Music

Notice a marked increase in the number of "reunion" acts and new albums by groups you thought had disappeared into the mists of time? So has Forbes.com, whose Tuesday piece titled "Old Stars, New Music, New Money" discusses major labels betting that acts like Peter Frampton, Styx, KRS-One, Chaka Khan, and Donna Summer will sell albums to people who, well, still buy albums:

Moreover, most of their fans are older consumers who are less likely to be satisfied with a single-song download from Apple's... iTunes Store, says John Kellogg, an entertainment attorney who teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. "These older artists' fans are CD or album-buying fans and that's one reason why record companies like them,'' Kellogg says.

They aren't selling in the several hundred thousands as in their glory days, however. Peter Frampton's recent Fingerprints has sold 52,000 copies, while America's Here & Now sold 46,000 copies in the US. These numbers explain why you often find these acts touring a lot more than they might have before.

Meanwhile, Led Zeppelin's members are making noises about touring in 2008 with Jason Bonham, son of deceased drummer John Bonham, after performing at a memorial concert for the late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. Could a record deal with Starbucks' Hear Music be far behind?... Neil Young, on the other hand, is apparently in no hurry to release the first volume of his decades-in-preparation Archives box set, which has been moved to 2008 from its 2007 release date, the latest in a string of dashed hopes for fans going all the way back to 2000.

Jimmy Carter's heart was no doubt in the right place when, at the urging of songwriter and record producer Kenny Gamble, he declared June 1979 to be the inaugural Black Music Month. And George W. Bush, unlike most of his predecessors, has taken special interest in the event by throwing White House parties and issuing proclamations such as this on an annual basis since 2000: "During Black Music Month we recognize the outstanding contributions that African-American singers, composers, and musicians have made to our country, and we express our appreciation for the extraordinary music that has enriched our Nation."

We don't really need a Black Music Month, of course. And as I poked around online looking for interesting observances to point to, I was struck by what a non-event it actually was, presidential proclamations notwithstanding. Only BlackAmericaWeb.com's series on "20 People Who Changed Black Music," which continues today with a tribute to "Revolutionary Poet Gil Scott-Heron, the First Rap Rebel," jumped out at me. The site's other black music changers include Teddy Pendergrass, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Michael Jackson, and former Motown Chairman Clarence Avant. The tributes only demonstrate the obvious: Black music is ubiquitous, a necessary component of nearly every American musical style since the first Africans arrived (involuntarily) in Jamestown nearly four centuries ago, and an integral part of our cultural DNA. Try going a month without it and see for yourself.

Steve Forbert, Strange Names & New Sensations (429)
Forbert's froggy voice sounds wise, weathered, and perfectly suited to his clear-eyed observations about middle age ("Middle age is different," he sings, "now you're someone else"), mortality ("Thirty More Years"), and suicide ("Simply Spalding Gray"). It's not all heavy, however. Just heavy enough.

Grateful Dead, Three From the Vault (Rhino)
Having recently recorded Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, the Dead were singing better than ever at this solid (and exquisitely remastered) 1971 show. "Bertha," "Loser," "Deal," "Bird Song," and "Wharf Rat" were all getting either their first or second performances, and Pigpen was still around for a nineteen-minute "Good Lovin'." Huzzah.

This Is Tom Jones (Time Life DVD)
From 1969 to 1971, prior to becoming a cliché, Tom Jones hosted an ambitious and energetic TV variety show that combined Vegas flair with some really excellent music. The highlights of this swinging triple-disc collection include Jones wailing convincingly alongside the likes of Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder (who also plays a wild drum solo), Aretha Franklin, and Crosby Stills & Nash.

Nick Lowe, At My Age (Yep Roc)
Who woulda figured that the former British pub rocker responsible for "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" would turn out to be the last of the classic country songwriters? Lowe sings convincingly about sin and redemption on an album that delivers its world-weary confidences at a slow simmer.

Kartik Seshadri, Live at Oberlin (Traditional Crossroads)
If you haven't paid attention to Indian classical music in a while, this would be an excellent place to reacquaint yourself. Accompanied by Arup Chattopadhyay on tabla, this Ravi Shankar disciple plays sitar with dazzling authority on one complete raga and the climactic gat section of another.

