Pay What You Want for This Article Published: December 9, 2007

Pay What You Want for This Article Published: December 9, 2007

(Page 2 of 3)

The band chose 10 concise, tuneful songs for the album. In them Mr. Yorke sings about displacement, disorientation, memories and moving on. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” wonders “Why should I stay here?,” imagines decomposing underwater and being eaten by worms, then concludes, “Hit the bottom and escape.”

Skip to next paragraph

Multimedia

 Thom Yorke on Radiohead's Online Experiment (mp3)

 Thom Yorke on Shuffling Music (mp3)

 Jonny Greenwood on the Production Process (mp3)

 Phil Selway on the Collaborative Process (mp3)

 Jonny Greenwood on the Recording Process (mp3)

Times Topics: Radiohead

Throughout “In Rainbows” Mr. Yorke’s lyrics can be mapped onto personal relationships, the state of the world or the state of the band.

Behind much of the album “was a sudden realization of the day-t0-day, tenuous nature of life,” Mr. Yorke said. “Most of the time I was really, really trying not to judge anything that was happening. I was trying to just, not exactly knock it out, but not trying to be clever. That’s all.”

The Internet had already witnessed much of the gestation of “In Rainbows,” as Radiohead tested songs in public, knowing they would be bootlegged immediately. “The first time we ever did ‘All I Need,’ boom! It was up on YouTube,” Mr. Yorke said. “I think it’s fantastic. The instant you finish something, you’re really excited about it, you’re really proud of it, you hope someone’s heard it, and then, by God, they have. It’s O.K. because it’s on a phone or a video recorder. It’s a bogus recording, but the spirit of the song is there, and that’s good. At that stage that’s all you need to worry about.”

The band worried over other things. After releasing “Hail to the Thief” and touring the world, Radiohead took a year off. The members, all in their 30s, turned to raising families as they mulled over the future. Early in 2005 they began rehearsing together tentatively, although, Mr. Selway said, mentioning the word “album” was taboo for a year. They had a list of songs, most of which would appear two years later on “In Rainbows,” by September.

But as 2005 ended, Radiohead still had not regained its momentum. Mr. Yorke, a prolific songwriter, made his own album, “The Eraser,” working mostly alone with his computer and samples.

Mr. Godrich was busy recording Beck, so the band tried some sessions with Spike Stent, who had worked with Bjork, at the beginning of 2006. It was disappointed with the results. Then it decided that performing might put the songs into shape. It booked a summer tour in 2006, playing half a dozen new songs at every show. Soon, thanks to bootlegged recordings online, fans were clearly recognizing each one. After the tour Radiohead returned to the studio, only to decide that the songs weren’t ready yet.

“To be brutally honest,” the guitarist Ed O’Brien said over lunch at Shoreditch House in London, “the problem about playing these songs live is that we were bored with them. We played them 80 times live or so, and we’d rehearsed them to death. It just didn’t happen when we got back intothe studio initially.”

Once again the band began tinkering. “We have a song and we’ve got lots of different ways we can try it, but we don’t know what’s going to work, and that’s why it still sort of feels a bit weirdly amateur,” Mr. Greenwood said. “You’d think by now we’d know what’s going to work, and what’s still frustrating, or kind of encouraging in a way, is that we don’t know whether it’s going to work on a laptop or whether it has to be a piano or. ...”

He half-smiled. “It’s got so twisted,” he added. “What we’ve learned is that you can’t repeat a method that you’ve already used for a song when it did work.”

The sound of “In Rainbows” often seems straightforward, almost like a live band; it is Radiohead’s most gracefully melodic album in a decade. But Radiohead arrived at the music circuitously, and there’s often more tucked into a track than is apparent at first. “Videotape,” with lyrics about recording a happy moment in a tape to be viewed posthumously, has a tolling piano and a beat so elusive that “we spent about a year in rehearsal on that song actually all trying to agree on where the one was,” Mr. Selway said. “Each of us, over the course of a year, we’d all lose it.”

