Tis a Pity She Was a Whore Review Bowie
'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore (Bowie home demo, unmarried).
'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore (Blackstar remake).
A human being of belongings and standing, believing his new wife virtuous, is deceived. She grows ill, though the clinic called, the x-ray's fine—she just ate some bad melons. Yet the truth's presently inescapable: she's pregnant, by another man. Worse, past her blood brother. I know you accept a son, her married man says. O folly! I'm such a fool: you went with that clown.
He's persuaded to forgive her, but plans revenge. In a season of criminal offence, none demand atone. Instead, the blood brother stabs her to expiry, skewers his sis'due south heart on his dagger, murders her hubby, and then at last is dispatched by thugs. A cardinal gets the closing lines:
The concluding words of John Ford's 1633 play are its title, and they likewise championship David Bowie's 2014 single, in which Bowie potted Ford's revenge tragedy into a film noir setting. Incestuous, doomed Annabella becomes Sue in the weeds.
Wait, no, Bowie'southward single is chosen "Sue." Turn the disc over. There, the B-side has Ford'southward title.
Just if "Sue" is "'Tis Pity She'due south a Whore" under an assumed proper noun, then what's this song?
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It's Sun in the late Seventies. In downtown Santa Cruz, the Pacific Garden Mall, "a playland of urban design," winds forth Pacific Street. A few blocks e is the San Lorenzo River; a half hour's walk brings you the ocean. A jazz band plays in forepart of the Cooper House, a vitrify-brick old grandeur that was born a courthouse and now holds shops, confined, and restaurants. It'south the maypole around which downtown dances, as a Santa Cruz announcer wrote.
The band's called Warmth, fitting for an outfit that carries shoppers and idlers through the Californian afternoons. The bandleader hops from Wurlitzer to piano to marimba; the necktie-dye-clad saxophonist uses his solos to tear off into space, with neat skronks, broils, and bleats. They play Cal Tjader, some Cannonball Adderley. As the afternoon ebbs, the tempo picks upwardly. "Experience Like Making Love" and "Mustang Sally," organ notes bouncing off the Cooper House walls. Couples tipsy from white wine over lunch get up to dance. Only offstage, sitting in a chair, is a boy of x or 12, watching his father'south band.
Donny McCaslin, born in 1966, is the work of postwar American systems: a well-funded public schoolhouse with a acme-notch jazz band; a community college with professional jazz instructors; a municipal infrastructure that supported concerts past Warmth, and a community centre to host concerts and seminars. "It was a place and fourth dimension where all of these elements were together in identify and I could just plug myself into them," McCaslin said recently. Today, many are gone. His loftier school jazz program "is nowhere near what it was…budget cuts have decimated [it]," though the music program of Cabrillo Community Higher, where he took courses as a teenager, is somewhat intact. The Cooper House and the original Pacific Garden Mall are not, as they were demolished after a 1989 earthquake.
When McCaslin was 12, he made an "impulsive conclusion to switch out of a class in junior high into beginner's orchestra," mainly considering a friend was in the latter. Asked what he wanted to play, McCaslin chose tenor saxophone, in part considering he was in awe of Warmth's bohemian saxophonist, Wesley Braxton ("I remember looking into the bong of his saxophone and there was like a pool of condensation and a cigarette butt floating in it").
Throughout his teenage years, McCaslin was steeped in jazz. He was lucky in his teachers: his professional musician father, and his ring managing director, whose friendship with a Duke Ellington trumpeter meant that a pupil band had a book of Ellington charts. In location, too. Santa Cruz was a stop for jazz musicians heading from LA to San Francisco, then on any given Monday night at the Kuumbwa Jazz Eye, he could see the likes of Elvin Jones.
He was a pro past higher (Berklee, class of '88), playing in Gary Burton'southward band before graduating. Moving to New York, McCaslin did stints with the Gil Evans Project, Steps Ahead, Danilo Perez, the Maria Schneider Orchestra. He found that he thrived in groups. "It would exist harder for me to live in a place where I was isolated and alone, and it was up to me in terms of my musical evolution."
