Birds of paradise update, plus how to turn hostility toward owls into art

Though I still haven't been shown the bird specimen collection at the American Museum of Natural History since the last post, I did in fact get to meet Errol Fuller, if only for a brief moment. About a month ago I played an "opening set", also at the Museum of Natural History, for a lecture by the author and artist Katrina van Grouw about her book The Unfeathered Bird, which is really cool and I'll probably write a post about it soon. This lecture happened to coincide with a lecture in the museum's other theater by David Attenborough, which was about Drawn from Paradise, a new book he co-wrote with Errol Fuller about the history of the birds of paradise in Western/European culture. Attenborough and Fuller were signing copies of this book after the lecture, so after I saw Katrina van Grouw's presentation I got in line to meet them. I didn't have their book yet, so I had them sign my sheet music.

Recently I got Drawn from Paradise, which is at least as awesome as The Lost Birds of Paradise which my last post was about. I haven't read all of it yet, but so far I haven't found any reference to the other book I wrote about last time, the one by Tim Laman and Ed Scholes (it's not in the index). However, I did notice a few observations about bird of paradise behavior that I thought may have been taken from Laman and Scholes' book. For example, the chapter about the 12-wired Bird of Paradise mentions that the male's special "wire" feathers are used to tickle the female's face, a fact I seem to remember reading that Laman and Scholes had discovered- I'll have to double check. *

(Tim Laman's photo of 12-wired tickling.)

One really cool thing I found in Drawn from Paradise relates to a painting, reproduced in the book, which is part of a series by the 17th-century Dutch artist Frans Snyders which depict a large group of birds of different species singing together, with an owl conducting them from a score. Attenborough and Fuller include this painting because there is a Greater Bird of Paradise in it, but their caption also mentions that the inspiration for these paintings may have been the observation of mixed flocks of songbirds converging around a roosting owl and scolding it. A taxidermied version of this behavior, which is known as mobbing, can be seen in the Japanese scene in the Museum of Natural History's hall of Birds of the World. I also wrote a tune that represents mobbing; it is the third movement of Bird Lives. The bass represents the owl.

More updates to come.

-Elijah

*This makes me think of the lonely male 12-wired Bird of Paradise that lived in the Bronx Zoo for much of my life- it needed someone to tickle so it was sent to another zoo in Germany that had a female.

Birds of paradise, mastery and mystery

Birds of paradise (which, to clarify for non-bird people, are any of about 40 species found in New Guinea and adjacent islands) are among the subjects, in any writing, that induce the most superlatives. Their collective name is one; so are some of the names of the individual species, such as Magnificent Bird of Paradise. This is due not only to their beautifully colored and textured plumage but also their diversity (it is hard to tell that some of them are related to some others), their apparent intelligence and in some cases the inaccessibility of their habitat, in dense rainforest or on remote mountains. It is all well and good to use superlatives about them, but once you’ve got those out of the way, how do you continue? There have been quite a lot of books about birds of paradise, and the ones I’ve read deal with this issue in very different ways.

Greater Bird of Paradise

Tim Laman and Ed Scholes’ book The Birds of Paradise (2012) is the result of eight years of expeditions to observe and document as many aspects of bird-of-paradise life as possible. It is definitely an impressive book, with lots of photos that definitely invite superlatives: many are very close-up and show the birds in action, eating or interacting with each other, often in their courtship displays. Laman and Scholes write about new discoveries regarding the birds’ behavior, as well as possible explanations for how all these diverse species and their lavish appearances could have evolved. This book frequently plunges into the facts after the superlatives are over. It is very precise; Laman and Scholes seem to be on their way toward mastery of their subject.
Laman and Scholes’ book contains many quotations from other bird-of-paradise books. One book that is notably not quoted from is The Lost Birds of Paradise by Errol Fuller (1995). This is a very different book on a slightly different subject: the birds of paradise that were collected and prepared as stuffed specimens, mostly from the 1890s to the 1920s, that are now in museums and do not fit into any of the known species. To me this book is at least, and almost certainly more, interesting than the other one. It is very much a history and extremely well researched; much of it is a skeptical response to the writings of a German biologist in the 1930s who claimed that all of these specimens that do not fit the known species are in fact hybrids. Though Fuller agrees for a few of the specimens, he makes the case for many others not being knowable for certain. Possibly they are separate species that are very rare or extinct; perhaps they are hybrids between other species than was originally assumed. This feeling of mystery serves to make the book particularly awesome, as do old pictures that provide historical context (such as an illustrated poem from some time in the late 19th century criticizing the wanton use of feathers {such as bird-of-paradise feathers} in hats, titled “A Killing Hat”- who knew the use of “killing” as a superlative was that old?). More importantly, Fuller’s book never stops with the superlatives. They don’t get in the way, but they give the book a sense of wonder that I feel is much more overt than in Laman and Scholes’ work, though it is far from lacking in the latter. It is this kind of wonder, I think, that put all the superlatives in the birds’ names in the first place.