You probably already know the story behind the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," one of a handful of pop masterpieces that appeared on a fairly popular and influential album released forty years ago this month. Four-year-old Julian Lennon shows his father, John, a picture he drew in school. John asks what it is. "It's Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds," Julian replies. The song John writes with a little help from Paul McCartney is perceived as a lyrical depiction of a trendy psychoactive substance, and the rest is mythology.

But what about Lucy? Julian's nursery schoolmate turns out to be one Lucy Vodden, 44, who recently related her story to This Is Hertfordshire. "I remember running around Julian's garden in St George's Hill," she tells the paper.

He had a swimming pool with beautiful tiles. I was always a bit scared of John as he was a big man with a loud voice, and I remember thinking Julian's mum was really glamorous - she used to pick him up for school wearing a mini-skirt and a beehive," she recalls as she sifts through numerous newspaper cuttings about her and "her" song.

Unfortunately, Lucy currently suffers from Lupus, psoriasis, and arthritis, and must avoid not only "marmalade skies" but pretty much all sunlight.

As for other Beatles song inspirations: Lovely Rita apparently no longer grants interviews, but Lucy Vodden remains friends with Melanie Coe, the inspiration for "She's Leaving Home."

Monday night I found myself in the Lower East Side's Bowery Ballroom watching a guy who calls himself Panda Bear sing and twirl knobs on an electronic console amid an attentive but subdued crowd. Panda Bear (AKA Noah Lennox) is the Animal Collective member behind my favorite song of the year. "Bros" is a dreamy and endlessly exhilarating quarter-hour plea for emotional space that any Pet Sounds fan could love. It's available on his challenging new solo album, Person Pitch, and you can hear a few minutes of it out on his MySpace page. Panda doesn't romanticize the sixties by any means; his beats and electronics can be dark and disturbing, not unlike Brian Wilson's own breakdown. He also seemed a little fragile alone onstage, his voice wavering uncertainly among the complicated beats and textures emerging from his rig as kaleidoscopic imagery swirled on a screen behind him. It's not easy being a one-man band.

I might not have mentioned Panda's minimalist thing if I hadn't been so struck by the contrast in performances while enjoying the heck out of Charles Gounod's Faust, which the Metropolitan Opera performed last night in the middle of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, my virtual backyard. Enjoying the opera with a few thousand families picnicking in front of a large outdoor stageful of musicians and full chorus was really no less intimate in its way than Panda's vulnerable performance in front of 500 self-conscious New York hipsters.

The Met's facility with Faust may have something to do with the fact that it was the company's first opera; they debuted it in 1883. The music was certainly ambitious and truly modern, in its way. Gounod's score is full of subtle digressions: two or three measures of, say, isolated flutes would convey enormous swaths of feeling. Tenor Fernando de la Mora, terrific as Faust, sang as though he were improvising the words on the spot, like those other great tenors Coltrane and Rollins. And you just can't beat hearing great music performed by top-notch musicians augmented by an incredibly clear sound system on a slightly chilly spring night. If you're around, the Met concludes its free park series with New Jersey performances of Faust and La Boheme this weekend.

Can you hear/see quality classical music between the coasts? New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross catches a plane, rents a car, and, "[t]hanks to generous speed limits," manages to see the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, and Birmingham's Alabama Symphony Orchestra in their native habitats over the course of two days. Condescending characterizations such as "regional" and "second tier" no longer apply, Ross discovers, and he writes: "I learned what touring musicians have been saying for years: that lesser-known orchestras can deliver sure-footed, commanding performances, and that the notion of a stratospheric orchestral élite is something of an illusion." Read Ross's "On the Road" and feel a little better about the state of classical music in the hinterlands.

Moreover, Ross documented his two-day trip photographically on his blog, The Rest Is Noise.

