Tom Waits on songs and songwriters | Far Out Magazine

Tom Waits picked his 20 favourite albums of all time

FAROUT Magazine 2023

 "For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in – so the bootlegs I obtained in the sixties and seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me.” 

Tom Waits

Tom Waits’ 20 favourite albums:

In the Wee Small Hours – Frank Sinatra

Solo Monk – Thelonious Monk

Trout Mask Replica – Captain Beefheart 

Exile On Main Street – The Rolling Stones

The Sinking of the Titanic – Gavin Bryers

The Basement Tapes – Bob Dylan

Lounge Lizards – Lounge Lizards

Rum Sodomy and the Lash – The Pogues

I’m Your Man – Leonard Cohen

The Specialty Sessions – Little Richard

Startime – James Brown

Bohemian-Moravian Bands – Texas-Czech

The Yellow Shark – Frank Zappa

Passion for Opera Aria

Rant in E Minor – Bill Hicks

Prison Songs: Murderous Home – Alan Lomax Collection

Cubanos Postizos – Marc Ribot

Houndog – Houndog

Purple Onion – Les Claypool

The Delivery Man – Elvis Costello

"Being inspired by Bob Dylan and The Beat Generation, Waits would later move to Los Angeles, where he signed his first recording contract with Asylum Records. The development of Waits’ sound would gradually move closer to rock, blues and experimental genres, so it was clear that he would cite Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart as an album that had a significant impact on his life.

“The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud,” Waits said of Beefheart’s album. “Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that’ll never be beat, it’s a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.” 

Lee Thomas@LeeThomasFO

Tue 31 October 2023 15:56, UK 

I have eight of these amongst the collection down in the vaults (down past the dungeon and turn right by the Ha-ha) Despite my tutor at Art School being on his list I have to disagree with Lee here as "perfectly balanced” “neatly constructed”  a list as its possible to get? 

Nope it is ODD!

 Marc Ribot? Les Claypool? Lounge Lizards? ( I own this one but top twenty in anyone’s collection? I think not?! 

Despite the mention of Dylan being as indispensable as "a hammer and nails" - the Basement Tapes? Odd and perverse choice I thought . . . . .

How about you? Discuss . . . .aaaaaand GO!

Gavin Bryars - Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (feat. Tom Waits)

Art of the day and in tribute to Fred Orton

 

FRED ORTON 1945-2025

MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887-1968). 

EXHIBITION • MAN RAY / JULIEN LEVY GALLERY. Folded exhibition brochure. 1945. 

11x9 inches 

I was looking around the internet looking for the source of this exhibition poster  when I discovered that my old Art History master at De Montfort University (Leicester Poly as was) the Marxist historian Fred Orton pass away last year -the day after my birthday- . . . . . I also discovered he had taken up painting again in his retirement which filled me with joy. 

He scared lots of us at Leicester in the first year with his intellect, his radical political awareness and depth of art knowledge (I once recall a lecture he gave us about Black Mountain College which brought him to tears!) and he was fiercely challenging but the tutorial study group on Marcel Duchamp, with fellow lecturer and my tutor at Art School, the composer Gavin Bryars, meant he warmed to me whereas I had previously thought for the longest time he considered me an idiot! 

I dedicate this post to him and send the kindest of wishes to old compatriot and sparring partner Gavin and Fred’s family his partner Miranda Orton and their daughters Daisy and Emmylou.

Fred Orton ‘untitled’

FRED ORTON - Historical Materialism

Steve Edwards

Fred

Michael Nyman - Great Death Game (The Draughtsman’s Contract by Peter Greenaway] | jt1674

  . . . I have mentioned my tutor at college several times and that composer Gavin Bryars held the somewhat unusual post in a Fine Art (Painting) Dept of a polytechnic in Leicester (now De Montfort University) alongside renowned historian Fred Orton and they arranged for Brian Eno to come visit as an outside lecturer. I also I mention perhaps less frequently that Gavin knew the equally extraordinary composer Michael Nyman and he visited as an external lecturer too. 

Thus began life long interests in all three composers and Fred too had an indelible effect upon me through the study group on the iconic avant garde artist Marcel Duchamp. I wrote papers on Francic Picabia and Man Ray also. A life long interest in Richard Hamilton followed for the so called Pop Art master was an authority on Marcel Duchamp (and recreator of the Large Glass) and Eno and of course through Michael’s beautiful work engendered a lifelong interest in iconoclastic filmmaker Peter Greenaway too. 

https://www.tumblr.com/jt1674/813339910590332928/michael-nyman-great-death-game

ART FROM THE FUTURE - Duchamp Ready Mades : The Urinal R.Mutt 1917

DUCHAMP Ready Made - Art From The Future 

from the Tate Modern:

Oh hello, cross-holes. Fancy seeing you here. 

