Bluebird

Rossini and Lasagna

Since we went down to the Rockridge Street Fair Sunday afternoon, I was under a tight timeline for dinner. Rossini's Barber of Seville helped me construct a lasagna at an allegro pace. It was a somewhat lighter lasagna, just right for a warm fall evening.

 

http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/free-form-sausage-and-three-cheese-lasagna

when she was cross referencing a cross-dresser...

So I read this terrifc article on NYTimes about a cross-dressing poet critic. The sidebar recommended several poems he liked and I liked them too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/stephen-burt-poetrys-cross-dressing-kingmaker.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&src=dayp

Then I clicked to the Paris Review and read some more poems--not all of which I liked.

Then I read "Four Poems" by Robert Haas and almost cried. It's about his brother's death and features four ruminations, each in a slightly different style that's still cohesive. It's utterly lovely. 

Four Poems

Robert Hass

August Notebook: A Death

1. River Bicycle Peony 

I woke up thinking abouy my brothr’s body. 
That q That was my first bit of early morning typing 
So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right. 

I woke up thinking about my brother’s body. 
Apparently it’s at the medical examiner’s morgue. 
I found myself wondering whether he was naked 

Yet and whose job it was to take clothes off 
And when they did it. It seemed unnecessary 
To undress his body until they performed the exam 

And that is going to happen later this morning 
And so I found myself hoping that he was dressed 
Still, though smell may be an issue, or hygiene. 

When the police do a forced entry for the purpose 
Of a welfare check and the deceased person is alone, 
The body goes to the medical examiner’s morgue 

In the section for those deaths in which no evidence 
Of foul play is involved so the examination 
For cause of death is fairly routine. Two policemen, 

For some reason I imagine they were young, 
Found my brother. His body was in the bed 
Which was a mattress on the floor. He was lying 

On his back, according to Angela, my brother’s friend, 
Who lives in the building and is schizophrenic 
And always introduced herself as my brother’s 

Personal assistant, and he seemed peaceful. 
There would have been nothing in the room 
But the mattress and a microwave, an ashtray, 

I suppose, cartons and food wrappers he hadn’t 
Thrown away and the little plastic prescription 
Bottles that he referred to as his scrips. 

They must have called the ambulance 
And that was probably a team of three. 
When I woke, I visualized this narrative 

And thought it would be shorter. I thought 
That what would represent my feelings 
Would be the absence of metaphor. 

But then, at the third line, I discovered 
The three-line stanza and that it was 
Going to be the second dignity. So 

I imagine he is in one of those aluminium 
Cubicles I’ve seen in the movies, 
Dressed or not. I also imagine that, 

If they undressed him, and perhaps washed 
His body or gave it an alcohol rub 
To disinfect it, that that was the job 

Of some emigrant from a hot, poor country. 
Anyway, he is dressed in this stanza, 
Which mimics the terza rima of Dante’s comedy 

And is a form that Wallace Stevens liked 
To use, and also my dear friend Robert. 
And “seemed peaceful” is a kind of metaphor. 


2. Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt 

Because I woke again thinking of my brother’s body 
And why anyone would care in some future 
That poetry addresses how a body is transferred 
From the medical examiner’s office, 
Which is organized by local government 
And issues a certificate certifying that the person 
In question is in fact dead and names the cause 
Or causes, to the mortuary or cremation society, 
Most of which are privately owned businesses 
And run for profit and until recently tended 
To be family businesses with skills and decorums 
Passed from father to son, and often quite ethnically 
Specific, in a country like ours made from crossers 
Of borders, as if, in the intimacy of death, 
Some tribal shame or squeamishness or sense 
Of decorum asserted itself so that the Irish 
Buried the Irish and the Italians the Italians. 
In the South in the early years of the last century 
It was the one business in which a black person 
Could grow wealthy and pass on a trade 
And a modicum of independence to his children. 
I know this because Earlene wrote a paper about it 
In school and interviewed fourth-generation 
African American morticians in Oakland 
Whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers 
Had buried the dead in cotton towns on the Delta 
Or along the Brazos River in Texas, passing on 
To their children who had gone west an order 
Of doing things and symbolic forms of courtesy 
For the bereaved and sequences of behavior 
At wakes and funerals, so that, for example, 
The eldest woman in the maternal line 
Entered the chapel first, and what prayers 
Were said in what order. During Prohibition 
They even sold the white lightning to the men 
Who were allowed to slip outside and take a nip 
And talk about the dead while the cries 
And gospel-song-voiced contralto moans 
Of grief that could sound like curious elation 
Rose inside. Also the rules for burial or burning. 
Griefs and rituals and inside them cosmologies. 
And I thought gratefully of Mississippi John Hurt’s 
Great song about Louis Collins and its terrible 
Tenderness which can’t be reproduced here 
Because so much of it is in the picking 
Of the twelve-string guitar and in his sweet, 
Reedy old man’s voice: 
            When they heard 
            That Louis was dead, 
            All the people dressed in red. 
            The angels laid him away. 
            They laid him six feet under the clay. 
            The angels laid him away. 