Pay What You Want for This Article

(Page 3 of 3)

The “Reckoner” that was part of the band’s live sets sounds nothing like the “Reckoner” on the album, which includes the lyrics “in rainbows.” When the band returned from touring, it decided the song needed a second part, and then a third one; eventually it discarded the original. For “All I Need,” Mr. Greenwood said, he wanted to recapture the white noise generated by a band playing loudly in a room, when “all this chaos kicks up.” That sound never materializes in the more analytical confines of a studio. His solution was to have a string section, and his own overdubbed violas, sustaining every note of the scale, blanketing the frequencies.

Skip to next paragraph

Multimedia

 Thom Yorke on Radiohead's Online Experiment (mp3)

 Thom Yorke on Shuffling Music (mp3)

 Jonny Greenwood on the Production Process (mp3)

 Phil Selway on the Collaborative Process (mp3)

 Jonny Greenwood on the Recording Process (mp3)

Times Topics: Radiohead

Mr. Yorke worked on many of the songs in the Rose and Crown. “I sit there, on the way in, because it’s a really nice little table,” he said, pointing. “And then I get out my scraps of paper and I line them up. I need to put them into my book because they’re just scraps of paper, and I’m going to lose them unless I do it. So am I writing here? Probably. I don’t know yet. I’m just collating information. This is a nice, relaxing thing to do, and it also keeps your mind tuned in to the whole thing. And you see things you didn’t know.”

The band and its managers are not releasing the download’s sales figures or average price, and may never do so. “It’s our linen,” Mr. Hufford said. “We don’t want to wash it in public.” A statement from the band rejected estimates by the online survey company ComScore that during October about three-fifths of worldwide downloaders took the album free, while the rest paid an average of $6.

Factoring in free downloads, ComScore said the average price per download was $2.26. But it did not specify a total number of downloads, saying only that a “significant percentage” of the 1.2 million people who visited the Radiohead Web site, inrainbows.com, in October downloaded the album. Under a typical recording contract, a band receives royalties of about 15 percent of an album’s wholesale price after expenses are recovered. Without middlemen, and with zero material costs for a download, $2.26 per album would work out to Radiohead’s advantage — not to mention the worldwide publicity.

Both Mr. Hufford and the members of Radiohead said the strategy had been a success. “People made their choice to actually pay money,” Mr. Hufford said. “It’s people saying, ‘We want to be part of this thing.’ If it’s good enough, people will put a penny in the pot.”

“This was a solution to a series of issues,” Mr. Hufford added. “I doubt it would work the same way ever again.”

Radiohead has not abandoned the physical disc. A mail-order deluxe version of “In Rainbows” — the album and a bonus CD, two vinyl albums, artwork and a fancy package for $80 — went on sale alongside the downloaded version on Oct. 10, directly from the band’s own mail-order merchandising company, W.A.S.T.E., and was shipped to the first buyers last week.

Mr. Hufford said that he and Bryce Edge, Radiohead’s other manager, had come up with the pay-what-you-want plan during a stoned philosophical conversation about the value of music. They had initially proposed releasing only the download and the deluxe box, but the band overruled them, noting that many of its fans are neither downloaders nor elite collectors. On Jan. 1 — a day when few albums are usually released — the single-disc “In Rainbows” is due as a retail CD and vinyl LP, in joint ventures with the independent labels TBD (part of ATO Records, partly owned by Dave Matthews) in the United States and XL in most other countries.

Will Botwin, the president and chief executive of ATO Records Group, optimistically described the download as “the world’s largest listening party,” drawing attention to the album among Radiohead’s core fans. The label plans to market to a broader audience with everything from television advertisements to in-store displays. Radio stations have already been sent the bruising rocker “Bodysnatchers” — a song, Mr. Yorke said, inspired by Victorian ghost stories, “The Stepford Wives” and his own feeling of “your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else” — and the tense folk-rocker “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

The music business awaits results on how the worldwide downloads of “In Rainbows” will affect disc sales. “The record company doesn’t know,” said a grinning Colin Greenwood, Radiohead’s bassist, over tea in London. “They called our office and said, ‘We’ve made this amount of records, is it enough?’ And our manager’s office said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great, isn’t it?” For Radiohead, uncertainty is home turf.

