Adon Olam (אֲדוֹן עוֹלָם; “Eternal Master/Sovereign Who Reigns Supreme”) from traditional Jewish liturgy. It is usually attributed to Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-1058, the Golden Age of La Convivencia) but the actual pronunciation of the words points to a much earlier origin. The music in the video below is to the tune of “Happy” written by Pharrell Williams.
This joyful rendition provides an uplift at a time when memorial services are not possible amidst the dying from Covid-19. Tho I am secular now, it still spirits me to my youth when we were made to recite a version of the last stanza before bedtime: Into his hand I commit my spirit when I sleep and I awake and with my spirit, my body, The Lord is with me, I will not fear.
Many will have encountered Adon Olam in Ashkenazi services during Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Kol Nidre. When I lived in London it was, for me, a highlight of Sephardim services sung antiphonally to an old Spanish melody.
Adon Olam may also be read in a room of the dying and in some synagogues as a means of relaying a death in the community (spoken without the musical aid of a cantor.)
Given its ready universality and application throughout the centuries, many have created their own tune to accompany Adon Olam. In 1976 Uzi Hitman wrote what has become a quite popular secular version but the most common melody is probably the one attributed to Russian cantor Eliezar Mordecai ben Yitschak Gerovitsch (1844-1914). Dudu Fisher does a nice job with this as does the singer Fortuna. The group Sabbathsong, below, performs the tune with verve and an unbeatable clarinet!
My rockin’ friends may laugh and poke fun accusing me of
loving schmaltz with this post (“On the
day you were born the angels made a dream come true.”) but I don’t care
– and neither will those of you who listen to the music on this CD and the
other music listed, below.
In 2003 Ronald Isley and Burt Bachrach teamed for the album Here I Am, a collection of Bachrach’s (mostly) 1960s tunes with Bachrach on piano led by Isley’s poignant, signature falsetto. Both Ronald Isley (Cincinnati, May 21, 1941) and Burt Freeman Bacharach (Kansas City, May 12, 1928) are American mid-westerners (yeh!)
Album: Here I Am: Isley Presents Bachrach.
Artists: Ron Isley & Burt Bachrach (with many others in the orchestra)
Like most musicians who people believe pop out of nowhere,
both Isley and Bachrach had a lot of road behind them when they entered mainstream
consciousness. Bachrach studied with famed Darius Milhaud and was a music
director for Marlene Dietrich from the mid-to-late 1950s to the early 1960s, touring
worldwide and writing songs. When he had an office at the famed Brill Building
in New York City he met the lyricist Hal David. Together they wrote many of the
greatest popular songs of the 1960s and 1970s, performed to perfection by
Dionne Warwick, one of the best selling female vocalist of all time, after
Aretha. (And, oh… we all laughed but Warwick made US$3 million from plugging
the Psychic Friends Network on late night TV for 7 years!) The Brill is still
there and worth a visit if you’ve not passed by. It was home to music
publishers and song-smiths including Bobby Darin, Gerry Goffin and Carole King,
Barry Mann, Gene Pitney, Johnny Mercer, Laura Nyro, Neil Diamond, Billy Rose,
Neil Sadaka and others who worked in small offices with upright pianos
(according to my father.)
“Breaking up is so hard to do”
Ron Isley and brothers (variously O’Kelly, Ernie, Marvin,
Rudolph) formed The Isley Brothers, an R&B group nonpareil. They made a hit
of ‘Twist and Shout’ in 1962, beating the Beatles to the line (1963).
If you are a mid-period baby boomer you most certainly remember the 1971 album ‘Givin’ It Back’ featuring the songs ‘Ohio/Machine Gun’ (by Neil Young /Jimi Hendrix), ‘Fire and Rain’ (James Taylor), ‘Lay Lady Lay’ (Bob Dylan), ‘Spill the Wine’ (Miller, Scott and 5 others) and ‘Love the One You’re With’ (Stephen Stills). The recently deceased Bill Withers played guitar on that album!
Then in 1973 they released the album ‘3+3’ (‘1001 Albums You Must
Hear Before You Die’) with ‘That Lady’ (Isley Bros.), ‘Don’t Let me Be
Lonely Tonight’ (James Taylor), and more.
