V02-T04 "Pythagoras' Trousers"

.....I recently read that this group had its first fixed-venue performance opening for Kraftwerk. I don't know if that's true, but it's not as strange as it might sound at first. Both can fall into an almost hypnotic, ululating groove.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 4

• 03:22 "PYTHAGORAS' TROUSERS" (Simon Jeffes)
• performed by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra
• original source: LP PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA Editions EG EEG11 (UK) 1981
• and my source: CD PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA Editons EG EEGCD11 (US/Cananda) [no date- JEM Distribution]

.....You may have heard this used in television or radio commercials or as background music in movies or on NPR. In fact, I may have intended to use " MUSIC FOR A FOUND HARMONIUM" and opted against that when it was used in an IBM advertisement running on television at about that time. The PCO is definitely genre-defying. The best explanation I've come up with for them is that they sound like the folk music of a culture nobody's ever heard of, that never existed. Jeffes formed the PCO at about the same time that the Kronos Quartet convened, in the early 1970's. Their missions were very different however, with the KQ championing modern classical composers, giving many classical works their first recordings and in many cases their first performances ever. Although Jeffes was classically trained he didn't see a future for himself in the classical music world, or even much of a future for classical music itself as it was forty years ago. If his peers sought to circumvent the stagnation with Keith Emerson doodlings and bombast in the pop music world, and KQ tried to reinvigorate the academy by shining brighter lights on its own more innovative corners, Jeffes turned inward. By his own account the Cafe was a fictional location that came to him literally in a dream, music and all. He spent the next quarter century trying to recreate the ambience of the Cafe from that dream. In the years that followed pundits and career pontificants seemed obsessed with coining term after term for the new mixtures of rhythms and textures that sprouted in the wake of the PCO's early experiments. None of them covered all the bases, and attempts to do so resulted in the frustratingly vague "world music" and similar useless undescriptions.

.....After fifteen years and four studio albums, The Penguin Cafe Orchestra became a hit and in demand everywhere but in American commercial outlets, which are hardwired to believe that easy categorization is an absolutely necessary first step to selling a recording. Selling out concert venues and getting into the British album charts (in 1987) meant nothing.The PCO became the umpteenth of my favorite groups blackballed by the American music industry. No airplay on commercial radio stations, which had became strangled by narrow formatting. No presence in chain music stores (except for Strawberries in the northeast before it was acquired by Trans-World, and Tower, which had only just extended east of New York at that time). In the few years between then and my compiling this tape I remember reading an article about Nigel Kennedy's then-new recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The article was really responding to much of the contemporary chatter about Kennedy's album making the pop album charts. It was seen as some kind of harbinger of the public 'discovering' the classical market. The author of the article cautioned that a casual investigation of his own into catalogues of work in print revealed that, on vinyl and CD, he found roughly 500 versions of The Four Seasons currently in print. That wasn't even counting versions that had not been reissued since the days of mono or imports that didn't make it to the US. He suggested that classical music had a brighter future with fewer superstars like Kennedy or the Three Tenors and more diversification instead. Essentially, that's what Kronos and Jeffes figured out almost twenty years earlier and had already made healthy careers out of creating their own niche. Following the publication of that article commercial advertisements began featuring increasing portions of music we had been told had no commercial potential. As it turned out, there was never a mass migration of classical music to the pop charts. But that didn't mean people weren't hearing classical music, or that they weren't hearing dispatches from the cutting edge in their computer ads. It only meant that the music industry began training people to expect to find the music that they enjoyed outside that industry. Today, finding PCO tracks and albums online takes seconds. It's no more difficult than finding the Rolling Stones. But I went to Amazon and typed in "vivaldi four seasons" (to distinguish from Frankie Valli) and what did I find under 'music'? Over 1500 selections. Sure, Amazon has more redundancies than print catalogues, but still...Amazon can only sell what the labels manufacture. And they tend to manufacture the same things over and over again.

.....While I put together this tape Simon Jeffes was launching his own label, Zopf. With a few more studio albums, plus live audio and video releases, the orchestra continued to tour the world while Jeffes stayed at home, demoing solo piano pieces. Many of us only heard after the fact that he had died of cancer in 1997, quietly closing the doors of the Cafe. Ten years later, almost to the day, the doors reopened. Arthur Jeffes, Simon's son, has reassembled regulars from the core ensemble and revived concert favorites, augmented by some compositions of his own. If I can find their website, I'll add it to the left side of the page.

.....Next up, I'll follow an all-instrumental selection with an all-verbal one.