 

When he mentioned Mississippi John Hurt's song "Louis Collins," I had to go and find it on Youtube. I really like his name. And his face. The song's heartbreakingly beautiful.

 

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8hAN8hg3XDI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAN8hg3XDI

Here's the link to the Paris Review for the rest of the Hass poem.

http://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/5979/four-poems-robert-hass

Chopin's 200th birthday celebration, live from Warsaw

March 1, 2010

This is it, Chopin’s big one. The Polish composer was born March 1, 1810. And Warsaw, it is hardly surprising, is the place to be for the mother of all the Chopin celebrations. If you've got a few hundred of the new 20 zloty Chopin banknotes (pictured, and worth about $7) and happen to be in the Polish capital -- and if you know a black marketeer dealing in scalped concert tickets -- you might be able to catch the Galowy Koncert Symfoniczny birthday event Monday night. The rest of us can, at 11 a.m. (West Coast time), click on to Chopin 2010 for a live webcast.

The program will begin with the Chinese pianist Yundi (who won Warsaw's Chopin Competition in 2000 when he was Yundi Li ) playing solo Chopin selections. Next Garrick Ohlsson (1970 Chopin Competition winner replacing an indisposed Martha Argerich, class of '66) will be soloist in the First Piano Concerto conducted by Antoni Wit, leading the Warsaw Philharmonic in music they’ve played a million times. The most intriguing aspect of the program, though, will be the Vietnamese pianistDang Thai Son (who was the first Asian to take top honors at the Chopin Competition in 1980) performing the Second Concerto on a 19th century period piano. He will be accompanied by the Dutch early music specialist Frans Bruggen leading his Orchestra of the 18th Century, which hasn’tplayed the Chopin concertos a million times.

And to make up for another Argerich no-show, Deutsche Grammophon has just released “Argerich Plays Chopin,” a CD of recently discovered early broadcast recordings she made in Germany. It begins with her setting afire Chopin’s First Ballade in a studio in Berlin in 1959, when “the exceptionally attractive Argentine pianist,” to quote the CD booklet notes, was an impressively impulsive 17.

The remainder of the disc contains performances from 1967, two years after Argerich won the Chopin Competition, which turned her into a star. According to DG’s breathless prose, that win proved more dazzling than such 1965 news as a Soviet cosmonaut’s first walk in space, Louis Armstrong’s first East Berlin appearance or the first woman to win the Peace Prize from the German Publishers Guild.

Well, she really was exciting (still is), and it is a thrill indeed to hear her find hidden messages in mazurkas and set the sparks flying one moment and turn impossibly seductive the next in the Third Piano Sonata.

Happy birthday Fryderyk.

-- Mark Swed

 

R.I.P. Dory Previn

Dory Previn, Songwriter, Is Dead at 86

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: February 14, 2012

Dory Previn, the lyricist for three Oscar-nominated songs who as a composer and performer mined her difficult childhood, bouts of mental illness and a very public divorce to create a potent and influential personal songbook, died on Tuesday at her home in Southfield, Mass. She was 86.

Larry C. Morris/The New York Times

Dory Previn performing at the Bitter End in New York in 1973.

Her death was confirmed by her husband, Joby Baker.

Ms. Previn rose to prominence as a singer-songwriter with a substantial cult following in the early 1970s and she enriched a period in pop music history that also saw the emergence of Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Laura Nyro.

