Mitch’s Monthly Mix: Aguas de Marḉo (Waters of March)

For his March mix tape, Mitch Ritter takes us on a journey through Latin America and the American southwest. It’s just in time for a certain music festival in that area, but like all Ritter’s writing, there’s a twist, a higher purpose than mere entertainment. As always with the lengthy Monthly Mix, make judicious use of the “read more” button.

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Mitch’s Monthly Mix: Aguas de Marḉo (Waters of March)
Blendt by Mitch Ritter
Lay-Low Studios, Or-Wa

La Niña has been brutal this passing winter, with natural disasters adding to the human-made miseries on every continent. Torrential rains, flooding and subsequent mud and landslides in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil have caused nearly a thousand deaths since the start of this still new year. Accompanied by approximately three times that number of homes destroyed, as watersheds around the world are swollen and ready to roll in either spring runoff or runaway thaw, this season and the one coming could use some gentle touches. For that we turn to the mellifluous master composer of Brazilian samba, Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim along with his duet partner in Brazilian Portuguese performance poetry Elis Regina. An intimate alternate English adaptation by Art Garfunkel was produced with a clubby New York feel by Richard Perry a year after the original Verve Records release. Following is a March sequence of songs and music to help constructively channel the moist blessings of abundance and help heal those whose lives and families have been dismembered, left in the wake and/or re-shaped by these trans-seasonal vapors and waters. Although every attempt has been made to accommodate the 80 minute running time of a blank CD, Lay-low Studios cautions all who try this blend at home to be mindful of the fluid nature of this material and be prepared to edit, fade and sequence accordingly.

1. “Aguas de Marḉo (Waters of March)” Tom Jobim & Elis Regina, Elis & Tom (Verve 1974\Re-mastered 2008)

2. “Waters of March” (Tom Jobim, translated by Gene Lees) Art Garfunkel, Breakaway (Columbia 1975)

A stick, a stone,
It’s the end of the road,
It’s the rest of a stump
It’s a little alone

It’s a sliver of glass,
It is life, it’s the sun
It is night, it is death,
It’s a trap, it’s a gun

The oak where it blooms,
A fox in the brush,
The knot in the wood
The song of a thrush

The wood of the wind,
A cliff, a fall.
A scratch, a lump.
It is nothing at all

It’s the wind blowing free,
It’s the end of the slope.
It’s a beam, it’s a void.
It’s a hunch, it’s a hope.

And the riverbank talks
Of the waters of March,
It’s the end of the strain,
It’s the joy in your heart…

The foot, the ground
The flesh and the bone.
The beat of the road,
A slingshot stone.

A fish, a flash
A silvery glow
A fight, a bet
The range of a bow.

The bed of the well
The end of the line.
The dismay in the face,
It’s a loss, it’s a find.

A spear, a spike
A point, a nail.
A drip, a drop
The end of the tale.

A truckload of bricks
In the soft morning light.
The shot of a gun
In the dead of the night.

A mile, a must
A thrust, a bump.
It’s a girl, it’s a rhyme
It’s the cold, it’s the mumps…

3. “When It Rains/Cuando Llueve” Tish Hinojosa, Soñar del Laberinto (Dreaming from the
Labyrinth) (Warner 1998)
4. “Laughing River Running/Riendo El Rio Corre” Tish Hinojosa Band, Live at Cactus Café
(Rounder 8/2/2002)

Bilingual Spanish-Anglo southwestern songstress Tish Hinojosa deepens the elemental mysteries with a studio recording set amid the singular silence of her dreamtime’s edge, followed by a live band recording capturing the energy of the moment at her Cactus Café retrospective on a damp August Austin, Texas night. Follow Hinojosa’s muse and her compellingly propulsive band from the hill country to the sea:

Corre corre corre el rio
Riendo el rio corre (x2)

Cuentame de las montañas de tu empesar
Cuentame de piedra y pena que llevas al mar

