Lola Flores – ‘La Faraona’ (‘The Pharaoh’)

 As a kid I read a novel by Alberto Moravia in which an old prostitute, plying her trade, awaits a next client. She contemplates her body, noting the top half still looks good and the bottom half, which was once a glory, could now only be revealed at the critical moment.

I thought of the novel today as I watched this video of Lola Flores and Celia Cruz performing 'Burundanga' on stage in 1991.

What strikes me gloriously is the proud and almost defiant presentation of sexuality by Lola Flores. It does not look absurd as it is within a certain Spanish cultural context, and within the gypsy tradition she identified with in her Andalusian folkloric singing and film career.

I’d seen Celia Cruz in concert here in Sydney some years back. Towards the end of the event ended, the audience excitedly stormed the stage to dance with abandon round the still singing Queen of Salsa.

Lola Flores however had never passed across my radar … till yesterday. Better late than never as this sixty-eight year old gal can really dance up a serious storm, though her best singing day are long gone.

I hope you find the performance gives you the big exhilarating shot in the arm it did me!

'Facade - An Entertainment'

Dame Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry (1918)

I posted a while back on Dame Edith Sitwell - a 1959 interview where she talks about being eccentric, not an unexpected topic I must say.

At the risk of being seen as a bit blue stocking, I'm venturing into this territory again.

In 1918, this aristocratic figure of rather alarming appearance began publishing in the literary magazine 'Wheels' a series of poems - 'Façade' - in which she experimented with rhythm and intonation. While seeming nonsense verse, the lines were shot with personal meanings and references.

The poems were given a musical accompaniment in 1922 by William Walton, resulting in 'Façade - An Entertainment'. Walton continuously revised the music up till 1951 when the definitive score was published.

The first performance of the work - a 'succès de scandale' - was given in the Sitwell's London home on 24 January 1922. The poet recited her verse through a megaphone protruding through a curtain, while the composer conducted six musicians playing his music.

Being avant garde, the mainstream press see-sawed between puzzlement and hostility, with 'Drivel That They Paid to Hear!' from 'The Daily Express' being an example of the latter response. Even those present who one would think to be at least sympathetic could react violently - Noël Coward made a very large show of walking out mid performance.

More measured views came from Edward J. Dent ('The Illustrated London News') ...

The audience was at first inclined to treat the whole thing as an absurd joke, but there is always a surprisingly serious element in Miss Sitwell's poetry and Mr Walton's music … which soon induced the audience to listen with breathless attention

... and from Ernest Newman ('The Sunday Times') ...
 

as a musical joker he [Walton] is a jewel of the first water

Of course, the work has now taken its place as more standard literary-musical fare - I was taken to a performance in London when I was living there as a kid.

The two recordings of  'Façade - An Entertainment' I most like are both from Decca. 

This first is the famous 1929 recording with Edith Sitwell, Constant Lambert and William Walton. I particularly love Lambert's delivery of the verse - he has been described as ...

a speaker sans pareil of the verse, clear, rapid incisive, tireless and commanding vocally an extraordinary range of inflection from menace to the threat of doom to the most debonair and jaunty inconsequence

My other favourite is the 1954 recording with Edith Sitwell and Peter Pears, and Anthony Collins and the English Opera Group Ensemble. Pears brings all his operatic training to give meaningful musicality to the recitation.

Delicious musical romps, don't you think?

Percy Grainger: ‘Read This If Ella Grainger or Percy Grainger Are Found Dead Covered with Whip Marks’

Quite an arresting opening gambit, don’t you think.

I’ve always been more than a bit intrigued by Percy Grainger (1882-1961) – I think it’s the faint remembrance of reading about him being both wildly eccentric and wildly talented musically.

Let’s deal with the musical stuff first.

The cover of Grainger's first extant composition, Klavierstück

Percy Grainger began his career as a pianist in 1902, playing Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with the Bath Pump Room Orchestra. Later that year, he toured Britain in a concert party with Adelina Patti, who predicted a stellar future for him. He went on to become an internationally known concert pianist, and to give some sense of his success, he was earning $5000 a week in the mid-1920s, around $60,000 today.

He was also a composer of small-scale keyboard works, played at times on instruments of his own devising …

Percy Grainger Kangaroo-Pouch Tone-Tool

… and had a avid research interest in folk songs, particularly those of Britain and Scandinavia.

He pioneered electronic music, and experimented with ‘chance music’ in 1912, 40 years before John Cage.

He spoke 11 foreign languages fluently, including Icelandic and Russian.

And was quite a decent amateur watercolour painter …

Barstow, California, Looking North from Casa del Desierto Hotel Watercolour 1920

Eccentricity seemed to come more than easily to Grainger.

He would jog between the towns in which he was giving concerts.