She never became as widely known as they were (though she did record a live double album at Carnegie Hall), partly because her voice was never as big as theirs, but also because her lyrics — frank and dark, even when tinged with humor, and often wincingly confessional — were not the stuff of pop radio. They were, however, clear antecedents of the work of later balladeers like Sinead O’Connor and Suzanne Vega.

In “With My Daddy in the Attic,” Ms. Previn wrote of her complicated relationship with her disturbed father. In “Esther’s First Communion,” she wrote about a girl’s indoctrination into religious ritual and her revulsion at it. In “Yada Yada La Scala,” she wrote about women in a mental hospital. In “Lemon Haired Ladies,” she wrote about an older woman pining for a younger man:

Whatever you give me

I’ll take as it comes

Discarding self-pity

I’ll manage with crumbs.

Unusually for a pop singer of the day, Ms. Previn’s background was in neither folk nor rock. Her early success came in Hollywood, writing songs for the movies, generally as a lyricist working with her husband, André Previn, who later earned fame as a classical composer and conductor.

Together they were nominated for two Academy Awards: in 1960 for “Faraway Part of Town,” from “Pepe,” and in 1962 for “Second Chance,” from “Two for the Seesaw.” But their best-known collaboration was the theme from the 1967 film version of Jacqueline Susann’s drug-soaked show-business novel “Valley of the Dolls” (later recorded by Dionne Warwick), which begins:

Gotta get off, gonna get

Have to get off from this ride

Gotta get hold, gonna get

Need to get hold of my pride.

The halting, almost stammering progression of laments, Ms. Previn later said, came from her own experience of relying on pills.

In 1969, working with the composer Fred Karlin, Ms. Previn earned a third Oscar nomination, for “Come Saturday Morning” from “The Sterile Cuckoo,” which became a hit for the Sandpipers.

By then, however, the Previn marriage was in a shambles. Mr. Previn had begun an affair with the actress Mia Farrow, then in her early 20s, whom he later married, and Ms. Previn, who had a history of emotional fragility and mental illness, fell apart. Fearful of traveling in general and of flying in particular, she had a breakdown on an airplane that was waiting to take off, shouted unintelligibly and tore at her clothes, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital.

The episode, as awful as it was, proved to be a turning point in her life and career.

Her first album afterward, “On My Way to Where” (1970) — the title was a reference to the airplane debacle — included perhaps her most famous song, “Beware of Young Girls,”about Ms. Farrow, and received polarized reviews. On her second, “Mythical Kings and Iguanas” (1971), many critics noticed a growing vocal confidence. Her third, “Reflections in a Mud Puddle/Taps Tremors and Time Steps” (1971), included a pained report of and reflection on her father’s death, and drew praise from the New York Times music critic Don Heckman.

“Ms. Previn is no great singer, her guitar playing is only adequate, and her melodies sometimes have an uncomfortable tendency to move in too-familiar directions,” he wrote. “But her message is stated so brilliantly in her lyrics, and the tales she has to tell are so important, that they make occasional musical inadequacies fade away.”

Dorothy Veronica Langan was born in New Jersey — sources differ on the town, Rahway or Woodbridge — on Oct. 22, 1925, and she grew up in Woodbridge. Her father, Michael, was a laborer and a frustrated musician who pushed her toward music and dance. He had also been deranged, Ms. Previn wrote in a 1976 memoir, by his service in World War I. He had been gassed, she wrote, and he was convinced the gassing had made him sterile; therefore she could not be his daughter. For a while he locked himself in the attic.

Ms. Previn left home as a teenager and worked in summer stock and in commercials and sang in small clubs, writing new verses to popular songs. Her work came to the attention of Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM movie musicals like “An American in Paris” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” who hired her for MGM, where she met Mr. Previn. They married in 1959. She had been married and divorced previously.

In addition to her husband, Mr. Baker, a painter whom she met in the 1970s and married in 1984, she is survived by three stepchildren, Michelle Wayland, Fredricka Baker and Scott Zimmerman, and six step-grandchildren.