SF-MOMA’s edition has the triangle holes, but it also has a line of holes at the top that are completely different from either other version. 

Here’s one from Moderna Museet. Line and a circular set of holes!

Duchamp definitely intentionally made these different on purpose. It’s a “readymade” but it’s not, really, each of these is a specific custom creation. 

It’s not even clear if he made it! He wrote a letter to his sister claiming that a female friend sent it to him, and he just enrolled it in the art exhibit under his own name. There’s also a possibility that that female friend was himself, since he later had a female pseudonym of Rrose Sélav. 

This whole piece of art is a fractal troll, and it’s a beautiful one. 

The only possible correction I can make is Duchamp’s alter ego’s name was Rrose Sélavy.  C'est la vie. Anglicé, “That’s life.”

Charles Ives : Piano and Violin Sonatas (on his 150th Birthday Anniversary)

 Now I have said before that composer Gavin Bryars was my tutor at Art school in Leicester alongside the noted Art Historian Fred Orton they organised a Duchamp study group which I was a member of and brought in Brian Eno and people like Peter Greenaway The Draughtsmam’s Contract film soundtrack composer Michael Nyman as external lecturers [yeah you never shut up about it - ED RUDE!] 

But Gavin also introduced me to many artists and writers (Thoreau) and composers not least his own work ( I think I am close to having everything official) and Charles Ives was one such composer and I have loved his work and appreciated it ever since hence this on the 150th anniversary, there is a new recording of his sonatas 

On the latest episode of ‘New Classical Tracks’ with host Julie Amacher, pianist Jeremy Denk collaborates with violinist Stefan Jackiw to highlight Charles Ives’ piano and violin sonatas in celebration of the composer’s 150th birth anniversary. Check out this clip from his interview and listen to the complete episode below!

Listen now: https://www.yourclassical.org/.../12/04/new-classical-tracks

Tom Waits Interview & Performance - KBCO (1999) Bret Saunders | Tom Waits' Facebook page

 I Come Calling In My Sunday Best . . . . . . 

Tom Waits performs "Picture in a Frame" live on KBCO - October 13, 1999. The full KBCO Session, including an interview by Bret Saunders, and performances of "The Fall of Troy," "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue," and "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet” by Gavin Bryars

Painting of The Day : Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 | For Connel in Normal People . . . .

 I think it was this that Conn is recommended to go see when they go to Europe and stay with Marianne in the family villa . . . . it meant a lot to me as we had enjoyed a ‘study group’ on Duchamp at college run by the peerless Art Historian Fred Orton and the wonderful composer Gavin Bryars which remains one of the few high points of my time at art school

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) is a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp. The work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time. Before its first presentation at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants in Paris it was rejected by the Cubists as being too Futurist.

The hanging committee objected to the work, on the grounds that it had “too much of a literary title”, and that “one doesn’t paint a nude descending a staircase, that’s ridiculous… a nude should be respected." Duchamp’s brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, sent by the hanging committee, asked him to voluntarily withdraw the painting, or paint over the title and rename it something else.

“But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that.” – Marcel Duchamp

I focused my attentions on Man Ray and Francis Picabia during this time and wrote papers on them both so we went on to meet Richard Hamilton (and his lovely partner fellow artist Rita Donagh) on whom I did my final thesis. We also went to the ICA Man Ray exhibition and were able to meet Sir Roland Penrose and his then wife, the Man Ray muse and artist, model and keen photojournalist herself (the first photographer into Bergen Belsen no less) Lee Miller

Happy Days . . . . . 

Antonin DVORAK : SOUL MUSIC - BBC RADIO 4 | Gypsy Songs: Songs My Mother Taught Me

 Soul Music this morning on BBC Radio Four looked at the piece ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me' by Dvorak and also touched upon the Charles Ives version of the same song some fifteen years later after Dvorak had written his original. I think I have mentioned that I was introduced to the work of Charles Ives by my tutor at art school, the composer Gavin Bryars, and I am eternally grateful for that. This piece by Ives, Dvorak’s contemporary, is remarkable I thought though I also very much enjoyed the Dvorak piece itself. The Radio 4 series usually to my experience looks at classic pop songs or things from the more popular canon and this was a welcome change. Hope you enjoy it here too

BBC Radio 4 - Soul Music, Songs My Mother Taught Me

BBC said :

Songs My Mother Taught Me

Soul Music

Antonin Dvorak wrote his Gypsy Songs in 1880. He was passionate about the folk music of his native Bohemia and set a poem by Czech poet Adolf Heyduk to music. Songs My Mother Taught Me is the fourth song in the cycle.

