SOUNDTRACK: MARIA VOLONTE-Tiny Desk Concert #183 (December 27, 2011).
One of my plans for this calendar year was to write about all of the Tiny Desk concerts from 2016 and from 2011 (to play some catch up). This is the final tiny Desk from 2011! Huzzah.
Maria Volonte is an Argentine singer who interprets tango music in her own way. She also plays folk, Latin blues as well as more traditional music. She plays three songs here and is accompanied by the fantastic harmonica player, Kevin Carrel Footer.
“El Beso Azul” (The Blue Kiss) is a pop-folk ballad expressing menacing sadness. Volonte’s voice is beautiful–full of longing and desire, heartache and sorrow. She plays a very rich and full sounding acoustic guitar and is accompanied by a wonderful bluesy harmonica which plays some amazing lines and riffs.
“Oh Viejo Tren” (Oh, Old Train) is based on a long train ride from the outskirts into the city proper of Buenos Aires. She says, “This is about people chasing their dreams in the city and then falling into reality.” This song is slower and sadder and her voice changes appropriately, even if there is still an air of sultriness about it. The harmonica in addition to playing great “train” sounds, keeps a perfect bluesy accompaniment.
“SF Tango” is an ode to San Francisco and to tango. The song is in English. I like the way she picks her guitar at the beginning and the cool strumming rhythm that the rest of the song has.
Typically, when there’s an interesting quote from the blurb, I post it here, but Jasmine Garsd’s write up is quite lengthy, and it tells an interesting history of the tango as well as some details about Volonte. It also says she can barely listen to “SF Tango” as she finds it so moving. I didn’t find it so, but I did enjoy what she wrote. Read it here.
[READ: January 2, 2016] Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour
I also wanted to make sure I finished all of the posts I started in 2015. This is the last one (although maybe I finished the book in 2016?). So it’s nice to have that burden lifted as well!
I read Warner’s The Sopranos in 1998. I loved it. It was very funny, very raunchy and a delightful way to see girls having wild fun.
Of course, it’s nearly 20 years later and I have a daughter of my own and I can’t help but think that the girls’ behavior is so unsafe, so unwise, so irresponsible!
This play also seems (if memory is any guide) to take the wildness of the girls and condense it. Since there is no narrator to slow things down they are just wild from the get go.
So this play is about six girls. The girls are the only ones in the play–they wind up doing different characters (including men) which sounds like it would be very funny to see). All of the girls are in the choir of Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour Catholic school. And they are all heading to a competition in Edinburgh
The six girls are:
Fionnula (lives in a council house bought with the money from her grandad)
Manda (Mum fucked off, lives with her da, never shuts up about her sister)
Chell (lives up the complex, has had a lot of tragedy in her family)
Orla (diagnosed with cancer but recently returned from Lourdes)
Kylah (parents own their house and she sings in a band)
Kay (stuck-up goody-two shoes, off to university)
The girls are hardened and cynical–they say there have been several pregnancies this year already in their class and they call their headmistress Sister Condom. They are excited to go to the city for this competition not to sing but to get shitfaced and hook up with guys.
Their language is fairly shocking from the starts. It’s one of the girls who says Manda’s mum “fucked off.” And this being Scotland, the word “cunt” is thrown around all over the place.
The girls plan to separate when the get to the city. But first they get started by going to the bar (the girls are afraid to bend over to pick up their cigarettes for fear of flashing the entire bar). They drink. A lot. Even though they are underage. And they get hit on by all sorts of men. One even has the pick up line “Do you know you have 206 bones in your body? Would you like another one in ya?”
And then the girls separate.
Two go home with a guy who is divorced and very sad about it (which leads to a very wild scene–including a moment in which one of the girls portrays a man with an erection–wonder how they did that).
By the end of the night at least one girls has thrown up, at least one girl has hooked up and it sure looks like they have no chance of winning their competition.
Unlike a Hollywood production though, this story is not destined to end with them winning everything (this is no Pitch Perfect). The girls are going back to their hum drum lives after this and they will also have to deal with the realities that a night of debauchery can reveal.
So despite the fact that this play is laugh out loud funny, by the end, it’s not really a comedy. Thanks, Scotland.
For a preview of the play, check out the video
I Just Read About That... 