In the 1980s, Ms. Previn and Mr. Previn reconciled as friends, and she came to loathe the fact that she was best known for their breakup. But the pain and grief were the foundation of her art. In the hospital after her breakdown, she was encouraged to write down her feelings, and they emerged as poems.

“I was always afraid to write music,” she said in 1970. “I wouldn’t have presumed to with a musician like André around the house. But I play a little guitar. So I started working them out on the guitar, thinking I could interest some singer in recording them and that’s how all these songs were born.”

 

San Francisco's torch song still burns brightly

Baghdad by the Bay prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tony Bennett's hallmark ballad, although it was dethroned by a song from the 1936 film 'San Francisco,' belted by Jeannette MacDonald.

Tony Bennett won his first two Grammys for "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." (Larry Busacca / Getty Images / February 11, 2012)

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times

February 13, 2012, 9:43 p.m.

Reporting from San Francisco -- At the stroke of noon on Tuesday, music will blast out over the shoppers in Union Square and the homeless people in Hallidie Plaza. The San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus will chime in from the City Hall rotunda, along with the big-hatted belters fromBeach Blanket Babylon. Radio stations have been asked to preempt the midday news.

And if Mayor Ed Lee has his way, San Franciscans from Nob Hill to Noe Valley, the Presidio to Potrero Hill, will look up from their computer keyboards, drop what they're doing and burst into song. The same song. The one this storied city's residents love to hate and hate to love: I left my heart in San Francisco. High on a hill, it calls to me ….

It is, more or less, the 50th anniversary of when Tony Bennett first crooned San Francisco's musical Rorschach test in the Venetian Room of the Fairmont Hotel, and the mustachioed mayor with the Busby Berkeley bent is presiding over a civic extravaganza in honor of the 85-year-old legend with the silver hair and golden pipes.

"Thanks to Tony Bennett, people have been experiencing the magic of San Francisco for 50 years no matter where they are in the world," Lee said in a written statement announcing the festivities. "The song reminds us of why we love our city so much and when we are away, it calls us home."

At least two people, however, are all but guaranteed to spurn the noontime chorus: the men who together dethroned the onetime official song of San Francisco, who stopped those little cable cars from climbing halfway to the stars, more than a quarter-century ago.

That's when then-Supervisor Quentin Kopp — who described "I Left My Heart" as "a schmaltzy jingle," the fault of the "hippie-love movement" and unworthy of the city it aimed to honor — introduced a resolution to instead make the theme from the 1936 earthquake movie "San Francisco" the official song of Baghdad by the Bay.

Now that, Kopp said in a recent interview, was a song. Belted out by Jeanette MacDonald just moments before the killer quake struck on the big screen, "it's a bracing, vigorous, strong song" about risk-taking and adventure, optimism and welcome.

But Kopp's distaste for Bennett's ballad was nothing compared to then-San Francisco Chronicle columnist Warren Hinckle's vitriol. During a monthlong imbroglio — played out in the newspapers and at City Hall as the Democratic Partyprepared for its 1984 convention here — Hinckle called the lyrics "infantile drool." The song, he said, was "barely suited for elevator music" and was "as much San Francisco as bathtub chablis."

In the middle of the debate, a Chronicle poll had "San Francisco" beating out "I Left My Heart" by nearly 3 to 1.

The paper's editorial board backed Hinckle and Kopp, arguing that Bennett's tribute to the city was about as exciting as "a visit from an aunt." Particularly, the board posited, when compared to MacDonald's punchy lines:

San Francisco, open your Golden Gate. 

You let no stranger wait outside your door. 

San Francisco, here is your wandering one saying, 'I'll wander no more.'

At first, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein threatened to veto Kopp's measure. Then she suggested, in rhyme, a Solomonic answer: Let the city have not one, but two official songs. "Let's admit it, Quentin: We're both right. So let's unite," she wrote to her adversary. "Who knows, we may not only compromise — but harmonize."

Kopp's response to her overture? No way.

Next, the city's Culture and Recreation Committee took up the matter of the official song. But many of the region's aspiring singers and songwriters mistook the panel's hearing for an audition, lining up and warbling out their own original compositions.

