I solved a musical mystery today. The mystery was this: every time I visited a certain bathroom at my place of work, I would leave humming Black Cow by Steely Dan. About the third time it happened, I stopped dead in my tracks and said, What the hell? If it weren’t so funny, it might have freaked me out. When it kept happening, I figured it was just me, not the mystery bathroom. For some reason known only to the deepest recesses of my psyche, that bathroom was always going to be my Steely Dan Black Cow trigger. But this morning I was in this same bathroom and then, when I reached for the automatic paper towel dispenser, I heard it: the dispenser whined the first two notes of Black Cow’s distinctive opening.

I was relieved about this (no pun). I like to know where my music comes from. My head is always filled with music. I mean, I have a sound track playing all the time. And it’s a good one, though limited to the music I’ve heard most often. Although I don’t have perfect pitch, I have a sharp ear for sounds and, as a result, I hear tunes exactly as they sound on the radio or an MP3 player. This may explain why I don’t walk around listening to an MP3 player.

In elementary school music class, which met once a week, I was made aware of my sensitivity to sound when we were told to listen to recorded instruments and guess what they were. After our initial introduction to each instrument — everything from oboe to mouth harp — I never guessed wrong. Even when listening to a symphony, I could pick out which instrument was playing each part. Had I been given some encouragement, I might have played an instrument other than the drums. But our music teacher, the notorious child-hating Mr. Harvey, encouraged nobody to do anything.

My head is full of hymns too. These are Protestant hymns from my childhood. They come to me unbidden and, really, I don’t mind them. One from my recent playlist is “My Father’s World.” Its lyrics are fitted to a traditional English tune. The age of the tune probably accounts for its strength. Here’s a traditional example, if you care to listen. And here’s Christian pop star Amy Grant’s version.

I have long assumed that everybody has a non-stop music player in his or her head. But is this true? Maybe you have something different. I can’t really turn mine off. It’s just there, ever playing. I can change the selection but not always, like the other day when the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing” was stuck in there for too long. Sometimes I have to give in and sing the song — loudly. The good thing is that I can update my selections. One of my favorite fairly recent additions is Nada Surf’s “Always Love.”

I should add that my internal player is no match for the real thing. By “real,” I mean full spectrum sound that comes from a CD on a good stereo system. I recall the days when my friends and I would simply sit for hours and listen to music on the stereo. It was our work, actually — what you were supposed to do as a teenager. I’m not sure what youngsters do nowadays. That is, I don’t imagine they gather to listen to music like this because nowadays each is in his or her own pod. Is that a good thing?

My parents didn’t listen to music, though my mother played piano and has a lovely singing voice. I got the impression that, once you were a grown-up, you were supposed to give up music. We Baby Boomers defide that rule. I still buy CDs to support the bands I like. And I compress them for portable play too, though I don’t like the MP3 format. I’m happy to say that, when I’m listening to music outside my head, the player inside goes silent.

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I’ve been invited by Largehearted Boy, a website of literature and music, to come up with a playlist for my just-released illustrated novel, Kiss, Me Stranger. If you watch the book trailer, you’ll hear David Smooke’s amazing music. It’d be splendid to have David score the entire book but, as he’s a world-class composer (specializing in the toy piano, no less) and very busy and I have no funds to hire such talent, I must content myself with his Kiss Me, Stranger suite and add to it other compositions that might make a full sound track.

You could help me out.

You don’t have to read the book to do this (though that’d be nice eventually). Just watch the trailer and consider what tunes would work well with this story. Then send me your suggestions. Kiss Me, Stranger is about a mother of 14 children trying to survive a civil war in a fictional country that’s built on landfill. There’s lots of scavenging and recycling in the book. Also some silliness with children. Suggestions I’ve received already: Talking Heads’ “Life in the Time of War” and Kate Bush’s “Red Shoes” (red shoes appear in the novel).

Here’s the trailer Give it a spin and let me know what tunes might work. Email me here: rtanner@loyola.edu

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I’ve spent a couple of days sorting through my 78s in search of just the right tune for the book trailer I’m making (”From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story”). I’ve decided that the tune must be old and peppy — maybe something from the 1920s. The music will percolate behind the various interviews featured in the trailer. It’s supposed to be humorous.