A John Coltrane fanatic at Berklee, McCaslin'south core influences would shift to Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter. He loved that Rollins one time called himself a "blue-neckband improviser," and "the compositional nature of [Shorter'south] improvising." With Perez, he developed his rhythms ("I grew up when jazz didactics for sax players was focused on…chord scales and chromatic substitutions, and in that location wasn't much emphasis on fourth dimension and rhythmic variation"). From Schneider, he learned how to deploy soloists, to loosen structure—his solo on her "BulerÃa, Soleá y Rumba" is i of his first definitive moments on record.
McCaslin stands at half-dozen′ 3″, a neat presence on stage, at times bowing to the ground as if gravity's bent on challenge his saxophone, while his lungs seem as large as mainsails. In 2007 Nate Chinen wrote of McCaslin "unfurling intricate lines as if they were streamers, in neat gusts of exhalation." A melodically dedicated improviser, he works in volume and tone, with a taste for long crescendos, slowly-accumulating builds that splinter into rapid-fire sprays of notes.
His albums mark his progress. Soar (2006) is McCaslin working through immersions in Latin music, nether the sway of tango vocalist Roberto Goyeneche ("the mode he sings, half of the time he's talking, and it's really over the bar line, information technology's got this real vibe"). The aptly-named Declaration (2009) was one grand solo later on another, like a man wheeling Cadillac models off a manufacturing plant floor, from the title track through "M" and "Rock Me."
At the turn of the decade, McCaslin started assembling his electric current quartet. Perpetual Motion (2010), his first anthology with bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Marking Guiliana, was also the start of electronica as a compositional influence, at the urging of his producer/mentor David Binney (by 2014, McCaslin was tackling Aphex Twin'due south "54 Cymru Beats"). It was also McCaslin looking dorsum to afternoons at the Pacific Garden Mall, cutting jazz fusion pieces similar "LZCM" (i.e., "Led Zeppelin Christian McBride"), "Impossible Car" and "Memphis Redux" (inspired past "Mercy Mercy Mercy," a Warmth favorite).
By 2012, when Jason Lindner had joined on keyboards, the McCaslin Quartet settled into its electric current form. With Guiliana, McCaslin had a drummer who could groove but likewise could replicate the rigor of electronic percussion, from the uncanny precision of his beats to how he varied the pitch of his snare hits via sleight-of-hand like placing a bottom-hat cymbal on the snare head. In Lefebvre, he had a road-seasoned, genial monster of a player who got thunderclaps from his pedals. And Lindner could glide from providing washes of synthesizer to the sudden clarity of a piano passage to a Wurlitzer groove that, over again, called back to McCaslin's begetter vamping on "Mustang Sally" for mall dancers.
Casting For Gravity was a first statement of purpose. "Says Who" has McCaslin alternating types of solos: melodically expansive ones based off a lopsided theme, minimalist ones in which he keeps to a handful of notes while his rhythm section spins around him like bumper cars. Its pb-off runway got its title from Guiliana's comment that one live performance had been so hot that information technology felt similar "stadium jazz."
Instead of Giants Stadium, the McCaslin Quartet had 55 Bar, a sometime speakeasy that'southward been on Christopher Street in New York since the Cherry Scare. Cecil Taylor would hang out by the ice machine, talking about Coltrane and Martha Graham; Norah Jones was there in her first years, Jaco Pastorius in his concluding. By the early 2010s, it had become "a clubhouse of sorts for players in McCaslin'south circumvolve."
On 1 June 2014, the Quartet was booked at the 55. On his web page, Lefebvre noted it as a "gig earlier we record Donny'south new record." It wasn't a flawless operation, as Lefebvre recalled struggling with his pedals at times ("the outlets there are janky"). During a interruption, a waitress came by to say there was a guy at 1 table "who looks like an old David Bowie."
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McCaslin, though not his band, knew to look Bowie in the room. The latter was composing "Sue" with Schneider at the time, and she'd recommended he check out the McCaslin Quartet for a few songs on his side by side album (shortly enough, McCaslin and Guiliana would exist in rehearsals for the "Sue" recording). Bowie and McCaslin didn't meet that night, only a twenty-four hour period or so afterward, Bowie sent him an email.
