Vieja Trova Santiaguera (Old Santiagoan Trova) is a quintet of spry old men, all from the eastern Cuban city of Santiago, an important city to Cuban music and the birthplace of trova, a genre that developed among poor, itinerant, self-taught troubadours (trovadores) in the late nineteenth century, growing out of cancion, urban music that grew out of the mixture of Cuban folk music, European popular song and influences from Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia.

Vieja Trova formed in 1994, naming itself in contrast to the politicized, eclectic “Nueva Trova” (new trova) movement that emerged after the 1959 Communist revolution. Though the members are apparently devout Communists, they didn’t have much truck with the innovations of their juniors. Although Buena Vista Social Club was still a few years in the future, Vieja Trova was founded on basically the same principle, of reviving the musical traditions of the past before all their practitioners died.

“El Tren” (”The Train”) is a whimsical song with wonderful vocal sound effects and onomatopoeia, from their self-titled album. The rest of the album is okay - there are a couple of nice standards (”Lagrimas Negras” (”Black Tears”) and “Son de la Loma” (”They’re From the Hills”) and a lovely song called “El Huerfanito” (”The Little Orphan”), but the rest is undistinguished. If you want to know more about trova and the whole history of Cuban music, I recommend The Rough Guide to Cuban Music.

Vieja Trova Santiaguera - El Tren

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci - Spanish Dance Troupe

The only real problem with Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci is their name. It’s pretentious to start with, and when you find out that the last word is pronounced “monkey,” it’s insufferable. They have no connection to either Arshile Gorky, the Armenian-American abstract expressionist, nor to Maxim Gorky, the Russian novelist. Actually, they’re a Welsh pop group, folky and psychedelic. Although their recordings are all very sunny and shimmery, they have a much harder sound live, or at least they did when I saw them in 2002. They’re a great live band, anyway. This song comes from an album with the same name; the Blue Trees EP and How I Long To Feel That Summer In My Heart are also very good. I don’t know what’s up with Wales and Scotland, but they seem to breed a disproportionate number of good bands - Super Furry Animals, the Beta Band, Belle and Sebastian, and so forth.

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci	“One Year the Milkweed,” by Arshile Gorky	Maxim Gorky

Psoy Korolenko - Pizza

I don’t really know what’s up with Psoy Korolenko. He’s a current Russian folk singer, I guess, and he really likes pizza. My friend James’s Russian teacher played this song in class, even though it’s in English. Even if it isn’t much of a language learning tool, it is completely amazing, which I guess is better in the long run. Some of the songs on this site are in Yiddish, too, so I guess he’s Jewish. There’s not much to the song; it’s just a list of the pizzas of the world: “The pizza from Rome, it tastes like the Pope; the pizza from Milan, like La Scala; the pizza from Verona is like Shakespeare, the pizza from Sicilia is like Mafia.” And on and on and on. It’s three minutes long, but they’re the longest three minutes ever, and needless to say, totally great.

Dukes of Stratosphear - Bike Ride to the Moon

The English band XTC are already rad when they’re playing with a straight face, not that a band that comes up with great lines like “She a laughing giggly whirlybird, / She got to be obscene to be obheard” is especially serious. But I just decided that what every great band really needs is to do an album under another name, with a half-hearted pretense that they’re not actually the same people, consisting of perfect pastiches of ’60s psychedelia. At least, that’s what XTC did, and it’s amazing, so I think everyone might as well do it, too. The Dukes of Stratosphear put out an EP called 25 O’Clock, after its perfect first track, and then an album called Psonic Psunspot, and then stuck them together in 1987 as Chips from the Chocolate Fireball, which is how you can get it now. Practically every song is a perfect imitation of its influences, but unlike the crappy parodies we all listened to in middle school, these songs are original themselves, instead of just renaming “My Sharona” “My Bologna.” ‘Cause face it, Pink Floyd is a good idea for a while, but after a while, they’re not worth the effort. What the world needs is psychedelic music made by people who are at least minimally in their own heads; enough to remember that most actual, authentic psychedelia is boring sober.

Heavenly - Shallow

A few kids at Oxford decided to start a band called Talulah Gosh, after hearing a compilation that came with NME magazine, called C86. They got good, and then broke up for whatever reasons, only to reform, after all getting first-class degrees, as more or less the same band, but now called Heavenly. Later, they would be called Marine Research, with a slightly different lineup. All three bands, though, and the members’ other projects, played twee pop - jankly guitars and sweet melodies, with desexed lyrics and haircuts. Heavenly was the best of the three, and the whole album that this song comes from, Heavenly vs. Satan, is great all the way through. Some of the songs are fast and happy on the surface, but they all have the same sadness as “Shallow,” somewhere. I especially like this song, partly because of the Beatles quote in the guitar solo, but mostly because of its peppy loneliness. It’s like Amelia Fletcher, the band leader and lyricist, is saying, “You hurt me and I miss you, and it makes me want to sing, sing, sing!“

Septeto Habanero - Voy a la Calle Vapor

As everything ever written about Cuban music has pointed out, there’s a lot of old men in Cuba who weren’t in the Buena Vista Social Club, and a lot of them are really good. This particular group of old men, the Septeto Habanero (”Havanan Septet”) is the oldest, and possibly also one of the manliest. It’s also one of my favorites. They were the first group to use the trumpet, without which, as this informative article points out, Cuban music is almost impossible to imagine; especially son, the style that the Septeto play, and that dominated Cuba in the 20s and 30s, when the group was but young. Especially in “Voy a la Calle Vapor” (”I’m Going to Vapor Street”), the hot, effortless trumpet is one of the best parts. The repetitive chorus and percussion make the improvisational verses and tres (guitar, more or less) almost the trumpet’s match. And I love that sliding end.

