Some music just makes sense to listen to.

Some music just makes sense to listen to. Like a logical expression or an irrefutable truth, and there are a lot of people who seek this kind of perfection in music for both listening and performance of. A perfectly balanced musical statement so sublime you can only marvel in its beauty and wonder at the great mind that created it. A musical statement can be called, in the technical discipline of music theory, a ‘sentence’ because it forms a full statement of meaning with an antecedent and a consequent and it just feels complete and right.  ‘To be, or not to be, ‘ is one of those statements that feels completely right and balanced, and is a fundamental issue of humanity stripped to an embarrassingly simple statement of intent, and is the sort of expression that makes you wonder how we ever managed without it (like the opening statement of Beethoven 5th symphony). One could say only ‘To be’ but it feels too little and leaves too many questions unanswered; add the ‘or not to be’ and the see-saw of human sanity sinks into place and order is restored (Imagine the Beatles writing a perverse song called ‘All You Need is . . . ‘). From one nugget of insight (To be, or not to be) pours forth mighty editions of human thinking and philosophy and we haven’t even entertained the business about whether it is ‘the’ question and we are certainly nowhere near considering any sense of nobility. 

The idea of a perfect musical statement has been raised because, although it is something I have studied, know of, recognise, and can appreciate and probably strive for when I am writing music, it has absolutely nothing to do with my state of ‘musical magpie-ness’ and the real reason I love music. Any sort of formal(perhaps normal) insight or thinking falls to pieces when I try to understand how I became such a fan of Boney M and the Nighflight to. Listening to the track there is nothing to it, nothing, you can’t sing along, hum or quote a lyric, and if you do its because you are confused and are thinking of the the next track from the album, ‘Rasputin’ which ‘Nightflight to Venus’ seamlessly becomes.

There is something else altogether indescribable that kicks in as soon as you hear the voice ad countdown at the beginning of the track. Imagine if you can, at 12 or 13 years old, in the old gymnasium at your school, a lunchtime disco, a few flashing lights and a loud stereo; this track starts up and you are left hanging until the damned drum lick kicks in; Drums that have been processed through a flanger! . . . Fantastic, Magic, Stirring, Evocative! Everybody at the lunchtime disco just went bonkers. And we’re talking about 1979, big hair, shoulder pads, fuzzy jumpers (OK it can be pretty cold in Edmonton during the winter), Daniel Hechter Stonewashed Jeans(snug fit), Adidas white trainers with the three blue stripes , er .. . the list goes on and, er, I am describing this from a boy perspective looking at the girls and having no idea what to do next because remember the age we are at here, 12, 13, 14 This may well be the most important, ever, age of discovery, the dawn of awareness. We had Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman and Fantasy Island setting out trends and role models on television, and here at the lunchtime disco you are surrounded by this newly discovered species – girls, and some crazy assed dance music with these far out drums, a robotic voice telling us to get ready for something, and here we were, on a space ship going to Venus. I mean girls! They were there all along! I had always got along fine with them and having older sisters I was used to them, no big deal right? However, they suddenly became girls (not my sisters, all the rest of them, though dear sisters, i don’t mean you are not girls, it’s just different . . . bear with me . . .  this hole is getting deeper every minute!). Girls! Ack, Boney M! Ack Those Damned Drums!

So dancing became the new ice hockey and going to the disco or the roller disco on the weekend became the new winter time full contact team sport. I was lucky at that moment to fall in with a very great group of friends which constituted many members from each team (boys and girls) and we were able to arrange meetings at the rollerdrome on weekends and there would be house parties and we would take over a garage or rumpus room (basement decked out like a bar) and there would be a stereo and we all brought our records. There was even a lunchtime disco dance club organised because the new French teacher at the school was one of the dancers from Edmonton’s own top of the pops programme on television cleverly titled ‘Disco Daze’, and all us impressionable nearly teenagers, were duly impressed. Many girls and a couple boys signed up for the disco dance club and it wasn’t until I started getting grief from my non-enlightened friends that I had any idea the club might be something to be embarrassed about.

In the face of ridicule by my peers I persisted because I had awoke to a new contact sport and enjoyed the game, the world had changed and it was a fuller, more beautiful place. My vision developed a soft focus condition, I became aware of lip gloss, I would find ways to spend time with girls, even invited a couple out to the movies and I became a good roller skating dance partner (no, really, I’m not kidding, this all happened). Obviously I cannot comment on what might have been the case from the girl perspective, but we all got along quite well, had a lot of fun, nothing ever got too serious, we all enjoyed our school and there are even a couple of folks from that time I am still in touch with. I think it was all good.