Running running laughing river
Laughing river running
Tell me of the highland mountains
That your eyes have seen
Tell me of the stories and sorrows

That you take to the sea
Corre corre corre el rio
Riendo el rio corre

5. “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone?” (Kirby & Martin) Doug Sahm & Band (Atlantic 1973)

It took some persuading to wrangle the wayward Texan “Sir” Doug Sahm and his band to New York City during his flirtation with psychedelic groove-country, a genre he and his compadres may have invented back home, but that took off in the darkly flowering San Francisco Bay Area with two freak radio hits “She’s About A Mover” and north of the Bay’s coasting “Mendocino.” When the music lovers then running the world’s fastest growing record company (having nurtured it from humble jazz and R&B wax drops from the back of co-founder Jerry Wexler’s car trunk barely a decade earlier) invited Sahm & his quintet to their sessions on the east coast, they kept mum about the drop-in guest players who were inconveniently under contract or renegotiating deals with Atlantic Records’ rivals. Like Bob Dylan who was still off the road and out of the studio for his own career, Mac “Dr. John the Night Tripper” Rebennack and rootsy string-slinger David Bromberg. These Atlantic sessions with Sahm & Band took on low-key word-of-mouth legs over the years, even if they didn’t exactly carry Sahm any higher on the pop rung via radio than his own warp-drive imagination and searing roadhouse fiddle in combo with Augie Meyers’ hypnotic early electric organ and Flaco Jimenez’s Tex-Mex ribbon-of-road accordion riffs had already taken him. Taste in songwriting and musicianship along with his own creative gifts and those of his band-mates and friends is evident to the discerning ear & eye on almost every Sahm track. This one’s mood is in keeping with our saturated theme. You younger songwriters, pay attention to the dancing syllables, casual poetic precision, velocity & brevity:

Rain drippin’ off the brim of my hat
It sure looks cold today
Here I am a’walkin’ down 66
Wishin’ she hadn’t done me this way

Sleepin’ under a table in a roadside bar
A man could wake up dead
But it sure seemed warmer than it did
Sleepin’ in my king-sized bed

Chorus:
Is anybody goin’ to San Antone
or Phoenix, Arizona?
Any place is alright as long as I
Can forget I’ve ever known her

Wind whippin’ down the neck of my shirt
Like I ain’t got nothin’ on
But I’d rather fight the wind and pourin’ rain
Than what I was fightin’ at home

(Chorus)

Yonder comes a truck with the U.S. Mail
People writin’ letters back home
Well tonight she’ll want me back again
And I’ll be just as gone… (Chorus)

6. “Coal Black Heaven” Gill Landry, The Ballad of Lawless Soirez (Nettwerk USA, Canada 2007)

Some records are for the Dark Season, and some are Wet Season affairs. Gill Landry’s Portland, Oregon-recorded masterpiece The Ballad of Lawless Soirez was made for a Dark Wet Season. The penultimate song on this inspired cycle, “Coal Black Heaven” is so well-realized by simpático players such as Annie Ford on fiddle and producer Nick Jaina whose minimalistic electric piano figure, corkscrews soulfully enough to sound like it seeped through Stax’s Memphis studios. Gill Landry’s plangently strummed acoustic guitar chords and vocal phrasing tossed off like coins into the depths give voice to a track that proves something of a hobo haiku to the national collapse and depression looming over every hollowed-out and rusted-through US river town.

If you can hear my poor voice callin’
Drowned in a bottle of black rain fallin’
Down through the sky
There is a land of thieves and wonder
With eyes full of smoke and ears full of thunder
Under all this glitter
Where I heard a bone-yard train a’screamin’
Above a veil of tears
I seen coal black heavens’ red fog rollin’ in
Down, down, down through the years

I went to a field down by the river
With eyes torn naked and cleansed within her
Ever-shifting face
Somewhere in a thousand years to the mountain
With a bite of heaven and watermelon

