Music

Soprano Natalie Dessay sings the fabulous Mad Scene ("Il Dolce Suono") from the New York Metropolitan Opera's new production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor in these three videos. [via Opera Chic]

A brain infection transformed English musician and musicologist Clive Wearing into an amnesiac, as recounted in "The Abyss," a chapter adapted for The New Yorker from Oliver Sacks's forthcoming Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf, October 16). The case is close to harrowing. Wearing is unable to remember where he is or what he is doing from moment to moment. At the same time, he has a remarkably complete musical memory and can conduct a choir, play Bach on piano and organ, and sing as he did prior to his illness. According to Sacks, "It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is wholly in the present."

Elsewhere in Musicophilia, Sacks describes a man who becomes obsessed by music, a true musicophiliac, after being struck by lightning; epileptic seizures induced by music; those sticky tunes known as "brainworms"; and how music therapy can benefit sufferers of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Steve Silberman, who has written one of the best profiles of Sacks to date, interviewed the doctor for Wired magazine. He asks him about the ways in which music can aid healing.

The therapeutic power of music hit me dramatically in 1966, when I started working with the Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham in the Bronx. I saw post-encephalitics who seemed frozen, transfixed, unable to take a step. But with music to give them a flow, they could sing, dance, and be active again. For Parkinsonian patients, the ability to perform actions in sequence is impaired. They need temporal structure and organization, and the rhythm of music can be crucial. For people with Alzheimer's, music incites recall, bringing the past back like nothing else.

Sacks also describes for Silberman the most vivid moment he's ever had on music—and on drugs:

Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, "I want to see indigo, now!" As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall - the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.

Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi's mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, "Good, the color exists in the external world." But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo - they were blue, mauve, pink. I've never seen that color since.

It took a mountain of amphetamine, mescaline, and cannabis to launch me into that space. But Monteverdi did it too.

Your grandparents' favorite music rarely sounded better than when three groups brought old Europe and the Ottoman Empire back to life under a nearly full moon last night in Central Park's Delacorte Theater. The show had an interesting back-story. Last year the New York State Music Fund was established to share the proceeds of a payola settlement with major record companies negotiated by New York's attorney general's office in 2005. The fund has dispersed $13 million to nonprofit groups for events such as this concert, part of the Joe's Pub In the Park series.

Sizzling Macedonian clarinetist Ismail Lumanovsk leads the New York Gypsy All-Stars Band, a quintet that plays traditional Roma music with classical finesse and a jazzy snap. Other members from Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia played traditional instruments such as the karun, a Turkish zither, and the darbula drum in addition to modern traps and electric bass. Unusual time signatures, happy-sad melodies, and top-notch academic chops brought the past into the present in sharp focus. The sextet of rowdies who followed them were a different carload of clowns entirely. Balkan Beat Box combines Middle Eastern- and Mediterranean-influenced tunes with Jamaican ska and dub, electronic beats, aggressing rapping, and as much attitude as you could stand. Unconcerned with musical niceties, MC Tomer Yosef and his cronies transformed the theater into a sweaty, anarchic dance club for an hour before order was restored.

The evening's de facto headliner was Beirut, an eight-piece group from Brooklyn that mixes Eastern European brass band music with the lambent French strings and accordion of Jacques Brel. Zach Condon, a precocious twenty-one-year-old with global musical aspirations and a limited warble of a voice reminiscent of equally ambitious Rufus Wainwright, leads the group. And while bandmembers switched around instruments (including a baritone saxophone, ukuleles, trumpets, a French horn, violin, and balalaika) between nearly every song, each waltz-tempo tune somehow conveyed pretty much the same endearing innocence as the next. As unlikely as it may seem, the band is better represented by the elaborate website devoted to its new album, The Flying Club Cup.

Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions (Columbia/Legacy)
If you enjoy tablas, German electronics, and hectoring wah-wah trumpet with your jazz-funk, Miles Davis's 1972 On the Corner is the record for you. The Complete On the Corner Sessions collects three years' worth of studio work surrounding this landmark fusion album on six CDs, including two hours of unreleased Miles. More is indeed more.

Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino (Vanguard)
Fats Domino abides. You can't beat the cause (instruments for New Orleans students and a Lower Ninth Ward community center) or the star power behind Goin' Home. John Lennon ("Ain't That a Shame"), Tom Petty ("I'm Walkin'"), Elton John ("Blueberry Hill"), Dr. John ("Don't Leave Me This Way"), and B.B. King ("Goin' Home") bring it all back home on this double-CD benefit package.