When I was in grad school in London the parties the Africans threw were the most fun (check out Osibisa, the first ‘World Music’ group) but for atmosphere and romance one could pull the Isley Brothers in for tactical support. If you could not keep company for the dreary autumn nights with the assistance of the Isley Brothers you were beyond helping!
‘Be mine tonight, let this be just the start
of so many nights like this… then
seal it with a kiss.’
But I digress.
The CD ‘Here I Am’ with
Bachrach will touch a chord with those of us who survived Vietnam, the war of
our generation, and the drug- and alcohol-fueled gatherings that took so many
of our peers. It is like listening with new (mature) ears.
Full orchestration is not always successful on pop and jazz
recordings, think 1955’s ‘Clifford Brown
with Strings’ with Brown, Richie Powell, George Morrow and Max Roach
– reviewed as “lush settings by some and muzak by others”. However, ‘Here I Am: Isley Presents Bachrach” is, to me, simply gorgeous; Bachrach
did not lose his touch with his 1960s work with Warwick. Isley’s
interpretations drop his ‘Mr. Biggs’ persona (much in evidence in his
collaborations with R. Kelly) and meld tenderness, love, poignant loss,
humility and romance all in one grand slow-motion sweep that will steam the
bedroom windows.
Listening to ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ we are no longer in B.J. Thomas territory riding that bicycle with Katherin Ross in 1969’s ‘Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid’ (the American Film Institute’s 73rd-greatest American film on its “100 Years…100 Movies”, 10th Anniversary Edition and 7th greatest Western (2008). Jack Lemmon, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen were all offered the role of Sundance by the by!)
(Ah… another recent loss: illustrator Mort Drucker (1929 – April 9, 2020) who drew movie parodies for MAD Magazine from 1956 to 2008 and did the pics for MAD Magazine’s ‘Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid’, Issue No. 136, July 1970.)
For the more visual among you, there was a PBS Special of these performances, too, that I have not seen.
Listen to this CD and you will be booking a site for a post Covid-19 renewal of your wedding vows!
P.S. For a great read on the relationship between the Isley family and Jimi Hendrix see: “Ernie Isley remembers Jimi Hendrix”. If I recall correctly, The Seattle Times article omits to report that the Isleys bought Jimi a new white Strat because they thought his (which was in hock, sans strings, at a pawn shop) was too tatty for their stage shows.
P.P.S. Dionne Warwick’s extended family is chock-a-block full of the musically and athletically talented. Blood relatives include Dee Dee Warwick, Cissy Houston, Whitney Houston, Gary Garland, Bobbi Kristina Brown and Leontyne Price.
In my post about The
Aeneid last week I did not include a photo of the actual shelves with books
from early authors (Aeneid, Gilgamesh, Dante’s Inferno, The Iliad, etc.)
because I had already included two overall images and I thought those enough.
Below is the photo I took but did not use.
Books of the classics and Elmore Leonard
One of the reasons, aside from having already included two pics
for my Aeneid post, was that the books of Elmore Leonard intrude onto these
shelves. This is the inevitable result of owning more books than shelves – tho
it is certainly a lesser evil than books stacked and strewn around the house
higgledy-piggledy.
The volumes of Leonard sit below those of Dick Francis, Carl Hiaasen, Robert Parker and Walter Mosley in the vertical stack of this shelf unit. It is the case with my guilty pleasure: mystery novels. Like the shelves with William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas McGuane, V.S. & Shiva Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie and a few others whose work I collect, most of the books are autographed to me. Leonard had a long career and began by writing Westerns including Three-Ten to Yuma (3:10 to Yuma). I cannot recollect another writer who had as many of his novels turned into movies, sometimes twice!
For the smart-assed among you, the early writers grouping
(‘early’ as in Herodotus) does not contain signed books (well, aside from a few
modern editors of these works). Likewise my collections of anthropology and
evolution are bereft of signatures except for a few letters.
Getting authors to autograph one’s books or a sheet of paper is an interesting custom. I used to have a nice little letter from Darwin’s son, Francis, answering a fan who wanted Darwin’s signature. Francis lamented he had already given away all those he had inherited. I sold the letter to the great scientist, writer and collector Stephen Jay Gould.
