Circular Reasoning - Comes 'round Again

“Circular Reasoning” spins here with a 1933 and 1/3 Betty Boop classic from Fleischer Studios.

Musical time starts counting again with Allison Crowe’s “Sylvan Hour” wonderland: http://music.allisoncrowe.com/track/circular-reasoning-sh


Circular Reasoning from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

“Sylvan Hour is truly a masterpiece” says pioneering culture blog Muruch. (http://www.muruch.com/2015/05/allisoncrowe-sylvanhour.html)

Discover this music from a remarkable artist at a personal and creative crossroads in her life. “Sylvan Hour” is an album of songs bridging west and east, piano and guitar, then and now…

For fans of Allison Crowe at her purest, this is voice, one accompanying instrument – one take. Real-time performances in the sequence they’re played and sung by Allison in a log-home on Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada.

That afternoon the musician was in the midst of migrating from her birthplace of Nanaimo, BC, on Canada’s Pacific, to a new nest in Corner Brook, NL, on the Atlantic coast. Soon to fly east, Crowe bade farewell to those near and dear on western shores – including compatriot Kayla Schmah on Salt Spring, neighbouring Vancouver Island.

Decades earlier Schmah’s parents had made an epic trek to the Pacific Northwest from Central Canada – in a repurposed donut truck. Planting themselves in the Gulf Islands archipelago, they lived at first in a converted parachute in the woods. From the ground up the home-steaders then built a family dwelling out of Douglas Fir – their “sylvan castle”.

Allison and Kayla, as musicians had shared stages together from their teens onward (and, years later, becoming a film-scorer in Hollywood, Schmah brilliantly orchestrated and produced Crowe’s album “Spiral”.) Among the friends together on SSI this day was Ryan Adams (who, like Schmah was a recent graduate of Berklee College of Music and was en route to becoming an in-demand tv/film audio engineer in Los Angeles).

With mics and a laptop set-up in the living-room, Adams captured this set of the newest songs in Allison’s repertoire – originals including “Skeletons and Spirits”, “Running”, and “Silence” as well as a trio of covers (interpreting songs famously by Joni Mitchell, The Lovin' Spoonful and Aretha Franklin).

Also gorgeous, but differently so, essentially group versions of most of these songs were released near the end of that same year (2006) on Allison Crowe’s album “This Little Bird” (the title track a celebration of her migration). “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” is the sole sylvan session recording released before – it’s presented now within the full hour of music for all time.

Enjoy this most natural of talents – in this most natural of settings.

Skeletons and Spirits

Clock strikes 12 for the second time in a “Sylvan Hour” selection – awakening Allison Crowe’s “Skeletons and Spirits” in this recording from Salt Spring Island’s sylvan castle:

          

In 1933 Ladislas Starewitch and his daughter, Irene, produced and directed "Fetiche Mascotte" – in English “The Mascot” – and it’s an excerpt from this classic film seen here with Allison’s musical performance.

Skeletons and Spirits - Sylvan Hour from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

Stop-motion animation pioneer and imaginative genius Władysław Starewicz was born in 1882 in Moscow, Russia to Polish parents. Following the October Revolution of 1917, he resettled in France –adopting the name Ladislas Starewitch (or Starevitch). Creator of the first puppet-animated film, he’s legendary for his use of insects and other animals as film protagonists and for his fantastic, inventive, techniques.

Starewitch died in 1965 while working on “Comme chien et chat” (“Like Dog and Cat”). Since 1991, his granddaughter, Léona Béatrice, together with her husband, François Martin, has been restoring and bringing to the world his wonderfully artful films: http://starewitch.pagesperso-orange.fr

Running

“Sylvan Hour” nears this Spring. Simply gorgeous. Gorgeously simple. It's an album of Allison Crowe music simultaneously familiar and revelatory.

“Running” is one of 13 coming attractions in this traveling fair of song. Drawing us into the Big Top is “Betty Boop’s Crazy Inventions” – calliope and all - helping get the point across. 

Circular Reasoning

“Circular Reasoning” from Allison Crowe’s upcoming “Sylvan Hour” album here joins Betty Boop through the looking-glass. Allison’s wonderland of song finds reflection in a visual pool of classic animation from Fleischer Studios.