Young Peter Seeger answers the question, "What's that funny-looking guitar you're playing?" and provides the voice of American roots music in To Hear Your Banjo Play. This 1947 documentary was written by folklorist-musicologist Alan Lomax, directed by Irving Lerner and Willard Van Dyke, and can be viewed on the Internet Archives. It's a fine and gritty document of Southern folk music's then-living traditions, and it doesn't flinch from acknowledging the impoverished conditions from which they sprang. Woodie Guthrie and Brownie McGee also pop up during its concise sixteen minutes. [via Rummage Through the Crevices]

In 2001, five gypsy bands from four countries toured the United States together for the first time. Director Jasmine Dellal's recently released documentary about the tour, When the Road Bends...Tales of a Gypsy Caravan, is both one of the best tour movies ever made as well as a valuable, enlightening, and sometimes heartbreaking look at one of the world's most misunderstood cultures. Originally from India, the Roma people, as they are more accurately known, currently number between eight and ten million. Although concentrated in Eastern Europe, at least a million gypsies (the name derives from the mistaken notion that they were 'gyptians from Egypt) have settled in the United States.

When the River Bends celebrates the common musical threads connecting the Macedonian "Queen of the Gypsies" Esma Redzepova, Spain's Antonio el Pipa Flamenco Company, Romania's Taraf de Haidouks, India's Maharaja, and Macedonia's Fanfare Ciocarlia brass band. Onstage, the musicians display variations on a happy sort of sadness, the indefinable mood the Spanish call duende. During the six weeks of their tour, their differences dissolve into a single communal spirit, and their offstage interactions are hilarious and touching.

As successful as each group may be, nearly all these musicians emerged from, and still subsist amid, shocking poverty and discrimination back home. Dellal's footage of their homes and families includes both a wedding (the marriage of one musician's nineteen-year-old son to a girl of thirteen) and a marathon musical funeral. (Veteran documentarian Albert Maysles, of Gimme Shelter fame, was the film's principle photographer.) In one scene, a group of men in Rajasthan debate the merits of literacy, and one of them notes that it helps to read the numbers on the bus.

When the Road Bends is an emotional cornucopia of music and stories originating in cultural contexts a long way away from our own. Roma pride is expressed in all five acts' music as well as in their (stubborn?) commitment to a very old way of life. "I've never assimilated for anyone," says Esma Redzepova proudly.

The Dynamites, Kaboom! (Outta Sight); Soul Sides Volume Two: The Covers (Zealous/Velour)
Covers to covet on the spotty Soul Sides Volume Two include Esther Phillips's female take on Gil Scott Heron's sadly knowing addiction classic, "Home Is Where the Hatred Is," and reggae singer Marcia Griffiths's loping and Antibalas's afrobeat version of salsa singer Hector Lavoe's "Che Che Cole." The Dynamites raise the proverbial roof on Kaboom!, a sweltering slab of hard Nashville funk.

Tord Gustavsen Trio, Being There (ECM)
Being There is the slow and stately conclusion to a trilogy this Nordic piano trio began in 2001 with Changing Places. Inspired as much by hymns, gospels, and chamber music as by jazz, Gustavsen's rapturous meditations evoke stony cliffs, roiling seas, and the ceaseless crawl of history.

Frankie Valli & The 4 Seasons, Jersey Beat (Rhino)
Admit it. There's something a little disturbing about Frankie Valli's exaggerated doo-wop falsetto, especially in the perfect yet overly size-conscious pop of, say, "Walk Like a Man," "Little Boy (In Grown Up Clothes)," "Big Man's World," and "Big Man in Town." This three-CD (plus DVD) box is a fitting tribute to a group that brought weird 1960s New Jersey to the masses.

Marva Wright, After the Levee Broke (AIM International)
"I got outta my bed, stepped in water to my knees," sings blues belter Marva Wright in the autobiographical "The Levee Is Breaking Down." Wright lost everything in the post-Katrina flood and this emotional album is her testament to dashed dreams, the memory of good times, and hopes of returning to New Orleans.

Pegi Young (Warner Bros.)
Talk about late bloomers. The longtime Neil Young backing singer—and longer-time spouse—took her sweet time before recording a debut album of bittersweet originals and simpatico covers. And it ain't half bad. The band's predictably solid, and Neil's an understated background presence as well as a psychedelic standout on electric sitar in "Love Like Water."

