Credits
Beston Barnett Quartet is:
"Schwee" Michael Schwartz - soprano saxophone
Dave Pschaida - kit drums
Patrick Marion - upright bass
Beston Barnett - acoustic guitar
Interview
NASHVILLE BARKER - "Composer's Diaries Unearthed"
Nashville Barker: Rumors about the “last voyage” of Sir Albus Manchild have circulated among afficionados for years. Tell us about how the diaries were actually found.
Beston Barnett: They were in an old trunk in my grandmother’s attic. I have no idea how they got there: maybe her mother had been on a boat with him and their luggage got mixed up. If I had just googled his name I would have realized what they were – maybe given them to the British Library right away. Instead, I spent almost a year leafing through them, picking out bits of their melodies on my guitar.
NB: Why did you choose to unveil these 100-year old melodies in such a modern form?
BB: Well, the jazz quartet can suggest a harmonic structure without imposing it. Many of these tunes were just hints of songs, scratched down as he travelled. I try to leave the listener alone with those unvarnished melodies as much as possible...
NB: Composers from Ravel to Ellington have claimed Manchild as an influence. What would his influences have been?
BB: I think Sir Albus saw himself as sort of removed from the stream of human accomplishment. He was classically trained of course, so he would have studied Bach, Mozart... but he tried to forget them, or at least to be equally open to the other sounds around him: birds, water, singing in the street.
NB: And yet he has at times been accused of unrepentant plagiarism.
BB: There was a childlike quality Sir Albus brought to composing. I think a blend of the romantic and the aristocrat made him disdain ... dissecting his own inspirations. Squabbling over royalties was for lesser music-makers.
NB: It’s even been suggested that these diaries themselves are forgeries – your attempt, perhaps, to ride on the coat-tails of Manchild’s resurgence?
BB: (laughing) It’s funny – he was such a Protean character that even his handwriting seems to change from page to page. You’d think he would be easy to fake, musically, his pieces are so different one from the next. Still, there’s an indefinable spirit there...
NB: When can we expect an appearance in Nashville?
BB: Um, I’m not sure this is the kind of thing Nashville really wants to hear right now...
NB: There’s a guitar and there’s a story. Isn’t that all Nashvillians want?
BB: I don’t know. Maybe.
Reviews
ALL ABOUT JAZZ - by C. Michael Bailey
Curious Melodies is an interesting, even prophetic recording by guitarist Beston Barnett that combines intelligent musical composition with a fun fictional narrative, making a story that doubles as its own soundtrack. The overriding theme is the discovery of compositions by the fictitious widely traveled Sir Albus Manchild, a polymathic wanderer. A narrator introduces the musical document by introducing the enigmatic Manchild. The recording recounts the travels of the Knight of the Realm and the music that inspired his composition.
Even if you're not interested in the subtext of the story, the music is provocative and compelling. Beston chooses a Middle East motif that's heavily accented with Hebraic influence and instrumentation. Beston plays a Django Reinhardt-inspired gypsy guitar, fronting a bass-drums rhythm section. Michael Schwartz sports a soprano saxophone that gives the music its most potent regional flavor.
“Zautreg” has the most densely ethnic sound, developing a theme that is mixed with other influences as the disc progresses. “Port-de-la-Bonne-Mort” adds a Caribbean patois, while “Delola City” is a Jimmie Rodgers country blues that Manchild picked up while traveling the cotton rows, transforming it, as Django stylistically did, into the complexity of “Gia Mang.”
Each composition retains elements of the previous ones, providing a polyglot palette. This relatively small quartet has the ability to sound very large and full. It remains to be seen if the recorded marriage between music and narrative will be a marketable commodity. The music in these Curious Melodies is superbly composed and played, warranting a spin beneath the laser.
(p.s. ART HURTS Note: This is a great review, and hey what a vocabulary!, but the thesis that Sir Albus is "fictional", though funny, is surely one this reviewer will be regretting the minute he does even the most cursory web search.)
JAZZ REVIEW - by David Seymour
Curious Melodies from the Lost Travel Diaries of Sir Albus Manchild takes the art of the concept record to a whole new level. The latest project by the Beston Barnett Quartet is allegedly based on historical documents discovered in a trunk in Barnett’s grandmother’s attic. After poring over the eccentric globe-trotting Victorian composer’s writings for a year, Barnett chose to present ten of his musical fragments in a small combo jazz format. Why not?
