Mark Sandman - Sandbox The Mark Sandman Box Set (2004)

El Mago Alberto nos comparte un solista de Mark Sandman, disco doble con muy buenos temas, pero si quieren saber más entren al post...

Artista: Mark Sandman

Álbum: The Mark Sandman Box Set
Año: 2004
Género: Rock alternativo
Duración: 60:48
Nacionalidad: EEUU

Lista de Temas:
01. Double Stripper Double Sax
02. I Can Do That
03. Tomorrow
04. Patience
05. Cocoon
06. Imaginary Song
07. Goddess
08. Jealous Dream
09. Justine
10. The Phone
11. Devils Boots
12. Born Again
13. Wig
14. 51%
15. Good Time Last Night
Disc 2
01. Riley the Dog
02. Some Other Dog
03. Snow
04. Doreen
05. Get Along
06. Monas Sister
07. Hombre
08. Hotel Room
09. Lets Not Talk
10. Bathtub
11. I Wanna Go Home
12. Deep Six
13. Livin With U
14. They Bent Me
15. Middle East
16. Early Man

Alineación:
- Mark Sandman / vocals, guitar, piano, organ, synthesizer, bass guitar
Musicians:
David Champagne / electric guitar
Jimmy Ryan / mandolin
Dana Colley / horns
John Medeski / keyboards
Chris Ballew, Mike Rivard / bass guitar
Billy Conway, Jerry Deupree / drums

Es increíble el trabajo de Mark, ya sea con Morphine o sólo, como podemos ver en esta joya que comparte nuestro amigo Alberto, que lo reseña cortito y claro.

Para algunos posteos quizas no hace falta tanta reseña, y éste es un caso de esos, creemos que todos saben quien fue Mark Sandman, su carrera con Morphine, su curiosa muerte, su particular estilo, etc. etc, bueno este box es una recopilación de temas en solitario, b sides, etc. etc, para los seguidores de este gran músico este box set es una joya, y para aquellos que no lo son también, así que así. como la curiosidad mata al gato,e spero que esta bocha de canciones mate alguno. Reseña corta si las hubo.

Alberto

Algún comentario en inglés no viene mal:

Mark Sandman, como muchos sabrán, fue un músico, compositor y luthier conocido fundamentalmente por haber sido la voz y el ejecutante de un bajo slide de 2 cuerdas (y varios otros instrumentos) al frente de Morphine desde la creación del grupo allá por 1989 hasta el 3 de julio de 1999, cuando durante un concierto en Palestrina, Italia, Sandman se desplomó sobre el escenario fulminado por un ataque al corazón, falleciendo a los 46 años, exactamente 15 años al día de hoy.
"Sandbox: The Mark Sandman Box Set" es el fruto del trabajo realizado por Bill Conway y Dana Colley, sus compañeros en Morphine, quienes durante varios años seleccionaron entre todo el material dejado por Sandman, ya sea en su etapa junto a ellos o en Treat Her Right o Hipnosonics, antiguas bandas de Mark, como así también varias experimentaciones propias.
En mi opinión Sandman fue uno de los músicos más interesantes aparecidos en los últimos años, un tipo al que le llegó cierto nivel de reconocimiento a una edad en que muchos músicos ya están más que consagrados y que lamentablemente no pudo permanecer más tiempo en este planeta. Tal vez para el que no conozca nada de su obra sería una mejor opción empezar por su trabajo con Morphine, y después indagar en su lado más desconocido, pero quién sabe.

