SOUNDTRACK: GOAT RODEO-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #73 (September 1, 2020).
Classical music is for serious people. Yo-Yo Ma, probably the best known cellist in the world, must surely be a very serious fellow. False!
Yo-Yo Ma is a hoot. How do we know? The first song of this set is called “Your Coffee Is a Disaster.” And the name of the group is Goat Rodeo, after all.
Yo-Yo man formed this assemblage known as Goat Rodeo nearly ten years ago. It consists of Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile and many other folks.
You’ve probably heard Stuart Duncan playing fiddle on albums with Dolly Parton, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and he was named the Academy of Country Music Fiddle Player of the Year numerous times. Edgar Meyer has played bass with Joshua Bell, Béla Fleck and Christian McBride, and the Nashville Symphony commissioned his first orchestral work in 2017. And you’d most likely recognize Chris Thile’s vocals and mandolin in the music of Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers.
I really enjoyed their wild (yes wild) Tiny Desk Concert back in 2011.
Fast forward a decade and this collaboration channels that same spectacular frenzy, separately captured in the gorgeous homes of the artists and mixed to perfection.
Thile introduces the song by saying the band is often in the midst of a a coffee war: Yo-Yo, Stuart and Edgar prefer beans that were roasted in a volcano for maybe millions of years, while Aoife and I prefer beans that taste as though the were fashioned by angels. We like good coffee.”
Up next is one of many inappropriate (not scandalous or anything) titles. When we are not arguing about coffee we are punning. This: “Waltz Whitman.” It is a slow piece that feels a lot like the kind of music Punch Brothers play–where it is a fiddle, not a violin. Although the middle section which has some gorgeous slow cello from Yo-Yo Ma makes this song transcendent.
“The Trappings” is a faster song and it’s got vocals! Thile sings lead and there is wonderful backing vocals from O’Donovan and Duncan. There’s fantastic cello trills from Yo-Yo Ma throughout.
It’s good til the last drop.
[READ: September 1, 2020] “That Last Odd Day in L.A.”
This story was really interesting.
We meet a man who goes by his last name, Keller. His girlfriend calls him that, his ex-wife called him that, even his teenaged daughter calls him that.
His wife left him after she had a bit of a nervous breakdown–the squirrels had dug up her bulbs and that was the last straw.
The woman Keller has been seeing, Sigrid, is a travel agent. She has a son and an ex-husband who has gone deep into animal rescue. Keller and Sigrid recently had a first date and it was a disaster. Although they are planning another date after Thanksgiving.
I really enjoyed his phone call with his daughter–each one trying to outdo the other with sardonic wit as she tries to determine if he will come to her place for Thanksgiving. After their conversation he wound up having a frozen turkey dinner for Thanksgiving (actually on Tuesday night… what did it matter really?).
Then comes the part about L.A. Keller had a niece and nephew–Rita and Richard–who were twins. They were stockbrokers and had never married. They shared a house in Hollywood and had made a fortune. Richard had recommended that he buy Microsoft just as it was taking off. Keller thought it was terrible sounding company but trusted his nephew. And now he was a rich man–although not as rich as they were.
He had often talked about visiting them, and since he nothing to do for Thanksgiving, they sent him a plane ticket and picked him up in a BMW convertible. He had an amazing time. It was good they had bought him a ticket for only a brief visit because if he’d stayed longer he might never have gone home. Richard and Rita enjoyed having him around–Rita called him fun–and they asked him to come back soon.
He wondered to himself if anyone would miss him if he didn’t go home. He lived where he lived for no apparent reason. He did have Sigrid, for what that was worth, but what else?
There was an incident in L.A. that was meaningful to him–it involved, of all things, a possum. And then a deer. But when he tried to talk about it, people just thought he was crazy.
The story ends absolutely unexpectedly, with Sigird’s son going off with his dad to liberate turkeys and then getting arrested. After his arrest, Sigrid’s son visits Keller–they’ve never met before. Within a short time, Keller runs through a gamut of emotions from concern to pity, to generosity to horror. It’s amazing how quickly the story turns dramatic.
It felt like a simple short story until the end, when it suddenly felt like it could develop into a much bigger story.
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