Beston Barnett is a self-styled guitarist who was raised in Nashville, but has traveled extensively. Though Curious Melodies from the Lost Travel Diaries of Sir Albus Manchild, is his first official jazz release, he has a prolific background in rock, hip-hop, and diverse roots music. In various interviews, he claims to play practically every instrument including ethnic ones from his time spent in Brazil, Africa, and Europe. Django Reinhardt is Barnett’s most obvious hero; he even named his first-born son after the famed gypsy guitarist. Given the bizarre nature of Barnett’s fiercely independent projects, it’s difficult to discern fact from fiction.
This imaginative exercise goes a long way to excuse diverse styles that are, figuratively at least, all over the map. Barnett plays guitar masterfully. Soprano sax-man ‘Schwee’ Michael Schartz (also of Critical Brass) adds a definite other-worldly sound. The question that remains is whether the compositions would be nearly as compelling on their own, without gimmicks. With a concept this austere, the answer is inevitably no.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. The straight-forward arrangements are fine, even good in spots, but there’s very little improvisation. Or maybe they were improvising, but it never quite took off. Despite the quartet’s over-the-top intentions, listeners are left with an amateur impression. The project lacks the brilliance and command you’d expect from veteran jazz musicians.
Sure, jazz is entrenched with tradition, much of which is too strictly enforced. And sure, it can be said jazz fans take everything too seriously. But still, it's hard to imagine anyone taking Beston Barnett's latest project seriously. And it’s not that we can’t take a joke. It’s that any joke gets old in less time than a ten song CD.
In most fields, and especially jazz, the accepted practice involves learning the rules and playing by them, before striking out in new directions. Curious Melodies from the Lost Travel Diaries of Sir Albus Manchild has to be one of the most preposterous debuts ever. You gotta hand it to the man, he’s got chops, and he’s got balls. Still, it's hard to imagine where Barnett could go from here. Maybe that’s just the way he wants it.
Each track is preceded with narration from Sir Manchild’s diaries. Unfortunately, the performances are not prodigious enough to offset this pretentious effect. If the songs really sounded like they came from different parts of the world, Barnett’s ambitious project might have worked.
Here’s hoping Beston Barnett learned enough from Sir Albus Manchild to channel him more subtly next time. With less concept and more musicality, his next outing could be pure genius.
ALL ABOUT JAZZ - by Jim Santella
The lost travel diaries of Sir Albus Manchild had been tucked away in an old trunk in Beston Barnett's grandmother's attic for many years, and their discovery led to this worthwhile project: an attempt to interpret these unfinished snippets logically.
According to the story, Sir Albus Manchild (1842-1914) was a composer who traveled to America to research the blues and other vernacular forms in the new land. This Manchild was an eccentric Victorian composer. He traveled the world and sought out music from distant lands. It's a fairy tale that contains many hopeful wishes.
With each selection that Barnett's quartet interprets here, the guitarist speaks at length about Manchild in an attempt to explain it all. His modern jazz quartet interpretation of Manchild's music (from notes in his lost diaries) explores world music in the same way that Manchild himself did a hundred years ago.
Acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, drums and a soprano saxophone give the music an exotic flavor that travels the world through its inherent connections. "Delola City" includes an early blues texture, but most of the material comes from distant lands. Sinbad the Sailor might have experienced some of these sounds. The same would apply to travelers such as Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. Too bad none of them carried a tape recorder or a video camera. We can only guess what they heard on their travels.
Today, we're fortunate in that we're able to take miniature recording devices with us everywhere we go. The music of Ghana, Guayaquil, Guiyang, Guangzhou, Guelmim or Goiania can be captured accurately without having to translate. Still, it's fun to interpret foreign musical forms in our own musical language. Benson (sic) Barnett's modern jazz retrospective provides one fascinating solution.
Commentaries
Zautreg
Sir Albus Manchild, composer, linguist, and amateur lepidopterist, was not a trained ethnomusicologist in the modern sense: the melodies he scratched in his travel diaries were impressions or pastiches, often reflecting his mood of the moment more clearly than the local musics he so avidly pursued. Nevertheless, this song appears to have been at least partially transcribed directly from its performance in one of the historically boisterous weddings of Zautreg, which, as a stranger, Manchild would have heard from the outside, sitting on a doorstep or under an open window, his notebook open on his knees.
Otoku
The Otoku melody seems to have been less an impression of the local music than an evocation of the island village’s prodigious storms, which Manchild describes as both frenzied in their destruction and stately in their imperturbable advance. Here, the frenetic bass and drums play the part of choppy waves while the sustained chord-rich melody becomes the march of black clouds against sheer coast. He writes: “The Otokuan is unafraid – in fact, he dreams of pursuing the eye of the storm and swallowing it whole.”