So as one of my first album purchases, Boney M Nighflight to Venus, the album and the track, became a shiny bright bit of musical madness. I would put the stereo speakers on the floor facing each other, get the track running, turn it righteously loud, and lay on the floor with my head between the speakers and get lost. If you’ve never done that, I suggest you try and headphones don’t do the experience justice, you have to be there on the floor and it has to be loud enough make the glasses on the coffee table move about and drop off the edge, and those drums from Nightflight will impress you and move you to your core,  but it sure ain’t Shakespeare.

My first 33 1/3 album choices.

I think I was 12 when I fist started playing in the Edmonton Youth Orchestra, carefully positioned at the back of the second violins where it was unlikely I could do any damage or throw anyone off. I could play the violin but as a student of the Suzuki Method (Listen and Play approach) my ability to read music had been very well hidden. My sister had played all the Suzuki pieces before I got to the so I hear them practised every day and then I heard them all again at the Saturday morning 'parties' where all the Suzuki students came together each week and played together and through as much of the repertoire as you knew. This meant when it came time in my private lessons to play a new piece of music, and the teacher asked me to read the music, I would struggle to gain the first few notes under my finger, but as soon as I recognised the work, I could close my eyes and play through it without needing much from the written page - Success! hmmm. On the flip-side, my first couple years at the back of the second violins in the youth orchestra were a very different story, you can't feel your way through the second violin parts of the Brandenburg Concertos. I couldn't sight read at all and in was laboriously slow for me to work out what I was doing. The best part of the youth orchestra, for me, was meeting a couple guys my age who played violin, and finding out they were normal people.

Here i met Brett and we talked about everything, and often got in trouble for talking, and behaved a bit like naughty schoolboys, because we were naughty schoolboys. I think we were even smoking during the breaks at this stage (remember I was 12). I hadp to junior high school and started hanging with a new group of friends who were all into listening to music on the hit parade (630 CHEDwas the AM hit radio with Wolfman Jack) and buying albums. But I was playing Vivaldi and Bach and new almost nothing about records, singles and albums, my one 'in' being I had kind of inherited a suitcase record player from my big sister and with it, two or three singles and an album or two. There was Foreigner - Dirty White Boy, Cher - Half Breed and then a Partridge Family album (I forget which but we used to watch the TV show, but I suppose seeing kids play in a band had some impact - I never thought of that before - see how therapeutic this writing thing can be). Anyhow, those bits of music were pretty non music for me. I remember sitting with the CHER single on the record player and holding a pin in my hand and using the tip of the pin to play the disc rather than using the proper tone arm needle; and you know, you could hear the song very quietly coming from the tip of the pin, in fact, feel the vibrations coming up my fingers. It would be years before I saw a high resolution photo of record grooves and began to understand how it all worked. Even today, working on audio waveforms in a digital music editor, the shape of the waveforms tell you what the grooves on vinyl would look like.

So Brett and I would talk about music and I knew nothing of the modern stuff and what was supposed to be good, and Brett seemed like he knew quite a bit. After saving my allowance and paper route money for a few weeks I had a stash ready to go into town and buy a record or two. So I asked Brett his advice and name a selection of  albums that would be good to start with. So that next Saturday I headed into downtown Edmonton on the number 51 from Capilano and went to the relatively new Edmonton Centre and headed into the basement area where the food court and record store was. The shop was heaving with people because part of the culture at that time was going to the record store on Saturday and buying a new album you had been saving up for. And there were all types of people there from every background all flipping through the bins of records. The hit parade record list would be hung up on the wall to see who was at the top and the age of picture discs had just arrived so there would be some coloured vinyl disco hits on the wall along with the Rolling Stones Lip discs. I joined the crowd and got to work looking for the albums on my list, and along the way you get sidetracked looking at all the album covers, looking at the pictures  and reading the stories and wondering about the bands and where they came from. Edmonton Alberta is quite a long way from anywhere else on the earth and if you've never been anywhere else, you don't realise there is anywhere else that is different. Its just the way it goes until you become older and aware and get the chance to travel.

I was so distracted it was only but the skin of my teeth I got out of there with my treasured choice. And I think it was an inspired choice which ticked all the right boxes for me and somehow illustrates my eclectic tastes in music and stretched my imagination in new and fantastic directions. So here they are in no particular order. My first three long play records bought with my own money that I saved from allowance and a paper route:

1. Van Halen I
2. Boney M - Nightflight to Venus
3. Led Zeppelin - The Song Remains the same

Not much I can say about it, I still like all of them. I do remember the next monday morning getting ready for school and I was playing the Led Zeppelin while getting dressed. My sister came through to my room and told me to 'turn it down, that's not really appropriate for a Monday morning'. . . . And I felt like I was on my way, I had achieved teenage, I was now offensive and obtrusive. And there was much more to come.