Songs my Mother taught me

In the days long vanished

Seldom from her eyelids

Were the teardrops banished....

It's a wistful melancholic piece evoking memory and loss. Soul Music hears the stories of musicians, poets and singers from around the world of why they are so drawn to it.

The poet Raine Geoghegan is the daughter of a Romany woman whose life was weighed down with the loss of her father at a young age. Raine identifies with the sadness of the music because it not only represents grief at the loss of her father but also for the loss of a way of life for the gypsy people.

For Emily MacGregor it's all about the music we inherit from our parents. She is writing a book about music and grief and says this piece perfectly represents the bittersweet feeling of listening to music associated with the loss of a loved one. Dvorak had already lost three children in infancy by the time he wrote his Zigeuner Lieder.

Paris based violinist and conductor Bartu Elci-Ozsoy associates Songs with the innocence of childhood and was moved to perform it at a benefit concert he organised in aid of the children affected by the devastating earthquake in his native Turkey and Syria in early 2023.

The Korean soprano Sumi Jo recorded it in honour of her mother and presented it to her a year before she died in gratitude for her determination to see her daughter become a professional singer.

When The Scotsman newspaper commissioned a series of lockdown concerts in Spring 2020 cellist Sua-Lee chose to recreate the concert by Beatrice Harrison a century earlier when she played the piece accompanied by nightingales in her garden in Surrey. Sua set up her cello in woodland near her home in Grantown- on-Spey and performed Songs My Mother Taught Me to a collection of woodland creatures

Singer Ruby Hughes performed the American composer Charles Ives' version of the piece for a collection called Bright Travellers - music curated and composed by Helen Grimes from poems by Fiona Benson. Ives wrote his own version of Dvorak's piece not long after the Czech composer had settled in America. She loves the rocking gentle lullaby sensation created by the lilting melodies of both Ives' and Dvorak's compositions.

Featuring additional recordings by Sua Lee and Zoe Challenor

Producer: Maggie Ayre

 Top Ten Classical Pieces

1. Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat 
           (1st live music concert I ever went to - Sheldonian Theatre Oxford as a schoolboy,  
            I went out and bought it on 10” classical album with my pocket money)
2. Rossini - William Tell Overture (my dad would conduct imaginary orchestras and listen to his          

           favourites - this was one and quickly became one of mine
3. Gavin Bryars - Sinking Of The Titanic
4. Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question/ Central Park In The Dark
5. Catalani/ Illica - La Wally (by Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez)
6. Ravel - Bolero (check 2014 Promenade concerts BBC) I loved this one too from a child and  

           teenager
7. Pachelbel - Canon in D major
8. Mahler - symphony no 9 in D minor

9. 'Pokarekare Ana'

 - This love song arose in Northland New Zealand at the start of World War One where it was modified into an action song telling of Paraire Tomoana's 1912 courtship of Kuini Raerena. I learned this at Primary school and knew all the words throughout my childhood much to my parents bemusement and the melody has stayed with me. I had a New Zealander teacher who taught us aspects of Maori culture, instruments and a number of songs. It is now known and sung world-wide.    

10.Mussorgsky- Pictures at An Exhibition (piano) not the Rossini orchestrated version, 

         discovered on my own I heard this original piano piece on my own listening to my first  

          transistor radio in my bedroom under the covers

Bubbling under: I saw A Clockwork Orange when it came out and was blown away by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos' soundtrack . . . . . . . . . my dad was horrified when I bought the album!

Thomas Tallis - Spem In Alium  religious music is not for me and the simplicity of hymns I do not trust unlike my dad who loved them. The meditative quality of Tallis though is not lost on me

Possibly a juvenile and unsophisticated mixed bag of where music started for me and with some additions largely from my art college tutor Gavin Bryars' influence (Sinking . . , Ives etc)

Gioacchino Rossini: William Tell Overture (1829) London Philharmonic, Alfred Scholz

Heaven 17 on the fuzzy warblers . . . . . . . .

How can you resist some 

Nat King Cole

MONA LISA

On this day in music history: July 8, 1950 - “Mona Lisa” by Nat King Cole hits #1 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart for 8 weeks, also topping the Rhythm & Blues charts for 4 weeks on September 2, 1950. Written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, it is the thirty first single release for the legendary jazz and pop vocalist from Montgomery, AL. The song is featured in the film “Captain Carey, U.S.A.” starring Alan Ladd. Arranged by Nelson Riddle and with instrumental backing by Les Baxter & His Orchestra, Cole’s version of the song is featured on the film’s soundtrack. “Mona Lisa” wins the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1951, quickly becoming a pop standard and is covered by numerous artists over the years, though Cole’s is widely regarded as the definitive version. Nat King Cole’s recording of “Mona Lisa” is inducted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame in 1992.

