This is a must see for any admirers of S&G, some great insights on how they produced their unique "sound"... https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0010kjw/simon-garfunkel-the-harmony-game
Just discovered this album, Junior, from a couple of years ago buy by Francophone indie band, Corridor from Quebec which is on the Sub Pop label and it's right up my street....
I'd not heard of this until it was chosen as Ken Bruce's record of the week. It's a reimagining of a collection of songs that David Bowie wrote in his early career in the 60s that he recorded in 2000 but was never released until recently....
Fable and InsideInfo got together again to do a song especially for films. They decided to cover Road To Nowhere, and here it is -
LTL Thanks for posting that track. I am really interested by this as someone has completely re-harmonised this tune. This kind of experientation is more typical of jazz but is demonstrative to me that someone has arranged this. The process of production intrigues me. It sound like the backing track is using sampling / keyboards as there are no acoustic instruments. I would be fascinated to know whether someone has written a score for this arrangement and how much the process of improvisation was used. The harmony used suggests to me a musical mind has been engaged in this example. It is not the production element which intrigues me so much as the musical element. it would be fascinating to listen to someone performing this with acoustic instruments and maybe take this music further outside with improvisation.
Thanks Ian. The producer, Paul (InsideInfo) is a pretty well known drum and bass artist, but has written and scored a lot for film and TV. All the vocal changes and arrangements are done by Holly (Fable) herself. They're both very musically adept. We probably will try and turn this into a live performance track with traditional instrumentation. As and when that happens, I'll try and capture a video of it!
LTL I think it is fascinating in pop music that a lot of critical acclaim is dished out to groups with very little musical talent. The whole production element of things is interesting because these days the production levels are incredible and frequently well in excess of what is actually "happening" or not in the music. Two names on contemporary pop who have impressed me are Laura Mvula and Micahel Kawinuka - the latter now resides in Southampton , I believe. Mvula is particularly interesting and comes out of a Classical education and her recent programmes on Radio 6 have shown a staggering range of eclectic taste from Soul to Miles Davis and on to Francis Poulenc! From time to time I will listen to pop music on the radio but there seems to be adversity towards stuff which is deemed too complicated. A lot of material now seems to consist on four bar vamps or even stuff which is just based on one chord.You can quit quickly pick out where there is musical mind behind something and where the person making the record is not musician. I think I am becoming more snobbish as I get older. If you can undertand something quite quickly it gets a bit monotonous. One of the alto saxophonists I love is Art Pepper and I was listening to a very early record he made between 1952-4 called "Surf Ride" which demonstrates the potential he had at an early age but which is largely made up of contra-facts. These are themes based on the chord changes of other tunes , usually standards. (The most famous example being Gershwin's "I got rhythm" which is ubiquitous as a set of changes both in jazz and in things such as the "Flintstones" theme tune.) Once you suss out that a particular tune is based on something like "After you've gone" it becomes a little bit disenchanting. Similarly the case with a lot of modal jazz where you can understand that it only employes a handful of scales. Sometimes I thinkyou need complexity to make things interesting. I have a theory that things like counterpoint and poly-rhythms are what makes music interesting even if you are not aware of what is happening. If you listen to alot of pop music, the "better" material always seems to be due to the fact that a lot is going on - interesing harmony, riffs, counter-melodies, bass lines and the way the drummer interacts with all of this. For my money, if you want to appreciate howmany ideas can be crammed in to 3 minutes, no one did this better than Jelly Roll Morton.The music has numerous strains but also manages to use different rhythms for them as well as mixing up polyphony and solos for each of the insturments. Every section is different and shows Morton's skill as an arranger. This record is nearly 100 years old but it is still too complex for many contemporary ears to appreciated. The use of form is fascinating but the employment of Spanish rhythms is best exemplfied by this track....
Even if you want to use simple structures, you need to go something creative like this track from Pharoah Sanders to make it interesting....
That's an interesting series by Produce like a pro plenty to listen to there's a load of songs and artists featured.