CRYSTAL AIKIN NAMED BET's SUNDAY BEST

 

CRYSTAL AIKIN NAMED BET's SUNDAY BEST: Emergency room nurse takes top prize in gospel reality competition, including a contract with Zomba Gospel.

 

On Tuesday, December 4, Crystal Aikin, the 33-year-old emergency room nurse, won the title of Sunday Best on BET's gospel reality competition. Aikin beat out Shari Addison, 46, during the live season finale.

      More than 1.5 million people cast their votes over a 10-week season. Along with the title, Aikin brings home a national recording contract with Zomba Gospel, a 2008 Toyota Camry and a $300,000 Tide "Loads of Hope" prize package for her community. The one-hour finale included special performances by platinum-selling gospel songstress Yolanda Adams and series host, Kirk Franklin.

      Crystal Aikin, a Tacoma, Washington native, placed her career aside, entered the competition and followed her call to minister to the masses in song.

      Learning about the SUNDAY BEST competition from a stranger who sought her out after hearing her sing more than eight years ago, Crystal used her mother's frequent flyer miles and traveled to the Los Angeles auditions for a mere $2.50.

      From the beginning, Aikin immediately captured the attention of all with her powerhouse voice. Belting out touching and hand-clapping selections each week, Aikin wowed the judges and America alike.

      "This journey has been busy, exhausting, fun, and anticipatory," said Aikin. "It's a blessed and privileged opportunity to be the SUNDAY BEST winner and to God be all the glory."

Carlos Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81

Carlos Valdés, a Conga King of Jazz, Dies at 81

Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos

Carlos Valdés performing at the JVC Jazz Festival in 2006.

Published: December 6, 2007

Carlos Valdés, better known as Patato, whose melodic conga playing made him a giant of Latin jazz in Cuba and then for more than half a century in America, died on Tuesday in Cleveland. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was respiratory failure, said his manager, Charles Carlini.

Born in Havana, Patato (a reference from Cuban slang to his diminutive size) played in the 1940s and early ’50s with important groups like Sonora Matancera and Conjunto Casino. He became a star in the early days of Cuban television for his virtuosic playing and for his showmanship; his signature song was “El Baile del Pingüino” (“The Penguin Dance”), which he illustrated with side-to-side, penguinlike movement in perfect time.

He came to the United States in the early 1950s and settled in New York, where he quickly established himself as an indispensable player, performing and recording with some of the top names in jazz and Latin music. In the ’50s and ’60s he worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Machito, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones; he played with Herbie Mann from 1959 to 1972.

Known for his fluid, improvisatory melodies, Mr. Valdés tuned his drums tightly to produce clear, precise tones, and he popularized the playing of multiple conga drums; when he began his career, conga players, or congueros, typically used only one or two drums, but Mr. Valdés played three, four or more to allow a wider range of tones.

He is also associated with using a key to tune the congas instead of heating the skins with a flame. Latin Percussion, the leading Latin drum company, makes a Patato line of conga drums.

Mr. Valdés had an influential role in expanding the rumba form. His 1968 album “Patato & Totico,” recorded with Eugenio (Totico) Arango, a singer who was a boyhood friend from Havana, was particularly inventive. Instead of sticking to the usual format of drums and vocals, the album added severalother instruments played by star musicians like Israel (Cachao) López on bass and Arsenio Rodríguez on tres, a six-string Cuban guitar. It is said to be Mr. Rodríguez’s last recording session, and its innovations had a lasting effect on Latin jazz.

“I had these ideas and wanted to advance them through jazz,” Mr. Valdés said in an interview with Latin Beat magazine in 1997. “I wanted something progressive.”

