Trade and Music (Lapham's Quarterlies)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XII-2: Trade (2019) Exchange of favours is not a human species-specific trait, but organised trade is. It’s one of the constants of human culture. All human societies regulate exchange, ranging from customs and conventions to formal rules and laws governing everything from weights and measures to contracts.
     The bits and pieces assembled here remind us that many humans will cheat if they can get away with it, hence the need for law. They also remind us that humans have co-operated from the beginning to gain advantages in trading, ranging from guilds and cartels to international agreements governing trade between cities and nations. The corresponding counter is conventions and agreements that give everyone the same opportunities for fair trading.
     Trading rules within societies (families, tribes, and eventually larger communities) ensured that essentials were produced and shared equitably. Trading between such groups ensured that necessary and desirable materials and products reached those who needed and wanted them. Trade made us what we are today: the most wide-spread and successful animal on Earth. It also encouraged the development of our most dangerous vice, greed, which has brought us to the point of no return in climate change.
     In short, trade is essential to human beings, and trade requires honest dealing and justice. It also raises a question: Was it trade that distinguished us from our sibling species, the Neanderthals, Denisovians, and others? Was it trade that gave us the advantages that enabled us to outcompete them? I see no obvious method for answering this question, but I think it’s an important one. Equally important is the question of how we can adapt our trading practices to survive climate change.
     Another good collection. Pretty well all past issues are available from the publisher; some have been reprinted as annual sets. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly X-4: Music (2017) I enjoyed the pieces by the musicians and composers best. Mixes of memoir, technical discussions, and reviews. They gave me insights not only into how music-makers experience the world and their art, but also into why I find music an essential part of my life. Music “sounds the way feelings feel”, to quote a phrase from Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1957). David Levitin’s researches into the neurology of music support that insight.
     There have been many speculations about the source of music’s power and of the human need to make it, and the attempts to justify or ban it on theological, moral, or philosophical grounds. The excerpts here are interesting as evidence of how all attempts at understanding ourselves are predicated on and hence limited by contemporary assumptions about reality. They may have satisfied the writers and their readers, but reading them now I was continually distracted by current knowledge of neurology, and a wider experience of music than some of these writers had. They also demonstrate the role of culture in music: in most cultures, music is assumed to be a finished art, and students are taught to emulate and replicate music as defined by their predecessors. The notion that art should be new, that an artist should create new and original works even when within a tradition, that notion seems to be peculiarly European, and a recent one, too.
     There are several fascinating bits about the instruments. All are versions of the three basic technologies: pipes, strings, and drums. ****

Two Songs

 I occasionally write song lyrics.  My Friend Lois Jones has set some of them to music.  In December 2020, her group Women in Song released their first album.  Two of the songs use my lyrics:

The Prairie's an Ocean, and True Love Waltz.

Enjoy!

Homo musicis: Why humans make music

Daniel Levitin. This is Your Brain on Music (2006) Levitin was in the music business in LA for many years, but discovered a yen for understanding what it was all about. So he became a neurologist, believing that understanding how the brain works when we make or respond to music would explain it all. It doesn’t, but it comes close.
     Music is species-specific behaviour: only humans make music.We could label oursleves homo musicis. Other animals use sounds for communication and for courtship displays, but none, as far as we can tell, play around with sound-sequences like we do. Not even whales.
     Every known culture and society has music. The three features of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. What’s interesting is how we perceive them. Rhythm is built on sequences of strong and weak beats. We recognise the same rhythm whether played fast or slow. Melody is a sequence of intervals, not notes: we recognise the same melody whether played with higher or lower notes. Harmony in the sense of timbre is omni-present: human voices and all musical instruments generate different combinations of overtones in addition to the main tone. Think of chords as deliberately created and controlled overtone groups. Then a melody becomes a sequence of chords combined with a rhythm. By the way, a melody can be played with different rhythms. And in every culture, music and dance are connected. You can’t have one without the other. (The Western habit of suppressing movement while listening to a performance is a relatively short-lived aberration.)
     Levitin sees two puzzles: First, how do we perceive and produce music? Second, how come music is such an apparently necessary part of human experience? Even people who are tone-deaf experience music as more or less pleasurable. Neurology provides some of the answers. Every part of the brain is involved when we make or listen to music. The cerebellum controls repetitive movements. The cortex plans them, and generates expectations. The limbic system supplies both the memory and the emotions. (It’s unclear just how many melodies we can recognise, for most of us it’s in the hundreds.) The auditory system decodes the complex wave-forms of the sounds of music, and delivers the results to other areas of the brain that recognise melody, rhythm, harmony, and the words of a song. Music is intimately connected with movement and language.
     We use music to build community. Although we can make it a solitary pursuit, it is first and foremost a collective one. We sing together, we dance together, we make music in groups. We prefer the music of our ingroup. Music is part of our courtship behaviour. It persists in our memories after dementia has destroyed almost every other part of our selves. A fragment of a song will trigger memories, and the emotions that accompany them. Music is such a pervasive part of our individual and collective experience that we take it for granted, and hardly realise how much it shapes our lives.
     As you can see, it’s complicated. Levitin has become a premier researcher in the neurology of music. Every result raises new questions. This book is now 14 years old, and recent work on questions of consciousness, mental health, the role of emotions, dementia, etc, have superseded some of his insights, but on the whole I think it’s an excellent introduction to music as a human endeavour. Levitin is an academic, so he tends to pile on the details, but that’s the only flaw in a very good book. Recommended. ***