Port-de-la-Bonne-Mort
The two rival funeral societies of Port-de-la-Bonne-Mort differ in one thing: where La Palme greet the death of a member with solemnity and somber ritual, Le Moineau celebrate with a joyful abandon. The dead man becomes an ally among the ancestors; Le Moineau throw him a raucous party so the ancestors can hear how beloved the newcomer was. La Palme fear that earthly delights will become sickly sweet in the mouth of the dead man when he has aged, grown powerful among the ancestors, and been forgotten by the living; they hope their subdued music will soothe him and make him merciful. In the era of Manchild’s visit, these two cults dominated the islands’ society. Beneath a melody in which he combines the moods of both, Sir Albus writes: “The dead are not deaf, but they are hard of hearing. Their ears are attuned to music that, like them, has passed beyond the pale, and they hear all living musics in the shadow of that other music.”
Delola City
The American colonies did not agree with Sir Albus; the insects were terrible, and he feared he had forgotten his own language, so difficult was it for him to understand the native’s feral English. Nonetheless, his exploration of the tobacco- and cotton-growing regions of the South was intrepid enough that he not only discovered its nascent blues idiom, but seems to have guessed the direction it would take. What was happening on the street corners and back alleys of Delola City bore little resemblance to the blues we know today, but it contained the seed – the blue note – and Manchild divined from that what strange fruit it would grow into.
Gia Mang
The diaries of Sir Albus brim with itineraries, amateur ethnographic sketches, romantic poetry, hand-drawn maps, and of course music, but the pages which should have been devoted to his time along the Gia Mang are strangely blank. This small mystery was made richer by the discovery of a single melody and the inscription, “whither your wings, angel,” still impressed 100 years later on the blank pages as if written hard on an earlier page. Or as if, moved by the singular beauty of a waitress approaching his table, he had frantically penned this melody and its inscription on a scrap of paper placed on top of the open notebook, and was afterwards made so disconsolate by her disdain for the indecipherable gift that he wrote nothing for weeks.
Only conjecture of course, but every melody must mean something, must be made less torn from context. From his writings, we know that Manchild thought of music theory not in the Greek terms of ratios and intervals, nor in the almost kabbalistic number system of modern jazz, but in his own highly personal and emotional symbology. I contend that if we could understand his music theory minutely, we could hear in the recovered Gia Mang melody a desolate love poem, written on a napkin and thrust awkwardly into the hand of an improbable love.
Mmabandjouma
Sir Albus was not a sociable traveler. He prefered to see each new city sitting alone in a cafe on the plaza, exchanging a minimum of signs with the servers, even if the cafe were a mud-and-thatch hut serving redbush tea and the plaza, a dirt clearing in the center of some small African village. It is from such a vantage point that one imagines he first saw the now-vanished snake-whistle-dance performed by some children in Mmabandjouma.
The snake-whistle itself was made from the young bush viper, a particularly poisonous and currently protected snake, which was killed and stretched out until rigor mortis set in, when finger holes could be cut out of the long stomach and a reed fixed in the jaws. Despite the otherwise solemn sight of a dozen barefoot children blowing into the mouths of snakes, the snake-whistle-dance was neither melancholy nor ecstatic. The music is simply happy because the player knows he has outlived the snake.
Kocediq
All that’s left in the popular imagination of the “goat-charming” tradition around Kocediq is Marc Chagall’s famous canvas, La Chevre Volante. In the painting, a handsome buck hovers serenely over the village, its eyes closed in what one critic described as “an almost Oriental concentration.” Though he sought them out, there were no goat-charmers left by the period of Manchild’s stay in Kocediq. There WERE verses still sung at holidays which must have, at one time, formed part of the goat-charmer’s repertoire. In his diaries, Sir Albus translates a folk-song which seems to speak of a sort of spiritual connection between charmer and goat:
my goat is no sheep: his courage is hot
my flute is no twig: the breath is warm through its reed
my goat is heavy, yet he floats cooly above the ground
my thoughts are heavy, yet they are blackbirds circling somewhere a cold moon
Praz'k
Even a single note can be heard from at least two perspectives: there is the note and also the silence it punctures. As notes are combined, becoming melodies, counterpoints, progressions, movements, so perspectives multiply, impressions form as the music is compared to the body of sounds the listener has already heard and also the body of sounds yet to be encountered. Visualizations multiply as well, transforming a string of notes in that infinitely divisible space between the ears into a trembling dandelion, or a caravan driven across a shallow stream, or a lover glimpsed running through dark trees.
