SOUNDTRACK: JHENÉ AIKO-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #89 (October 1, 2020).
This is the 89th Tiny Desk Home Concert (if I’m counting correctly) and I am really surprised that this is probably the 40th one (not counting at all) in which I’ve never heard of the artist even though they are referred to as a star or at least wildly popular.
In this Tiny Desk (home) concert, R&B star Jhené Aiko coasts through an eight-song medley that plays like the ultimate nod to her legions of fans — fans who’ve been begging for a Tiny Desk for a long time.
Is “star” warranted? I don’t know. But here’s her raving blurb:
The Los Angeles native’s star status is a result of her music’s versatility and vulnerability. Jhené Aiko Efuru Chilombo has carved out a space of her own over the past decade, despite a rapidly changing R&B landscape. As a songwriter, she leaves no stone unturned, explicitly expressing her struggle, joy and sexuality while always administering the vibe.
The set begins with Aiko stirring a singing bowl, which I admit is pretty nice. I have a tiny one, but it’s nowhere near as cool as hers are.
Backed by an ensemble of masked players, Aiko bookends her set with a sound bath of singing bowls that’s peace personified through sound.
I appreciated the way the note of the singing bowl segues perfectly into Julian Le’s opening piano for “Lotus (Intro).” Aiko has an old-fashioned vocal style–deep and breathy.
The short song fades out and in comes Brain Warfield’s thumping percussion and a gorgeous harp trill from Gracie Sprout that signals “Stranger.”
It is also short and as it fades and she drinks some tea, the bass from Bubby comes sliding in to open “Do Better Blues.” The song pauses and she says she wants only three things in a relationship:
Eyes that won’t cry ; lips that won’t lie ; love that won’t die
Things slow down to the piano and chimes as the band jumps into “To Love & Die.” Iam quite impressed wit her vocal restraint. There’s a few moments of R&B diva wailing, but mostly, she sings very nicely and prettily with no histrionics.
This works especially well on “Born Tired” which opens with just a harp. It’s impressive how well this acoustic setup works with these songs.
This medley of songs is disconcerting because everything is so short. She only plays two minutes of “Born Tired,” before Bubby’s high chords on the six string bass introduce “W.A.Y.S.” which has the most R&B styled-vocals so far.
“Summer 2020” opens with harp and piano and a spoken introduction from Jhené as she introduces the “quarantine edition” of her band. After a verse she throws in a verse from “Everything Must Go” without changing the music. I do have to wonder about the mindset of someone who writes the lyrics:
I am no god or messiah
But here’s what I know
Three chimes on the singing bowls introduce “Eternal Sunshine” as she sings almost a capella. The band comes in to flesh out the song and she ends with a lengthy R&B warble which quickly fades out as the song comes to an end.
I’m still not sure if she’s a star, but I am really impressed with her voice and musical choices in this set. Often, I have found that when I really like an R&B performer’s Tiny Desk, it’s because of the way it is stripped down–both instrumentally and in production terms. So I’m not going to listen to her album because this set was a perfect introduction to her and just enough for me to enjoy.
[READ: September 24, 2020] “The Intensive Care Unit”
During the COVID Quarantine, venerable publisher Hingston & Olsen created, under the editorship of Rebecca Romney, a gorgeous box of 12 stories. It has a die-cut opening to allow the top book’s central image to show through (each book’s center is different). You can get a copy here. This is a collection of science fiction stories written from 1836 to 1998. Each story imagines the future–some further into the future than others. As it says on the back of the box
Their future. Our present. From social reforms to climate change, video chat to the new face of fascism, Projections is a collection of 12 sci-fi stories that anticipated life in the present day.
About this story, Romney writes
When I first thought about stories for this collection, I knew J.G. Ballard had to make an appearance. Initially, I had chosen an entirely different piece. Then COVID-19 came to the United States and I learned how very bad I was at predicting the future. ‘The Intensive Care Unit’…is a story about living entirely in isolation: no human-to-human contact, ever. Even families live together through screens, not physically in the same space.
Frustratingly, she ends with
I’ll leave you to guess which other Ballard story this one replaced. [I don’t know him well enough to even hazard a guess].
I haven’t read many J.G. Ballard stories, but I have it in my head that all of his stories are very dark and very violent. The few that I have read certainly were. And this one is no exception.
It’s starts off with a violent sentence: “Within a few minutes the next attack will begin.”
The room he is in is filled with his wife’s faint breathing, his son’s irregular movements, marked by smeared hand prints on the carpet, and his daughter’s limp body under the fallen lamp.
Yet despite the extensive damage this is still recognizably the scene of a family reunion.
He looks at his wife and thinks of their first meeting ten years ago. The rest of the story is flashback and it’s easy to forget this opening because of how novel the rest of the story is.
Even the opening of the flashback: “The unusual, not to say, illicit, notion of actually meeting my wife and children in the flesh had occurred to me some three month earlier.”
Then we learn the narrator’s story. He, like everyone else, was brought up in a hospital–thus spared the dangers of a physically intimate family life. On television he was never alone. His parents watched from the comfort of their homes.
He then became a medical student–never having to see a patient in the flesh.
He met his soon to be wife Margaret because she was a patient of his. She was wearing no makeup for the camera.
This accounted both for her arctic skin tones and for her youthless appearance–on television thanks to make-up, everyone of whatever age was 22, the cruel divisions of chronology banished for good.
He diagnosed her and she offered for him to repay the services with a massage (remote, of course–no idea how that works).
After that they started to date. They shared the same films on television, watched the same meals prepared in restaurants and exchanged old pictures of each other. Six months later they were married.
They had children (through a machine of course) and were very happy.
When he finally proposed they meet in person, she willingly agreed. Bit on their first attempt, she fled before they could get to close. He saw her briefly but “around the entrance hung a faint and not altogether pleasant odour.”
When they saw each other on screen again, things were much better. Yet they decided to try again. This time with the children. As they talked more he found that she felt “the same distaste for me that in turn I felt for her, the same obscure hostility.”
And that brings us full circle to the beginning.
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