And the first song Bowie sent McCaslin, non long later on they started emailing, was a demo he'd recorded at his apartment, a song inspired by what he'd heard at 55 Bar that night."I sat there in stunned silence for a while," McCaslin said, recalling starting time hearing it. Although Bowie was in the studio in summer 2014 to record full demos with Tony Visconti, Zachary Alford and Jack Spann, the B-side of "Sue," issued that November, was Bowie alone: the same abode demo he'd sent McCaslin, full of keyboard presets and crackling with cheap distortion."The B-side was a demo. It was but kickass," Visconti said. "His production skills take gone up v,000%."
He'd been recording home demos since his teens. His quondam manager, Kenneth Pitt, recalled one chamber studio set-up for which Bowie piled dissimilar-sized stacks of books to serve as tom and kick drums. There were a slew of tapes from those years, most of which were washed for his publisher (to no surprise, the bulk of bootlegged "lost" Bowie compositions hail from this catamenia—the tapes circulated among London song-pluggers).
Bowie's demos are his shadow songbook. What exercise they sound like? Are they fresher, wilder, more strange than their finished takes? You could project anything onto them, brand them the "real" versions of disappointing album cuts. The early "Scary Monsters" that Bowie made for Iggy Pop in LA, ca. 1975. Whatever the first version of "Bring Me the Disco King" was. His producers were struck by the tapes, from Nile Rodgers ("I said 'wow, that's the way 'Cat People' goes?'" Rodgers recalled of hearing the original demo) to Hugh Padgham, who described the legendary "soul" demos for This evening equally being livelier and better than some released tracks.
Sometimes he'd dispense with the crutch of pre-recording songs—his late Seventies and mid-Nineties come to mind, when worked without a cyberspace in the studio. But by his last years, he'd essentially get a home-studio indie musician—the McCaslin Quartet recalled each demo being a miniature operation, full of surprising sounds, with bass and drumlines intricate enough that the players oft based their performances on them. "The demos he sent u.s.a. were basics: so off and quirky and awesome," Lefebvre said.
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Having gone through McCaslin's catalogue in preparation for working with him (Lefebvre: "commonly information technology's the other way around—you research the guy who hired you "), Bowie focused on 2 pieces from Casting For Gravity. I was McCaslin's take on Boards of Canada's "Alpha and Omega," in which a multi-tracked McCaslin played a looped, phased melodic theme over variations driven by pulsate and bass. The other was "Praia Grande," which built to a maximalist McCaslin solo total of great bass note waggles, riding a wave of drums (lots of splash and tom fills), Lindner'southward synth and Binney'due south vocals.
In the demo of "'Tis a Pity," the song's development is driven past Bowie's saxophone and piano lines, which pivot off a relatively-unchanging rhythmic base of operations. "Compositionally the bass is more arhythmic and less of a harmonic office," Lindner said. "Information technology remains pretty much the same through the harmonic changes, with a couple of notes shifting to complement the progression." ("That'southward one where I was using a lot of octave pedal," Lefebvre added.)
The same was true for the drum pattern. "The groove on the demo was a driving one-bar loop," Guiliana said. "The challenge was to play this repetitive office but stay in the moment and proceed pushing the intensity." In overdubs, Guiliana played a Roland SPD-SX "full of 808 sounds," almost all of which were kept in the last mix (due east.thousand. the flare-up against Bowie'south "'tis my fate" at three:33).
Another starting signal was likely Ix Inch Nails' "Mr. Self Destruct," which like "'Tis a Pity," begins with a sonic barrage (taken from THX-1138) and whose timbre is similar. It's possible Bowie was working out how to create a Steve Reich-esque sense of phasing, dispatch and heightening, and as he had the Nineties on his heed (see time to come entries), "Mr. Self Destruct" before long emerged equally a rock-vanquish-driven template he could utilise. (A commenter in 2015 suggested all the same another possible ancestor: the soundtrack of the 2005 film Lemming, which also has lots of acceleration and odd timings).
There's a key instability in "'Tis a Compassion," which spends much of its span shading between F major and F minor, from its intro and solo sections (Fm-Bb-F) to the coda, where Bowie'due south waves of backing vocals shift from singing A-apartment to A major notes, in plow coloring the underlying F chord from major to minor and dorsum again.
