At the free sound web page we have found your great “Homestyle Mandolin matched set” which we would like to use for a short vídeo which I am sending you. We are a photography collective and we have been asked by NOKIA to test their new N8 camera. We have made 7 short pieces and one of them is Matías Costa’s on his daughter birthday. The vídeo will be on the NOKIA page and their blog.
It doesn’t bother me that a business like Nokia is involved, by the way.
This same mandolin music was also used in mandolin love by gurdonark, which is a fun bit o’ honey that I posted about previously.
Africa Polka is a song I got from Turner’s Banjo Journal #10, a British magazine of sheet music from the 1880s or 1890s. I think it was a yankophile thing populated mainly with American music. There was a banjo fad going on in England, an early example of American folk culture crossing over to the top of the pops. It was similar to the way that Howling Wolf’s shows in Britain in the 1960s influenced the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton.
I was playing with live dancing in mind. The part with just chords and no melody might be fun to jam over — the chords are C-G-G-C and G-D-D-G.
The guitar has a couple rattles. There’s a blooper note near the end that I am hoping doesn’t really affect anything. YouTube reencodes the original video to sound and look really bad.
I know this is obsessive, given that I’ve already done five, but I have two new versions of Horace Weston’s Old Time Jig, this time dated March 3, 2010. I thought I was done with this tune but I happened to play it at a slower tempo that was just right and magic happened.
The first of the two new versions is a straight acoustic recording from the mic on my laptop. The second is the same recording with an effect that gives it a electronic feeling. After all these straight acoustic recordings, it’s interesting to hear it with heavy processing.
This recording is 1:10 long. The tune would be a natural fit to connect segments in a larger piece like a radio play, so I have also clipped out shorter snippets to fit as needed:
Yesterday’s version of Horace Weston’s Old Time Jig was better than the day before, but it started weak and was emotionally distant. It needed a beginning and it needed fire.
So here it is, the fourth and (I hope) final recording.
It’s 1:43 long. It’s in A minor. The time signature is 2/4. The tempo is 173.
To the extent possible under law, Lucas Gonze
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
Horace Weston’s Old Time Jig version 4.
This work is published from
United States.
Here’s a version of Horace Weston’s Old Time Jig which improves on yesterday’s in that it’s faster, it fixes a timing problem, and it’s on my steel string instead of my nylon string.
I have done a new recording of the 1885 schottishe “Slightly On The Mash”. You are welcome to reuse my recording in derivative works or upload it to other people. It is in the key of D. The time signature is 4/4. The length is 1:16.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfuvmmmYtVA">
<img src="http://soupgreens.com/audio/slightlyonthemash/LucasGonze-SlightlyOnTheMash.png" alt="Lucas Gonze playing Slightly On The Mash schottische" />
</a>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJq2E1rb9I">[[[Link to video on YouTube]]]</a>
Here’s a new recording of Horace Weston‘s Celebrated Polka (sheet ♫), which I wanted to try a different approach to. The first one I did was classical style with rubato laid on thick. This new one is ragtime flavored.
It makes sense that that you could do either way, considering that Weston was part about European art music and part about American vernacular styles like minstrelsy. In his time people thought that the euro influence was automatically better, in our time it’s maybe the other way around (at least if you’re more into rock/blues/jazz/disco than classical) but this one guy managed to integrate them. And if this composition sounds more snooty highbrow euro than rube yank, keep in mind that it was written for banjo not guitar.
The main theme has a swirly mood like a lady getting dressed up to go out.
The second theme has colorful and daring harmony for that time and place.
Go digging for music by the 19th century banjo star Horace Weston and you’ll won’t find much. He was more of a player than a composer, I guess. Fortunately this 1880 compilation of banjo tunes:
On page 18:
Had this sheet music:
I don’t have a banjo, and if I did I still couldn’t play this on it. What I do have is a parlor guitar from more or less the same time period and an hour or so a day for practicing the damn thing until I get it right. So I did this video:
Bleak gospel in a raw bluesy style w/ bottleneck on resonator guitar + whistling and singing.
Recorded in a single live take using the mic on my laptop, so the singing goes out of tune in a couple places. I did this just to hear what the arrangement was like, then forgot about it for six months or so. The jagged guitar tone is the cool thing about it.
It’s the same song as “Rocking Yukon Gold” — an old time number called “Talk About Suffering” that Ricky Skaggs, Doc Watson and many others have covered.
It’s from a book called “Banjoist’s Budget” by Mr. A. Baur. According to Carl Anderton:
Baur was from New York, soldiered in the Civil War, was badly wounded in Georgia during Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” and spent the next 9 years recovering his health. He practiced banjo constantly during his convalescance and became one of America’s leading players. His “Reminiscences of a Banjo Player” published in S.S. Stewart’s Banjo and Guitar Journal are quite insightful.
I didn’t find the date of this book, but I did find a stray comment on the internets claiming it’s from 1880, which sounds just right.
Here’s the sheet music for them that can read it:
My recordings here are all hereby dedicated to the public domain per CC0 1.0 Universal.
Fandango means “A lively Spanish dance in triple time performed with castanets or tambourines. The dance begins slowly and tenderly, the rhythm marked by the clack of castanets, snapping of fingers, and stomping of feet. The speed gradually increases to a whirl of exhilaration.”
The harmony dips into both blues and classical. I hear Paganini *and* Rev. Gary Davis. As an example of classical harmony, at the center of the piece is a dissonant chord in A minor spelled b-f#-g-d; notice the f# and g right next to each other, without even an octave between them to help them get along. As an example of blues harmony, he uses V minor (E minor) and V dominant (E7) interchangeably, without modulating, which makes the third a blue note.
Rhythmically it plays a subtle game with a strong offbeat and weak downbeat: 1 *2* 3 *4*. This was ten years ahead of ragtime and thirty ahead of jazz, and it’s clearly an antecedent.
A wonderful and special thing about Weston is that as a gifted and educated free black man in a time of poverty and intense ghettoization he was able to write his own story and document his times for himself. Very few black people were empowered to do that. And what do you find? The advanced rhythmic techniques that characterize all African-American genres _and_ mastery of European music theory.
In terms of my own playing here, I feel good about how it came out. I like the way the time ebbs and flows, and I like the brightness of the tone. There are no bad spots or mistakes. Also, I feel like I succeeded in bringing out the weird and awesome combo of blues and classical. But the recording is too short to really succeed. I feel like I needed to get at least two minutes out it to have something that people would listen to for its own sake.
The one good thing about the shortness is that this would be a natural soundtrack for a Flickr video, since Flickr videos can’t be longer than a minute and a half.
Anyhow, you’re welcome to remix my recording here, as well as download it, upload it, and tattoo it on your behind. It’s in the public domain.
To the extent possible under law, Lucas Gonze
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to
Egyptian Fandango.
This work is published from
United States.
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It’s a great little composition with a lot of spooky flavor. Very 
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