Thursday, October 31, 2002 #7 The Tiger Lillies, "Send in the Clowns" I check out their website and my heart bleeds for them. Doomed, possibly forever, to the mandatory wackiness of the cult band, they hammer out jokes about sheepfucking, songs about the European demimonde, cabaret and gyspies, all of whom are dangerous and sexy, but also dead, hence not dangerous and sexy at all. And hey! Look! They've got accordians! I have no patience for Tom Waits when he attempts an Americanized version of schtick like this (which is most of the time), but at least Waits doesn't sound like grandma. Martyn Jacques sings the way Dame Edna Everage would if she was being dead serious: high-pitched and unstable, with little crinkles around the edges that in MP3 format sounds ungodly shrill. That's the hook, both of song and of band. Their website says Martyn Jacques "trained himself as an opera singer with a castrati style voice," adding "whilst living alone above a strip joint in Soho for seven years." Mister Jock-wheeze, you so CRA-ZAY! Aiming for the pathos of frailty, he hobbles his lines, but with a very rote technique. He hesitates before hitting the last word, or slurs it, much the same way crappy new wave singers used to imply menace by punctuating their lines with...UUUPspeak. "I thought that you'd want what I want" turns into "I thought you wanted what I [breath] wanted" and "no one is there" becomes "no one is...there." Another pause that does not refresh: at fifty-five seconds in, an audible breath of air, then a moment of silence before he lets out a line little shriller than usual. This is either a lapse of breath control, or a moment of irritation the singer doesn't want to send out. Irritation at what? Well, it could be many things, but obviously I'm hoping that it means that he's just as irritated as I am at the transparent hokum he and his band are peddling, because I WANT THIS FUCKING BAND OUT OF MY LIFE RIGHT NOW! GOD! (link)

Monday, October 28, 2002 #6 Zamfir, "Send in the Clowns" You'd be suprised how nicely it starts off. The orchestration is so transparent, low and slow. Then you realize it's modest because someone decided nothing should get in the way of the fucking panpipe, which inhabits the same sonic space as a wounded puppy puffing on a jug. Or a jug-puffing, wounded puppy getting maudlin about clowns. (link)

Sunday, October 27, 2002 #5 Benny Goodman, "Send in the Clowns" Damn! At 2:26, this is short! In comparison, at 3:28, the original cast recording version is a whole minute longer; Judy Collins' is 4:05, Barbara Streisand's (which includes a whole extra verse) is 4:42, and Grace Jones' disco thing is 7:35. The tempo's about the same as the more canonical versions because Goodman disposes of the intro and one whole verse. Now while it feels complete -- or, more accurately, it doesn't feel incomplete -- and there's nothing wrong with it, really, but...I'm left wondering why he even bothered. It's so very small, just clarinet and piano (maybe a bass somewhere in there as well). It's filler. Classy filler, but filler. It communicates nothing more than the fact that he does an unembarrasing version of "Send in the Clowns." And maybe that, yeah, he was down with the new sound, that new, introspective Broadway much the same way he (briefly!) went bop and covered "Rocky Raccoon" at Carnegie Hall in 1978. I know little of jazz or Goodman, but he always struck me as a fundementally decent cat with no firsthand experience of the narcissicist modernism that unites the boppers and the Beatles and Sondheim. So it seems mildly weird that he'd cover this. Lord knows what the swing purists thought. (link)