THE ERRANT APPRENTICE

I happened to hear this performed by Andy Stewart on PHC this Sunday and was spellbound by the rhyming gymnastics. Sadly, it was not credited or titled on the air. Happily, I was able to unearth it. The link above includes audio, and now I have the song lodged firmly in my ear again.

The Viola Joke as Musician’s Folklore was uncovered whilst idly Googling. I sought research on the tradition of genre-specific ostracism-based musician jokes. These jokes are directed at a specific instrument, and are told within a community of musicians who participate in ensembles including the instrument being mocked.

The best known of these are banjo jokes, viola jokes, and drummer jokes. The banjo mockery is associated with traditionally-oriented pickers; the viola jokes are for consumption by a classical consort, and drummers take shit from rockers.

One article appeared tantalizingly beyond the web, however. Knowing the Score: The Transmission of Musician Jokes among Professional and Semi-Professional Musicians, by Nancy Groce, was published in the New York Folklore Journal Vol. 22 in 1996, but appears online only in the list of contents.

To judge a book by its’ cover, however, the title appears to propose a function for the jokery: it establishes that the joker has been exposed to the culture of working musicians. If that’s the thesis, I’d love to read more.

Are there similar categories of writer’s jokes?

Some notes on the new Jason Webley CD, Only Just Beginning.

At the concert at Town Hall Friday night, I sat next to a man I introduced myself to, but whose name I have forgotten. He mentioned that he’d recently interviewed Jason for a San Francisco-based publication, but did not mention it by name.

We briefly discussed the experience of interviewing Jason and I asked him some questions about what he’d learned from Jason in the interview. He told me that yes, this new record is the end of the cycle that began with Viaje; that the songs on Only Just Beginning are about family, and finally, that each song on Only Just Beginning relates direcly to the songs on Viaje.

Curious, as I was ripping Only Just Beginning, I looked at the tracklistings for Viaje. What I noticed was interesting enough that I’ll reproduce both side by side here.

The songs are structured as the close of a fugue begun on Viaje, such that Viaje’s “Prelude” determines Only Just Beginning’s “Coda,” and so on. “Halloween” and “May Day.” “Old Man Time” and “Icarus.”

(Update: oops, I reversed the songtitles titles at first.)

There are musical relationships as well – “Music That Puts Everything Together” echoes both “Halloween” and, obviously, “Music That Tears Itself Apart,” but I have, er, only just begun to listen for them.

Finally, I noticed that Jason also studded the concert last night with simiilar puzzles – the only one I really saw and got was at the beginning of the second song, “Balloon Feather Boat Tomato,” when he pulled these objects, in that order, from within the grand piano on the stage. As the audience recognized each, cheers rang out, presumably for the roles each symbol hs played over the years at these elaborate shows.

The title of the song, by the way, relates in reverse chronological order, the ways in which Jason’s end-of-season Death Day shows transported the performer-character to the Other Side. At the first Death Day show, the Tomato led the procession, where Jason was shorn and placed into a coffin; At the second (my favorite of the ones I saw), he departed in a boat, accompanied by Charon and the Lady of the Lake; at the third, he was cocooned against a tree as feathers rained down on the freezing, silent crowd; and at the most recent, his avatar ascended through the drizzle slung beneath a clot of balloons.

One cannot help but wonder what in the world will happen at the end of this summer.

Bob Edwards: 30 Years on NPR is the NPR-hosted farewell site.

Twenty minutes ago my eyes snapped open just as Bob Edwards began his last on-air interview as host of Morning Edition with Charles Osgood, the same man he began the show with, a quarter century ago. It will be odd in the morning without him, the last day-to-day vestige of my childhood gone from my life.

American Mavericks just started on KUOW tonight at 10p. But it’s in the KUOW Presents, which means it might be transient.

I still resent the fifteen-year-old loss of classical music programming on the station. I hope they pick this up, but even if they don’t I have at least heard about the feckin’ thing. Check out the audio on the AM website. Reich! Cage! Composers I’ve never feckin’ heard of!

This is the show played tonight.

attn: ERIC: the john peel sessions: Every peel session since 1992.

(via things.)

Mike McGonigal writes about the Sun City Girls for the Seattle Weekly. He mentions the recent show at Tacoma’s Java Jive, and that he first saw the girls when they toured with eighties skatepunk band JFA in 1984, the same tour I first saw them on.

I’ve been friendly acquaintances with the Girls since they first moved here, even designing an early Abduction Records logo. Alan is the person who first told me about Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the morning they found the body.

So it’s a distinct relief to see this piece, which, I must say, does a pretty good job of capturing the delightful non-sequiturs the boys are so fond of tossing off.

Tom Waits: MP3 archive. Bootlegs via MoFi.