Billie Holiday, Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles (Columbia/Legacy)
Reconnect with chameleonlike jazz icon Billie Holiday via Lady Day. This sublime eighty-track, four-CD set begins with Holiday's relatively blithe 1935 recordings, continues through her memorable association with saxophonist Lester Young, and concludes with a true star exploring the darker aspects of her persona in 1942.

Nellie McKay, Obligatory Villagers (Hungry Mouse)
This perky politico in updated Doris Day dresses suffers no fools gladly or otherwise on Obligatory Villagers, a jazzy froth of bouncing tunes, swinging arrangements, and man-the-barricades rebellion. She also revives the womanly wit of cabaret icons such as Annie Ross and Blossom Dearie with half-rapped, half-sung lines like "kittens high-hattin', sittin' on satin with a host who's catnip-fond."

Alto saxophonist Art Pepper was a piece of work. An emotional bebop improviser with TV-star, if not movie-star, looks, Pepper acquired a world-class heroin habit while playing in Stan Kenton's big band during the forties. He nonetheless managed to record more than a hundred albums during a career punctuated by drug-related prison stays, including a five-year stint in San Quentin. He met his second wife, Laurie Pepper, in the Synanon rehab program, and she helped put him on track for a robust later-life career that ended with his death in 1982 at age fifty-six. The Peppers began recording an oral account of Art's tumultuous life after leaving Synanon in 1972. The resulting book, 1979's Straight Life, is as eloquent as his saxophone playing, and practically begs to be filmed with someone such as Johnny Depp in the lead role.

It turns out that many people in the film industry, including Mr. Depp, have approached Laurie Pepper about translating Art's words into film. Frustrated by the compromises they would have her make, e.g. selling the story and walking away from any other participation in the project, Laurie has bravely, and perhaps foolishly, opted to film it herself on digital video with an Apple computer. "They thought they knew who Art was," Laurie says of her Hollywood suitors. "A tragic wild man, a junkie hipster. Art was way more interesting than that. I wasn't going to let them lie about him."

Clips of her early results can be seen at Straight Life: The Movie. Using audio from the cheap, noisy tapes they used to write the book, a glorious selection of Pepper's music, and a visual style reminiscent of Monty Python animation, Pepper appears to be on her way to creating one of the most honest and uncompromising, i.e. straight, jazz films ever.

Not to wax overly sentimental, but it wasn't until Nick Lowe strummed the first few chords of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" that I realized why I'd wanted to hear him sing outdoors at the base of the New York's towering World Financial Center One, a block away from Ground Zero. Has a better antiwar anthem come along since Lowe first released the song in 1974 on The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwartz? The most familiar version of the song is Elvis Costello's seething take on Armed Forces, which Lowe produced. And Curtis Stigers sang the most profitable for The Bodyguard, a hit movie whose hit soundtrack reportedly made Lowe a millionaire and allowed him to pursue his current solo trajectory.

Lowe has matured with enviable grace. Among the eleven solo albums the fifty-eight-year-old has recorded in addition to his work with pub rockers Brinsley Schwartz and rockabilly revivalists Rockpile, his three most recent are especially wonderful. Lowe reinvented himself in middle age as a deceptively mellow country crooner and marvelously expressive barroom balladeer in the tradition of say, Ernest Tubb, Faron Young, and Johnny Cash (to whose step-daughter, Carlene Carter, he was once married). From 1994's Impossible Bird through this year's At My Age, Lowe has written and sung material of increasingly dark wit and knowing maturity. The sardonic ire of "I Trained Her to Love Me," about a cad who attracts women only to break their hearts, is balanced by the redemptive modesty of "Hope For Us All," in which the singer reckons that if even a "feckless" man such as he can find love, anyone can. Having written "Cruel to Be Kind" and "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" back in his own feckless youth, you know Lowe knows whereof he speaks.

Tom Petty's version of Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'" (listen here) is part of Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, due out Tuesday. John Lennon, Elton John, Dr. John, Neil Young, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, and others perform Domino's bumptious R&B on a double-CD set benefiting the Tipitina's Foundation, which purchases instruments for New Orleans school children and funds other community programs.