Too late for Father's Day (unobserved in our household, which tends to eschew Hallmark holidays), the limited edition miniature Fender guitar replicas produced by GMP are cunningly crafted die-cast fetish objects for both weekend guitar heroes and those who worship the real deals.

Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Mark Knopfler, and Jeff Beck all played the Fender Stratocaster, one of the twentieth century's most beautiful audio and visual icons. GMP's one-third sized replica of the Strat includes flickable pickup selection switches, twirlable volume and tone controls, and a removable tremolo bar. I've known many a guitarist who's bought an instrument based on looks over sound, so this is a heck of a bargain at $50; Clapton's black Strat went for a million bucks at Christie's in 2004, after all. GMP also sells foot-high faux Strats in red, black, and sunburst finishes, butterscotch and sunburst Telecasters, three Fender basses, and a scaled rack for display.

GMP actually specializes in tiny cars rather than guitars. I'm weirdly drawn to their boy-toy dioramas of mechanics, a chop shop, racing legend Carroll Shelby, and a lovable yet vaguely menacing Southern sheriff right out of Smokey and the Bandit. Hm. Maybe there's something to this Father's Day thing after all.

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin comes up with an amazing roundup of "YouTubes to make your Mexican grandmother cry." It's both a terrific musical roundup and a history lesson, as informed commenters explain, for example, how the Toña La Negra's bolero "Alma de Veracruz" relates to Cuban music. In addition to other clips by Toña, Xeni points to Lucha Reyes singing "Que Lindo Es Mi Gringo" (How Handsome Is My Gringo) in 1939, moody ranchera singer Lola Beltran's dreamy "La Cigarra," Costa Rican-born (and openly lesbian) ranchera singer Chavela Vargas performing in Madrid at age 81. Deeply emotional stuff.

One of the increasingly popular forms of YouTube amusement is to create videos out of re-edited movies. One user created a disturbingly perfect music video of the Arcade Fire's "My Body Is a Cage" using images borrowed from Sergio Leone's spaghetti-Western masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West. Rated V for violence involving harmonicas.

James Brown, Little Richard, and Weird Al Yancovic play "Wheel of Fortune" for charity in 1994. James and Richard, oddly, are playing as a team. [via Bedazzled]

Paul McCartney has a new album and David Frost has a weekly show on Al Jazeera English, as I learned last week in my Morocco hotel room. Enjoy younger versions of both of them in this 1964 interview, where a top-of-the-world McCartney discusses maybe retiring in a couple of years. And here's Macca three years later, when everything is completely different.

Each time I walk into the medina, the mile-square medieval city that's the heart of Fes, Morocco, I promise myself I won't get lost in its mazelike alleyways. But of course I always do. The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, on the other hand, is the punctual and well-ordered counterpart to the medina's chaotic and relentless mélange of sights, sounds, and smells, both charming and sometimes not so.

The Batha Museum courtyard, one of the most tranquil concert spaces ever, was the perfect location for my personal festival highlight, a Friday afternoon performance of Southern Indian classical music by vocalist Vasumathi Badrinathan. A deep-voiced, joyously improvising singer in the Carnatic tradition, Badrinathan's songs and single complete raga were accompanied by violin, mridangam (a double-headed barrel drum), and the ancient morchang (or so-called Jew's harp). The following day's Batha show was a much more sober affair consisting of Syrian singer Waed Bouhassoun, who accompanied her dry yet moving (to others, mostly) verses by the Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammmed Rumi on oud, and Uzbekistan singer Nadir Pirmatova's Uzbekistan songs reminiscent of Chinese folk music.

Lebanese singer Jahida Wahbé also concentrated on songs by Rumi at the tonier Bab Makina Friday night. Without understanding the Arabic lyrics, though, I tired rather quickly of her Streisand-esque emoting. Which made Syrian vocalist Elias Karam's following set all the more exciting. Although his music came from the same tradition of sacred poetry as Wahbé's, his arrangements shifted constantly through the course of each call-and-response tune. Karam would sing a verse with certain instruments at a certain tempo, then the orchestra would reply with a magnificent variation at a slightly brighter tempo. It was over far too soon.

