Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 21, 2011 14:50:27 GMT
Ray Manzarek: Manzarek Hears Echoes Of Doors
Ray Manzarek's Carmina Burana will distance him even farther from his days with the Doors.
POP STARDOM can be a double-edged sword. The Doors' success came back to haunt its keyboard player Ray Manzarek when he released two solo LPs and a pair of albums with Nite City in the mid-'70s. Each project was accompanied by subtle but constant record-company pressure to echo the lucrative Doors sound...right down to suggestions about what kind of keyboard Manzarek should play.
"That came up: 'Why don't you play that organ you used to play in the Doors?'" recounted Manzarek in his manager's Hollywood Hills home. "I played the organ in the Doors because I had to have something to put the keyboard bass on. The Vox organ at the time was the only one that had a flat top. That's why I played that organ in the Doors.
"That little Doors devil was always lurking back there, more in the minds of the record company than in my mind. It would always stick its little head up and say, 'Make it like the Doors, Ray'."
Manzarek's first album in several years should easily distance him from his old association. Instead of issuing a predictable collection of rock songs, he's collaborated with noted contemporary minimalist composer Philip Glass on an adaptation of Carmina Burana, a bombastic work for chorus and orchestra composed by Carl Orff in the 1930s. It's due in the stores this week.
The work, which sets to music a 13th-Century text describing the bawdy experiences of a band of renegade poet monks, has been a Manzarek favorite since he first heard it in his late teens. But the idea of performing the piece lay dormant until a copy of Manzarek's three-song demo tape reached Glass last year. They quickly agreed to collaborate and A&M promptly snapped up Manzarek as a solo artist with Glass producing.
"I thought these two guys getting together would make an interesting record," said A&M Chairman Jerry Moss. "With the association of Philip and Ray, both very large cult names, I think we have something going for us. Half the battle is doing something unique."
A&M's decision to give the pair artistic carte blanche was tested when Glass suggested a major change in the project. It was his idea to perform a slightly edited version of the entire Carmina Burana rather than the planned hodgepodge of selections from the Orff piece, Erik Satie compositions and some original material.
"I just went 'Eureka' when Philip came up with the idea," Manzarek enthused. "The fact that the words were written in the 13th to 14th centuries and then put into this 'classical' piece is exciting to me. It's a strange blending of things.
"Carl Orff obviously had a very interesting mind to take that text and, 500 years later, stick it into contemporary music. Philip and I tried to put Carmina Burana into an even more contemporary vein, an '80s version of the same thing Orff was doing in the '30s."
The album's sound is far removed from the heavily layered, multiple-keyboards-and-reeds approach Glass fans are familiar with. Manzarek's arrangements feature a basic rock quartet (the L.A. group the Fents) augmented by Glass associate Michael Reisman on synthesizer and his own array of keyboards. The music may bear little resemblance to rock orthodoxy, but the initial stages of the project did adhere to one revered facet of the rock tradition.
"The Fents is a garage band, and we worked it out in their garage in Eagle Rock," Manzarek said with a laugh. "I bought the sheet music, and we went over the charts. We were all there at our first rehearsals, our eyes glued on the score, following the music that Orff originally put down."
The end result may set a new record for confounding expectations and breaking down tidy musical categories. It's not just the fact that a major contemporary classical figure is producing a well-known rock musician performing a 50-year-old classical composition faithfully adapted to rock instrumentation.
The lyrics remain in the original Latin, and the choral-style voices of Glass' regular stable of vocalists are treated as an additional instrument rather than the central focus. The entire affair runs counter to virtually every hip trend on the current pop scene.
There are vague rumblings about live performances – possibly at Carnegie Hall or the Universal Amphitheatre – but the only concrete project is a full-scale video opera of Carmina Burana sponsored by the Mark Taper Forum with a script written by Zoot Suit playwright Luis Valdez. It's a long way from the rock mainstream, but Manzarek is confident the fans who know him from the Doors' music or his production work with local heroes X can make the leap to Carmina Burana.
"The key to listening to Carmina Burana is just the sheer power and energy of it," Manzarek concluded. "Forget any intellectual considerations and just feel the energy coming off the record. It's as powerful as an X album or a Doors album. This is visceral, gut music, and that's just what Carl Orff intended back in the '30s."
