I've been a fan of John Cale ever since I heard his cover of "Hallelujah" over the closing credits of Basquiat in 1996. I picked up the Seducing Down the Door box set in 1998, just in time to inflict it on
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vond during the drive to Origins. (I remember being really impressed by "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Paris 1919," and scandalized by "Pablo Picasso.") My enthusiasm has dampened somewhat over the years; I'm willing to concede that, for instance, "Honi Soit" isn't to my taste, and "Walking on Locusts" is kind of mediocre. Regardless, he's done some absolutely bloody brilliant stuff, like the "Paris 1919" album, or "Hobo Sapiens" and "5 Tracks" from 2003. Plus, he's Welsh.
Because he's Welsh, he's culturally obligated to have a deep and abiding appreciation for Dylan Thomas. Since he's a classically trained violist and composer, sometime in the 1980s he got the idea to compose an orchestral arrangement of some of Thomas's poems. The result, including "Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed," "On a Wedding Anniversary," "There Was a Saviour," and of course "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," is entitled "The Falklands Suite," and was released in 1989 on the "Words for the Dying" album.
So far so good. I've had a copy of the album for ages now; I don't listen to it often because I don't listen to instrumentals often, but it's decent stuff. One of the later tracks ("The Soul of Carmen Miranda") is both a good song in its own right and a neat precursor to the Eno/Cale collaboration "Wrong Way Up."
Where it gets interesting is that the process of making the album was filmed, and the "Words for the Dying" film was recently released on DVD. I picked it up a few weeks ago and, since the creative was mostly gone from my brain, watched it this afternoon instead of writing. It's neat; Cale and Eno (who produced the album) fly to Moscow to record the orchestral tracks over the course of a week, then to Wales to get the boys' choir backup track, and then record Cale's vocals. There's attendant drama when Eno refuses to be filmed, and a stopover to sell Cale's now-abandoned and -vandalized boyhood home without upsetting his mother (who speaks only Welsh).
Now. All of
that was a lead-up to how, the last two days they were in Moscow, Cale and Eno had a bassist, Rodion Azarkhin, come in to play. Cale says "I've heard recordings. He plays Paganini, which is a nightmare on the
violin." And he does. He is, to put it bluntly, absobleeping incredible. He does things with the bass that I didn't think were possible. Here, have
a sample of Azarkhin's playing. Those high notes that sound like they ought to be coming from a violin? Yeah. That's a bass. You can tell by how the sound is so much richer, more full. (At least, you can if you've spent the last twenty-some years grumbling at how the squeaky violins always get all the good parts.)
I'm not entirely clear as to why Azarkhin came in. I think it was partly just because Cale wanted to meet and hear him. Cale and Eno spent a day working on a song,
Year of the Patriot, with him playing bass, but it seems to have never gotten anywhere. The song wasn't included on "Words for the Dying." The two of them were trying to get Azarkhin to make these dissonant high harmonics that I can't imagine anything in his training had prepared him for. And yet, the video at the link (taken from the "Words for the Dying" film) has just a snippet, maybe thirty seconds of song, and it's as unsettling and powerful as anything Cale's done.
(The film has several additional shots of Azarkhin playing for Cale. Two things: first, he's absolutely gigantic, to the point where the bass standing next to him looks perfectly normal-sized; second, he uses some sort of
strange modified bow and grips it sideways, rather than overhand.)
Also at the "Year of the Patriot" link are a couple of paragraphs of interview with Cale about working with Azarkhin, and another link to
an intensely depressing interview (scroll down, and ignore the black-text-on-blue-background if you can). I mean, really, what was I expecting from the life of a Russian symphony musician who was born under Stalin? But it just keeps on being so very. . .
Russian.
Still. Because of this man, there exists a recording of "Flight of the Bumble Bee" played on a bass. (
uilos: "It actually sounds like a bumble bee.") I have nothing deep or insightful to say about the relationship between art and pain, or whether the existence of Azarkhin's music can in any way justify what he'd been through. All I can do is admire.
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