The act of collecting has been the subject of those writing both fiction and non-fiction; Sigmund Freud tackled the subject. He believed it sprang from the conflict of unresolved toilet training. (What a shit that shrink was, altho he did collect antiquities.) Balzac, John Fowles and Bruce Chatwin covered the conflict zone. Mozart continues to entertain us with his opera Don Giovanni and collecting of a different sort: sexual conquest. The psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger in his engaging work Unruly Passion was onto something and he ought to have known: he collected African art as a youth but lost everything to the Germans in WWII, coming to America with $100 and a mask he sold to Rockefeller. He was an example of people who cannot be held down and his practice came to include patients like Danny Kaye, Laurence Olivier, James Dean and Marlon Brando. Muensterberger maintained a correspondence with many of the great names of the century: Thomas Mann, Mary Wigman, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, Constantin Brancusi, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein and others.
The list of those exploring the psyche of collecting goes on and on but I love John Steinbeck’s simple explanation: “I guess the truth is that I simply like junk.” Which brings up hoarding – but that is another foible altogether.
One of the favorite items on my shelves is this sheet of
text sent to me by Elmore Leonard, ‘Rules
to write by’. He originally published it in The New York Times. It is a hoot to read and he gave it to me as a Thank
You for showing him a published bibliography of his works that he did not know
about – or authorize.
of the favorite items on my shelves is this sheet of text sent to me by Elmore Leonard, ‘Rules to write by’. He originally published it in The New York Times. It is a hoot to read and he gave it to me as a Thank You for showing him a published bibliography of his works that he did not know about – or authorize.One of the favorite items on my shelves is this sheet of
text sent to me by Elmore Leonard, ‘Rules
to write by’. He originally published it in The New York Times. It is a hoot to read and he gave it to me as a Thank
You for showing him a published bibliography of his works that he did not know
about – or authorize.
Elmore Leonard Advice On Writing
I have had many spectacular books, letters, manuscripts and signatures through the years. I am looking for a great photograph to go with the the signature, below. It is Teddy Roosevelt’s and is special because, prior to his presidency, The White House was called The Executive Mansion. Here he has signed a ‘White House’ card!
The Aeneid is the story of how a refugee from beaten and destroyed ancient Troy preserved his people, via divine authority, by founding Rome, with his descendants going on to establish an empire.
In 19BC the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro left Greece, where he had been conducting research for The Aeneid, to return to his home in Rome. He shipped out on a vessel with the Emperor Augustus, as one does. They stopped at Megara where Virgil contracted fever (or heatstroke) and he died as the ship docked in the southern Italian trading port of Brundisium. Among his last thoughts was his dissatisfaction with a 10-year long writing project, this book, The Aeneid. Rather than let an unfinished work see the light of day, he asked his executors to burn the manuscript. Augustus, who knew something of the book as Virgil had read him three chapters, stepped in and ordered the work to be published ‘as is’.
The Aeneidis an acknowledged cornerstone of Western literature and by two centuries after his death was a prerequisite in Latin education, which is to say, any western education above the rudimentary. Even in the 19th century it was often a requirement of students to memorize the whole of it! Its 9,896 lines have been printed in hundreds of editions in both its original Latin dactylic hexameter and in poetic and prose translation. Its opening line was even found in excavation as graffiti in Pompeii: Arma virumque cano, “Of arms and a man I sing.”
In 1680 Henry Purcell published the music for one of my favorite operas, Dido and Aeneas with Nahum Tate writing the libretto. (Tate is today mostly remembered, when he is remembered art all, for rewriting Shakespeare’s plays so that every scene would be “full of respect to Majesty and the dignity of courts”. Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same!) I have many versions of The Aeneid shelved in several libraries around the house. My current favorite is the translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1983). I own four copies of this translation: one (trade paperback) in the sunroom library, one (mass market paper) in the research area for my work on wine in life and literature and two in the bedroom (first edition hardcover and a trade paper to share my enthusiasm by lending to friends.) Hmmm…. maybe this is why I have more than 5,000 books!