Don Snowden, Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1983
Ray Manzarek's Carmina Burana will distance him even farther from his days with the Doors.
POP STARDOM can be a double-edged sword. The Doors' success came back to haunt its keyboard player Ray Manzarek when he released two solo LPs and a pair of albums with Nite City in the mid-'70s. Each project was accompanied by subtle but constant record-company pressure to echo the lucrative Doors sound...right down to suggestions about what kind of keyboard Manzarek should play.
"That came up: 'Why don't you play that organ you used to play in the Doors?'" recounted Manzarek in his manager's Hollywood Hills home. "I played the organ in the Doors because I had to have something to put the keyboard bass on. The Vox organ at the time was the only one that had a flat top. That's why I played that organ in the Doors.
"That little Doors devil was always lurking back there, more in the minds of the record company than in my mind. It would always stick its little head up and say, 'Make it like the Doors, Ray'."
Manzarek's first album in several years should easily distance him from his old association. Instead of issuing a predictable collection of rock songs, he's collaborated with noted contemporary minimalist composer Philip Glass on an adaptation of Carmina Burana, a bombastic work for chorus and orchestra composed by Carl Orff in the 1930s. It's due in the stores this week.
The work, which sets to music a 13th-Century text describing the bawdy experiences of a band of renegade poet monks, has been a Manzarek favorite since he first heard it in his late teens. But the idea of performing the piece lay dormant until a copy of Manzarek's three-song demo tape reached Glass last year. They quickly agreed to collaborate and A&M promptly snapped up Manzarek as a solo artist with Glass producing.
"I thought these two guys getting together would make an interesting record," said A&M Chairman Jerry Moss. "With the association of Philip and Ray, both very large cult names, I think we have something going for us. Half the battle is doing something unique."
A&M's decision to give the pair artistic carte blanche was tested when Glass suggested a major change in the project. It was his idea to perform a slightly edited version of the entire Carmina Burana rather than the planned hodgepodge of selections from the Orff piece, Erik Satie compositions and some original material.
"I just went 'Eureka' when Philip came up with the idea," Manzarek enthused. "The fact that the words were written in the 13th to 14th centuries and then put into this 'classical' piece is exciting to me. It's a strange blending of things.
"Carl Orff obviously had a very interesting mind to take that text and, 500 years later, stick it into contemporary music. Philip and I tried to put Carmina Burana into an even more contemporary vein, an '80s version of the same thing Orff was doing in the '30s."
The album's sound is far removed from the heavily layered, multiple-keyboards-and-reeds approach Glass fans are familiar with. Manzarek's arrangements feature a basic rock quartet (the L.A. group the Fents) augmented by Glass associate Michael Reisman on synthesizer and his own array of keyboards. The music may bear little resemblance to rock orthodoxy, but the initial stages of the project did adhere to one revered facet of the rock tradition.
"The Fents is a garage band, and we worked it out in their garage in Eagle Rock," Manzarek said with a laugh. "I bought the sheet music, and we went over the charts. We were all there at our first rehearsals, our eyes glued on the score, following the music that Orff originally put down."
The end result may set a new record for confounding expectations and breaking down tidy musical categories. It's not just the fact that a major contemporary classical figure is producing a well-known rock musician performing a 50-year-old classical composition faithfully adapted to rock instrumentation.
The lyrics remain in the original Latin, and the choral-style voices of Glass' regular stable of vocalists are treated as an additional instrument rather than the central focus. The entire affair runs counter to virtually every hip trend on the current pop scene.
There are vague rumblings about live performances – possibly at Carnegie Hall or the Universal Amphitheatre – but the only concrete project is a full-scale video opera of Carmina Burana sponsored by the Mark Taper Forum with a script written by Zoot Suit playwright Luis Valdez. It's a long way from the rock mainstream, but Manzarek is confident the fans who know him from the Doors' music or his production work with local heroes X can make the leap to Carmina Burana.
"The key to listening to Carmina Burana is just the sheer power and energy of it," Manzarek concluded. "Forget any intellectual considerations and just feel the energy coming off the record. It's as powerful as an X album or a Doors album. This is visceral, gut music, and that's just what Carl Orff intended back in the '30s."
Don Snowden, Los Angeles Times, 18 September 1983