Seasons at youth

When does the age of awareness kick in. I know there are large swathes of being a kid that seem gone from my memory but if I sit back and let the mind wander, it is astounding what pops up. In an era when there wasn't a TV or radio in every room and tech gadgets were something you found listed under 'the future' in our 1964 edition of the World Book Encyclopaedia, your imagination and motivation was often all you had to work with. And if I was home from school ill, I was sent to bed until better. But sometimes a song would echo off in the distance on the radio downstairs in the kitchen, or the sitting room, and because it was radio, if you heard something you liked you had to pay attention right at that moment.

Laying in bed all day is not a lot of fun even with a few books, the odd comic book and several stuffed bears who spoke loud enough for only me to hear. I clearly remember lying in bed, bored, watching the curtains; they were white with blue spacemen, Apollo modules and satellites, with the odd star dotted here and there, Mom had made them for me. When I was ill (or whenever in bed unable to sleep and bored) I would stare at the curtains for long periods of time until this strange feeling in my head started to play with my spacial distance and the curtain would zoom in close and then shoot away, and then zoom in again and shoot away. It wouldn't happen if you tried to make it happen, it would only happen out the corner of my eye. The characters on the curtain would move in opposite directions, zooming in and out, and create the feeling I was floating in space and couldn't tell which way was up or down. . . . . one of many indicators that imply you are likely to become a musician, Your curtains tend to float around the room zooming in and out and you have difficulty pointing to the sky without falling over. . . .  It would be years yet before I made those experiences more real and persistent.I could also hear everything. I could hear my friends in the school-yard at break time playing and running around, That made me lonely. I could hear Mom working around the house doing different tasks and wishing she would come and play with me, I could hear the birds and dogs outside, sometimes the wind, and often the sound of a distant TV or radio.

Off in the distance the music that sticks in my mind here is the gut wrenching, totally seventies (because it was the seventies), 'Seasons in the Sun' by Terry Jacks. I must have been about 9 or 10 when hearing this song on the radio, perhaps a sister had the single and played it on her suitcase record player, or maybe on TV, it was a hit around then. The guitar lick at the beginning was like an alarm bell to me. I didn't know what an electric guitar was and the song started with this strange guitar lick which announced the arrival of the song. Seasons in the Sun comes in to play at an age where I was becoming aware, starting to perceive and experiencing strong emotions. A song that suggests it is hard to die when the sun shines and birds sing, spring comes and there are friends and family around, captures the imagination and starts your romantic thinking and feeling, testing out the theory, 'what if it were to happen to me?' . . .  and so the journey goes.  Feeling things that deeply was maybe a little rare in my childhood so when it came along I would grab it and hang on. Later, these sensations would trigger my own need to write and express images and feelings.

Melancholy is such a weapon(tool!) of creativity and inspiration to the songwriter/artist that can also be a debilitating crutch when left to run rampant in the mind. Having a focus for melancholy means you can revel in it, explore its outer reaches and try it on like a coat and see if it matches your hat and gloves. For a kid loving music, this is a way to entertain dark thoughts and troubling times as the hormones change your childhood, swimming within the security blanket of a song and exploring all the corners, humming the verses, singing the chorus, making noise through the guitar riff.

True melancholy signals an end of something, a grief for loss, freedom childhood ebbing away, the moment where mortality becomes real. The person in the song is going to die and it is no different than me not knowing my own fate. It can be poetic and surprising, ultimately sad and perhaps untimely, but very real and very personal. And the feeling in the gut, the muscle cramp, demands reality in a depth that is new to the youngster.

I am not 9 or 10 any longer and my powers of description have grown and my life is something I could never have imagined, but this song is still so powerful it can, in an instant, trigger all the same feelings in my gut and my heart. I return immediately to my parents house, sitting at the top steps in the hallway looking out the window to the front street, watching for cars or people and this song on the old radio in the sitting room floating up the stairs; there is the tummy ache, the muscle cramp and the hunger so fierce you don't dare eat, and the curtains begin to zoom in and out. I feel dizzy and safe.

A Bungalow.

When I was a kid, my parents started my older sister and I playing violin through the Suzuki method from the age of 3. I don't remember much about it. Twinkle twinkle little star and masking tape markings on the bow showing me where to aim. I think it can't be very pleasant listening to a 3 year old play violin. I played through the first eight books of Suzuki before leaving that program for other worlds, but what really stuck in my memory were the flexible translucent green plastic 33rpm records published in each suzuki volume with examples of all the songs in the book. The records were stapled into the back of the book. The Suzuki motto is 'listen and play'. I don't recall every listening to the green records because we could never get them to work properly, and when they did the sound was pretty terrible, and it was probably 1972 or there abouts (the grammar is a hint to where I done growed up). But my sister was 5 years older than me and I got to hear her play everything before it was my turn. Turns out I was very good at learning from listening.