Joni Mitchell reworks "Big Yellow Taxi" for Shine, her first release since 2002's Travelogue. Mitchell's 1970 hit fits her politically engaged new album perfectly, and you can hear it here.

Michael Jackson's famous "Thriller" video, directed by John Landis, was great creepy fun when it hit MTV in 1983, and many still consider it the best video ever. But you're in for a shock if you still haven't seen the version performed by inmates of the Cebu Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines, which has been racking up millions of views on YouTube. The inmates have also performed "Sister Act" and "Jailhouse Rock," but "Thriller" is their masterpiece. Watch and read more about it here.

Grateful Dead fans will swoon over this intimate onstage seven-minute version of "Dark Star" from 1970.

Listening to Easy Living this morning while running reminded me how much I love the quintessential cool playing of saxophonist Paul Desmond. Watch him perform his beautiful ballad "Emily" at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1975.

All My Loving (MVD Visual DVD)
John Lennon helped director Tony Palmer book Cream, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and, uh, Lulu for this 1968 BBC documentary that still packs a significant wallop. Color-saturated performances are punctuated by sensationalist musings on this crazy new "pop music," as it's referred to throughout; articulate interviews with Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, and Donovan; and some grim footage from Vietnam and Germany.

Gloria Estefan, 90 Millas (Sony International)
Gloria Estefan musically bridges the ninety miles separating her Cuban homeland from her Florida home on 90 Millas. The Spanish-language album follows four years after her Anglocentric Unwrapped. In addition to Carlos Santana's seismic soloing on "No Llore" (Don't Cry), this thoroughly danceable disc boasts a who's who of Caribbean stars such as trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, bassist Cachao, and singer Giovanni Hidalgo.

Emmylou Harris, Songbird: Rare Tracks & Forgotten Gems (Rhino)
Songbird spans the length and breadth of this highfalutin crooner's nearly forty-year career. Consisting largely of live tracks, alternate takes, compilation one-shots, and guest appearances with the likes of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, Harris's four-CD set is a superb testament to one of country's defining talents.

Prefab Sprout, Steve McQueen (Legacy)
This britpop classic released originally as Two Wheels Good in 1985 has lost none of its luster over the years. Songwriter Paddy McAloon's masterpiece contains songs about desire and loss in consumer culture and, like the Kinks' Muswell Hillbillies, it combines American country music with a distinctive British sensibility. A myriad of new musical details shine forth in Thomas Dolby's remastered version of the album he also produced. A bonus disc recorded by McAloon last year contains reworked acoustic versions of its contents.

Directed by Julie Taymor, of Broadway's Lion King fame, Across the Universe at first looks like a glossy, PG13/High School Musical repackaging of music and sentiments deeply embedded in our generational DNA. Fortunately, it's far better than that. The uncomplicated story about a visiting Liverpudlian named Jude (Jim Sturgess, looking far more like Paul than John) who falls for a Midwestern blonde, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), while sharing an East Village apartment with her draft-bait brother, Max (Joe Anderson), is driven almost solely by thirty-one Beatles songs, with the possible exceptions of Bono's trippy "I Am the Walrus" and Eddie Izzard's Monty Python-esque "Mr. Kite." Across the Universe begins with Jude sitting on a beach, head filling the screen, singing a slow, dreamy version of "Girl," which segues to Lucy at her high-school prom, dancing a last dance with her boyfriend who is on his way to Vietnam. Antiwar politics, along with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, are all treated as nonjudgmentally as they were in certain large circles at the time.

A couple of dance sequences are particularly wonderful. An Asian lesbian named Prudence (T.V. Carpio) drifts dreamily and untouched through a football team in full scrimmage while crooning "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to her object of desire. Joe Cocker changes from a panhandler to a pimp to And an Uncle Sam recruitment poster's "I Want You" sets off an inventively choreographed, if frighteningly machinelike, journey that ends with a group of soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty through the jungles of Vietnam. (A Joplin-like singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and her Hendrix-like boyfriend (Martin Luther) help bring a tougher musical edge to this unabashed Boomer nostalgia fest.) Across the Universe isn't subtle, but it doesn't need to be when you have Joe Cocker transforming from a panhandler to a pimp to a street musician over the course of "Come Together." If anything, the movie is the closest thing in years to the epic and gleefully excessive Hollywood musicals of the forties and fifties, the kind people think they don't make anymore. Well, think again.