Turning in the sun
When I heard a sullen-eyed maiden dreamin’
Beyond parasite fears
I seen coal black heavens’ red moon fallin’ in
Down, down, down through the years

7. “Until The Rains Come” Don Cherry with Peter Apfelbaum & Berkeley Hieroglyphics, MULTIKULTI (A & M CD, 1990; DVD live in Germany 1990 re-released ViewVideo 2009)

Don Cherry was a peripatetic aural history curator and pocket trumpet musical visionary. He recorded with at least three major jazz combos on as many continents in between solo-driven projects. By 1990, with family on the west coast (where son David Ornette Cherry continues into the Aughts to develop his Expressions of Energy ensemble in Portland, Oregon), Don Cherry was collaborating with recent graduates of Berkeley High School who’d formed the pun-ishing Afro Jazz-inspired Hieroglyphics Ensemble.

Working out of the Fantasy Studios in west Berkeley, then more an art film director’s soundtrack retreat than the “House that Creedence Clearwater built,” Cherry and what would come to be a who’s who of Bay Area-originated national musicians at the cutting edges of Jazz, New Music, World Beat and wondrous genre-defying sounds more associated with Brooklyn, Chicago, Paris, Bamako and Berlin than Berkeley, spent a winter woodshedding and issuing a stunning fully-realized work, quite different in sound and accessibility than the Oslo-recorded ECM releases Cherry was issuing to world-wide acclaim and globe-trotting tours with with Codona (trio) as well as Old and New Dreams (quartet).

Here in a 12 minute track that includes a vocal interlude improvised by German New Music vocalist and Boulder, Colorado-based Naropa Institute of Disembodied Poetics mid-70’s faculty member Ingrid Sertso, Cherry and Berkeley Hieroglyphs explore various relationships of natural resource-deprived peoples to the arrival of life force in arid communities. Special mention must go to the Hieroglyphics dynamic drum-duo of Deszon X. Claiborne and Joshua Jones along with West Afro-percussionist-vocalyste Frank Ekeh and Buddha Huffman, guitarist Will Bernard looping through the cross-shuffling polyrhythms. Trombone-vocalist Jeff Cressman and ‘bone soloist James Harvey, orbiting trumpeter Bill Ortiz and of course baritone saxophonist Peck Allmond under the reeds of tenor saxophonists Jessica Jones and Tony Jones along with reed triple-threat Peter Apfelbaum who multi-tracks nimble textures on Korg organ. Apfelbaum anchors the sprawling musical excursion on percussive piano when not tossing in ritualistic gong, slave shackles and hand-bells for Cherry’s soft-tissue yet scalpel sharp trumpet to spiral his helixing horn betwixt and between.

Plants grow through cracks in the concrete
And a flower blooms in the desert
But the land is dry
Until the rain comes….

So we put another log on the fire
To melt the ice that surrounds us
& Bells ring from an ancient tower
But the land is dry
Until the rain comes…

8. “Soul Shadows” (Joe Sample-Will Jennings) Bill Withers with The Jazz Crusaders, Greatest Hits (Columbia 1981)

The writers of this classic single by low-profile performer Bill Withers and a long-running concert highlight of the Jazz Crusaders and their pianist-composer Joe Sample surely captures the vaporous milieu of San Francisco’s fog rolling in through the early to mid-20th Century African-American Fillmore District and other such indigenous classical musical meccas scattered from coast to coast to Gulf. Take the Bay Bridge on-ramp past west Berkeley & Oakland’s own African-American musical mecca after stopping for an eye-opener and Icebox Lemon Pie at the counter of Lois the Pie Queen, then drive past Treasure Island and over to San Francisco, but don’t head for these Fillmore haunts as they were gone to hippies and Japantown a few urban renewal campaigns ago and a generational genocide of cultivated ghosts later.

San Francisco morning coming clear and cold
Don’t know if I’m walking or I’m dreaming
Riding with Fats Waller on the Super Chief
He said “Music’s real, the rest is seeming.”

