The jazz and blues standard “St. James Infirmary” opens, at least in a version by Louis Armstrong, with this image of a corpse laid out:
I went down to St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there
She was stretched out on a long white table
So cold, so sweet, so fair
As such, the song all but suggests itself as a subject for musical dissection.
Recently the San Francisco-based programmer and musician Christopher Abad (aka Aempirei) did just that, applying his computer to the gloomy classic, thus joining the ranks of Cab Calloway, Wynton Marsalis, Cassandra Wilson, Django Reinhardt, and countless others (including, yes, Andy Griffith as well as the White Stripes). And as with any proper take on “St. James Infirmary,” Abad’s appears to have originated with an intimation of mortality — in his case, a bike crash.
In late August, Abad wrote in a single post on the blog of the Tenderloin District art gallery he runs, twentygoto10.com, about two separate events: first, that he had been in a bike accident; second, that he’d been “working on a generalized method for note detection on musical instruments.” His goal was to be able to have the computer transcribe what he played on his trumpet. “Needless to say, I inevitably failed,” he writes (at twentygoto10.com), “but I did come up with some novel audio filters during my fruitless research.”
In the manner of jazz musicians and computer programmers alike, he made use of his self-described “failure” and improvised, putting the notes of “St. James Infirmary” through the hombrewed filter and coming up with a version all his own (MP3), one that clocks in at a little longer than nine minutes. The result has the shape of the antique original (that lonesome chordal arc, and the requisite funereal pace) as well as the digital fixings of a contemporary rendition (notably the algorithmic pulses, as well as some glitches that suggest a dog barking). Abad has posted the C++ code of his little program, should you want to compile it and fiddle with the experiment.
And if the digitized jazz of Abad’s “St. James Infirmary” strikes your fancy, then check out a more recent post of his, from mid-September, which features a test run of another classic, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” on a simple synthesizer he wrote (MP3, twentygoto10.com). It sounds like it’s being played on a bass-heavy glass harmonica, these tremulous swells carrying the melody along. Abad posted not only the MP3 and the C++ program, but also the input data of the song. Shown below, it is the digitized corpse of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” laid bare in cold code:
2a3
6f3 2a3
3f3 1f3 1d3 3c3
1f3 1f3 1f3 1f3 1a3 1a3 2c4
6c4 1d4 1c4
6a3 2c4
3f3 1f3 1d3 3c3
1f3 1f3 1f3 1f3 1a3 1a3 2g3
6f32c4
1c4 2f3 1d3 2f3 1f3 1f3
1f3 1f3 2f3 1d3 3c4
1f3 1f3 1f3 1f3 1a3 1a3 2c4
6c4 2c4
1d4 1c4 2a3 2a3 2f3
1f3 1f3 1f3 1f3 1d3 3c3
1f3 1f3 1f3 1f3 1a3 1a3 2g3
6f3
For deep wells of background information on “St. James Infirmary,” visit not one but two blogs focused on the subject: nonotes.wordpress.com (that link goes directly to the “Infirmary”-related posts) by R. Walker, author of the books Letters from New Orleans and Buying In (and an old friend from when we both lived in New Orleans), and iwentdowntostjamesinfirmary.blogspot.com by Robert W. Harwood, author of the book I Went Down to St James Infirmary.
(1) The seven tracks on Sand (Touch) by Philip Jeck were recorded live, but what the music consists of is all pre-recorded. These are no mere mash-ups, mind you. Jeck is about as far from the kaleidoscopic party music of a Girl Talk or a DJ Z-Trip as a DJ could find himself. The layers of music on Sand, as in much of Jeck’s work, are the result of atmospheric loops of manipulated turntables. Be sure to check out the ecstatic “Fanfares,” in which clips of orchestral grandeur (reportedly sourced from Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”) echo into the distance as the reverberations gather enough richness to overcome the evident record scratches. Also worth spending time immersed in is the album’s “Residue,” a rice-paper-thin extension of light crackles and nearly sub-aural drones, with occasional, scene-changing alterations in volume and density.
(2) In our age of malleable media, listening habits can, at times, be less like playlists and more like recipes. Right now, my favorite recipe is as follows: the instrumental track of rapper Aceyalone‘s (aka Eddie Hayes of Freestyle Fellowship) “To the Top” (a single from last year, backed with “Jungle Muzik”), its naked Bo Diddley beat dropped to 70bpm, run through the Automaton plug-in (from the folks at Audio Damage) via Ableton Live, with Automaton’s Replicate function picking up random segments, glitching ‘em all to hell, and repeating them at unexpected intervals atop the original.
(4) A little off topic, Metallica‘s Death Magnetic is, easily, the band’s best album since 1991, when Metallica (aka “the black one,” aka “the one with ‘Enter Sandman,’” metal’s closest approximation of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which Nirvana released barely a month later) hit stores. It isn’t just the return to Ride the Lightning-era riffs, thanks to judicious production by Rick Rubin, that makes the album. It’s that those riffs are often the majority of a given song, meaning Metallica has put the straightforward pop structures of Load, ReLoad, and St. Anger behind them. On Death Magnetic, which opens with a heartbeat reminiscent of … And Justice for All‘s “One,” those riffs churn with a bare-bones aggression, which means that rock’s equivalent to grinding gears are, for the moment, a mainstream sound. Yes, it would be great to hear more of Earth/Sunn O)))’s drone-metal in Metallica, and maybe some touches of Godflesh/Drumcorp-style digitally chopped’n'screwed beats, but simply for having taken the band back in time, Rubin has secured Metallica’s future. (Maybe we’ll be treated to some remixes?) I was in LAX a year or so ago, my plane delayed, and while wandering the mostly deserted halls, I ran into, of all people, Metallica’s lead singer, James Hetfield. I’d interviewed the band’s loquacious drummer, Lars Ulrich, on several occasions, but had never spoken with Hetfield before. I approached him, and he eagerly joined in conversation about working with Rubin (production was already well under way, and Rubin’s involvement was pubic knowledge). When I mentioned the great work Rubin had done with Slayer and Johnny Cash, Hetfield’s agreement was clear, but when I mentioned his then recent work with Neal Diamond, something changed, and he sort of closed down. The conversation was over. At the time, I figured that he took offense at being reminded that Rubin had resuscitated the reputation of the 1960s and ’70s singer’s recording career, as if Metallica had anything in common with that lovably cornball folk-pop — or he took it as a suggestion that Metallica needed something approaching resuscitation, which it did. But now it’s clear that Rubin did exactly the same thing with Metallica he’d done with Diamond and with Cash: located the place deep in the back catalog when the music still mattered, and then convinced the musicians to meet him there. (Maybe he can revisit the Beastie Boys now, and re-awaken the true old-school, tape-loop-based hip-hop production?)