Although I’m not a collector of old records, I have picked up quite a few of these 78s at flea markets, where people nearly give them away. Who has a 78 record player any more? Do you? I hoped to digitize them. Wouldn’t that be cool, to have a music library of rare and unusual tunes from way back when? Jill got me a turn-table that plays 78s and now I’ve got my system rigged up to record them onto CDs. I went through more than fifty of them this week. And I did find some quirky stuff. Take, for instance, a pile of Hungarian records–made in the U.S. for recent immigrants. Check this one out from the “jatsza Band Marci”:

Yeah, I know. The sound quality could not be worse. How about this little ditty, that takes you to an eastern European military parade circa 1920? It does get better. I found one of the earliest recordings of Frank Sinatra in a trio that sang with a band called Tommy Tucker Time. Can you pick him out from this clip? I found plenty of old hits, like “Ma! (He’s Making Eyes At Me).” One I really like is “I Get the Neck of the Chicken,” written in 1942 and now associated mostly with Cab Calloway, though somebody else wrote it. (Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loessner). Eddie Stone sings this version. I like his delivery a lot. Another that turns my head is “Gotta See a Dream About a Girl,” also from the ‘forties.

As you can hear, the sound quality on these clips is marginal. That’s because these records — nearly all 78s you’ll find — are in horrible condition. They are, after all, 60-80 years old and they’ve sat in dusty attics, damp basements, and dirty garages for decades. I’ve tried to clean them (with distilled water and a little grain alcohol) but they don’t clean easily, dirt ingrained in the grooves. Then I’ve tried tweak the recordings with an audio mixer but there’s only so much you can do when the original source is so mucked up. As a result, I’ve abandoned my dream of gathering 78s to create a unique music library. Almost anything from the 1940s and later has been re-mastered one way or another and you can find it on the internet. The really old stuff, well, maybe that’s best left to the collectors who know what to look for.

Speaking of collecting, Jill and I came upon a treasure trove of 45s this summer at a yard sale–many of them from the early 1950s, including an early Elvis. We bought a pile of them for $15. A steal, right? We figured we’d clean up on eBay. The ONLY two records that sold from the bunch were the early Elvis (”Love Me Tender”) with a sleeve — for $12– and the Beatles “Do You Want to Know a Secret” without a sleeve for $5.50. Nobody else wanted the other records, which included Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruiti” with the original sleeve and Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” on the SUN label. We listed several more than once. Not a bite.

Why? Four reasons: 1) A lot of records were produced. 2) Which means that collectors can find mint copies without too much bother (and I’m not selling mint copies). 3) Nowadays nobody has the old players for these records. Why bother? It’s a hassle to play them and the novelty wears thing quickly. 5) Finally, all of this music is easily found as Mp3 downloads on the internet. So there you have it: be forewarned — if you find an old record at a flea market and think, “Jackpot!”. think again.

You may have forgotten, as I had, that the length of songs was dictated by the medium — you couldn’t get more than 2-3 minutes of music on a 78 disc. They were the single of the day, which led to the practice of stacking records on a changer that could play 5-10 in one go. This practice continued even after the introduction of the 33 Long Playing record. Singles maintained the short format as 45s replaced the 78s on a much smaller record. Although the 33 LP was introduced in 1931, it wasn’t popularized until the late 1940s and early ’50s, and even then production of 78s continued. I was surprised to find so many 78s from the 1950s.

A revolution in music occurred in the 1920s with the shift from acoustic recording — musicians and singers gathered around a large horn that funneled their performance to a stylus that would engrave their noise onto a cylinder or disc — to electrical recording, which used microphones: the kind of recording we’re used to now, which tremendously increased the sound’s fidelity. The earliest (acoustic) recordings were painfully crude, even to listeners at the time, and this may explain the quality of some of my really old 78s. It appears that the last 78s were produced in 1956. If you go to a flea market today you’ll see stacks of them. Really, it’s remarkable that these brittle shellacked platters have survived and I have to admit that, despite my assertion that I won’t buy anymore, it’s always hard for me to pass them by.

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Yesterday we said good-bye to Atdelius “Atlay” Washington, the singer in Jazz Caravan, my band. She died of leukemia last Sunday. Singing jazz in a band was only a fraction of who she was. I met her 14 years ago at a rehearsal in somebody’s living room. A guitar player I knew was putting together a band for a gig, but neither the gig nor the band materialized after that first session. None of us was particularly good, except the singer. Good Lord, I’d never met a singer like her before: it wasn’t that her voice was beautiful and impressive — smooth and full of emotion. It was more that, when she sang, she was absolutely elated. She beamed, she shone, she lit up a room.