One nice thing about this album, which is well worth buying, is that it’s apparently the exact same music the band was playing 75 years ago, but it was recorded in 1997, so the sound is good. You can get legit old recordings of the O.G. greats, but the sound quality is usually so bad that there’s not much point in listening. And other old groups, like the Septeto Nacional, almost as ancient as the Habanero, have new albums, too, but every song on their album starts the same way (that is, with the same tuneup that begins “Voy a la Calle Vapor”), although after the first few seconds, they’re all great.

Oh yeah, and obviously I was lying about putting off new posts. I wrote about patent medicines all day today, though; I get to do some music.

Barbara Manning - Blood of Feeling
The 6ths - San Diego Zoo (featuring Barbara Manning)

Barbara Manning is cute, in an aunt-like way, and quiet, but she’s got brains and grit under her extremely red hair. Doing covers of a Tom Lehrer song (”The Irish Ballad,” renamed “Rickety-Tickety-Tin”) and of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” one of my favorite Beatles songs, helps endear her to me, too, more than just any singer-songwriter shmoe. “Blood of Feeling” comes from her excellent album 1212, which has a fun song cycle about fire, from the points of view of everyone involved, including the arsonist and the match. There’s another good version on Under One Roof, a pretty solid singles collection, too. She’s got a lot of albums, with a whole bunch of bands, with weird track overlaps, and a lot of her stuff is out of print, but it’s not too hard to find in used bins, and it’s all pretty good. She also collaborates a lot with other bands. “San Diego Zoo” is one of those songs, from the 6ths, one of Stephin Merritt’s millions of side projects when he’s not writing another thousand songs for the Magnetic Fields. Aside from this song, Wasps’ Nests has a couple others that are pretty good, but most of the album’s value is the title, whose whole point is that it’s unpronounceable. The other 6ths album, Hyacinths and Thistles, is barely easier to say. That Stephin Merritt. What a joker. For some reason, Barbara’s really popular in Germany, and plays there all the time, but she’s from Chico, CA, and plays in California sometimes. I saw her play a lovely show, too short, at the Mile High Club in Oakland a few months ago. The extra bonus at that club is that they have tater tots, which go pretty well with a Fat Tire.

I decided, more or less on a whim, that it would be fun to make an mp3 blog, so here we are. The last time I did any Internet music-type thing was Bollywood for the Skeptical, which was a mix CD with some explanation of Bollywood music, and that was fun; hopefully, this blog will give me a way to talk about music in a less structured way, or at any rate differently structured. I’ll be posting at least once a week, and probably more. Some songs might be new to me, and some won’t; some will be by well-known musicians, at least well-known to somebody, and maybe some won’t.

I’ll start off with three songs that, I hope, show more or less what I’m trying to get at.

Lata Mangeshkar - Yara Sili Sili
“Yara Sili Sili” comes from the 1990 Bollywood movie Lekin (However). I can’t find “yara” in my Hindi-English dictionary, but one site translates the title as “How Slowly the Tinders Smolder.” I haven’t seen the movie, but reportedly, Lata loved the music especially well. It’s understandable, too: she sang with her sister Asha Bhonsle on the soundtrack, which is unremarkable, since they’re both extremely prolific, and collaborated a lot when Asha was alive, but more unusually, their brother, Hridyanath, also wrote the music as well as sang. Also, Lata produced the movie. My iPod introduced this song to me on shuffle, while I was reading a great piece by Jonathan Lethem in a recent New Yorker. The piece had to do with music, like a lot of what Lethem writes, and for some reason, the combination of the song and the article, which was really about his mother’s death, really moved me. It might have had to do with being in the cathedral-like cages of the UC Berkeley microfilm room. Also, I think the song is pretty. You can get it on the Rough Guide to Lata Mangeshkar, which has some other good songs, too.

Billy’s Band - Оторвемся по-питерски (Atarvyomsya pa-piterski is my best match for his pronunciation)
As far as I can tell, this is Tom Waits, singing in Russian and backed by a klezmer band. I don’t really know anything about it, but a girl who lives in my co-op saw this band play in Russia. This is the title track of an EP with the same title; there are also two other versions of the same song, and two more songs.

Billy Childish and the Buff Medways - Troubled Mind
OK, here’s something in English, and another Billy. According to my friend John, and what the Internet has told me, this guy has more than a hundred albums with a lot of different bands. He’s English, and doesn’t consider himself a musician - he says he just likes to play music. I’m not sure I really buy the distinction. The song’s got a dirty groove and a cool jerk, like a more primitive, rockabilly-inflected version of The Strokes’ “Hard to Explain.” It’s an import (at least, in the US), but Steady the Buffs has this song.