Dee Dee Bridgewater, Red Earth (Emarcy)
Ella Fitzgerald acolyte Dee Dee Bridgewater traveled to Mali in order to reinvent herself as, well, herself. Many of Mali's finest singers and instrumentalists join the Tennesee-born singer on an album that blends traditional tunes and rhythms with Africa-inspired jazz standards like "Afro Blue" and "Footprints."

Cinematic: Classic Film Music Remixed (Six Degrees); Hollywood's Greatest Hits: Classic Music From the Movies (Primary Wave)
The Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra performs action-packed and emotionally charged film themes by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, and Duke Ellington on Hollywood's Greatest Hits. The same tracks are given loving and ingenious remix treatments by a world-class assortment of producers and DJs on Cinematic. Highlights include Anglo-Italian producer Gaudi's pagan expansion of Pino Donaggio's theme from Carrie and The Real Tuesday Weld's vintage reworking of Ellington's romantic jazz for Paris Blues.

Joe Henry, Civilians (Anti-)
"Our Song," the elegiac six-minute centerpiece of this accomplished producer's rich and mournful new album, begins with a sighting of Willie Mays in a Scottsdale, Arizona, Home Depot. This fantasy image of the America's best in aging repose resonates throughout an album that mixes thoroughly adult ruminations on married life with gruff musings of life in these United States. It's beautifully performed throughout by the likes of Van Dyke Parks and Bill Frisell, and will likely make you either very happy or very sad.

Oakley Hall, I'll Follow You (Merge)
This rollicking Brooklyn country-rock group is named after the author of the "Legends West" series, the Western equivalent of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." This trivial bit of good taste extends throughout their four albums to date. Their latest makes a rocking right turn from its more sixtiesfied predecessor, Gypsum Strings. Guitars, fiddle, lap steel, and ragged-but-right male-female harmonizing rarely sounds so spiffy as in tracks like "Free Radicals Lament" and "Take My Hands, We're Free."

The state of music criticism, according to popular humor publication The Onion.

CHICAGO—Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website.

According to the review, authored by Pitchfork editor in chief Ryan Schreiber, the popular medium that predates the written word shows promise but nonetheless "leaves the listener wanting more."...

Jazz pianist Joe Zawinul's late-life artistic surge was cut short last month, when he was unexpectedly hospitalized following a six-week tour of Hungary, and he died yesterday of Merkel cell carcinoma. He was classically trained, and performed with Dinah Washington, Maynard Ferguson, and Cannonball Adderley after immigrating to the United States in 1959. His composition "Pharaoh's Dance" took up an entire side of Miles Davis's electric breakthrough double album, Bitches Brew. As founder of Weather Report in 1970 along with saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassist Miroslav Vitous, Zawinul expanded jazz's parameters to include rock rhythms, electronic keyboard effects, and the musics of Brazil, India, and Africa. Although Weather Report was pigeonholed as "jazz fusion," it seemed to exist in order to defy any simple categorization. Earlier this year he released Brown Street, a live double CD containing expansive big-band versions of "In a Silent Way," which he also composed, and Weather Report material such as "Black Market." It's a terrific album, and I looked forward to his next pass through town.

Adding a cozy coda to Sunday's Farm Aid extravaganza, Willie Nelson performed for a few hundred auction winners,media, and industry types at New York's Hard Rock Cafe last night. The event marked the launch of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, a nonprofit organization founded by Nelson's wife, Annie. Nelson's set bore a remarkable resemblance to his closing Farm Aid Slot. "Jackson," "A Peaceful Solution," "Whiskey River," "Superman," "You Don't Think I'm Funny Anymore," and "On the Road Again" were all back, with Nelson evidently shifting the spotlight to his daughters, Paula and Amy, and sons, Micah and Lukas.

In addition to promoting sustainable biodiesel fuel, the evening also served to promote the sibs' own farm-fresh musical efforts. Amy Nelson's comedy-folk combo Folk Uke opened the show with a set of unadorned ditties more or less as raunchy as their name would suggest. But the evening's highlight was a short set by 40 Points, the sixties revival group fronted by the brothers. Lukas sounds uncannily like his father at times, and it's a little eerie to hear that Texas twang over Hendrixian guitar riffs and beats that echoed both the Allman Brothers Band and Santana at different times. They concluded with a topical cover of the Band's "King Harvest," which you will unfortunately not find on their excellent new album, which strangely seems available only on iTunes so far.