Hugo

My neighbors Jamie and Michele threw a birthday party recently for their two small sons, Dylan and Julian, who were born on the same day two years apart. It was the usual chaos of kids and toys and crying and running until Jamie gave Dylan his big present. It was a sandbox. It was sitting in the back yard: a giant red plastic turtle with a removable shell. Under the shell lay a little beach of lovely, beige sand, pristine and irresistible.
The kids drew around it like scraps of iron to a magnet. Some climbed in immediately and started digging; some calmly transferred handfuls of sand from the box to their pockets, their hair, their mouths; some grabbed fistfuls and threw them at anybody nearby. Baby Julian sat in the sand rolling a few grains delicately between his chubby fingers, nonplussed and clearly wondering "what is this stuff?" His big brother Dylan would not be distracted from his new mecca and at one point prostrated himself facedown in the box, like he was surrendering himself to the sand god or just trying to become one with the stuff.
I know just how he feels. I've been listening to Sandbox: The Music of Mark Sandman, a set of two CDs and a DVD, released in the last few months. To call it a retrospective of the work of the musician most famous for being the singer/writer/two-string slide bass player of the Boston band Morphine, doesn't do it justice. No mere "best of" compilation, this set explores the myriad aspects of Sandman's creative genius, in recordings never released, music videos, interviews, artwork and odd footage. Once I heard Sandbox, I lay right down in it and haven't gotten up yet.
Compiled by his Morphine bandmates, drummer Billy Conway and saxaphonist Dana Colley, the set represents what by all accounts was an exhaustive culling of huge numbers of recordings Mark Sandman made over the years. Sandman, who died onstage at age 46 of an apparent heart attack, recorded tracks with many of the musicians he played with in those years in bands like Morphine, Treat Her Right, Hypnosonics, Either Orchestra, and Candy Bar, as well as with other players in the Boston scene. For Morphine fans, the set gives plenty of time to the dark, low sounds of the trio's signature slide bass, baritone sax, and drums instrumentation. And for followers of Treat Her Right, there's a good helping of that band's bluesy swamp-rock. What's most evident in this collection, though, is the reach of Sandman's creativity and the range of his influences.
We learn from a video interview that he was entranced by some early Muddy Waters recordings that used only bass and drums and that it was from this low setting that he started to experiment with a sparer, darker palette. Hard-core jazz, the beat poets, rock in its varied forms, blues: it's all in here, merged by and filtered through the wit, ear and shadowy baritone voice of Mark Sandman. From the sardonic skip of "I Can Do That," a tune powerfully reminiscent of beat jazz singer Mose Allison, to the sad (and creepy) Tom Waitsian piano tune "Devil's Boots," to the world-beat rocker "Mona's Sister," to the dark, echoey "Hotel Room," an eerie venture into acoustic country--these recordings show him to be a musician who digested a staggering variety of music whole and created something unique and yet with clear and honest roots.
It's interesting, too, to hear the evolution of Mark Sandman's now famous instrumental experimentation. He altered instruments--taking off most of the strings, swapping out bass and guitar strings, tinkering with the pickups--to reproduce the sounds in his head, hence his use of the two-string slide bass in Morphine, as well as other "new" instruments, like one he called the tritar. The DVD is a window into this subject and a hundred others. There's a great, albeit uncomfortable interview in Europe just after Sandman has exited the stage of the Pink Pop Festival. The interviewer keeps asking Sandman if he doesn't find using only two strings "limiting." Sandman says, no, it's easier. Undeterred, the interviewer asks the question again. Sandman answers that all twelve notes are there and he really only needs one string, that actually the second string is him being extravagant. Clearly, the interviewer is the one who finds the two string approach limited. There are lots of strange, funny, and telling moments like this caught on video. They nicely round out the portrait the CDs paint.
Colley and Conway have done an admirable job creating a coherent and multi-faceted view of Sandman's work, which in less capable and knowing hands could have seemed obscure or merely random. It's surprising how accessible a lot of these songs are, though, and doubly amazing that they didn't make it onto the band's records. Perhaps if Sandman had lived longer, they might have.
My friend Jamie, it turns out, was a friend of Mark Sandman's back in Boston. The man he describes is someone who really did immerse himself in music and poetry and art like Dylan trying to merge with his sandbox. This Sandbox captures that feeling well and demands any number of responses. You might wonder, like Julian did, what this stuff is. But, if it calls you, you could dig in it for hours, turning up new ideas, or ingest it bit by bit, or lie in it for a while trying to become one with the soul of Mark Sandman's music. One thing is certain: you won't walk away without getting some on you. It sticks and you'll find it later in some surprising places. Sandboxes are like that.

Judith Edelman

Morphine leader Mark Sandman was the inventor of a sound called “low rock”—the distinctive blend of sonorous saxophone, bass and deep grooves that, along with his lyric poetry, propelled Morphine to fame. Although Morphine and the seminal swamp-blues quartet Treat Her Right had underground success, much of Sandman’s work was never commercially released and remains unheard by anyone outside his circle of friends.
Sandbox: Mark Sandman Original Music, the forthcoming box-set retrospective of Sandman’s music, promises to bring everyone into that circle. The two-CD/DVD set features 31 songs, as well as rare and unseen footage. Sandbox will be released on Nov. 16 on Hi-N-Dry.
After Mark’s untimely death in 1999, the surviving members of Morphine—Billy Conway and Dana Colley—organized the Morphine Orchestra tour in 2000 as a tribute to Mark and his music. Then they began meticulously culling the large collection of original music, poetry and art he’d left behind. As they pored through his many hours of tape, even his closest friends were surprised at how prolific Sandman was.
“This set just scratches the surface,” writes album annotator Ted Drozdowski. “Not only of the vast body of Mark’s previously unveiled work, but of a life richly lived on its own terms and done too soon. And always, always, always to be remembered warmly and well.”

