New Ken Burns film a must-see

This week, I’ve been watching “The War”, the new Ken Burns documentary airing on PBS this week that takes a closer look at World War II. I’m a big fan of Burns’ previous documentaries, including his epics on the Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, as well as his shorter, two-part film on Mark Twain.

“The War” seems to differ from those films in that it reflects on this monumental event primarily from the vantage point of the men and women who physically waged the war on the battlefields abroad or in the factories, shipyards, and salvage drives back in the states. Burns’ previous works tended to give at least equal attention to the leading figures of the events or cultural entities they examined, whether it was Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, Lou Gehrig and Willie Mays, or Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker.

However, anyone who’s ever flipped on the History Channel or Turner Classic Movies knows that the Second World War has received it’s ample share of screen time. Just about every angle of the war has been covered extensively, perhaps even more so than most of the subjects in Burns’ earlier films. So Burns may be correct to assume that we don’t need another exhaustive on-screen look at the key strategies of the Normandy Invasion, the Yalta conference and its aftermath, or full profiles of FDR, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Ike, Tojo, Mussolini, MacArthur, Patton, and the rest of the major characters. That’s all been done.

Instead, Burns builds his narrative around four towns: Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Cal., Waterbury, Conn., and Luverne, Minn. He allows the members of those communities who lived the war first-hand to tell their stories of what it was like as individuals doing their part to pull the country through that trying time. In this way, Burns allows his subjects to describe the collective experience of the nation as U.S. troops fought line-to-line with German and Japanese forces, as factories at home brought in thousands of workers to fill the demands for ships and planes, as citizens gathered scrap metal and bacon fat to help produce armaments and munitions, as black Americans still served in all-colored units almost 80 years after the Civil War, and as Americans of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps here at home.

But despite the stark realities Burns displays, he also uses the film to portray American hope and optimism. Despite their treatment, many Japanese Americans still signed up to defend their country in the military. Families made sacrifices at home, knowing that “the boys” overseas faced much worse conditions on the front lines. And despite tactical blunders by second- and third-tier generals, American troops still pushed on to win a war that, at least at the outset, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, they were not well-equipped to fight.

The seven-part series continues tomorrow evening I can’t wait. If you don’t see it, then, to borrow a phrase from a noted philosophical treatise, I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Incredible live music archive

While working on a story about Oklahoma’s own Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, I stumbled yesterday upon a pretty incredible digital archive of live music, called (what else) the Live Music Archive, part of (again, what else) the Internet Archive.

Obviously, some shows are of better quality than others. But already I’ve listened to portions of some fantastic shows — many from 2007 — of acts like JFJO (with their new drummer), Charlie Hunter (with his new lineup), as well as the Derek Trucks Band, Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, Robert Randolph & the Family Band, the Aquarium Rescue Unit, and the Rebirth Brass Band.

There are also links to collections of shows from slightly more established artists like Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Ryan Adams, and even the Smashing Pumpkins.

Like a lot of digital music archives (at least the ones I’ve seen), many of the artists featured here, including some of those mentioned above, are stalwarts of the “jam band” scene. For instance, there are 562 shows listed for Blues Traveler, 745 for the Yonder Mountain String Band, 779 for Phil Lesh & Friends, and a whopping 1,078 for the String Cheese Incident. Sadly, I couldn’t find any of my favorite garage-blues duo, the Black Keys, who have been known to perform at jam-band festivals like Bonnaroo.

Oh yeah, they also have 2,875 shows listed for some band called the Grateful Dead. Go figure. None for Phish, Widespread Panic, or the Allman Brothers, though. Maybe those are housed elsewhere.

All-in-all, they have tens of thousands of shows from hundreds of artists, going years back — even into the ’90s (oooooh…).

One particularly great thing about the site is that, with many of the shows, you can either listen or download. Or, of course, both. In other words, you don’t have to know how to deal with Kbps, M3U, Flac, or other kinds of data options that, quite frankly, I have no clue about. Often, all you have to do is press the “play” button. (Though, in all honesty, I haven’t tried to download any of the shows yet, so the site may or may not work well in that aspect — I’d love some feedback if you know.)

