I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RAUL MIDÓN-Tiny Desk Concert #718 (March 15, 2018).

I had never heard of Raul Midón before this Tiny Desk.  So I’ll use the blurb for an explanation of who he is.

Raul Midón lives in a world of sound — blind since birth, Midón’s interpretation of his surroundings is borderless. He sings with the passion of the best classic soul singers, and his instrumental chops stand along side the most accomplished jazz musicians.

Normally backed by a band that straddles styles just as well as he does, for his turn behind Bob Boilen’s desk Midón stripped it down to just voice and guitar, the musical equivalent of tightrope walking without a net.

You could choose any of the songs he performed, listen on repeat and continuously discover layers of musicality — the nuance of a bent note in his vocals, a burst of perfectly placed guitar notes.

Midón played five songs.

For “Gotta Gotta Give” he primarily uses a kind of slapping guitar style for his chords–he slaps all of the strings with his palm making a kind of gentle but loud sound.  But he also does some great picking on the descending chords.  I love the little harmonics he throws in a the end of the verses.  For this song he plays a trumpet solo with his mouth which is pretty cool.  Later he does a solo duet with his mouth-trumpet and the guitar.  His voice is powerful and soulful.  It’s a great song.

He says that he wondered how to address the fact that he was blind. He wanted people to talk about the issue but no one every would, so he called his new album Badass and Blind and people talk about it now.

“Sound Shadow” has a more abrasive picking style–almost like a slap bass but on all of the strings.  It’s a very different sound form the first song.  The solo is a mixture between very fast picked notes and some really fast pick-less strumming.  Vocally he really mixes things up as well, with some nice falsetto at the end.

“If Only” was inspired by Tin Pan Alley stylings which you can hear in the chords.  “Bad Ass and Blind” has a bluesy sound with some more cool harmonics and some dramatic minor chords.  I like the way the chorus is very different from the staggered melody of the verses.  The second verse is all rapped while he plays that guitar.  And his delivery is solid.  It’s got an even better sounding trumpet solo.

For “Mi Amigo Cubano” he switches to a nylon stringed guitar.  He says he wrote this song with Bill Withers, who wanted a song written sin Spanish–basically Raul translated what Bill wanted He asked how do you say “Hows your wife?” “Como esta tu esposa?”  “Well put that in there!”  This song has Spanish soul.

I really enjoyed this set a lot.

[READ: March 20, 2018] “The State”

I didn’t really enjoy this story.  It felt kind of slow and meandering and the ending was really bland.

But I have learned though, that if I don’t like a New Yorker ending because it doesn’t feel like an ending, it is probably an excerpt–which this was.  Knowing that now changes my opinion of the whole thing.  And reading a bit about the novel it sounds multifaceted and really quite interesting.  Now I feel badly for judging it harshly at first.

It begins “before you were born, you were a head and tail in a milky pool.”  Your history goes back further and further, but then returns to your birth when your heartbeat was arrhythmic.

Your dad said “maybe he as a drummer.”  And in the womb, you did begin to kick to any beat offered.  Your dad is 100 per cent Indian–a recovering alcoholic medicine man from Oklahoma.  Your mom is white but there is too much and not enough whiteness to know what to do with it.  You were raised Christian although you enjoyed your father’s powwows more–but your mother became more and more opposed to them as she got older.

When you were older you joined a powwow at the Big Oakland Powow (which features prominently in the novel, evidently).  There’s never been anything like the feeling you get from drumming.

It even managed to reduce some of the sadness of getting fired.

This overview settles down into the present tense.  As you walk around, shoulders hunched, you notice white teens.  They are out of place here yet they act like they own the place, and that is intimidating.

You started drinking in your twenties.  It helped you sleep better.  Plus you’d always had a kind of eczema.  Your father rubbed peyote ashes into it which helped, but when your father died, the only think that made it better was alcohol.  You eventually learned to find the perfect State between drinking too much and feeling really good.

You drank too much one night because drum class was cancelled.  At work the next day, you were told to get rid of a bat that had entered the space.  But because you were still drunk (and smelled like it) you were fired.

I really enjoyed all of the conflicts within the character–his race, his religion, his love of a job but his need to drink.  But the ending was so vague that I was initially disappointed.  Now I wonder what comes next.

For ease of searching, I include: Raul Midon.