That evening, during a party scheduled in the Beaux-Arts rotunda, thousands cheered renditions of "San Francisco" by the Gay Men's Chorus and a dozen or so others — and booed the UC Hastings College of the Law rugby club, which had the unfortunate job of belting out the underdog.

The 50-cent drinks didn't help matters much.

Eventually a compromise was reached. "San Francisco" did unseat "I Left My Heart" as the city's official song. But Bennett's baby became the official city ballad. (For anyone who is curious, Los Angeles doesn't have a single official song.)

Tuesday's festivities probably will not match the volume of the celebration and rancor of 1984.

It is, after all, Valentine's Day.

City Hall and the Fairmont Hotel will be bathed in red light. Bennett, who won his first two Grammy Awards for "I Left My Heart," will be the guest of honor — fresh from winning his latest two Sunday night in Los Angeles.

However, Bennett won't be serenading the noontime crowd. He's saving that for a $5,000-a-head dinner at the Venetian Room on Tuesday night to benefit the UC San Francisco division of — you guessed it — cardiology.

He will, however, take part in the City Hall singalong. Ready?

The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay

The glory that was Rome is of another day

I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan

I'm going home to my city by the Bay...

maria.laganga@latimes.com

 

Now Collaborating | Kim Gordon + Surface to Air

WOMEN'S FASHION

 |

By ALEX FRANK

 | FEBRUARY 7, 2012, 11:27 AM

Cedric Bihr

Kim Gordon, a woman who spent the last 30 years crisscrossing the country in a tour bus as the bassist for Sonic Youth, wanted the capsule collection that she designed with the French brand Surface to Air to do two very specific things — mix and match, and fit in the overhead compartment of a bus. “You can’t pack that much for the road, and I’ve always liked the idea of not dressing up for a performance,” she says. Made of basics that all pair easily with each other, the 12-piece collection features cropped neon-tangerine pants (“that’s a good, bright color to wear on stage,” she says), black, brown and snakeskin boots, a soft leather jacket and T-shirts printed with Gordon’s own illustrations. “I like balancing things. I’m a mom, too, you know, but I don’t always want to look just like that,” she says. “It’s the idea of finding things that work and are comfortable, but in which you can still feel like you have an identity.”

The collaboration began when the Surface to Air crew saw Gordon playing a show in a pair of their boots. “In 1991 I was listening to Sonic Youth and in love with Kim’s voice,” says the Surface to Air founder and C.E.O., Jérémie Rozan. “So how do I feel about collaborating with her in 2012? Lucky.”

Having dabbled in fashion before, most famously in the early 1990s with a skate-inspired line called X-Girl (modeled by a young Chloë Sevigny and Sofia Coppola), Gordon knew the drill and started by sending the Paris design team little sketches and photographs of her personal style icons: the French pop singers Catherine Ribeiro and Françoise Hardy. “I’m a sucker for French culture,” she says. Her favorite piece in the collection is a silk tank dress with a digital shattered-glass print. “It’s open with slits down the sides,” she says. “It’s a little narrow and sexy, but you can move your arms around, do what you need to do. Girls are going to like that.” We have no doubt.

Surface to Air x Kim Gordon will be available in all three Surface to Air stores (Paris, New York, São Paulo), as well as at select retailers worldwide this month. Go tosurfacetoair.com.

 

Saint Betsy Johnson of Pop Music

 

 

H.B. Max Roach

January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007

R.I.P. "Ghost"

Ralph MacDonald, Pop Percussionist, Dies at 67

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: December 20, 2011

Ralph MacDonald, a Grammy Award-winning percussionist and composer whose understated Afro-Caribbean rhythms were known as “the ghost” behind the hit records of a multitude of 1970s and ’80s pop stars and who was a co-writer on the hit songs “Where Is the Love?” and “Just the Two of Us,” died on Sunday in Stamford, Conn. He was 67.

E

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Ralph MacDonald at home in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1977.

The cause was lung cancer, his family said.

Mr. MacDonald’s touch on the conga drums and dozens of other percussion instruments was ubiquitous for many years in pop music. It supplied the intimate undertow of Bette Midler’s “Do You Want to Dance?” (1972), the drive behind David Bowie’s “Young Americans” (1975) and the Caribbean lilt in Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” (1977).