Separate ticket tables for "media," "VIPs," and "farmers" offered a clue as to the focus of the twenty-second Farm Aid concert, an all-day affair held yesterday on Randalls Island in the borough of Queens, New York. Sustainable local food and family farmers were the focus of the festival, with Neil Young their most eloquent spokesperson. "This song used to be about one thing and now it's about another, Young said by way of introducing "Homegrown," a former ode to marijuana cultivation now applied to organic produce. Accompanied by his wife, Pegi Young, and dobro player Ben Keith, Young stayed on message throughout an intimate acoustic set consisting of hits like "Heart of Gold," the seldom performed "Human Highway," and new material from his upcoming Chrome Dream II. Chatting between nearly every tune, Young endorsed conservative family values (moms wanting to feed their families pure, wholesome food) and railed against big agribusiness's chemically enhanced, energy-inefficient products.

Farm Aid's first few hours consisted of twenty-minute teaser sets by 40 Points, the Derek Trucks Band, the Ditty Bops, Montgomery Gentry, Supersuckers, Guster, Warren Haynes, and Billy Joe Shaver. With the exceptions of orthodox Jewish reggae star Matisyahu and Jimmy Sturr's polka group, the day's primary diversity often appeared to lie in performers' ages. Guitarists Haynes and Trucks reappeared with the Allman Brothers Band, who, along with Counting Crows, Dave Matthews, and Farm Aid founders Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Young, all played longer "festival-length" sets. Nelson joined Gregg Allman for extremely casual takes on "Midnight Riders" and "Sweet Melissa" prior to the Allmans' set. Mellencamp, who performed a couple of new songs and rearranged versions of older material, looked and sounded like a flashback to a vintage MTV era of manly hard rock. And if the exodus following his duet set with accompanies Tim Reynolds was any indication, it's a good bet that most of the (estimated) 20,000 in attendance were lured by Matthews's Southern preppie sincerity.

Willie Nelson closed the concert, as he traditionally does, with an unexpected, but not unlovable, old-fashioned family sing-along. This included daughter Paula's rendition of "Jackson," ripping guitar solos by son Lukas (who fronts the promising neopsychedelic band 40 Points with his drumming brother Micah), and "A Peaceful Solution," co-written by Willie and daughter Amy. The Youngs, Mellencamp, Matthews, and other performers joined the Nelson clan onstage for the song. So did a pair of Native Americans in colorful tribal garb and a pair of US soldiers, standing at strict attention in full dress uniforms, who sang nothing but conveyed volumes.

A sad year for opera, following the deaths of Beverly Sills and Jerry Hadley, continues with the loss of Luciano Pavarotti to pancreatic cancer this morning. While many tributes to the "King of the High Cs" will undoubtedly be scheduled, YouTube is a font of Pavarotti videos, both solo and with frequent duet partner Joan Sutherland. And Opera Chic is on the case, of course, beginning with this tribute:

Whenever we mention a phenomenon such as Juan Diego Florez, and his sometimes uncanny ability to produce a sound that we consider similar to the Platonic ideal of a tenor voice -- such as Tito Schipa's was -- we sometimes forget that Pavarotti's voice will be remembered as another gold standard just like Schipa's, and Gigli's, and no other -- the clear-as-a-bell sound, the natural beauty of the timbro, the truly awesome power, let me repeat, the unmatched power, the perfect diction, the apparent effortlessness of that heavenly sound.

Composer Phil Kline (of Unsilent Night fame) anticipates the University of Illinois's September 13-15 Wall to Wall Guitar Festival with a free performance today at 3:30. Kline's World on a String will transform the school's Krannert Center lobby into a ginormous meta-guitar. The festival officially kicks off next Thursday with a party featuring Toubab Krewe, Sonny Landreth with Cindy Cashdollar, the Campbell Brothers, the Yohimbe Brothers with Vernon Reid and DJ Logic, Bob Brozman, and Led Kaapana—which is to say, an eclectic assortment of afropop, blues, gospel, Asian, and Hawaiian styles. Friday night's Global Guitar event features Iraq's Rahim AlHaj, India's Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, and French-Algerian Pierre Bensusan. Latin rock giants Los Lobos perform at 10 p.m., and rowdy electric blues benders the North Mississippi Allstars at midnight. Sunday's events include classical guitarists the Romeros; India-influenced blues guitarist Harry Manx; a Wood, Steel, and Beyond event featuring experimentalists Kaki King, Tony McManus, and Alex de Grassi; a rare US appearance by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension; and an Evening Blues show with Malian guitarist Abdoulaye Alhassane Toure, Hot Tuna's Jorma Kaukonen, and Chicago legend Buddy Guy. And, yes, I really wish I could be there.