Virgil was a talented writer and superb stylist who cleverly knew his way around alliteration, onomatopoeia and other wordplay. His poetic lines are of a grand and stately solemn nature, very foreign to our modern ears attuned as we are to formulations of unstructured free-style verse and sentences. His goal in The Aeneid was to create a work that would glorify Rome and rival Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. There are twelve books (what we might call chapters) in The Aeneid, written using the same syllabic and metrical line as used by Homer. The first six chapters play on the Odyssey and the last six the war and battles in the Iliad.
Though a great work, The Aeneid has not been free of issues. Yes, there are literary ones (it is a bear to translate as it is composed in what the Germans call kunstsprache, an artificial or invented artful language; I never truly mastered it in my school Latin.)
But, the problems I address here are political in nature. The work was ‘co-opted’ right from the beginning by Augustus. The emperor is kindly mentioned by name in scenes where Aeneas is gifted sight into the future when he enters the Underworld to visit his late father, Anchises. Augustus’ reign came after decades of instability (the Roman Civil Wars) following Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon in 49BC, taking his legions into Rome and eventually becoming Dictator. Augustus was seen by many as savior and last hope of the Roman people for peace after the civil turmoil. Likewise it has been used through the centuries as a support for the aggrandizing and subjugating nature of colonization, a classical ‘white man’s burden’ made flesh.
But, to be fair, The Aeneid has also been interpreted as an anti-war poem and it is this tack I take. The language and potent imagery is second to none – cinematic even. The battle scenes do not require a very active imagination to visualize. It is sad that Virgil is no longer on the required reading list of our schools. It still has a lot to teach us about myriad human qualities like devotion, piety, hubris, rage, fate, courage and love in all its incarnations. Stop in and borrow a copy or buy your own if you are unfamiliar with the joy of reading this fine story.
Below, a section from “The World Below”, where Aeneas, led by the Sibyl, travels to the Underworld to see his father. She is carrying, under her dress, their entry ticket: the golden bough. It had been torn off a tree by Aeneas who was foretold it was needed as a presentation to Charon to get him to ferry them across Cocytus, the Stygian river leading to Hades. At the other side of the river there is another obstacle, the huge three-headed dog, Cerberus, but he enters the picture some lines later.
(If the words ‘golden bough’ seem familiar look up J.M.W. Turner’s painting of the same name and, also, the early anthropologist Sir James George Frazier whose work greatly influenced a generation, including Freud and Jung; Aleister Crowley; T.S. Elliot and William Carlos Williams; Hemingway, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Yeats; and the man who founded anthropology ‘off the verandah’, the founder of my university’s department, Bronislaw Malinowski, who was prompted to lay out the first statement of the aims of ethnography in his ground-breaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Though now superseded in scholarship, for many years The Golden Bough exerted a profound influence upon literature, anthropology and intellectual thinking.)
Selection, below, courtesy of Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, NY. The Aeneid Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Book VI, lines 331-402. Copyright 1980, 1982, 1983.
Bedroom Library
Book VI, “The World Below”, lines 331-402
The cavern was profound, wide-mouthed and huge,
Rough underfoot, defended by dark pool
And gloomy forest. Overhead, flying
things
Could never safely take their way, such
deathly
Exhalations rose from the black gorge
Into the dome of heaven. …
“Away,
away,”
The Sibyl cried, “All those unblest, away!”
Depart from the grove! But you, Aeneas,
Enter the path here, and unsheathe your
sword.
There’s need of gall and resolution now.”
She flung herself wildly into the cave mouth,
Leading, and he strode boldly at her heels.
Gods who rule the ghosts; all silent
shades;
And Chaos and infernal Fiery Stream,
And regions of wide night without a
sound,
May it be right to tell of what I have
heard,
May it be right, and fitting, by your
will,
That I describe the deep world sunk in
darkness
Under the earth.
Now
dim to one another
In desolate night they walked on through
the gloom,
Through Dis’s homes all void, and empty
realms,
As one goes through a wood by a faint moon’s
Treacherous light, when Jupiter veils
the sky
And black night blots the colors of the world.