The Dar Tazi courtyard, where different ensembles dug deep into the Sufi tradition every night at eleven, is another wonderful venue and a great place to wind down at the end of the day's three concerts. Sufi acts like Friday night's Chadilia Mchichia (from Tetouan, Morocco) attempted to raise audiences to a higher plane through repetitive beats and chants. As the elders looked on, however, one got the idea they were giving the younger B team a shot, and after an hour it was time to leave.

For the real Fes experience, however, one had only to enjoy each evening's free concert in the large plaza outside the medina's great gate, That's where you could hear Moroccan groups such as Mazagan and Darga\ turn up the volume for tens of thousands of fans and curious medina residents, many of whom expressed their hurling younger brothers high into the air. Darga, from Casablanca, cranked up a ten-man fusion spectacular that mixed everything from reggae, hip-hop, and acid rock with Algerian rai, Andalusia riffs, and trancey gnawa rhythms. It was exactly what a festival concerned with preserving the sacred and traditional in a complex contemporary world was supposed to be about.

For the past couple of days I've been in Morocco for the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music. The thirteenth edition of the festival is once again "presented under the high patronage of his majesty King Mohammed VI," and I'm part of a press junket that is also appreciating his patronage. The week-long event's "sacred" aspect is interpreted loosely. Some of the music heard during the fest's three or four daily concerts is religious, certainly, but much is more generally spiritual, or simply spirited.

This would apply especially to acts such as Angelique Kidjo, who was born in the West African nation of Benin and now lives in Brooklyn. She performed her energetic afropop in the Bab Makina palace courtyard to an upscale crowd that embraced her as an African sister. Kidjo was in a loquacious mood, too. "People talk about the new global community," she said in French. "But is it possible to keep your own culture and identity in such a world? I don't have the answer. I simply pose the question." She delivered something of an answer, though, in the music she performed from her new album, Djin Djin, a rooted yet cosmpolitan call for a return to African culture. Much of the audience joined her onstage for one of her final songs, "Ae Ae," which suggests that young Africans shouldn't be forced to move abroad in order to improve their lives.

Kidjo's query is at the heart of this festival, which was established following the first Gulf War as a means to reconcile the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. And it would be hard to find a better crash course in many of the more important Islamic musical styles. Festival organizers wisely program nightly free concerts in the immense square near Bab Baoujlud, the great gate that serves as main entrance to Fes al Bali, the Arab world's largest functioning medieval city. These concerts seem to take their energy from the medina and draw audiences that would not otherwise be able to afford this music.

Wednesday night's Bab Boujloud act was the Akhtar Sharif Arup Vale. This Pakistan qawwali ensemble features the wildly soaring vocal style, accompanied by handclaps and harmoniums, made famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Last night's performers consisted of three great female singers, Tunisia's Sonia Mbarak, Algeria's Beidhja Rahal, and Morocco's own Fadwa el Malki, all accompanied by the Fes Orchestra. The three vocal styles may have been quite different, but they all obviously came from the same place musically.

Sufi Nights, another remarkable festival tradition, feature a different aspect of the Muslim sect each evening at 11 in the Dar Tazi courtyard garden. Wednesday's Chekouriya ensemble, from northwest Morocco, consisted of thirteen singers, arranged in a horseshoe shape, whose mesmerizing, droning songs were accompanied by a single bass drum. But last night the gnawa ensemble Ouled Kamar (AKA the Sons of the Moon, Keepers of the Invisible Sacred Music) was an eighteen-strong mass of kinetic energy that had the crowd in a near-frenzy at times and sent at least one woman into a full-on trance state.

Afternoon concerts are held beneath a giant oak tree in the serene and beautiful garden of the city's Batha Museum. Singing birds accompany all performers at this location, and yesterday their featured guests were the Piñana brothers' flamenco trio and Diapason, a Cuban string quintet. The two groups performed singer Curro Piñana and guitarist Carlos' flamenco mass. Diapason added subtle Cuban rhythmic accents to Curro Piñana's passionate evocations of the Christian liturgy. It was sacred, spiritual, and spirited all at once.