-Elijah

P. S. I am trying to set up a opportunity to go behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History and see the bird specimen collection, which has many of the “lost” birds of paradise. Expect an update!

One of the "lost" ones. I might get to see these exact feathers!

Jam

jam

1. To cram or crush together; to get stuck.
2. A fruit preserve/spread.
3. (music) To improvise collectively; an open-ended session of jazz improvisation.

How do we get the 3rd definition out of the others?
I researched the origin of the “jam” of the jam session and found that there are several theories on where it came from. The most believable is that it was used for situations in which the musicians were jammed together in a tight space. It seems less likely, but still somewhat plausible, that it came partly from a contraction of “jamboree”. A rather unlikely suggestion I also saw is that it came from one particular session (or series of sessions) in which an amateur singer was present who often snapped his fingers on beats 1 and 3 instead of the 2 and 4 that feels better in a jazz setting, thus “jamming” the beat and the groove. (I’ll have to write a whole other post about 1 and 3 vs. 2 and 4- I feel that some people really need to calm down about this.) Though this explanation is almost certainly wrong, it could easily apply to a few of today’s jam sessions.
I feel sorry for pianists, bassists and drummers at jam sessions in certain New York venues such as Smalls, Fat Cat, and Smoke. They have to accompany endless strings of endless horn solos, which are frequently competitive and repetitive (if there was another word that ended in “petitive” I would add it here) and can lack nuance and contrast. The choruses, and eventually the solos themselves, blend into each other and become fungible. No progress can be made and the session is jammed.
If you crush fruit the way jazz is crushed in these sessions, the result is a sort of fruit preserve. Compressed jazz produces a kind of jazz preserve in which traditions get jammed in a sort of suspended animation. These traditions come largely out of the bop of the 1940s-‘60s, such as the almost universal “trading 4’s” and certain solo orders. However, there are somewhat inexplicable newer traditions in these jarfuls of compressed jazz, such as soloists’ avoidance of certain notes (often the roots of the chords, fear of which should be called “rhizophobia”) and the idea that, no matter how many soloists, everyone should remember the order in which they soloed on any given tune so they can trade 4’s with the drums in the same order, minus the bass player. Who said bass and drums can’t trade with each other? Who said remembering the solo order when there were 19 soloists playing 11 choruses each was practical?
In the face of all this thick, slathery, stuck, fruity, preserved jazz spread all over the place, I have searched for jam sessions that neither get jammed nor resemble jam. The Tea Lounge comes close, but enough people show up that the house band (which is awesome) doesn’t get to play once the jam part starts, and then there’s no guarantee there won’t be competitive rhizophobes about, though there is a limit to number of players per tune which helps to keep the solo orders memorable for trading. Last night I went to Mona’s for the first time; I’ll definitely come again. This is specifically a session for “trad” jazz (jazz of the 1920s) and I’m sure overt rhizophobes not tolerated there, though I must say there were a few squishier players who had a harder time filtering the bop influence out. Nobody, however, lost sight of the goal of this session, having a lot of fun with trad jazz, and thus it neither jammed nor resembled a jarful of jam.
Finally, if this was improvised it would be the most awesome jam ever. (I was in the audience at this performance- maybe I'm in the video.)

Elijah

Auctioneering as music?

If you haven’t done so already, check this out.