Referring to this rondo written in Praz’k, Manchild writes,”first there are the shapes the birds cut out of the sky, and then there are the shapes the sky cuts out of the jutting rooftops, and these shapes repeat and become one and encircle the Plaza of the 15 Mysteries.”
Al-Tanaabanna
Camped with a group of nomads outside the oasis city of Al-Tanaabanna, Sir Albus wrote these words of a desert flute he heard in the distance: “When I hear music like this, with one eye on the moon and one foot in the grave - its people assimilated, its purposes forgotten – I imagine how the air must be thick with all the musics that have already succumbed and been lost. I feel I am travelling through a morgue of music.”
Home
On June 28, 1914 – the same day that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated and Europe plunged into its first great war – the body of Sir Albus Manchild returned home to England. He died on the open sea, probably of malaria, on the last leg of a five-year odyssey of music. It’s clear that his thoughts were occupied with homecoming: the last melody written in the diaries seems to have been an attempt to recall the famous hymn, “Abide with Me”, though after the first most recognizable notes, it deviates considerably. “Abide with Me” played daily on the bells of Manchild’s hometown church in Lower Brixham, Devonshire – indeed the tune still rings over his grave there. That he was able to forget even a note speaks to the depth of his immersion in the musics of the outer world.
The diaries themselves, whether misplaced or pilfered, did not get off the boat in England. Their travels have continued, from ship to ship, attic to attic, and now, from museum to museum, and yet, the travels of the curious melodies they contain are only beginning.
Correspondence
Here's the email Beston sent to David Seymour after his review came out:
Hi David. Wow: my first really terrible review. It’s probably bad form to write back and mope, though I’m sure many artists ‘ their prides impaled on pens ‘ do just that. My opinion is that aesthetic judgment generally precedes analysis, so if you didn’t dig it, well, you didn’t dig it. And that’s that, more or less.
I’m writing, then, to clarify my own thoughts on a subject you touch on in your review. The album gets called ‘pretentious’ (which despite pangs, I have to admit is a perfectly reasonable response to a project which tries hard to sound like a well-edited, dry-witted NPR documentary), an adjective usually associated with the latter, more decadent, days of a music-maker’s career ‘ when he gets too big for his britches and starts writing songs about world peace. Unless you’re a poet, in which case you start off pretentious and then work it off with experience (and penny-lessness). Unless you’re a film-maker, in which case it tends to happen to you like a mid-life crisis (see Woody Allen) and your audience eventually womps it out of you. Unless you’re a visual artist, in which case it may be a good reason for a cocktail party.
Pretense (pretentious-ness?) is what happens when what-seems-like-life in an artwork is outweighed by what-seems-like-art. The acceptable ratio is fairly genre-specific: biographies should lean towards life; romances, towards art; poems can be nothing but. Because it’s genre-specific it’s also alot about expectations. You could go see the greatest ten-hour movie ever made, but if you were expecting the usual two-hour variety, you’re going to walk out. Artists who are after breaking up expectations, tend to make stuff that some people scan as pretentious and others as revolutionary. Think of George Clinton’s famous tautology: ‘funk is a hamhock in your cornflakes.’ Not what you ordered, in other words. Some of my favorite authors ‘ David Foster Wallace or Italo Calvino (to whom Curious Melodies’ is dedicated) are constantly being called pretentious. God forbid you should pick up an Italo Calvino novel and be expecting anything like a novel.
It is hard to talk about what-seems-like-life in music, because music is not constrained by the need to make sense. I could take a vague stab at it and say that in the last hundred years of popular music in the Americas, what-seems-like-life in music is the feeling of rooted-ness, of coming from music that once served more than artistic purposes, of chain-gangs and folk revivals, of being a vital part of the stream that flows from those early folk musics, and also the feeling of emotion delivered without guile, of unclouded identity, the feeling of hearing the real character of the performer and not some weak disguise. I think these two basic feelings: the feeling of roots and the feeling of truth, are how listeners distinguish between James Brown and Michael Bolton, John Coltrane and Kenny G, good Stevie Wonder and bad Stevie Wonder. Which is not my point at all.