Paste Staff

“Me llamo Mark Sandman. Musica para nosotros es la cosa mas importante… el dinero no importe nada… importe muy poco, un poco…. Los canciones son escritos sobre la mujer y para perder, para ganar, y el peligrosodel ser humano. Cada cancion tiene su propria vida, y nos tratamos tocar cada cancion como existe solo. Entiende?”
It was not always easy to understand Mark Sandman. Understated to the point of muted, laconic way past the borders of ironic, the frontman for Morphine and Treat Her Right constantly defied easy comprehension, demanding from his audience a more focused, more participatory involvement in his music. “I leave room to think about things that aren’t said in words” is the way Sandman described his own brand of lyricism that not only left room for, but demanded interpretation. Classic Morphine songs like “Empty Box” and “The Jury”, over a decade after their initial release, still swim openly in endless seas of meaning.
“Have patience / Give it just a little more time” might at first be Sandman’s plea to his listeners who constantly demanded simple explanation of his music. But heard as the harrowing chorus of “Patience” on the new release Sandbox: The Music of Mark Sandman, it instead is a eulogy and epitaph. In the saddest rock ‘n’ roll death that wasn’t Otis Redding’s, Mark Sandman collapsed on stage of a heart attack while playing with his band Morphine in Palestrina, Italy. And in painful comparison to the fact that Redding never saw his “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” posthumously rise to the top of the pop charts, Sandman never lived to sit on his back porch and drink red wine on 9/9/99, despite his aspirations in “French Fries with Pepper”.
Last July marked five years since Sandman’s untimely passing, and his close friends and musical companions Billy Conway and Dana Colley—who, in 2000, marked Sandman’s death with the Morphine’s posthumous The Night—now come forward to help pay homage to Mark’s life with Sandbox. A ceaseless collaborator and constant creator of new music, Mark spent his life finding new partners with whom to create music of meaning. Mostly in the Boston bars he haunted, Sandman found friends first and then turned them into bandmates whose trials by fire were on weekly display at Cambridge’s famous Plough and Stars and the Middle East. With names like Hipnosonic, Candy Bar, Treat Her Orange, and Super Group, along with the well-known Treat Her Right, the better-known Morphine, and the best-named Pale Bros., Sandman left behind an incredible testament to one man’s insistence on finding what is good in music.
That dedication, that inspiration, and Sandman’s singular talent are what make Sandbox such a strong success. Unlike so many records rushed out in the wake of an artist’s untimely passing, this two-disc set (packaged with a wonderful DVD that includes the above-quoted interview from Galician TV) is hardly a pastiche of half-baked, undercooked songs: Sandbox holds up as a complete album to anything ever bearing Sandman’s name released in his lifetime. While there are certainly a few weak tracks (a rambling post-kidnapping confession of a war correspondent entitled “Middle East” takes that prize here), they are mostly buried at the end of the package (not unlike the lesser “Free Love” and “Hanging On a Curtain”, put near the close of classic Morphine records). For the most part, from start to finish, this thoughtful collage of Mark’s material comes off as incredibly cohesive and entirely moving.
As the subtitle suggests, this collection is to be understood as “The Music of Mark Sandman”. While band names and bandmates are given credit, it is as an entirety, and not track-by-track. The result prevents the listener from hacking the material up into segments of time and space, instead allowing the music to be heard more fluently. A clearly later track “I Can Do That” juxtaposes nicely with “Tomorrow” which, to my ear at least, seems to be earlier material. (Even in death, Sandman keeps us guessing.) The low-rock sounds made famous by Morphine flow into guitar-driven material which sounds, surprisingly, rather trebly. Despite making his name playing a two-string slide bass in a band that was all about baritone, Sandman—who claimed guitar was his favorite instrument, just not the right one for Morphine—masters a variety of sounds and tones in the 31 varieties scooped into Sandbox.
Women—losing them, gaining them, and the time spent in between—are the focus of the songs on the set. Like all Sandman’s other material (and as promised above in Spanish), here each song is given its own life. “Bathtub” contains not only the reflections of the singer while sitting there soaking, but also captures the feel of an echo-filled, tiled chamber. A song about bragging, “I Can Do That”, uses the music to prove the singer’s bravado; ethereal harmonics create the dreamy soundscape for an “Imaginary Song”. And as for women, they’re all over the place: shaking things up like “Mona’s Sister”, breaking things up like “Doreen”, and wreaking divine vengeance in “Goddess”. Mark’s muse remains unchanged.
“I spent all day yesterday / Watching the grass grow / And what I learned is / The grass really grows slow” makes it seem as if Sandman thought life laid out endlessly before him. “Have patience / Give it just a little time / And everything will work out fine” is a cruel and ironic epitaph to leave the posthumous lips of a good man gone too soon. But perhaps Sandman’s message, like his music, is the healing balm that now, after time, comes to remind us that while life is not fair, it is life nonetheless. It is life to make our own, whether learning from the growing grass, making magic with dear friends, or fulfilling the heights of potential within. If life is short, but life is full, the rewards remain. At the very least, from the terse and oblique symbolism that is now Mark Sandman’s life, that is the message I can construct today.

Seth Limmer