Remember soul singer G. M. Stevens's Sit'tin By the Window? It was released in 1968 on Mother Goose Enterprises and contained the poignant loner tracks "It's a Boy's Life (But a Man's World)" and "Everyone's Goin' Somewhere Except Me." Jack Benny wrote the liner notes, describing "G.S." (somehow his initials changed from front cover to back) as "a bright and intelligent young man with a great, exciting future." Or perhaps you recall Mingering Mike's 1972 gospel holiday album, Just in Time for Easter. Or the Outsiders' seventies release, Mercy the World, containing "The World Is Just a Big Ball of Air" and "We Mercy the World."

But you probably don't, because all these records exist in editions of one. Or less than one, if you take into account that their elaborate hand-drawn covers, often sealed in cellophane and slapped with price tags, contained no actual vinyl. They, and a hundred other imaginary albums and singles, were created on cardboard by a Maryland man who still goes only by the Mingering Mike moniker. In 2003, they were rediscovered in a Washington D.C. flea market by soul-obsessed record crate digger Dori Hadar, who manged to track down the artist. Mike informed him that his find was the sad result of Mike's inability to pay the rent on his storage space.

While Mingering Mike's fantasy recording never took off, he has since been rightfully lauded as one of the more fascinating so-called outsider artists to emerge in recent years. And though his music can't be heard, it can certainly be seen: through July 28 at the Hemphill Gallery in Washington, DC; in the handsome Princeton Architectural Press tome Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar; and on a website. Every great unknown soul singer should enjoy such an afterlife.

Anchored in Love: A Tribute to June Carter Cash (Dualtone)
Threads of blood, friendship, and autoharp run through Anchored in Love. Elvis Costello dives into the "Ring of Fire," which Carter Cash co-wrote; Loretta Lynn recalls the Carter Family's mountain-music heyday on "Wildwood Flower"; and Roseanne Cash salutes her stepmother's spiritual side with "Wings of Angels."

We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song (Verve); Love, Ella: The Original Versions (Verve)
Once upon a time, jazz was pop music and Ella Fitzgerald was its swinging queen. Diana Krall ("Dream a Little Dream of Me") and Dianne Reeves ("Oh Lady Be Good") are the jazzy standouts on We All Love Ella. Queen Latifah, Linda Ronstadt, and others provide the pop. It might not be a good idea to compare and contrast this well-intentioned Ellabration with the originals heard on Love, Ella.

Paul McCartney, Memory Almost Full (Hear Music)
Hidden behind one of the drearier album covers you'll see, assuming you still see album covers, is Sir Paul's best album in years. The theme, declares a song title, is "My Ever Present Past," and the sound is vintage McCartney. The opening track, "Dance Tonight," could just as easily have appeared on his 1970 solo debut. "Mr. Bellamy" is the sort of quaint mini-suite he might have recorded with Wings. And the five tracks that (almost) conclude the album form a sort of rewritten Abbey Road side two. Unlike 2005's forgettable Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (recorded after much of Memory was first tracked), McCartney pays little heed to current musical trends and by eschewing the hip has created a keeper.

Bruce Springsteen With The Sessions Band, Live in Dublin (Sony BMG CD and DVD)
After releasing last year's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, big Bruce dressed up a seventeen-piece acoustic group in Dustbowl drag and took them on the road to perform charmingly rearranged chestnuts like "Old Dan Tucker," "Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep," and "When the Saints Go Marching In" alongside Springsteen originals such as "Highway Patrolman" and "Open All Night." The results may smack more of Broadway than rock and roll, but if anyone can renew interest in America's rich musical heritage, it's this New Jersey marketing genius.

Porter Wagoner, Wagonmaster (Anti-)
Country legend Porter Wagoner turns eighty this year, but he sounds remarkably strong on Wagonmaster, which Marty Stuart has produced to resemble a vintage stage show. "The Agony of Waiting" and Johnny Cash's "Committed to Parkview" recall a time when the best country songs were often very beautiful and a little creepy at the same time.