Dave Brubeck at 91: Take Five at Montreal in 2009.

 

Just listened, again, to this Dave Brubeck version of Take Five at the 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival. He was 91. IMO this version is the best ever. It's 10 minutes long, so be prepared.

Jim Galloway, jazz musician

Jim Galloway On TVO Take a look and a listen. Also on Youtube.

St Thomas Cantelupe, Bishop of Hereford

     Meryl Jancey. St Thomas Cantelupe, Bishop of Hereford. (1982) I didn’t know there was a St Thomas of Hereford until I was given this book. My Great Uncle Peter (F.  C. Morgan) contributed two photographs to it, and his daughter Cousin Penelope contributed an essay and a photograph.
St Thomas was Bishop of Hereford in the latter 1200s, soon after St Thomas a Becket was martyred for his insistence on the Church’s rights and privileges. St Thomas of Hereford had a somewhat easier time of it, but the  relationship between Church and King had still not been settled, and he had some trouble asserting the power of the Church. Hence his canonisation. I think that the strained relationship between Church and King continued beneath the more or less formal accommodations between the religious and secular authorities, which made it easier for Henry VIII to break with Rome.
     Very little documentary evidence about St Thomas survives, apart from the dossier assembled as part of the canonisation process. But even that is incomplete. The essayists take care to stay well within the bounds of plausibility when they fill in the gaps. St Thomas was a typical senior churchman of his time, of an aristocratic family, used to command, and absolutely sure of his authority. What faint impressions of his personality reach us across the eight centuries since his death suggest an imperious, somewhat cold man, who took his duties seriously, and discharged them faithfully. He would not have been a chatty dinner companion. I learned a lot about medieval life in England. The canonisation process became formalised during St Thomas’s life; I suspect that he would have been made a saint much more easily a century earlier.
     Saints' cults were a major source of income for the Church, which had not yet assembled the wealth that would make it pretty well independent by Henry VIII’s time. Hereford encouraged the cult of St Thomas, which lasted for about 100 years from the time of his death (about thirty years before he was canonised). Cousin Pen’s essay describes the evidence for the effects of the cult of St Thomas. The money raised was used not only to build a splendid tomb for St Thomas, but also to repair and eventually rebuild the cathedral. The See was not rich, and needed the money.
     I’ve been to Hereford several times. It’s best known for its library, one of the oldest preserved medieval libraries in the world, with its original volumes still chained to the shelves; and for Mappa Mundi, one of the oldest maps of the world. Uncle Peter and Cousin Pen always gave us a wonderful time guiding us around the library and the Cathedral. That’s why I’m glad to have this book.
     It’s a good ancillary text for any student of medieval history. The documents presrve a surprising amount of the music, which has been reconstructed and rewritten in modern notation. ***

A movie and a concert

     The Wind Rises (2013) (D: Hayao Miyazaki. Voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Krasinski, Emily Blunt et al ]
     A biography of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of Japanese WW2 fighter planes. The story’s simple: Horikoshi is near-sighted, so he can’t qualify to fly planes. Instead, he designs them. He falls in love, but the girl has TB. However, they marry, and have a short time together before she dies. The story of the design successes and failures is well done, the personal life is touched on rather than told, and the subtext is definitely anti-war, mixed with pride at the success of Japanese engineering. It’s an animé movie, a style that occasionally jars: I don’t like the way in which grief and other strong emotions are portrayed. But overall it’s well-done. Recommended. ***

    Blast From the Past: Louise Lemieux Does the ‘50s Louise sang mostly standards, mostly love songs, and mostly the ones that were hits because of teenagers: Bye, Bye Love; Are You Lonesome Tonight; Only You; Peggy Sue; etc. Teen angst is not new, only the recent worry that it’s a sign of emotional fragility is. She also likes songs from the musicals: I Could Have Danced All Night; Oh, What a Beautiful Morning; etc. She’s a performer who happens to use songs to entertain, and she does a wonderful job of it. We’ve known her for a long time, and have always enjoyed her concerts. The show was not sold out, which means some people missed a great evening’s entertainment. ****