He was also a flamboyant performer who knew how to work a crowd. One of his performance hallmarks was jumping atop his drums and dancing while keeping the beat. In the 1956 film “And God Created Woman,” he is briefly seen teaching Brigitte Bardot to dance the mambo.

He is survived by his wife, Julia; two daughters, Yvonne and Regla; and two grandchildren, Jose Valdes and Mayra Garcia.

Mr. Valdés never stopped touring, recently working with his group the Conga Kings, which also includes Giovanni Hidalgo and Candido Camero, a fellow octogenarian. While flying back a few weeks ago from concerts in California — including one at the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Nov. 9 — he had trouble breathing, and the plane made an emergency landing for him in Cleveland. He had been hospitalized since then.

Displaced Jazz Musician Rebuilds in New York

Displaced Jazz Musician Rebuilds in New York

 

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

The Jazz Foundation of America has assisted Davell Crawford, called a “male Billie Holiday.”

By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

Published: November 22, 2007

The musical Prince of New Orleans has been touring New York in vagabond shoes.

Skip to next paragraph

City Room Blog

The latest news and reader discussions from around the five boroughs and the region.

Go to City Room »

“I’ve been walking around at night looking at all the clubs andthe restaurants, just trying to figure out a new beginning for myself,” said Davell Crawford, 32, sitting on a piano bench recently at Roth’s Westside Steakhouse on the Upper West Side, where he practices. “I’m just thankful to be given another chance in a great city like this, a chance to fit in somewhere and entertain the people.”

Mr. Crawford, a jazz artist who is as well known in New Orleans as Mardi Gras, lost everything but his melodious soul in 2005 to Hurricane Katrina, which caused many musicians to leave and try to find work in other cities.

His career ruined by the storm, the man who once opened for Etta James, jammed with Lionel Hampton and thrilled audiences on four continents lives in a tiny Manhattan apartment provided by the Jazz Foundation of America, which has aided in more than 3,000 emergency cases involving musicians and their families affected by Katrina.

“Davell is a cross between Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, a male Billie Holiday,” said Wendy Oxenhorn, the executive director of the Jazz Foundation. “He is way too talented to be going through hard times.”

Mr. Crawford, called the Prince of New Orleans by a former mayor, Marc H. Morial, said that Katrina wiped out his apartmentand his Lower Ninth Ward recording studio, where he kept his grand piano, recordings, compositions, jewelry, even money.

The studio doubled as a music school for hundreds of aspiring young artists whom Mr. Crawford, whose energetic music embraces jazz, gospel, funk and rhythm and blues, taught to sing and play the piano. The catastrophe forced him to live for a while in his grandmother’s beauty salon, which Katrina left partly standing, with no running water and no heat.

As the rest of New Orleans struggled to recover, Mr. Crawford used his life’s savings to support himself while performing at funerals and benefits around the city.

For those performances, he took no pay, but great pleasure in repaying those who had showered him in better days with thunderous applause at places including the House of Blues, Charly B’s and the Maple Leaf.

“Down in New Orleans, we’re a very tribal community,” Mr. Crawford said. “We’re like family — we help one another.”

By February 2006, six months of volunteering had taken a financial toll on Mr. Crawford. He had drifted to Atlanta and was sleeping on the floors of friends’ apartments.

One afternoon, he found himself in a Burger King there, with $12 left in his pocket.

“A preacher friend of mine from Atlanta called me that very day, just by coincidence,” Mr. Crawford said. “He rushed over to the Burger King and gave me a hundred dollars — and I just broke down and started to cry.”

The next day, he received a phone call from Ms. Oxenhorn, whose foundation began helping him with bills and finding him work. In August this year, the foundation brought him to New York and placed him in his apartment, gave him a donated grand piano worth $12,000 and had his grandmother’s beauty salon in New Orleans repaired.