I made sure to get her number, though I suspected that she was too good for any project I might put together. Still, several years later — after I had established a band of my own — I gave her a call. She said she was available and, after she auditioned for my band, she said she’d be happy to join. I was dizzy with disbelief. How or where could I ever have found another singer as grand, as classy, and as nice as she?

Most musicians are flaky — the cliche is too true. And singers, oh my. If they are good, they often have an attitude and, sorry to say, are very high maintenance. But here was a singer who not only did her homework, came prepared, was extremely talented and joyous when she sang, but also was the sweetest, most cooperative band member. The other band members and I often shook our heads in wonder and agreed that we were very lucky.

Atlay had such presence on stage, such poise, that she was never harassed or pursued by drunken, smitten men the way most female band singers are. Although she was warm and most congenial, she was also thoroughly classy — and that class, I think, kept the fawning men at a distance. The moment she started singing, she centered all of her passions there — and you knew then that there was nothing half-way about this woman. You can’t mess with somebody like that. You can’t get in that person’s way. You just have to step back and let her fly. When she sang, she flew.

We last performed with her at a concert in October. It was a gorgeously autumnal day and Atlay was in great form. She blew the audience away. You’d never have guessed that she was in pain and battling for her life.

Her memorial service was standing room only and, though I wanted to celebrate her memory, I dreaded going because I knew it would be powerfully emotional. It was made all the more difficult by the fact that more than one member of the choir — which Atlay had directed — was intermittently in tears. Most painful of all was watching Atlay’s seventeen-year-old son hold up through it all. At one point he played Beethoven’s Fur Elise on the piano in tribute to his musical mother. I don’t know how the kid made it through without breaking. Fortunately, he has a wonderful father, who was by his side the whole time.

The theme of the service was, predictably, that Atlay is in a better place now, gone to her glory. I know that Atlay was content with this understanding, which is why she wrote her own obituary — read to the congregation by one of her nieces. Still, no matter how satisfied some may be in their belief that death is ultimately a reward, I wanted Atlay back. She’s gone too soon.

You could see here, among her congregation, why Atlay sang the way she sang. She was electrified by the holy spirit. For her, music was for her Maker. And her congregation tried to make that point clear as it sang her to higher ground. I did appreciate their efforts, I did enjoy their music, and I did envy their certainty that, in the end, Atlay was ready and willing to go simply because it was her time.

I don’t know that I will have such grace when my time comes, which is to say that our lovely, talented friend sets an example even after she’s gone. We have her music and it will give us some solace but, looking back even now, I see her at a distance, like a friend waving from atop a very high hill. I know who it is but I can’t see her in any detail — and some part of me panics as I wonder how or if or when I can close that distance and bask in her smile once again.

Listen to this beautiful woman sing: La vie en rose

More selections here: Jazz Caravan website

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Lady Gaga, my god, I had no idea who she was, only caught her in glimpses, heard her topping the charts, but what’s another pop diva in a sparkly body stocking? Out of curiosity, I looked at ALL of her gone-viral videos last night. This 24-four-year-old (nee Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) gets 20-200 million hits on each of her YouTube music videos. Her rivals get 3 million, if they’re lucky. How can anyone generate that much heat?

It seems Gaga came out of nowhere, another manufactured disco queen in wild outfits. We’ve seen many like her before. Start with Madonna, circa 1989’s “Just Like a Prayer,” stir in a little Cher circa 1998, as Cher was getting her ultra-glam Liberace-like Vegas act together (and take a listen to her techno-hit “Do You Believe in Love After Love”), add a dash of Christina Aguilera — and a dozen other platinum-blonde sex kittens — and there you have it: Lady Gaga. Or do you?

How is it that Gaga is getting ten times the video viewers that Madonna’s getting, and a hundred times the viewers that the long-lived, sexy, (and still young) vocal powerhouse Aguilera is getting? Aguilera must be sweating blood. She’s got better chops than Gaga can dream of having. But Gaga’s not about chops, the critics have made clear.Critics point to Gaga’s melodies — her hooks. I agree, Gaga’s got some good ones. But good melodies alone don’t make a star.

Lady Gaga doesn’t have great looks either. She’s a narrow-faced, skinny kid, just this side of knobby-kneed. Her ladylike derriere and always-elaborate make-up save her from looking like a waif. But a good butt and fancy face paint aren’t enough to make her crazy-famous either.

Watching Gaga’s videos, I realized I’ve heard her hits often at the gym I frequent, where the music is always pitched to the 18-20-year-olds. None of it impressed me. Really, her music is forgettable. And her early videos, I’m sorry, are shite. Cliches of a white party-girl trying to sound black. Dog turds steaming on a summer sidewalk make better entertainment.