My point is that artists ‘ by which, read ‘me’ I guess ‘ can’t view their creations in terms of pretense at all. To them, it’s all art ‘ something created or fashioned ‘ and the most ‘pretend’ part is actually trying to put what-seems-like-life into it. A novelist who writes a life-like novel is a good pretender: she is pretending she didn’t just make it all up, and we judge her by how true that pretending seems. Italo Calvino pretends nothing: his readers never forget that it’s all fabulous and distinctly created, and yet he is the one more likely to be called pretentious. A musician with a fair knowledge of his instrument could pick it up and play literally anything ‘ and believe me for every string of notes that makes sense in terms of the stream of human music, there are many, many more that would stand outside that stream. Jazz musicians starting out today generally fumble around in the great river of jazz until they find a vacant spot where hopefully the current is strong and the water unpolluted. Then they anchor there and play until it starts to seem to the listeners that they have always been there ‘ that they are somehow authentic (another scary word) representatives of this little section of water. But it’s just pretend: in this day of global interconnectedness, I repeat, a good musician can play literally anything.
I’m not a jazz musician. I’m an idea-man. The idea or central theme behind Curious Melodies’ was the feeling of mourning for lost musics. It’s not a common emotion, like love or anger at injustice, but a very rare, specialized kind of feeling. Almost as if I had decided to make a whole record about the smell of bacon on a Sunday morning or the vague anxiety of watching the housing market bump around. For most people, the closest they might come to mourning for lost musics would be listening to a Robert Johnson recording. You are vaguely haunted not only by the music, but the idea that it might never have been recorded. A whole towering genre of music could be said to have grown out of those powerful recordings (I know, I know: it’s not that simple): but what about the genres of music that might have grown out of something beautiful but unrecorded. A Russian shepherdess singing on the steppes three hundred years ago, a Zulu warrior recounting his victories, King Solomon singing in his garden. When I listen to Leadbelly and his wife sing ‘The Old Ship of Zion’ that’s the feeling I get: not just an intellectual experience, but a real gut feeling for all the musics, as powerful and steeped in local magics as Leadbelly’s was, which I will never hear or which may never be heard by anyone again.
So I run across Sir Albus who was traveling around a hundred years ago having the same kind of thoughts. And I interpret his melodies through the filter of the jazz idiom, which were themselves interpretations of local magic through the filter of iconoclastic Victorian composition. And the feeling of reaching to listen through those two filters to the original local magic was meant to parallel or bring about that same feeling of mourning for lost music. And the story of his death dovetailed nicely into the story of the death of those musics he was seeking and which I tried to get the listener to seek within the recordings.
That was the idea for this experimental project, and I know it smells a bit of pretense, though I would argue optimistically that it’s the smell of an artist simply not pretending to be doing anything but art. An experiment has a hypothesis ‘ in this case, that the aforementioned feeling of mourning for lost musics can be communicated though a narrative jazz project like this one ‘ and a hypothesis can be proven or disproven. Experimental music gets proven or disproven everytime somebody listens to it and feels it or doesn’t feel it. You didn’t feel it. Hopefully, your experience won’t be the general one, though the fact that you’re a respected reviewer doesn’t bode well.
My favorite part of your review is when you write, ‘‘it's hard to imagine where Barnett could go from here.’ I’m right there with you. I feel like, at this moment in my life ‘ 32 years old, playing music, happily married, father of a cute kid (yes, he’s really named Django, not fiction) ‘ I’ve made what seems to me to be an almost perfect record. I’m really not sure how I could be expected to do better.
Here's the email he sent back to me:
Hello again Beston,
I appreciate your words (and your music, believe it or not.) We can both agree that writing objectively about something as subjective as music is tricky business. I am pleased you stand by your art 100%. That reinforces my point--you're destined for greatness. I personally don't think this record will be your masterpiece, but I know you've got (at least) one in you.
A couple years back I heard an NPR review of Paul Thomas Anderson's film "Magnolia." The reviewer said something about how Anderson goes into each project determined to create the absolute greatest film of all time, and fully believes he is accomplishing that feat throughout the entire process. "Magnolia" obviously IS NOT the greatest film of all time, but it benefits from the director's reckless passion. It's a grand idea that would have been spoiled by anyone else. Making it for the studios or for the masses would have produced a total trainwreck. I guess what I'm saying is his movies escape my criticm because they don't claim to be jazz. I approached your record as a jazz document, an admittedly strict and snobbish measure. I don't think yours is a great jazz record, but it absolutely IS a great idea. I couldn't wait to hear it, so thank you for sending it.
I smiled a lot while reading/listening to it. It's a lot of fun, no doubt about it, I could hear how much fun you were having making it. For what it's worth, I think I would have been more forgiving it you had contained the diagnosis to the liner notes (I know extra pages equal extra expense) and let the music stand on it's own.
I didn't think the record was terrible. Not at all. I guess I need to update my review with some of these kinder thoughts. But don't be dismayed, I'm not THAT well-respected :-)
Keep up the good work, seriously. Hell, call it jazz for all I care.
- David Seymour