Help support the Behind The Grooves music blog with a donation by clicking on the link at: PayPal.Me/jharris1228

Not The Mona Lisa

I used to collect versions of the Mona Lisa from adverts, different cultural appropriations of the picture being put on fridges to a supremely awful Painting By Numbers and methods of reproducing it badly and also repros of the many versions there were in other historic collections and also had numerous bad reproduction in plastic trinket souvenirs that I found in junk shops and the collection was with a view to doing an exhibition loosely about culture and it would have been funny, (hopefully) There is an apocryphal story of course that the one you see in the louvre is not the real thing at all but a reproduction. There is a school of thought that there is one in a Great Britain that is the 'real' one! The Isleworth Mona Lisa is clearly not it!

The Islesworth 'Mona Lisa' attributed now to Leonardo (sic)

Who would know! You can scarcely see it in the Louvre being behind bullet proof glass and usually thronged by people four or five deep. 

I also had newspaper clippings about the theft of the painting and the books upon the theft and also basic books written about the one painting [there are hundreds literally]. It would also include Marcel Duchamp's 'L.H.O.O.Q.'  a reproduction with an added moustache which started the whole thing as part of my studies under Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars where we started a Duchamp study group at what is now Demontford University. 
Duchamp playing with the gender issue ahead of his time questioning how we saw the sexes (he himself was not averse to being shown cross dressing as his alter-ego Rose Selavy)

The 'school of copies' fascinates me too. . . . . .this would have been on a loop on the gallery . . . . . 

The stealing of the Mona Lisa

The internet has now made this idea preposterous and completely redundant really (Google it and you'll see why) 

Mona Lisa of The Subway (Internet meme)

Lisa Gerardini by Leonardo Da Vinci c.1503-06 current value approx £630 million 

Hopefully more eclectic than knowingly perverse, here's another sound I liked a lot and Penguin Cafe Orchestra were quite a bit on my playlist way back when and in the days of Walkman's I listened to them a lot on the way to work until the late nineties I guess. They somehow remind me of Michael Nyman and his 'Draughtsman's Contract' era of writing and as I have mentioned before that my tutor at Leicester Poly Art Dept was composer Gavin Bryars and, alongside Brian Eno, we had Michael as a visiting lecturer and all to a painting school (sic!) and all of them influenced my thinking, creativity and listening . . . . . . without them I would have probably stuck here . . . . . . .is that a bad thing . . . . . . . . I don't know

6,455 plays

One of my favourite compositions. In conjunction with 'Central Park In The Dark'. Largely thanks to my art school tutor Gavin Bryars who introduced me to Ives' work . . . . . 



Charles Ives: "The Unanswered Question" . (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas) This work was composed as a companion to "Central Park In The Dark" Both works were composed in 1906, and paired together by Ives as: I. "A Contemplation of a Serious Matter, or The Unanswered Question", II. "A Contemplation of Nothing Serious, or Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summertime". Prior to having The Unanswered Question professionally copied, sometime around 1930 - 1935, Ives revised the score, adding many details and changing the woodwind and trumpet parts. The revised version is presented here.

swappers:

If I could only listen to one piece of music for the rest of my life, this might be it.

Gymnopédie No. 1, Erik Satie

1888

I think I have mentioned composer Gavin Bryars before and would like to thank him for introducing me, through our studies at what was then Leicester Polytechnic Fine Art Department, to Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia and the composer Erik Satie to the work of Charles Ives and others. With historian Fred Orton they ran what was a groundbreaking peerless study group and we had visiting lecturers in Brian Eno, Michael Nyman et al

BRIAN ENO

Brian Eno -  © Pennie Smith 1974

These are the tape machines used by Brian Eno for his recording 'Discreet Music' in the 1970's. Brian was always a profound influence upon me and thanks to my tutor at Leicester Polythechnic Art Depart where I did my degree, the composer Gavin Bryars, we were able to have visiting lectures by Brian and others like Michael Nyman. I followed the work of all three ever since . . . . . 

Sonic Journey: Gavin Bryars & Blake Morrison

16th June - 16th July 

Sound UK and Yorkshire Festival present an exciting new commission and collaboration from internationally acclaimed composer Gavin Bryars and poet Blake Morrison. Together they have created a new work inspired by, and to be experienced on, the Northern stopping train from Goole to Hull (or Hull to Goole). Listeners are invited to download the free track, board the train at Goole or Hull and embark on a uniquely personal artistic journey through the Yorkshire countryside (or indeed listen to it anywhere).

Sonic Journeys