Oh, deep pain
Feelings that won’t go away
Left the sound of his soul in the air
I can hear it out there and I know

They left those soul shadows
On my mind, on my mind, on my mind (x2)

Standing by the window as the fog rolls in
I swear I can hear a far off music
Jelly Roll is playing down in Storyville
And Satchmo is wailing in Chicago

You ought to heard ‘em play

Feelings that won’t go away
Left the sound of their souls in the air
I can hear it out there and I know

They left those soul shadows
On my mind, on my mind, on my mind… (fade)

9. “All Rise” (Renée Harcourt) Blame Sally, Night of 1000 Stars (Opus Music, Berkeley 2009)

Blame Sally’s Renée Harcourt learned of the breast cancer some four years ago. That could have been a game changer for the hardworking Bay Area songwriter, mother, designer and co-founding band-member (a coupla-three times over). Trying to take in all the info the doctors were throwing at her, independent research and the accumulated wisdom of the various nature-pathic and spiritual traditions rooted by now in her home town of Mill Valley or surely within a few mile radius thereof, Harcourt drew on the ancient Persian mystic Rumi’s verse as inspiration for this healing if western-harmonized ghazal.

First they took me down a road
Not a road I’d ever seen,
It was dark and it was cold
Mortal end, mortal gold
Fight or flight, this crazy ride will
make you wonder what you know

All rise, all rise hear the recommendation
All rise, sometimes the guide’s disguised in pain
All rise, all rise hear the recommendation
Meet the guide with an open light,
All rise

And then they came into my home
They knocked me down and took everything I owned
I tried to see beyond alone
Where empty makes room for
something new and unknown

All rise, sometimes the guide’s disguised as pain
All rise, hear the recommendation
Meet the guide with an open light
All rise

Then they showed me to a shrine
Tall and shimmering,
It illuminated time
My eyes followed up the line
And I could not conform,
and I could not confine

All rise, sometimes the guide’s
disguised in pain
All rise, hear the
recommendation
Meet the guide with an open light,
All rise

10. “Her Slow Ascension (For Jillian Neary)” Rebecca Sanborn, Ballads & Namesakes (Duomo, Portlandia 2005)

We should all be blessed to share history with some childhood friend who knew us when. Some get to share more history than others. I don’t know of any calculus for valuing such shared personal history. It seems that’s what songs are for. And also for navigating around the obstacles and distances life can throw down between each of us and that special friend. So what is a song about dislocation and relocation on the surface doing blendt into this month’s theme of The Waters of March? I can’t be sure, yet this intuitive ballad is reaching for something ascending and that ascension seems to become the very soul transforming the way mist does off a waterfall or the way dew condenses off muskeg or the way Blame Sally’s “All Rise” segues into this song of discovery and of the soul.

The thunderstorm awakened
when you let down
I watched the sun make a haze of
The light in the room

You chose a passage to read me
over the phone
about the things that bring us to
the Soul of the World

You came to me in my dreams
as I slept by the beach
Your presence was so nurturing as
you sat down on the bed next to me

You asked me to come to California

You asked me to stay
You asked me to come to L.A.
You asked me to stay

I long for your return
to blue water and yellow light
to green that is not a graveyard
and magic sonorous with a Florentine night

It’s so tangible, you’re my Beauty
so close to your hands I know
just had what you’re most afraid of
and once you get there let it go
once you get there let it go

The glow of a taper illuminates
a photo on my wall
of two young women on a double-decker bus
on their way to a castle

Wrapped in mahogany
rich in memory
the color of sunny lawns

Before the days we traveled there
you sent a letter
and in it a poem of a woman who
walked into the water

I see you rise from the murky darkness
your anchor dissolved
your ascent so slow the light imperceptibly
beckons you on
Hold your lungs, hold your heart
prepare for release
and burst forth from the
waves of mutilation
like a gorgeous Venus

I see your submersion as ascension
and crisis the gateway to your happiness
an ancient feel to your confusion
and divine energy to all of your cries