The foundation also provided Mr. Crawford with recording equipment to make CDs to get bookings for festival work and helped him land an audition for Blue Note Records in New York and numerous gigs around the city.

Those gigs included the foundation’s annual benefit concert, “A Great Night in Harlem,” held at the Apollo Theater in May, which raised $750,000.

“We have to keep in mind that this is just one story out of hundreds of musicians that have needed us,” Ms. Oxenhorn said of Mr. Crawford’s plight. “Many of the other musicians we have been helping are elderly, without any resources.”

For now, the foundation arranges for Mr. Crawford to play at private parties, which pay just enough to cover rent and basic expenses. But he dreams of playing in bigger venues, honing his piano skills in his apartment on the donated piano and practicing at the steakhouse.

Mr. Crawford, who has been performing since he was 7, won a 1998 Big Easy Entertainment Award for Best Gospel Artist. He is the grandson of James Sugar Boy Crawford, a pioneer of New Orleans rock ’n’ roll and composer of “Iko Iko,” a popular song written in 1954 under the original title “Jock-A-Mo.”

In the early 1960s, Sugar Boy was caught in a different kind of storm. While on tour in the still-segregated South, his entourage was stopped by the local police, and he was taken from his car and beaten so badly that he decided never to return to music.

“He had his Katrina,” Mr. Crawford said softly, “and I had mine.”

While mentioning the places he would love to play in New York — the Algonquin Hotel, the Blue Note and Birdland — Mr. Crawford noticed a tip jar on top of the piano with several bills stuffed inside.

He left his piano bench, picked up the jar and gave it to a waiter.

“This is not my money,” he said. “When I earn it, I’ll keep it.”

Cecil Payne, Baritone Saxophonist Who Mastered Bebop, Dies

Cecil Payne, Baritone Saxophonist Who Mastered Bebop, Dies

 

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Published: December 4, 2007

Cecil Payne, who in the 1940s was one of the first baritone saxophonists to master the intricacies of modern jazz and who for more than half a century was a leading exponent of his instrument, died last Tuesday in Stratford, N.J. He was 84.

The cause was prostate cancer, said Wendy Oxenhorn, director of the Jazz Foundation of America, which provides support to musicians in need and had been helping Mr. Payne.

Mr. Payne spent virtually his entire career out of the spotlight: he never led a band of his own, recorded only a few albums as a leader and played an instrument that rarely takes center stage in jazz. But he was highly regarded by his fellow musicians, especially those he worked for — a list that included Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Randy Weston and many others — and by the critics.

The beginning of Mr. Payne’s career coincided with the birth of bebop. With its complex harmonies, tricky rhythms and blistering tempos, the new music posed challenges to all musicians, but some instruments were better suited to its demands than others. While the often cumbersome baritone saxophone was not an ideal vehicle for modern jazz, Mr. Payne’s highly fluid and melodic approach effected a seamless marriage between instrument and idiom.

One of his first high-profile jobs, shortly after he was discharged from the Army in 1946, was with Gillespie’s big band, an ultramodern ensemble that played a famously demanding repertory. He remained with Gillespie’s band for three years and was prominently featured on some of the band’s best-known recordings. Few if any baritone saxophonists recorded as many memorable solos in the early days of bebop.

Cecil McKenzie Payne was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 14, 1922. As a teenager he studied alto saxophone, and his earliest recordings were made on that instrument. By the time he joined Gillespie, after a brief stint with Gillespie’s fellow trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the baritone had become hisprimary horn.

After leaving Gillespie in 1949, Mr. Payne worked with various other bandleaders, notably the tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet. But by the mid-1950s he was essentially a freelance sideman, and he remained one for the rest of his life.

In his later years he battled glaucoma and other health problems, but he continued performing and recorded several albums for the Chicago-based Delmark label. Encouraged by a group of younger musicians who worked with him, and given financial and medical help by the Jazz Foundation, he was a frequent attraction at the Upper West Side nightclub Smoke and, more recently, at the Kitano Hotel at Park Avenue and 38th Street.