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things”. Get cracking with this musical Easter egg: http://music.allisoncrowe.com

There Is

Superman - Clark Kent, a joint creation of great friends, Toronto, Canada-born illustrator Joe Shuster and American writer Jerry Siegel (born in Cleveland, Ohio), entered our public universe in 1938 - via Action Comics #1

The mythic character, able to leap a tall building in a single bound, first took flight in fabulous,1940s cartoons made by brothers Max Fleischer, animator and director, and Dave Fleischer, producer.

The brothers' Fleischer Studios produced nine Superman classics - animated shorts - in 1941- 42. (Over the following couple of years, also for Paramount Pictures, another eight episodes were made for - these by Famous Studios. All 17 Superman cartoons are now in the public domain.)

For this, the first episode of a two-parter in "16 Songs", Allison Crowe's "There Is" provides the soundtrack to an excerpt from "The Mechanical Monsters" (one of the earliest of Superman's animated adventures - released November 28, 1941).

There Is from Allison Crowe on Vimeo.

The Man of Steel mythos brightens our world still today.

Brought to life on the big screen as a science fiction spectacular in Summer 2013, Krypton and the Earth of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Perry White and all denizens includes musician Allison Crowe - as the "Singer in Cassidy's", a road-house in the great North woods where Clark is employed before taking on the mantle of Superman.

The Cassidy Inn is an actual, historic, bar/hotel on a stretch of highway on Vancouver Island, Canada about 10 minutes drive south of where Allison was born. Originally, and for decades, it was home to miners in this coal-rich area. More recently it became a rough-and-ready “biker bar”. The Cassidy fell into disrepair and closed before Hollywood set the scene with its epic, modern, production involving DC Entertainment, Syncopy Films, Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros.

The opportunity to work with Director Zack Snyder, Producer Deborah Snyder and the entire, truly stellar, production+ team, cast and crew of "Man of Steel" proved more amazing and fun than imaginable, and will forever rock Allison Crowe's daily planet.

"There Is": Allison Crowe - vocals, piano, engineer, producer; Del Crowe - guitar; Dave Baird - bass; & Laurent Boucher - percussion.

#5 of 16 Songs

        

Creep

Fourth in the feast of imagination that is Allison Crowe’s “16 Songs” Video Album is a cultural dish centuries in the making.

Since the Middle Ages there are reports of the Welsh having a fondness for toasted cheese. The first recipes for “Welsh Rarebit” (or “Rabbit”) appear in the 1700s – and, this, (as well as an English Rabbit, an Irish and a Scotch Rabbit), hopped to the New World with the colonists.

To Scottish immigrants in Woodstock, Upper Canada, in the year of the country’s Confederation, 1867, was born Zenas W. McCay. Then, again, the artist, who would grow up known by his middle name, Winsor, may have entered this world a few years later, and south of the border – in Spring Lake, Michigan. Whatever the ingredients of his origin he found his way to revolutionize comics+ with his pioneering techniques, and, especially his creation, “Little Nemo in Slumberland”.

McCay by the late 1800s was illustrating posters to comic strips (he later toured, as well, drawing live on the vaudeville stage for appreciative audiences). Winsor McCay’s legacy – his enormous influence and inspiration’s given nods by Max Fleischer, Walt Disney, Federico Fellini, Maurice Sendak, Art Spiegelman and other greats in visual and pop arts.

In 1904 he launched the newspaper strip “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend”. This successful series ran until 1911 – and related the strange dreams of folks who’d eaten Welsh Rarebit before going to sleep. Between 1911 and 1921 Winsor self-financed and animated ten films - three of which fly on this theme.

          

An excerpt of McCay’s “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend: The Pet” (1921) is on the menu here with Allison Crowe’s version of “Creep”, recorded live-in-concert with her first trio – the cooking rhythm section of Dave Baird on bass and Kevin Clevette on drums. The music’s captured by audio archivists Condor and John MacMillan at the Chilliwack Arts Centre, BC, Canada in 2003.

That’s a decade or so after the song, lyrics penned by Thom Yorke and music composed by Radiohead, was released by that band as its cracking debut. In turn, it’s 20 years before Radiohead’s giant international hit with “Creep” that a tune by musicians Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood delivered The Hollies to the toppermost of the poppermost with “The Air That I Breathe”. Radiohead and Hammond/Hazelwood agreed to co-songwriting credits on “Creep” – serving up delicious melody and a rare bit of shared popular music history on the side.

#4 of 16 Songs

          

Crayon and Ink + Destino (excerpt)

One of Allison Crowe’s much-loved, “early”, songs on-stream with animation begun in the 1940s by Salvador Dali and realized by succeeding generations of Disney studio animators.