He wore self-designed terry-towelling clothing …

Distrusting anything Mediterranean, he purged his writing of Greco-Latin elements, substituting these with words having Nordic roots. So ‘family’ became ‘breed-group, ‘literature’ became ‘book art’ and ‘attractive’ became ‘on-draw-some’. I suspect I won’t be using the last on my next pick-up!

But what interests me is his unashamed enjoyment of sadism and flagellation, writing, in the letter titled ‘Read This If Ella Grainger or Percy Grainger Are Found Dead Covered with Whip Marks’ …

‘I am a sadist & a flagellant – my highest sexual delight is to whip a beloved woman’s body … . To a lesser degree I enjoy being whipped myself (& before marriage used to whip myself every few weeks)’.

I would have thought it would have been more than a little difficult nearly one hundred years ago to have such sexual interests, and to talk about them reasonably openly. Grainger liked to record and show the results of such sexual activity …

As early as the 1930s, he endowed a museum in Melbourne dedicated to himself and to which he donated manuscripts, scores, instruments, 73 whips and blood-stained shirts.

A courageous fellow of a different path – something to be admired!

Edith Sitwell - On Being Eccentric

As a kid in London, my family had a friend, the minor Bloomsbury Group painter, Eve Disher, whose 1940 work 'Still Life of Arum Lilies and Tulips' ...

Eve Disher - 'Still Life of Arum Lilies and Tulips' (1940)

... I bought not so long ago from an antique dealer in a small town in France.

One day at Eve's flat in Eccleston Square, Knightsbridge, the phone rang and it was Sachervall Sitwell - one of the famed eccentric sibling triumvirate of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell ...

... with Edith, a poet, being perhaps the most physically arresting of the three ...

Some of Edith's poems were set to music, most famously a series  known as 'Facade' which had an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton. And I recall going to a performance or reading of this work in my late teens.

All up then, I've always had a soft spot for the Sitwells (and eccentrics in general) and when I heard this 1959 interview with then Dame Edith Sitwell ...

 ... I was keen to share it round.

Hope you like it as much as I do.

Yvette Guilbert (1865–1944) - Cabaret Singer and Belle Époque Actress

'Yvette Guilbert' - Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1894,  gouache)

Yvette Guilbert first came to my attention at university in the course of a Fine Arts degree ... as the subject of the above gouache by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec.

More recently and with my quite rabid interest in late C19 French music hall (where is that coming from?), I became aware that by 1890 the French cabaret singer and Belle Époque actress was headlining at Le Moulin Rouge, along with such 'luminaries' as La Goulue (Louise Weber).

Yvette Guibert 'Saluant le Public' ('Taking a Bow') Henri Toulouse-Lautrec 1898

In his memoires, English painter William Rothenstein described Yvette Guibert's debut at the famed venue:

"One evening Lautrec came up to the rue Ravignan to tell us about a new singer, a friend of Xanrof, who was to appear at the Moulin Rouge for the first time... We went; a young girl appeared, of virginal aspect, slender, pale, without rouge. Her songs were not virginal - on the contrary; but the frequenters of the Moulin were not easily frightened; they stared bewildered at this novel association of innocence with Xanrof's horrific double entente; stared, stayed and broke into delighted applause."

The singer herself expanded on this impression in this artistic mission statement:

"I was looking for an impression of extreme simplicity, which allied itself harmoniously with the lines of my slim body and my small head ... I wanted above all to appear highly distinguished, so that I could risk anything, in a repertoire that I had decided would be a ribald one ... . To assemble an exhibition of humorous sketches in song, depicting all the indecencies, all the excesses, all the vices of my “contemporaries,” and to enable them to laugh at themselves ... that was to be my innovation, my big idea."

Singing raunchy songs of tragedy and lost love rooted in the Parisian poverty from which she'd come, Guilbert was to appear in other noted Montmartre venues, such as Jardin de Paris, Divan Japonais, the Eldorado Club and 'Les Ambassadeurs' ...

... usually wearing her trademark black gloves ...

 

Yvette Guilbert - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Litho, 1894)

... and Marilynesque plunging necklines ...

Yvette Guibert 1891

Naturally I was drawn to the ribald vulgarity of her songs, one of the most famous being 'Madame Arthur' (c1850 by Paul de Kock):

The lyrics to the song, translated are:

Ms. Arthur is a woman
That made talk, talk, talk, talk to her long,
Without newspapers, without anything, without calling
She had a crowd of lovers,
Everyone wanted to be loved by her,
Each of the courting, why?
Is that without being really beautiful,
She had an indescribable!
Ms. Arthur is a woman
That made talk, talk, talk, talk to her long,
Without newspapers, without anything, without calling
She had a crowd of lovers,
Ms. Arthur is a woman
Who was talking about her long.