Evan Ziporyn was wailing on his bass clarinet alongside the high-octane TACTUS as I wandered into the large and light, yet cathedral-like, Winter Garden in Battery Park's World Financial Center on Saturday evening. TACTUS (the Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Ensemble) and Ziporyn were playing his aptly titled Drill, a work that peaked from intensity to intensity. It was the second piece in this year's Bang on a Can Marathon, an epic and hotly anticipated event that this year stretched out over twenty-six hours in honor of its twentieth anniversary (making last year's nine-hour version seem almost stingy in comparison). The marathon, which features dozens of composers and scores of performers, was held in conjunction with the River to River Festival, a free 500-event summer series held at different locations around the city.

Bang on a Can was formed in 1987 by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe as an outlet for composers whose works were unsuited for traditional institutions due to style, length, instrumentation, or attitude. And while the work BOAC champions and funds (through their innovative People's Commissioning Fund) is certainly "serious," it is also seriously entertaining most of the time, with an emphasis on rhythm and influences often rooted in rock, jazz, and international music. They appeal to audiences of all ages, and if a single organization can renew interest in contemporary music, this is it.

I heard maybe a dozen works during my four hours at the marathon, and (with only a couple of exceptions) they'd all be worth hearing again. De facto house band the Bang on a Can All-Stars performed four pieces by as many Myanmar composers with Kyaw Kyaw Naing, who plays the pat waing, a traditional Burmese instrument consisting of tuned drums arranged in a circle behind a kitschedelic gold-leaf screen. The music was fast and intricate and performed with nimble good humor. The San Diego percussion ensemble red fish blue fish played Signal Intelligence, an even more complex work derived from algorhythms. Composer Christopher Adler described it beforehand as his interpretation of "the secret information we get from all the spying networks." The dramatic string quartet Ethel played "Arrival" and "Memory," two movements from a larger work by Brazilian film composer Marcelo Zarvos; "Memory" involved flamboyant flamenco-like shoe stomping.

Pairs of trumpets, trombones, and bass trombones in two balconies at the rear of the space made a mountainous racket during Lois V Vierk's Jagged Mesa, a series of constantly changing fanfares that eventually evoked a vintage Western soundtrack. The Books were greeted with almost pop-star adulation and split the difference between art music and band in pieces like "Be Good to Them Always" and "The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?" that owe a great deal to Laurie Anderson. Synchronized film footage from their thrift store home-movie scavenging expeditions flickered behind the Massachusetts duo as they played their acoustic guitar, electric cello, and various electronics.

The final work I heard—and saw—was composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison's Gotham (the pair collaborated on a remarkable 2002 tribute to cinematic compost titled Decasia: The State of Decay) performed by TACTUS. Gotham's anxiously crescendoing music and vintage film footage relates a history of New York—from sheep grazing in Central Park to the September 2001 tragedy that occurred across the street from where I sat. The power, immediacy, and emotion of Gordon and Morrison's work seemed the perfect conclusion to the day, so I headed home. Thousands remained, however, to enjoy the twenty-one hours of sound sculpting that would follow.

Bang on a Can's next marathon takes place July 28 at their summer home at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Today's featured film on Folkstreams.net is Sweet Is the Day: A Sacred Harp Family Portrait. Director Jim Carnes's 2001 film documents the Woottens, a Sand Mountain, Alabama, family who have been practicing Sacred Heart "shape note" singing for 150 years. The Sacred Harp is a hymnal published in Georgia in 1844, and its music is written in four note shapes used to teach the songs to groups. The technique evolved into a tradition that lives on in various Southern communities and families like the Wootens, who Carnes hangs out with at home, in church, and at Sacred Heart conventions.

Sweet Is the Day can be viewed online, purchased, or rented for public screenings at Folkstreams.net, the self-described "National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures." Other recent films featured on the site include three 1985 shorts comprising a Texas Living Blues series. (One of these, Les Blank's Cigarette Blues, compresses a sculpture made out of cigarettes, an antismoking message, and a searing performance by Sonny Rhodes and the Texas Twisters into four short minutes.) Style Wars is a classic 1983 documentary about the now-classic era of graffiti and hip-hop culture in New York. And Yasha Aginsky's Les Blues de Balfa looks at Louisiana's Balfa Brothers, a legendary Cajun duo.

Folkstreams.net is an altogether amazing online cornucopia of folk music, art, and culture. It opens windows onto worlds you may never have imagined existed. Spend some time there and feel proud to be an American.