Eddie Van Halen

228: Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou // Jerusalem

Jerusalem Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou 2023, Mississippi Records (Bandcamp)

When she passed away at age 99 in Jerusalem in March of 2023, the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (alternatively spelled Tsege-Mariam Gebru) had achieved a degree of international fame for a number of piano recordings she had made in the 1960s and ‘70s after they were collected on a 2006 volume of the long-running Ethiopiques series. Much of the attention paid to her story has focused on the circumstances of her extraordinary life, which reached from the court of the Emperor Haile Selassi, to wartime refugee status after Mussolini’s 1936 invasion of her home, to an administrative denial of an opportunity to study at London’s Royal Academy of Music, to taking her vows at nunnery. There are richer synopses already written than I can manage here of both her life and the technical qualities of her remarkable compositions, which utilize a uniquely Ethiopian musical vocabulary but will likely remind Western listeners of Satie or Beethoven.

Mississippi Records has undertaken a project to reissue her slim body of work (she is known to have composed around 150 songs, though the number she recorded seems to be more like 50), though their compilations tend to hop around chronologically rather than re-releasing complete records. Jerusalem is the latest of these as of this writing and the first to be released since Emahoy’s death, collecting tracks from a 1972 10”, home recordings made in the 1980s, and a single song that appears to date from 1963 (the liner notes are somewhat unclear on this). Like Emahoy’s other releases, these are all solo piano tracks, instrumental save for that 1963 outlier, the tender “Quand la mer furieuse,” which is the first vocal track in her oeuvre. The highlight to my ear is 1972’s “Jerusalem,” a vivid longer piece the artist says is meant to evoke both the love of Ethiopians for that ancient city, and the tragedies of the wars which have ravaged it. Indeed, there is a pensiveness to the song, a sense of an endless cycle in its refrain that nonetheless cycles off into a different motif each time it recurs—signs of hope, perhaps, that despite the recurrences of history, the city’s soil may produce alternative flowers.

227/365

As I was wheeled into the OR today, the nurses that brought me in informed me that they would be listening to ‘80s music’ while they did surgery.  As I crossed the doorway, their music playlist shuffled to ‘Fortunate Son’, causing my vision to be filled with Vietnam imagery as I was laid upon the table for people to poke around my chest.

It wasn’t until I got in the car to get home that I remembered Fortunate Son came out in 1969.

Nightclub singer at home, ca. 1960s

kate bush photographed by barry schultz, 1979💐

☎️

The Left Banke — There’s Gonna Be A Storm

The Ronettes kicking each other’s ass while on tour with the Beatles (1966).

Janis Joplin in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. 1969

Besties at the concert 🐝🎸

also i know hot honey is probably a boyband or something but here's a playlist based on what i like to imagine Amy's taste in music is like :

Ok I need to know tumblr’s opinion on this cuz it’s driving me crazy

Feel free to say why/why not in the tags!

Janice Joplin

360: Dusty Springfield // Dusty Springfield's Golden Hits

Dusty Springfield's Golden Hits Dusty Springfield 1966, Philips

These early Dusty Springfield singles really get the “Wall of Sound” production treatment, despite Mr. Spector’s absence from the credits: mixed loud as hell like the kids liked it, screaming string charts, backing vocals en regalia, and a big beat knocking around underneath. Folks love to cite her as the second artist of the British Invasion to hit the U.S. charts, and for cultural reasons that may be significant, but her early sound was indistinguishable from American acts like Lesley Gore and the Shirelles. I don’t know many of the details about her career, but it seems like whoever was managing her was hell-bent on breaking her in the States. Call it a credit to English ingenuity (and specifically arranger Ivor Raymonde) that they were able to give Springfield a knock-out sound that passes for the contemporary Hollywood (or Detroit) product.

Dusty Springfield’s Golden Hits, her first major compilation, is Brill Building / girl group-style music par excellence, with a murderer’s row of hitwriters from both sides of the pond (Bacharach/David, Goffin/King, Beatrice Verdi/Buddy Kaye, etc.). Practically anyone could’ve had chart success with these songs and this packaging (and a number of these were subsequently hits for others), but Springfield had a cannon of a voice on her that makes the best of these numbers undeniable. Those who place her voice with the Arethas and Dionne Warwicks wish she’d been guided towards soul or sophisticated torch songs from the start, but I personally love it when someone vocally overqualified for bubblegum is made to tear into a good bop. “I Only Want to Be With You” is buffeted along by the force of her voice, the violins shrieking like a 33rpm record dragged up to 45; “Little By Little” could’ve been written for a Motown powerhouse like Darlene Love (but scarcely improved on by her); “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” moves from the sound of a girl sadly combing her hair before her vanity to Sampson bringing down the temple.

There’s plenty of treacle here, and “Wishin’ and Hopin’” probably set feminism further back than “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” but this is a worthy addition to any ‘60s pop library.

360/365

Doing a trial run of the 60s music bracket that will occur after this one ends

Natalie Wood in her dressing room after shooting a scene in Gypsy, the musical of the life of stripper Louise "Gypsy Rose Lee" Hovick, 1962

joni mitchell, cass elliot, and judy collins at the big sur folk festival, 1968💐🌞

John & Alice Coltrane, 1966 ♡