I'd also have liked to attend the Banff International String Quartet Competition, which wrapped up Monday night in beautiful Banff, Alberta. Australia's TinAlley String Quartet won the contest, which consisted of quartets by Haydn, Beethoven, Webern, Bartók, and a new quartet written for the competition by Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy. The good news is that you can listen to all thirty-two performances via the CBC's Concerts on Demand, which contains many other great performances from across Canada.

Peter Case, Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John (Yep Rock)
Peter Case, who received a taste of rock stardom during the seventies in Los Angeles's Plimsouls, knows whereof he sings in "Palookville," the centerpiece of this strong, honest collection of acoustic tracks in praise of life's coulda-beens. The ghost of Woody Guthrie smiles benignly over Sleepy John, especially in Springsteenian songs such as "Million Dollar Bail," wherein Case sings about "two kinds of justice....One's for folks up on the hill, the other's down below."

Norman Granz Presents: Improvisation (Eagle Rock Entertainment DVD)
You don't see high-quality footage of Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, and Buddy Rich jazzing together every day. But this DVD captures the special 1950 occasion—with the caveat that the five tunes they play were recorded separately, and the synchronization is a tad offputting. The remainder of impressario Granz's film anthology is fairly stunning as well, particularly Joe Pass's pair of 1979 solo tunes, Duke Ellington serenading artist Joan Miro on the Cote d'Azur, Count Basie at Montreux in 1977, and Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, and Eddie Lockjaw Davis in a high-velocity cutting contest at the same festival.

Incredible String Band, Live at the Lowry (MVD Visual DVD)
If anything, the mystical, mythical bent of this legendary Scottish folk combo is even more pronounced in this 2003 concert film than when the band was bending young countercultural ears during the sixties. Mike Heron and Clive Palmer (third ISB founder Robin Williamson is elsewhere) reprise "The Hedgehog Song," "Chinese White," "A Very Cellular Song," and other more traditional numbers such as Palmer's medley of fiddle and pipe tunes.

Oliver Mtukudzi, Tsimba Itsoka (Heads Up)
The title of this Zimbabwean star's very moral album means "no foot, no footprint," and the phrase resonates throughout the lush Shona-language harmonizing. Lilting polyrhythms and echoes of Hugh Masekela's South African jazz can also be heard in songs that endorse the Golden Rule, compare life to a game of cards, and encourage responsibility, respect, and action.

The news that Ludwig van Beethoven may have died on March 26, 1827, from accidental lead poisoning caused by his own doctor is fascinating, but not only because it allows us to fantasize about what he might have composed if he had lived beyond his fifty-seven years. Two more string quartets? A tenth symphony? No, the most interesting part of Viennese forensic scientist Christian Reiter's article, published last week in Beethoven Journal, is that merely several strands of hair clued analysts to dramatic spikes in lead concentrations over the course of five medical treatments the composer underwent toward the end of his life, months he reportedly spent miserably in unclean conditions. Reiter theorizes that Beethoven's physician, Andreas Wawruch, may have been treating Beethoven's pneumonia with a medicine containing lead. Beethoven's overindulgence in wine containing lead may also have led, as it were, to liver cirrhosis. Unfinished works or not, Beethoven seemed to be in your basic downward artistic spiral.

The science delivering us these historical details, on the other hand, is virtuosic. Researchers have been analyzing Beethoven's hair since 2000. Their research material is part of the so-called Guevara Lock, 582 strands of hair a young musician named Ferdinand Miller yanked from Beethoven's corpse the day after his death and gave to his son as a birthday present in 1883. Four members of the Beethoven Society, including principal investor Dr. Alfred Guevara, eventually paid $7,300 for the lock at a Sotheby's auction in 1994. Guevara donated part of his portion to San Jose State University's Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, who have put it on display and provided it for analysis. It's a weird and amazing story, and the website for the 2005 documentary Beethoven's Hair (based on Russell Martin's book Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved) makes it stranger still.