But the greatest destabilizer is Bowie's accelerando–rallentando saxophone, moving in and out of phase with a plinking keyboard line. The feeling is of a song laboring to gather itself, with the saxophone sounding like a locomotive slowly taking on steam until, when Bowie starts singing, the saxophone so slows in tempo, as if out of jiff, but to build upward again. This struggle continues throughout the song—Bowie's saxophone disregards whatever function was planned for information technology to move in its own way, often keeping on the same note as if out of spite, taking an occasional cue from the vocal but more a corrosive amanuensis that winds up ruling the rail.
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Indulge withal some other theory. David Bowie sits downwardly to write a song based on John Ford'south 'Tis Pity She Was a Whore, turns the Annabella graphic symbol into "Sue," winds up with a song called "Sue." But he yet likes Ford's title (fifty-fifty if he keeps putting an "a" before Compassion) and wants to utilize it. Having transferred Ford'due south "plot" into "Sue," he has an empty phase where in one case there was a play. A scratch-space to populate.
You could say Ford's lustful and murderous players are notwithstanding here, hidden behind screens and made absurd. But the 2nd line, 'hold your mad hands!' I cried," in quotations on the lyric sheet, is an apparent reference to Robert Southey'south Sonnet I (1797), which begins a sequence of poems condemning the slave trade, and whose opening lines are:
This led Nicholas Pegg, in his newest revision, to become off on an interpretative spree that includes Toni Morrison'south Dearest (I won't spoil information technology—you should go the book). "'Tis a Compassion" is a hub around which the grandest, about bizarre interpretations tin wheel. Like the now-demolished Cooper House in Santa Cruz, it's a maypole.
There's also the inevitable biographical reading. Bowie, manifestly having suffered multiple eye attacks in the 2000s, faced worse medical news. Hence the references to disease and theft, to the thought that life is no longer skirmishes but has become a final, consuming battle that the singer knows he'll lose in fourth dimension.
And and so, Bowie's just public statement on the song: "If Vorticists wrote Rock Music, it might have sounded like this." The Vorticists, U.k.'s answer group to the Futurists, had been on his mind for a while—they're creeping effectually The Next Twenty-four hours and the Vorticist Blast is listed in his Top 100 Books.
Sitting in the crowded 55 Bar that night in New York, watching a jazz band smash abroad on stage, his brain existence its usual warehouse, did Bowie flash on a parallel? The Cavern of the Golden Dogie, the notorious Vorticist cabaret of the early on 1910s, combination gay bar and avant-garde hobnobbing gallery. A low-ceilinged club in the basement of a cloth manufacturer, its walls adorned with Ballet Russe murals and Wyndham Lewis' stencils.
Calling up wild mad nights in London in the early on 1910s, comparing them with a crowd of polite immature jazz enthusiasts gathered that night in New York in the last years of the Obama Administration. The Vorticists had demanded the future, wanted a world of dynamism, machines, color and dissonance, and they got the war instead, the war that began the summer that the Cave of the Gilded Calf went bankrupt. The war that killed several Vorticists and sent Wyndham Lewis to the Western Front, on patrol for the Royal Arms, spying on German language positions from forward ascertainment posts, calling in artillery strikes.
We say we desire the future, just when information technology comes, it's always the war.
The Cavern of the Golden Calf was located at ix Heddon Street, London. Its sometime building is in the groundwork of the embrace photo of The Ascension and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, with Bowie posed right up the street.
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Making a "proper" version of "'Tis a Pity" for Blackstar was a top lodge of business—it was one of the first tracks taped for the album, on five Jan 2015. "When we got together that offset week, David said he wanted to re-record [it]," McCaslin said. "We were playing difficult and going for it. That just happened in like ten minutes. That might've been the first have."
The Blackstar "Pity" opens with two sharp intakes of jiff, like a man readying himself to walk up another flying of stairs. Or, to be fair, similar someone snorting coke.
The demo vocal is quieter, its laments humbler; it's a man making strange asides in a corner of the room, trying to find an angle into the vocal, which is rolling along without any need of him. The Blackstar singer is more gregarious: he has an audience. Man, she punched me like a dude, he begins in a conspiratorial tone, trying to cadge a beverage from a stranger in a bar. He rubs his cheek in wincing recollection. My curse, I suppose, in a tootling phrase; his four-note closing emphases—that-was-pa-trol—broken with a piping lift up an octave to a high F on "waaaaar."