Violin got sidetracked by soccer and ice hockey but it never ceased. At 12 I started playing sax and flute while banging away on the piano at home. My main music influences were coming from television in the form of The Ed Sullivan show, Tommy Hunter(epic Canadian country music hero), Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, Rocket Robin Hood, etc etc. Also riding around in the car with the radio playing was an unexpected source. My folks listen mostly to classical and opera, and as kids we played violin in the Edmonton youth orchestra, several quartets, a string orchestras and a few small ensembles (which would travel around to retirement homes performing Greensleeves and Silent Night with two violins, flute and a voice, to a room full of potential cheek tweakers and me being probably 10yrs with buck teeth, giant ears, fly away blond hair and the inability to handle tricky social situations being confronted and cornered by the elderly residents who talked and liked to tweak your cheek, it was back then ya know).

Riding in the back seat of the car (there were three of us and it was before seat belts - ooooh and it was a 1966 Pontiac Parisienne) we could occasionally get the radio turned to something non-classical. My first memory is 'Bungalow Bill' and singing along with it at the top of our lungs. I never knew what it was about, but there were kids in it, and I loved the way the song would switch back and forth from the two different parts(and I guarantee I was singing 'Buffalo Bill' because that was something I knew about and I would have sung before really listening). I still don't know what its about. I just searched it on wiki and as I started reading I immediately stopped. I don't want to know. I want to hear it (cue youtube and multiple browser tabs). And hear it I have.

Bungalow Bill is an interesting first Magpie Moment. It contains a few things which were to become very ingrained in my musical psyche and very much a theme for what really turns me on in a moment of music. The chorus, the Hey Bungalow Bill bit is a very rollicking play play of harmony between major and minor modes which may or may not be interesting, but what it does is toy with your musical emotions. As westerners we are very trained and in tune with the emotional extortion-ism and, might I add, terrorism, of the minor versus major, the Happy-Sad conundrum. Which is over simplifying but raises the issue of simplicity to which we will return later on. Bungalow Bill's chorus goes back and forth from happy to terrifying (remember I am 10) and the joyful crying out is tempered by asking 'what did you kill?', which to me I thought I must be hearing it wrong because a song couldn't be about killing things, . . . or so I thought at the time.

I could never remember the verse, slow bits, and so I never learned the story, but I could sing the chorus anytime, anywhere, I still can, and I absolutely love the way the chords play out with the melody. Its deep in my heart. I have to confess I didn't know who the beatles were either. This was a song on the radio and that is the only place I ever heard it.

I had not yet made the connection that playing music on my violin had any relation to the music I heard on radio and television. I didn't realise I too was making music. It may seem odd and I can't explain why, but that connection would come some years later.

So go and listen to Bungalow Bill and sing along. It will make your heart feel a little bit lighter and provide a musical bug in the ear for the rest of the day. Or at lest until you hear something you like better.

TL

The Introduction

I love and consume music; it is a sustenance, it is a guide, it feeds me and it sustains me, I play it and it plays me, I am a musician too. Just in the last week it dawned on me I am like a musical magpie. For all the copious amounts of music I consume and as much as I love vast quantities of it for so many different reasons, I am also prone to focusing in or being attracted by the 'big shiny bits that are really really fantastic' . . . to me.

Someone suggested I write about these moments and so this blog starts. The beginning is bound to be convoluted so bear with me while I get sorted out. I have to introduce a few historical facts to set the scene and as a disclaimer I must add that all opinions are valid at the moment I write or remember them and that I will be happily distracted by anything that attracts my ears and my thoughts along the way, so there may occasional incomplete thoughts and feelings. I encourage my own contradictions, confutations, contraventions, disputes and inconsistencies. Because music is like that. We are passengers to our own emotional journey and if we are to be honest, then we must accept the wide range of change experienced every day. In my world that can be pursued hotly by a musical soundtrack that can often stem from very strange places and have a surprising amount of influence.

I think I must also say there is no agenda here. This is a purely an indulgence to pursue the moments of musical magic and mayhem that have made footprints on my mind. This has contributed to the development of me as a musician and contributes to (because it happens to me every day) to the choices and decisions I make as a performing and composing musician.

A little bit about me: My name is Tom Lyne and I am a professional jazz bassist living near Edinburgh, Scotland. I've been a working bassist since high school (1982-ish) in Edmonton Canada and have been in music since the age of 3.

Nurture: What we know comes out as what we are. Which is a little like, you are what you eat. And that is possibly rooted in, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And if that last one is not right, then it should connect because there is nothing better than music that makes my insides writhe and wriggle, and that is what I aim to do with the music I make.

TL