Let it tear you apart
Let it break all you know

Let it bring you a sense of peace
Let it carry you home
Let it bring you home

I’m sending you a plant to make up for
each little death
to eradicate the smog and turn your
tears into breath

Before we hung up the only azure clarity
lay in the west
And that pale continent of sky was
stronger than the storm’s heaviness

I’m sending you light
I’m sending you breath
I’m sending you light
I’m sending you breath
You’re ascending to light
You’re ascending to breath
You’re ascending to light
You’re ascending to breath
I’m holding you
I’m holding you
I’m holding you

11. “Beyond the Rain” Chico Freeman Quintet, Beyond the Rain (Contemporary OJC 1978)

We’re past words here in the comfy intimate spaces opened up by Chico Freeman’s Dolphy rising flute, Junieeh Booth’s probing bass, Hilton Ruiz’s horizon-tinged piano and Jumma Santos’ palm-reading percussion. This interlude was a close call with Abdullah Ibrahim’s Capetown inflected piano solo “The Perfume Scented Garden.” Consider that familiar melodic loveliness as a variation on this interlude.

12. “Les Fleur” (Charles Stepney-Richard Rudolph)
13. “Rainy Day In Centerville” (Stepney-Rudolph) Minnie Riperton, Come To My Garden (Varese Sarabande 2002/Original Chicago Chamber Soul Psychedelia sessions arranged & produced by Charles Stepney in 1969)

Minnie Riperton is another flowering artist cut down too young with terminal illness, yet attaining in these historic Chicago sessions produced by Charles Stepney in Chicago’s Chess Records Ter-Mar studios a sound that has come to be known as Chicago Chamber Soul Psychedelia for Stepney’s florid approach to arranging and instrumentation. The material is evocative and harmonically well-suited to Minnie Riperton’s delicate vocal style, yet rhythmically muscular enough to sashay past soul’s wispier stylings. The 10 tracks of this album are cohesive enough in lyrical narrative and musical continuity to comprise a Soul Cycle from the more small-town and therefore friendlier expanses of the Midwestern milieu dealing with all the discovery that was 1969, not only the urban trauma. Consider “Les Fleur/The Flower” and “Rainy Day In Centerville” to be the Summer of Love’s Showers, the calm bathwater before quite a few innocent babies got blown away in the darkening storm.

14. “Intro to a seasonal ritual’s last gig”
15. “Urge for Going” (Roberta Joan Anderson aka pre-marital Joni Mitchell) Dave Van Ronk, And the tin pan bended, and the story ended (Last gig Dave Alive) (Smithsonian Folkways 2004/Recorded 10-22-01 at Institute For Musical Traditions, Adelphi, MD)

This song, not recorded by a pre-marital Joni Mitchell, then Joan Anderson of Winnipeg, Manitoba hard on the Canadian plain, was first heard by Dave Van Ronk in 1965 at a college broadcast concert in Winnipeg. It made a deep impression. So much so that when Joan showed up in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan a few years later with no recording contract yet but a marriage behind her, Van Ronk and his wife, folk performer manager Teri Thal, championed her work. Through the years this song,  which Mitchell only got around to recording after other folk visitors carried it into the world on wax first, such as Tom Rush, became an autumnal ritual for Van Ronk. This recording made within days of learning he had cancer, comes freighted with the depth of emotion this wonderful Village lover-of-life found even when playing to a church cellar café or barroom of bleary-eyed song-chasers through the disco scare years, many Me Generations and wars to end all wars later. Through the urban soot and grime and downtown shuck and jive, when Dave Van Ronk went off his darker jazzy repertoire to play this song all pre-fab skeptical or even cynical bets were off. You don’t know innocence until you find a man who has come as close as most to seeing it all, rediscover this world’s marvel. Miss ya, Dave!