He keeps on, his muddled tale growing murkier (maybe he got that drink), cracking the hard "ks" of "kept my cock" similar walnuts, oddly dramatizing her "rattling speed" by slowing his notes down, crowning "whore" by making it his new octave-jump. Each time he repeats the championship phrase, he grows more cool until, in the last go-circular, his voice seems to have crawled into his pocket: teeshapeetysheeewarseurhoooor.
The other neat change lies in how the saxophone's deployed. On the demo, it's always in that location in the verses, essentially becoming the atomic number 82 vocal, the main colour in a whirlwind of noise. On Blackstar, with McCaslin at present taking the part and breaking it in ii (he did sax overdubs months after the initial take), its employ is more precise and dramatic. In the first poetry, McCaslin only enters with a slow dancing phrase after "my expletive"; in the third, he arrives with some Albert Ayler-esque trumpeting phrases. His multiple sax tracks accept on much of the work of the piano on the demo, making an upspeed-downshift duet of stereo-scoped saxophones.
Every bit McCaslin spirals outward into the coda, vehement into notes and discarding them, David Bowie breaks character. A whoo! as if he's startled past something, so two shouts—goddamn, this is happening —and a last yell like a human being coming off a roller-coaster loop. Standing in the studio, facing this miraculous band he'd found seemingly from out of nowhere, stepping back to come across what'south in front of him.
It's the Vorticists' "separating, ungregarious British grin." Information technology'southward Jacobean incest-murder noir, or God's judgment on slave traders or but whatever strange jokes floated through his head on the twenty-four hours he sat in his flat and started taping his demo. A ridiculous bloody history of this cleaved world is within "'Tis a Compassion She'southward a Whore," a latter-life masterpiece, with no top and no bottom.
Recorded: (demo, B-side) ca. June 2014, Bowie'due south home studio, Lafayette St., NYC; (album) (backing tracks) 5 January 2015, Magic Shop; (McCaslin overdubs) ca. March-April 2015, Human Worldwide; (vocals) 20, 22 April 2015, Human being Worldwide. Released: (demo) 17 November 2014, B-side of "Sue"; (album) 8 January 2016, Blackstar.
Sources: Quotes on Pacific Garden Mall from the Santa Cruz Sentinel: Wallace Bain, 3 Oct 2009 ("urban pattern") & Jason Hoppin, 14 October 2014 ("maypole"). McCaslin bio: primarily from David Adler, Jazztimes, xiii June 2011, and DM'south interview with Neon Jazz, 12 February 2016. Also Nate Chinen, NYT, fourteen June 2007; Jason Crane, All Well-nigh Jazz, 8 September 2008. Other quotes from Jazztimes (Lindner), Modern Drummer (Guiliana), No Treble, Pedals & Furnishings (Lefebvre), Mojo (Visconti, McCaslin), Uncut (McCaslin), New Yorker Radio Hour (McCaslin). Insights on limerick: Alex Reed; "Crayon to Crayon." Momus, in 2014, brought upwards the Cave of the Golden Calf; his album The Ultraconformist claims to have been recorded on wax cylinders at the order in 1910.
Photos/fine art: Annie McDuffie, 'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore, 2015; panel from Hawkeye No. 9, 2013 (Matt Fraction/David Aja; proffer of Fraction); Warmth at the Cooper House, ca. 1970s; Santa Cruz Sentinel, 31 March 1989; Nadja van Massow, "Donny McCaslin, Jazz Baltica," thirty June 2007; McCaslin & ring at 55 Bar, 2015; Lydia Wilson as Annabella, 'Tis Compassion.., Barbican, 2012; Wyndham Lewis, Cave of Gilded Dogie brochure, 1912; mash-up of Cave of Golden Calf, 1912, & 55 Bar, 2015. All text breaks from Blast No. 1 (1914), the 1915 D.C. Heath & Co. edition of Ford'southward 'Tis Pity She's a Whore or the NYT, 9 August 1914.
Source: https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2017/02/16/tis-a-pity-she-was-a-whore/
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