Its size was very ordinary,
Her eyes small but sémillants,
Snub nose, his clear voice,
Its curved legs and wriggling
In short, looking at his face,
Nothing you put in commotion;
But behind her figure
Promised an indescribable!

Stuck by her lovers,
It was she who sent them
She loved the new ardor,
An old love he disliked
And each grief at heart,
Find more lyrics on similar 

In his heart no longer use,
Said, alas! another woman
Will not have its indescribable!
You should have seen the dance;
His enthusiasm was unmatched
By his movements, his bearing,
She was the Queen of the Ball
The rider facing it
His foot touched the nose, my faith,
Everyone applauded his grace
And especially its indescribable!

So what this lady lived?
Showing a large retinue,
Common in vaudeville, drama,
Nothing at the forefront told
She saw for the ordinary
Come an end without fear,
For then the owner
Admired his indescribable!

Oh! woman who are looking to do
Conquests of morning and evening,
In vain you go to please you
Hours in your mirror,
Elegance, grace mischievous,
Look, sigh of genuine,
Velvets, perfumes and crinoline
Nothing beats an indescribable!

 

I'm now even more pleased to be able to perform my own small reverential  act of resurrection as today I came across two little bits of footage of this famous chanteuse in a French documentary - firstly with Guilbert posing for the camera, and then giving a speech and singing at a gathering ...

It's great to have a person up close and personal, even in the form of film footage, after the remoteness of all those art images from way back when.

Way To Nail An Audition

This is most definitely the way to nail an American Idol audition - well, any audition for that matter ...

... and to see one of our own up there doing it in such style is for me icing on the cake.

I just love how, in a completely controlled way, Jacob pours all of his heart and soul into this performance of 'God Bless The Child'.

Delicious!

Question is, gentlemen, ... .

Question is love of which of the two following 'blast from the past' music videos would best suggest ...

[1]  a fine taste in popular music?

[2]  unexcelled retro fashion sense?

[3]  faultless appreciation of high production values?

[4]  a deep understanding of the choreographic possibilities of a piece of music?

[5]  a general smoothness and all-round super and current coolness?

Better accompany your choice with reasons, guys.

Courage gentlemen!

BTW this post is perhaps just an excuse to have two oldies but goodies out there ... yet again.

Big Big Bawdiness In Weimar Republic Germany

Sometimes the impact of a personality is just so arresting that, even with great distances of time and place, it demands your attention.

And so it is for me with Claire Waldoff, rough and bawdy Berlin carbaret singer of the 1910's and 1920's.

Born Clara Wortmann, the singer arrived for work in Berlin in 1903, saying:

I fell passionately in love with Berlin. Not because the city was beautiful or the Imperial capital, but because it was Berlin, with its special atmosphere, its vivacious and curt character

For the stage, she adopted a gruff persona and the rough slang of the working class native Berliners, full doubles entendres and sexual innuendos:

I began to become the Berliner, a prototype of the Berliner, a representative of modern Berlin

 

This is typified in ''Ach Gott Was Sind Die Männer Dumm'' ('My God How Stupid Men Are'):

A regular at the Chat Noir in Friedrichstraße, and the Eldorado ...

Eldorado 1932

... Claire Waldoff limited her performances to three songs only, with no encores, which allowed her to play a number of different venues each night, establishing herself as a major star.


The rise of Hitler and fascism in the 1930s put an end to Waldoff's career, and she and the lover with whom she had always lived openly, Olga Von Roeder ...

 Claire Waldoff and her lover, Olga Von Roeder 

... went to love in Bayerisch Gmain - and took up gardening in a very serious manner.

Sadly, or otherwise, after listening to 'Ach Gott Was Sind Die Männer Dumm' I feel just a tad  more 'delicate' and less hairy-chested than usual!

How bout you?

I guess the Isherwood posts put me in the mood for things of this sort, and the angle it gives on gay social history.

If you'd like more, then I came across an interesting blog 'Berlin Cabaret' - LINK.

The post on Anita Berber, who you may know through Otto Dix's painting ...

... is particularly good.

And my bet is the work was used as one of the models for the look of the dykes at the Kit Kat Klub in the 1972 film of 'Cabaret.

What do you reckon?

Still THE Most Stylish Version of 'Fever'

Reckon this arrangement of 'Fever' from the incomparable Peggy Lee is still the very best.

With the added delight in the late 1960's of slight self-parody - at points rolling her eyes up or being blown back on the word 'fever'.

That lady had laid back jazz cool totally under control!

The Music You Need To Post

There's some music you're just need to post - and often the next step is finding images that work with it.

So, to go with part of the Adagietto from Mahler's fifth Symphony, how bout something like ...


I can almost feel the hot summer sun ...


... and smell the salty sea air ...


... of my early childhood by the sea.