I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
And all the trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going, but I never seem to go
I get the urge for going, when the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I had me a man in summertime
He had summer-colored skin

And not another girl in town
My darling’s heart could win
But when the leaves fell on the ground
And bully winds came around
Pushed them face down in the snow
He got the urge for going
And I had to let him go
He got the urge for going
When the meadow grass was turning brown
Summertime was falling down and winter was closing in

Now the warriors of winter
They gave a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying
All that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight
Flapping and a-racing on before the snow
They’ve got the urge for going and they’ve got the wings so they can go
They get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I’ll ply the fire with kindling now, I’ll pull the blankets to my chin
I’ll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in
I’d like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she’s got the urge for going and I guess she’ll have to go
She gets the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
And all her empires are falling down
And winter’s closing in

And I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
And summertime is falling down…

16. “Bleak Street” (Allison Russell-Trish Klein)
17. “Malaise Days” (Allison Russell-Trish Klein) Po’ Girl, Po’ Girl (Nettwerk/Hightone 2003)

From Vancouver, BC came reformed social worker and ex-Be Good Tanya, Allison Russell and Trish Klein respectively, and as songwriters they both command respect, along with a scrappy and inventive rhythm section along with a cohort of beatboxing-harmonica blowing-hip hop rapping friends and fiddlers all enmeshed in the moldy decay of Vancouver’s notorious downtown east side. No better or more heartbreaking visual introduction to the milieu than that which accompanies “City Song” included here as a You Tube link as the blendt CD ran just over 79 minutes without it. But watch that video and listen carefully to Trish Klein’s narrative before entering the perpetual chill drizzle of Vancouver downtown east side’s “Bleak Street” and “Malaise Days.” Allison Russell must’ve drew on her experiences working with, if not surrounded by humans who do what all humans do, that is make some bad decisions, but these folks had non-criminalized heroin in seemingly plentiful supply and although not yet apparent in the early Aughts when these sessions were recorded, the largest mass grave of murdered women north of Ciudad Juarez.

Clarinet-playing Allison Russell would go on to deal with the disappearing women of the streets of Vancouver’s downtown east side in subsequent Po’ Girl recordings on Nettwerk, prior to Trish Klein’s departure and Po’ Girl’s transformation briefly into Sofia with new rhythm partner Awna Texeira, then back into Po’ Girl on their own indie label recording and touring with their favorite band, Chicago’s JT & The Clouds spouting Joseph Campbell-inspired repertoire, lifestyles and an aphorism Follow Your Bliss titling this year’s Po’ Girl release with decidedly more upbeat material. I don’t begrudge anyone their bliss, and indeed the debut Po’ Girl album bore a song by Allison Russell that re-wrote Billie ‘Lady Day’ Holiday’s tragic life of abuse willfully imposing a healthier and happier template of better choices by today’s daughters in song. However, here are the fruits of Russell’s earlier caseload and hard-won battles with human frailty for those of us as reluctant to consider smack as to find a Follow Your Bliss credo as seductive as this young troubadour does.

It’s been one of those days, nothing seems right
I slept through the sun, now I’m staying up all night
I’m leaky-eyed and dissatisfied with myself
And my thoughts and my life

Chorus:

I wanna jump right out of my skin
I wanna jump right out, out of my skin
I don’t know where I’m goin’, don’t like where I’ve been
I wanna jump right out, out of my skin

Is this melancholy mood an epiphany?
Or just renegade chemicals unbalancing me?
I’m so uninspired, makes me tired and I’d sleep
But my dreams don’t bring me relief

(Chorus)

I went down to a club, the band was a drunk joke
Recycled Nashville, imitation cowpokes

If they’re [vague] musicians, I’m a magician
But they’ve got an album and the audience loved them

(Chorus)

I try to tell myself, I’ll grow out of this
It’s just a passing youthful fit
But I’ve got this intuition, a sneaking suspicion
Periodic malaise [sung mal-aise as in ‘evil ease’]
It’s a human condition

(Chorus)

—Mitch Ritter
A Lay Low Studios, Or-Wa blend especially for Driftwood Magazine