Survivors include his sister, Cavril Payne, a singer.

EVEL KNIEVEL DIES DAYS AFTER KANYE TRUCE: Daredevil passes Friday at age 69.

EVEL KNIEVEL DIES DAYS AFTER KANYE TRUCE: Daredevil passes Friday at age 69.

 

Legendary daredevil Evel Knievel died Friday, just days after announcing his meeting with Kanye West that led to a settlement over the rapper's video for "Touch the Sky."

      The 1970s motorcycle stuntman has had a myriad of health problems in recent years, including diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable condition that scarred his lungs. He had undergone a liver transplant in 1999 after nearly dying of hepatitis C, likely contracted through a blood transfusion after one of his many spills. He also suffered two strokes in recent years.

       Knievel, 69, died two days after it was announced that he and Kanye had settled a federal lawsuit over the use of Knievel's trademarked image in "Touch the Sky."

The late Evel Knievel & Kanye West

      The video features the artist as "Evel Kanyevel" trying to jump a rocket-powered motorcycle over a canyon. Knievel failed in his attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in 1974. West's attorneys argued the video amounted to satire, covered under the First Amendment.      

       "We settled the lawsuit amicably," Knievel said last Tuesday in a joint statement released by West's label Def Jam. "I was very satisfied and so was he."     

       Knievel also expressed concern for West in the wake of his mother's death on Nov. 10.       

       "I know he's had some tough times the past few weeks, and I hope things work out," Knievel said.

 

Folklorist’s Tunes

 

 

Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes Sign In to E-Mail or Save This By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

Published: December 2, 2007

NASHVILLE

John Work III took part in field recordings of blues singers like Muddy Waters and the gospel quartet Fairfield Four on acetates.

Multimedia

 If I Had My Way by the Heavenly Gate Quartet (mp3)

 I Am His, He Is Mine by members of Zema Hill's Church (mp3)

 Walk Around in Dry Bones by the Fairfield Four (mp3)

Estate of Raeburn Flerlage/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Muddy Waters

TWO years ago, the book “Lost Delta Found” criticized the American folklorist Alan Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. With the release of “Recording Black Culture,” an album consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to buttress this claim.

Mr. Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Mr. Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on “Recording Black Culture,” instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.

Robert Gordon, who edited “Lost Delta Found” with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Mr. Work’s recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called “I Am His, He Is Mine” as an example.

“There’s nascent boogie-woogie in that music,” said Mr. Gordon, who has also written a biography of the blues singer Muddy Waters, whom Mr. Work and Mr. Lomax recorded on their trip to Coahoma County, Miss., in 1941. “That piano would have made many loyal churchgoers angry: a harbinger of the response to R&B and rock ’n’ roll.”

The pressing harmonic and rhythmic interplay of the Heavenly Gate Quartet singing “If I Had My Way” offers further evidence of this evolution. The heavy syncopation heard there and in Mr. Work’s recording of the Fairfield Four’s “Walk Around in Dry Bones” presage doo-wop a good decade before vocal groups like the Clovers and the Coasters would establish it as the soundtrack for young black America in the 1950s.

This isn’t to claim Dead Sea Scrolls-like significance for the music on the new CD. Black Americans, though, were making the transition from rural to urban life. Spirituals were being supplanted by music that was more agreeable to black communities in which congregations were buying pianos so they could play the songs of contemporary gospel composers like the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey during worship. Mr. Work was committed to capturing these changes as they were happening rather than after the fact.

Issued by Spring Fed Records, a label based in Woodbury, Tenn., “Recording Black Culture” demonstrates not only Mr. Work’s understanding of the dynamic way vernacular music functioned in black culture but also his omnivorous musical appetite. In addition to dramatic examples of gospel singers anticipating rock ’n’ roll, the selections include rare recordings ranging from black Sacred Harp singing to the virtuoso banjo playing of Nathan Frazier, performing as half of the banjo-and-fiddle duo Frazier & Patterson.