Yep, right images for the music for me!

Justifiable Causes for Dancing at Home

Everyone must know the salsa is a dance genre that comes from Cuba and is a mix of rhythmic African and Latin music. So little wonder I was dancing with great energy round the house today ... as I came across to a clip of Celia Cruz singing 'Egosimo' on television in 1966. And dancing is the sure sign for sharing!

Now, there's another angle on this Queen of Salsa for me cos we saw her on tour - in Sydney a few years back. Her music and performance were so extraordinarily infectious the audience were dancing in the aisles of the theatre, way before half though. In fact much as I was this morning!


And towards the end of her concert the public had crowded onto the stage around this artist, almost stopping the show.

With all that said, the lady also has great moves! And a killer and glittering 'period' sheath!

Just tell me you're not on your feet - or at least thinking of it!

Working Class Songs of the US-Mexican Borderlands

Just been listening to some music from famed Chicana idol, Lydia Mendoza (1916-2007).

This twelve-stringed guitarist sang popular and sentimental Mexican songs often of the struggles of working class people who lived in the borderlands of the US and Mexico. Hence 'La Alondra de la Frontera' (The Lark of the Border).






Particularly haunting I think are, first, her early 'Collar De Perlas' ...

... and then, later in life, 'Tango Negro' ('The Black Tango') ...

Just keen to share, as usual!

PS - No 'Pearl Necklace' comments please!

Noel Coward and 'Nina'

Never been particularly keen on Noel Coward - I'd seen a few of his plays ('Private Lives', 'Design for Living' and 'Blithe Spirit') and, if I thought anything, I guess it would've been he was second rate Oscar Wilde.

And it wasn't him not being hairy-chested and 'blokey' (like me) - just an aversion to the exaggerated and bitchy thing, all the worse for being dressed up in a certain class elitism.

But yesterday I had a new respect for Coward as a writer and performer after seeing and hearing his 1955 performance of 'Nina' - the wickedly clever lyrics and their delivery pithy sparkle and explode like noisy fireworks, for example ...

She said with most refreshing candour
That she thought Carmen Miranda
Was subversive propaganda

... and ...

She said that love should be impulsive
But not convulsive

Still chuckling ... how bout you?

Bernadette Peters - Ourselves ... as a Serious Cabaret Singer!

Bernadette Peters is the way many (most?) of us would like to imagine ourselves ... if we were able to step through that magical mirror into our other more theatrical and alternate careers ...


I saw her in concert in Sydney a few years back - and still have some of the glittering golden 'coins' she threw out into the audience in her opening song, 'Pennies from Heaven'.

She performed both the following and contrasting Stephen Sondheim pieces.

'Not A Day Goes By' from 'Merrily We Roll Along' ...

... where here she nearly looses to a degree that's almost uncomfortable, particularly at the end - but then maybe it's planned that big cos a live audience is not as close as the camera.

What do you think?

The other song is 'Hello Little Girl' from 'Into the Woods' - with Peters being less than a little wolf-ish ... to an innocent Red Riding Hood.

The lyrics are so incredibly witty and close to the bone I thought I'd put down the first verse and the last lines ...

Look at that flesh, pink and plump
Hello, little girl...
Tender and fresh, not one lump
Hello, little girl...
This one's especially lush,
Delicious... Mmm...
Hello, little girl, what's your rush?
You're missing all the flowers
The sun won't set for hours
Take your time ...

There's no possible way
To describe how what you feel
When you're talking to your meal!

... hope you're chuckling away!

So, are any of you guys Peters devotees?

Music from Heaven at 5.15am

Just been listening to some heavenly music from Jeff here - slow, exquisitely sweet, introspective, simple, sensuously caressing, the instrumentation pulled right back to essentials ...

... bliss.

Just thought I'd like to share it before I hit the sack - it's 5.15am!

'I Never Knew How Good Our Songs Were Until I Heard Ella Sing Them' (Ira Gershwin)

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996)

I was listening to some Ella this morning - 'Manhattan' - and understood it just couldn't be sung any better - differently yes but not better.

This first lady of song molds every single musical phrase and lyric so that the combination is totally meaningful and individual and never musically commonplace.

So I needed to post a couple of songs!

'Every Time You Say Goodbye' (London, 1965) ...

Ella Fitzgerald 'Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered' ('The Nat 'King' Cole Show', 1960s) ...

Did Anyone hear her live?

And can say what the experience was like?

Janis Joplin - 'Me and Bobby McGee'

Janis Joplin seems to embody the Counter Culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s - the clothes, beads, incense, drugs, sexual freedom ... real liberation from convention.



And 'Me and Bobby McGee' seems to catch its essence.

Wish I'd been part of it - rather than a kid wondering at it!

Anyone out there live through it?

What was it like?

Any stories would be good guys!