Before the entrance, in the jaws of Orcus,
Grief and avenging Cares have made
their beds,
And pale diseases and sad Age are there,
And Dread, and Hunger that sways men to
crime,
And sordid Want – in shapes to
affright the eyes –
And Death and Toil and Death’s own
brother, Sleep,
And the mind’s evil joys; on the door
sill
Death-bringing War, and iron cubicles
Of the Eumenides, and raving Discord,
Viperish hair bound up in gory bands.
In the courtyard a shadowy elm
Spreads ancient boughs, her ancient
arms where dreams,
False dreams, the old tale goes,
beneath each leaf
In my spare time, while sequestered to keep Covid-19 at bay, I am having a great time re-reading books and articles I have previously read, looking for those jewels of language and expression that make me smile, nod in agreement, cry and ponder. Sometimes we read a piece that is a wonder of wonders that will stick to our brains until we bid the world adieu.
Here, a poem by Shailja Patel, a Kenyan poet, playwright, theatre artist, and political activist. She is most known for her book “Migritude” based on her one-woman show of the same name funded by the Ford Foundation. CNN characterizes Patel as an artist “who exemplifies globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange.” – Wikipedia
When I lived in Tanzania, East Africa I was often mistaken for a Wahindi (Indian). I spoke rudimentary Kiswahili so I would sometimes correct folks. Other times I just went with the flow and brushed it off. Idi Amin expelled Indians, many of whom owned small businesses, in 1972. Tanzania was a little better but prejudice came to the fore after independence leading many Indians to migrate out. (One guy most people know was from Zanzibar, Farrokh Bulsara, better known as Freddie Mercury!)
Here, a long, but great Patel poem, “Migritude”, (a word she created from the African diaspora movement of the 1920s known as Negritude, joined with ‘migration’ and ‘attitude’.) I know exactly what she means and sometimes think of this poem (especially the section about her father speaking 5 languages) when I am working on my disappearing languages project!
Migritude by S. Patel
“The children in my dreams speak in Gujarati turn their trusting faces to the sun say to me care for us nurture us in my dreams I shudder and I run. I am six in a playground of white children Darkie, sing us an Indian song! Eight in a roomful of elders all mock my broken Gujarati English girl! Twelve, I tunnel into books forge an armor of English words. Eighteen, shaved head combat boots – shamed by masis in white saris neon judgments singe my western head. Mother tongue. Matrubhasha tongue of the mother I murder in myself. Through the years I watch Gujarati swell the swaggering egos of men mirror them over and over at twice their natural size. Through the years I watch Gujarati dissolve bones and teeth of women, break them on anvils of duty and service, burn them to skeletal ash. Words that don’t exist in Gujarati : Self-expression. Individual. Lesbian. English rises in my throat rapier flashed at yuppie boys who claim their people “civilized” mine. Thunderbolt hurled at cab drivers yelling Dirty black bastard! Force-field against teenage hoods hissing F****ing Paki bitch! Their tongue – or mine? Have I become the enemy? Listen: my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty rich as saag paneer coastal Kiswahili laced with Arabic, he speaks Gujarati solid ancestral pride. Five languages five different worlds yet English shrinks him down before white men who think their flat cold spiky words make the only reality. Words that don’t exist in English: Najjar Garba Arati. If we cannot name it does it exist? When we lose language does culture die? What happens to a tongue of milk-heavy cows, earthen pots jingling anklets, temple bells, when its children grow up in Silicon Valley to become programmers? Then there’s American: Kin’uh get some service? Dontcha have ice? Not: May I have please? Ben, mane madhath karso? Tafadhali nipe rafiki Donnez-moi, s’il vous plait Puedo tener….. Hello, I said can I get some service?! Like, where’s the line for Ay-mericans in this goddamn airport? Words that atomized two hundred thousand Iraqis: Didja see how we kicked some major ass in the Gulf? Lit up Bagdad like the fourth a’ July! Whupped those sand-niggers into a parking lot! The children in my dreams speak in Gujarati bright as butter succulent cherries sounds I can paint on the air with my breath dance through like a Sufi mystic words I can weep and howl and devour words I can kiss and taste and dream this tongue I take back.”