Classically trained at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (now a part of Juilliard), Mr. Work became a professor of music at Fisk University in Nashville; from 1947 to 1966 he was the director of the school’s spirituals chorus, the Jubilee Singers. His son John Work IV recalled that his father, who died in 1967, was also conversant with jazz.

“I remember Duke Ellington coming to the house on at least three occasions,” John Work IV wrote in an e-mail message from New York City. “On one of these, I am sure that I was a slight embarrassment to my father when Maestro Ellington went to the piano and played ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and one other major composition and I could recognize neither.”

Mr. Work’s expansive grasp of black music was reflected in his approach to collecting source material. “Instead of pigeonholing musicians in terms of what he wanted them to play, Work acted as a fly on the wall and recorded what was there at the moment,” said Evan Hatch, the producer with Mr. Nemerov of “Recording Black Culture.” “He accepted what was indicative of the culture, as opposed to only going after what he expected or thought should be there.”

Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes

Published: December 2, 2007

(Page 2 of 2)

Mr. Work’s method of documenting the music proved a corrective to the sometimes romantic approach of Mr. Lomax, who viewed the spiritual, for example, as the apex of black culture and largely ignored the new sounds emerging from Southern black churches. “Blues had become established,” Mr. Gordon said, “and churchgoers began to ask, ‘Why should the devil get all the good tunes?’”

Skip to next paragraph

Multimedia

 If I Had My Way by the Heavenly Gate Quartet (mp3)

 

Mr. Lomax also seemed preoccupied with old work songs at a time when the cotton fields were becoming mechanized. “Workers weren’t just dragging the big sacks behind them in the fields anymore,” Mr. Nemerov explained. “Muddy Waters was a tractor driver.

“But to be fair to the Lomaxes,” he added, referring both to Mr. Lomax and to his father, the pioneering folklorist John Lomax, “they were interested in preserving music that wasn’t going to be around in 10 years’ time. You can’t fault them for that, but not knowing all the details, modern listeners get a skewed view of what black people liked to sing. Thus you have people listening to this music 20 or 30 years later going, ‘Oh, look, black people love to sing ‘Go Down, Moses,’ when that wasn’t really the case.”

Racial dynamics at the time might have contributed to the Lomaxes’ view of the music. Because of the prevalence of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, many Southern blacks might have been wary of white folklorists from the Northeast. As a black man and a Southerner, Mr. Work would have had a much easier time gaining entree to churches, dances and other social events than would his white counterparts.

“Work clearly would have had a rapport with the church singers, especially with the church hierarchy, being from a religiously based college like Fisk,” said David Evans, the director of the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis. “There was also the reputation of the Jubilee Singers. All of that would have given him a kind of in.”

Unable in some cases to gain such access, the Lomaxes turned to the prisons, where inmates like Lead Belly had no choice but to sing at the warden’s bidding. “Lead Belly of course is an icon of American music, so it’s not to be dismissed,” said Mr. Nemerov. “Nevertheless, the Lomaxes gave America a very peculiar view of black music. Professor Work’s recordings give us a much more balanced view, both in terms of music and social class, of the black culture of the time.”

Why Mr. Work did not publicize the acetates that have been meticulously remastered on “Recording Black Culture” remains unclear. When Mr. Nemerov found the discs in the attic of the Work home near the Fisk campus a few years ago, they appeared to have been played frequently, suggesting that they were dear to Mr. Work.

Some of the recordings that he had made with Mr. Lomax, largely the work songs and spirituals favored by Mr. Lomax, had been deposited in the Archive of American Folk Song at theLibrary of Congress. The rest of the performances, which have gone unheard by the public for the better part of seven decades, give a more expansive view of the black vernacular music of the time.

“Professor Work had big ears,” Mr. Nemerov said. “The overarching theme here is just how much music there was in the black community before World War II. It just seemed to be everywhere, and in every layer of black culture, not just in the cotton fields and prisons.”