zeitgeist hipster irreverence for convention would push us beyond that) but for the utility of 10. Ten allows you to vehemently oppose a few of the selections (even allow them to personally offend you) while generally agreeing with any decent list. The music bloggers � the likes of Largehearted Boy, Pitchfork and Fred Wilson - have been releasing their votes, proposing the albums that will imprint our audio memory of 2006. It wasn�t 1964, but all things considered, 2006 was a good year for new music. But the important question is will this music matter five, ten years from now. So I decided to go back � to 1996 � to search the lists that defined that year. At the time, my 1996 was dominated by Dave Matthews and the intoxicating sound of Crash, but perusing old lists � not a blogger�s to find � the answer to my question became a resounding yes, the best new music of 2006 trumpets the growth, reflection and in some cases comforting consistency of music from some of the best new artists of 1996. Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt landed on cd players in 1996 and with it the prodigal son of raw lyrical talent came home to chart the course of hip hop�s destiny. Playing retirement as the new entrance, Kingdom Come was released in November of this year. With a polarizing sound and mesmerizing fanfare, Jay-Z proved 10 years of relevance. 1996 saw Belle and Sebastian release their first two albums Tigermilk and If You're Feeling Sinister and their prolific song crafting and vocal harmony have persisted as evidenced by this year�s The Life Pursuit. What Would the Community Think brought us face-to-face with Cat Power (in her first widely-noticed release) and her emotionally itinerant performance style. This year�s The Greatest, from what I�ve sampled of it, is an artifact of artistic growth. Ghostface Killah dropped his first album Ironman in 1996. Ten years later, Fishscale came out in March 2006. I�ve yet to get my hands on the LP, but I welcome any extension of his refreshing lyrical clarity. Beyond the artists listed above, I learned to love The Annuals, The Killers (again) and Regina Spektor. The Decemberists and My Chemical Romance offered arguably their best work yet, and I was mostly won over. I learned to appreciate The Knife, Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado (and more accurately the production genius of Timbaland). My underground infatuation became Forro in the Dark, the East Village Bahian street music ensemble and Ultragrrrl�s newly signed, The Oohlas. And between Sunday mornings and wandering treks through concrete canyons, I really found Deathcab for the first time. For a comprehensive list of the best of 2006 as decided by bloggers popular and obscure, check out Largehearted Boy�s compilation gateway: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2006/12/mondays_2006_ye.html