This video calls attention to a tradition that lies on the edge of music. Though I don’t know exactly what auctioneers try to accomplish by jabbering like this (other than excitement and showing off), it seems that the auctioneering chant is considered a skill rather than an art form. Much like traditional Alpine yodeling, it comes from a non-musical background but can definitely be considered musical. The auctioneer seems to be improvising, but within a set form or pattern, reminiscent more of early jazz or perhaps some folk music traditions than the bebop/postbop continuum that dominates modern jazz. The auctioneer’s filler syllables often resemble “bols”, the syllables used for learning tabla drumming (or even more so “konnakol”, the equivalent in southern India for mrudangam drumming). They also remind me of “scat” singing and folk traditions of nonsense syllables, such as Celtic “mouth music” or similar (unfortunately stereotyped) kinds of Eastern European singing. (This particular auctioneer’s filler syllables sound a lot like the “Hi Digga Digga Dum” of these “gypsy” stereotypes.) Unlike yodeling, also a non-verbal vocal tradition, auctioneering’s musical possibilities haven’t been truly explored outside of this video and this song.

There are several possibilities for expanding this tradition musically. I would perhaps like to hear a drummer (or any musician) who has studied the auctioneer-chant tradition enough play along with an auctioneer in real time. This could lead to either having an auctioneer sit in with a band or having a singer, rapper, or beatboxer learn the tradition and work it into something else. With regards to the genre-blending that goes on so much in experimental/postmodern music, why not?

-Elijah

Believing, seeing and does everyone need all of science?

As a bird enthusiast, I find this post highly amusing and also thought-provoking. There's a little bit of jargon here, but to sum it up, this is a hypothetical situation in which an Australian birder, fed up with never seeing uncommon bird species he searches for, decides that these species do not exist. He removes the corresponding pages from his copy of this book, and continues to believe in their non-existence. Eventually, he proposes that Latin names be removed as well (the reason that he gives for this is hilarious!), that English names can be replaced with initials, and that the remaining pages can be taken out once the birds they describe have been seen. This is all in the interest of slimming the book (it's pretty chunky- I have the second edition which is over an inch thick, and the 8th edition probably isn't much thinner, if at all) as well as keeping up disbelief in the existence of uncommon species.

There is much that is obviously fictional here, but some points raised by this situation are worth lingering on. The idea that once a bird is seen, its illustration and account in the book doesn't need to be looked at again is a parody of competitive birders (the famous "twitchers" among Brits*- though "listers" is used more frequently in North America) who seem to watch birds only in the interest of assembling lists of what they have and haven't seen. The point of view in this post seems to be of someone who can't keep up with the "twitchers" (in the British sense) and could be getting back at them by suggesting they're searching for things that don't exist. However, if we get past the humor, it can also be seen as a new system an individual birder has worked out for himself. And it works for him.

Being an attempt by humans to understand the universe, science is artificial. It is not a single dominating truth without alternatives. Nature itself may be more of a truth, and as it flows freely, human endeavors to document it shift. The binomial system of Latin names for species, as invented by Carolus Linnaeus, was perfect for the Enlightenment times he came from, when everyone seemed to be trying to reduce nature to numbers and draw straight lines on it. Since then, lines have bent and blurred; wholes have been seen to exceed the sum of their parts. However, enough aspects of the Enlightenment approach have persisted to make current science a complex hybrid of the objective and the subjective- too complex to be the first thing that comes to mind when nature is perceived firsthand. Not everyone knows science, and though it's often interesting to know science's take on nature, not everyone has to.

With respect to identifying bird species, there are lots of situations in which species are so similar it would take a highly skilled eye and ear to differentiate them (this is the result of lumpers and splitters- but that's a story for another post). Does anyone who's not that curious about what they are need to be able to tell them apart? People get along just fine not knowing the subtlest differences.

Blue-winged parrot, as mentioned in the post above.

Elegant parrot. I don't blame you if they look the same to you.

It is the same with Latin names- nobody who's not a biologist uses them, but some pretentious "twitchers" (twipsters?) think it's necessary to know them. As Mr. O'Malley notes, the Aborigines don't need to use Latin even in formal occasions. There is not a single instance in which a Latin name is absolutely necessary for a non-scientific birder.

As a birder who is interested in identification by overall impression, I consider the distinctions one makes for themselves more important than the accepted scientific distinctions. As far as Mr. O'Malley's character, he isn't doing anyone a disservice by believing hard-to-identify birds don't exist. He is merely identifying them in his own way, and as long as he isn't trying to communicate with scientists or hardcore birders, no non-scientist or non-hardcore birder would say his system was wrong.

-Elijah

*I hear that in Australia all birders are called "twitchers".