Frankly, I can’t believe I’ve never heard about this site or seen it written about anywhere before now. Maybe I’m just out-of-touch. I have a feeling I have only begun to scratch the surface of what both it and its companion sites have to offer.

Let me know if you’re aware of any other good digital archives out there like this one. One other I know of is at nugs.net.

Behind-the-scenes video from upcoming Wes Anderson film

If you’re a fan of Wes Anderson’s films, as I most certainly am, you can’t help but be excited that his new picture, The Darjeeling Limited, is due out at the end of the month. It stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman, among others, in a story about three brothers attempting to reconnect on a spiritual odyssey in India.

The film’s website features some good behind-the-scenes videos. I’ve included one below:

Current reading: a pair of required Blues classics

I’m currently in the process of reading a pair of books on the Blues. The first is Deep Blues, by the renowned music critic Robert Palmer (no, not the “Addicted to Love” guy). The other, Blow My Blues Away, is by the less-known but equally respectable George Mitchell, who made a slew of recordings of dozens of mostly unheard-of blues and folk musicians in the deep South during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

While both books focus on strains of blues that originated in or near the Mississippi delta, each approaches the subject from a different angle. In his book, Palmer — who, during his career, wrote extensively for the New York Times and Rolling Stone and taught ethnomusicology at a number of U.S. universities — gets as close to being all-encompassing on delta blues as one can without becoming entirely overbearing. His book covers the Blues’ African origins, its genesis within the southern sharecropping system during the turn of the 20th Century, its particular musical significance, and the stories of some of its most famous practitioners, including Robert Johnson, B.B. King and Muddy Waters.

Mitchell, meanwhile, focuses on a segment of the Blues rarely examined in such depth; his book, first published in ‘71, consists almost entirely of first-hand testimonials from poor southern blacks in northwest Mississippi who were known in those parts for their skill playing blues and gospel songs. His subjects are people most blues fans have never heard of, folks like Other Turner, William Diamond, and various members of the Hemphill clan.

If you’re taking notes, it’s safe to say that few people, if any, have done more than Palmer and Mitchell to document, publicize and preserve the memory of the raw, authentic blues music that continued to be played — albeit less and less as the years went by — in the South following the American folk music revival of the 1960s.

At present, both men’s most resounding legacy toward this end has quite possibly been their involvement in the independent music label Fat Possum Records, originally of Oxford, Miss. While teaching at Ole Miss in the early ’90s, Palmer was an inspiration for the label’s founder, Matthew Johnson, who was briefly a student in one of his classes. Palmer even served as producer on some of the label’s early releases, and in the process helped alert the world to the value of old codgers like Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside and CeDell Davis, all of whom specialized in a style of severely unpolished, primal blues from the North Mississippi hill country that differed in many aspects from its nearby delta cousin.

But since Fat Possum’s stable of aging blues wonders started dying off near the end of the decade, the label has employed a pair of tactics to stay both relevant and afloat. First, they began releasing more albums from younger, white acts with indie-rock leanings, such as the Black Keys, the Fiery Furnaces, and Andrew Bird. Second, they made a deal with Mitchell to release a large number of his field recordings, many of which hadn’t been available to the public in decades. His vast archive of gems ranged from recognizable names like Sleepy John Estes, Fred McDowell and Robert Nighthawk to largely unknown masters like Joe Callicott, Jim Bunkley, and many of the characters from his aforementioned book.

I suppose it would be an understatement, considering the preceding tome, to say that I have a bit of an affinity for blues music. But I have a particularly special place in my heart for the backwoods fare that Palmer and Mitchell worked so diligently to promote. It’s my hope that labels like Fat Possum and organizations like the Music Maker Relief Foundation will keep receiving enough support to keep this music’s memory alive.

If you’re interested in more about this strand of the Blues, the Web journal Southern Spaces, from Emory University in Atlanta, has a thorough section on the blues of the lower Chattahoochee Valley, including clips of Mitchell’s recordings and even some interview segments with Mitchell himself.