But wait a second. Her recent videos — especially “Bad Romance,” “Telephone” and “Alejandro” — are powerful entertainment. And they make her music powerful. And they make Gaga a very appealing entertainer. Why have viewers watched her “Bad Romance” video 226, 630, 136 times? Because it’s bizarre, other-worldly, mystifying, fascinating, funny, weird, and there’s nothing else like it on the internet.

Here’s the difference between Lady Gaga (now) and every other female pop star: Gaga’s recent videos don’t worship Gaga as a sex goddess. By contrast, look at Christina Aguilera in “Not Myself Tonight,” which has earned her a paltry 3,546,969 views since its April 2010 release. It’s all about Aguilera straddling and strutting and bumping and grinding. It’s conventional fare, really, the kind of dominatrix-themed quasi-porn pop that Madonna wore out in the 1990s. The camera is always leering at Aguilera and the story, such as it is, doesn’t go any farther than this Bad Woman pinning a sweaty partner in a big bed. It’s boring. That said, I like Aguilera and think she’s really talented (much more so than her former Disney-kids peer Brittany Spears). But Aguilera, like most women in pop music, is trapped in a one-pony sideshow. When that pony gets old, the show folds.

Girlish Gaga can’t compete in the same tent. She’ll never be a bombshell. I suspect that’s why her videos have changed. Look at Gaga in her newest video, “Alejandro,” which has earned her a staggering 16,794,408 views since its June 8, 2010 release — that’s one week ago. The video doesn’t start with Gaga herself, it starts with storm troopers in a mystifying, timeless, menacing place. The choreography isn’t particularly novel — Michael Jackson set the standard for ensemble steps like these back in the early 1980s — but the dancing is different enough, with its awkward squats and mincing marches and ersatz-Egyptian snakiness. The odd dancing suits Gaga because she’s like a kid at play. She’s not exactly a woman in these videos and, unlike Madonna et al., she’s never clearly defined as a sexual predator. The main thing is this: she’s always part of an ensemble. And she’s always in disguise. Her look morphs wildly in these videos. The message is clearly about performance — we enjoy watching Gaga play with these wild costumes and sets.

You’ll notice that Gaga’s recent videos are long — the longest clocks in at nearly 9 minutes. These are far more than songs, these are mini-movies. They seem to have introductions and epilogues. They do not try to make sense, though they do adhere roughly to thematic strands, as in “Alejandro,” with its storm troopers and dark Nazi other-world. Yes, we see Gaga stripped down and wrestling with muscled men on beds in this video but it’s not the main event and, in any case, it’s not particularly sexy. It’s mostly good choreography, pretty dancing, a good show – that’s the attraction. These videos are entertaining film and Gaga is nothing more and nothing less than the main actor in each. In other words, the story is far larger than the CFM fantasies that other women singers offer.

There’s one other element that seems to account for the unprecedented appeal of Gaga’s act. In these videos, Gaga assumes a martyred-outcast-heroic role (starting with “Paparazzi”). In “Alejandro,’ she’s asking to leave a relationship. As she puts it, “Don’t call my name [any more], Alejandro” The visuals suggest things the song never does, that Alejandro is a fascist lover, unforgiving and unrelenting. And Gaga is beseiged and conflicted by her need to get away from him. So, yes, she’s a victim of love but more than that. Her first wild costume makes her look like the princess of some snowy, high-tech, Tim Burton future-world. And she seems to get the upper hand (and dominant position) in many scenes. The suggestion, finally, is that this young woman prevails somehow against great odds and adversaries or, if nothing else, puts up a good fight, even as she is doomed. In other words, there is a vulnerability here that we don’t see in other women’s videos. There’s nothing vulnerable about Christina Aguilera wielding a riding crop, for instance.

Gaga herself isn’t a particularly strong presence in any of these videos and that’s a bonus because the production absorbs her in ways that productions do not, cannot, absorb stronger women, like Madonna. This too makes Gaga vulnerable and appealing. It seems Gaga knows that she is strongest when she lets herself be swallowed by costume and cast. In sum, it comes down to this: she owes a lot to her creative team, those who dream up and direct and choreograph and costume her recent wild and wonderful videos. And, yes, Gaga gets some credit too. In two short years, riding a rocket of fame, she has made and re-made herself. It’s a promising beginning and an act worth watching.

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