With a reputation in the industry as “the ghost behind the million-selling albums,” as The New York Times recounted in 1977, he made similarly defining contributions to records by Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Phoebe Snow, Rod Stewart, George Benson, James Taylor, Billy Joel, Luther Vandross and Amy Winehouse. “My approach is to work with melody by simply enhancing it,” he told The Times. Mr. Simon, with whom he made six albums, “sings such pretty songs,” he said, that “it’s a challenge to enhance that without overdoing it.”

Mr. MacDonald began learning his craft at an early age. His father and five uncles, immigrants from Trinidad, all played professionally in calypso bands. It was one of his uncles, Urias Fritz, who taught him to play with his fingers, not his whole hand, and showed him where to hit the drum. “He didn’t just hit the top of the drum,” Mr. MacDonald said in an interview. “He’d hit it all over, for all types of sounds.”

Mr. MacDonald was 17 when Harry Belafonte hired him for his touring orchestra. He worked with Mr. Belafonte for 10 years, and at some point informed him that despite his many gold records and despite being celebrated as the King of Calypso, Mr. Belafonte really didn’t know what calypso was.

Mr. Belafonte apparently took the criticism with magnanimity. According to Mr. MacDonald’s Web site, Mr. Belafonte invited the young man to write him a song. Mr. MacDonald wrote many, most of which ended up on Mr. Belafonte’s 1966 album “Calypso Carnival.”

After leaving Mr. Belafonte in the early ’70s, Mr. MacDonald and two partners, William Salter and William Eaton, began composing full time. One of their first songs, “Where Is the Love?,” was recorded in 1972 by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway and went on to sell several million copies and win two Grammy Awards. He and his partners wrote many more successful songs, including “Just the Two of Us,” a huge hit for Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr. in 1981.

Ralph Anthony MacDonald was born in Harlem on March 15, 1944, the eighth of Patrick and Evelyn MacDonald’s eight children. His father was a calypso star known professionally as Macbeth the Great. In interviews, Mr. MacDonald said he had grown up almost literally with a set of drums in his hands and had been extremely lucky in his teachers: his father, his uncle and Mr. Belafonte.

He is survived by his wife, Grace; their children Nefra-Ann and Atiba; two children, Anthony and Jovonni, from a previous marriage; a sister, Sylvia Pristell; and three grandchildren.

Mr. MacDonald’s versatility made him a sought-after session player on records by jazz and jazz-soul fusion artists like Bobbi Humphrey, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Herbie Mann, David Sanborn, Ron Carter, Tom Scott, Maynard Ferguson and Mr. Washington, for whom he and his partners wrote the 1975 hit “Mr. Magic.”

He and his partners also wrote “Calypso Fever” for the soundtrack of “Saturday Night Fever,” which earned Mr. MacDonald two Grammys of his own in 1978 as a performer and a producer.

In the interview with The Times, Mr. MacDonald said he never regretted being a relative unknown, despite his renown among his peers. “I don’t want to be a superstar,” he said. “Above all, I’m a musician first.”

 

Louche Luxe with a cool beat

Styled to a T | Richard Thompson

Culture, Men's Fashion

|

By T MAGAZINE

| December 1, 2011, 2:35 pm

Photograph by Cass Bird; fashion editor: Bruce Pask. Fashion assistant: Elena Hale. Hair by Dennis Lanni for Redken. Grooming by Maki at the Wall Group.Jack Victor jacket, $595. Go to jackvictor.com. BLK DNM shirt, $170. Go to blkdnm.com. Levi’s jeans, $58. Go to levi.com. His own Fossil watch.

The Trend

Louche Luxe. Rumpled, textured velvet sees the light as the smoking jacket shows off its daytime look. Tom Ford, Comme des Garçons and Roberto Cavalli all take this holiday classic for a walk on the wild side.

The Guy

The guitarist Richard Thompson, founder of the seminal folk rock band Fairport Convention, just finished his 23rd — yes, 23 — solo record, “Cabaret of Souls,” a folk oratorio set in the underworld.

The Look

A Jack Victor blazer gets rough and ready with a double shot of denim.

Below, a performance of “Haul Me Up,” by the Richard Thompson Band, part of a DVD called “Live at Celtic Connections,” due out in January.