Talks about Shakespeare in 1960

     B. A. W. Jackson, ed. Stratford Papers on Shakespeare (1960) Given at the Shakespeare Seminar organised by McMaster University’s Extension Department. I don’t know if the experiment was repeated. The participants are listed, almost all of them are women. Teachers mostly, I would guess. I think they got their money’s worth.
     C. J. Sisson (in his day a noted Shakespearean) discussed King John as an Elizabethan history play, outlining Shakespeare’s selections from Holinshed’s Chronicles and arguing that the play amounted to propaganda for the Tudors. Of course. King John has always, I think, mattered more as propaganda than as history. Sisson reminds us that the modern veneration of Magna Carta would have made no sense to Elizabeth. I’d go a step further. I think that anyone suggesting the typical modern interpretation of it would have risked losing his head.
     John Cook gives some apposite and cogent remarks on music in Shakespeare, using his experience as a theatre composer to explain how Elizabethan players used music, and to argue that modern productions need modern music. Agreed. His slighting references to movie music betray a blind spot. Movies aren’t theatre in another medium, so music plays a somewhat different role.
     RCMP Sgt R. A. Huber, an expert in forensic handwriting analysis, gives a cautious “probably Shakespeare” as his verdict on who wrote the extant manuscript pages of The Boke of Sir Thomas More. Sisson’s afterword adduces content and style as support for what he regards as a clinching argument that we do indeed see Shakespeare at work here. I don’t know enough to either agree or disagree with his conclusions, so will stick with Huber’s “probably”.
    In Shakespeare the Writer, Sisson presents a rather too bardolatrous study of Shakespeare’s lost years, arguing that he must have been writing scripts for quite some time before envious rivals bothered noticing him as an upstart shakescene, a valid and important point. He traces Shakespeare’s development as a writer and dramatist, arguing that Shakespeare’s plays increasingly were about character: Hamlet is about Hamlet, he says. True enough, but that’s not enough. Hamlet’s despairing The time is out of joint, O cursed spite that ever I was born to put it right announces the theme of the play. It’s the disconnect between Hamlet’s sense of himself and his times that’s kept the play relevant for four hundred years. It is indeed “about” something, the alienation caused by an increasingly human-constructed world.
     I’ve seen many Shakespeare plays more than once (Hamlet at least 12 times on stage and screen), so I found Robertson Davies’s after-dinner talk the most congenial. He says that he’s enjoyed Shakespeare more the more plays he’s seen and the more often he’s seen them. Exactly. Sisson’s treatment of the plays as literature tends to misses the point. They’re scripts, and a script must be acted just as a score must be played.
     An uneven but interesting collection. Out of print, but if you like Shakespeare, it’s worth looking for. ** to ****

Take Five by Dave Brubeck at Montreal in 2009

One of the great jazz standards is Take Five. Dave Brubeck made it his own. There are many versions available on line, but this 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival video is one of the bests. Brubeck was near the end of his life, and he just lets his crew take the tune to wherever they want to take it. Lovely sax, cello, bass, and drum solos. ****

The Genius Within (2009)

      The Genius Within (2009) A bio of Gould that pays homage to his music, but focuses on his love life. He fell in love with Cornelia Foss, and she with him, so she moved her children to Toronto, and for a while it seemed they might marry. But Gould became increasingly dependent on his anti-depressant meds, and eventually she returned to her husband. Gould died of a series of strokes in 1982 at the age of 50. His death hit the children especially hard.
     An above average documentary, with reminiscences by Cornelia, the children, Lorne Tulk (the sound engineer on Gould’s recordings), and other friends and acquaintances. The biographer speaks a few times, and confesses that there’s a mystery he was not able to penetrate. This remark is echoed by other people. In the end, what remains is Gould’s music, and  the impression of a life that was perhaps less fulfilling emotionally than it might have been.
     Does the genius of Gould’s interpretations of Bach match the cost of his and others’ emotional pain? Perhaps. Everybody must balance the costs and gains of his life. Gould came to accept the cost, enjoying his time at the family cottage, and in playful impersonations of imaginary figures, recorded in photographs. Hearing his second recordings of the Goldberg Variations, I imagined scenes from a movie, of figures in a cityscape at night, together but alone, wandering in and out of lights and shadows, while some unknown hunters close in on them with dispassionate intensity, preparing for the kill. ***

In Search of Beethoven (2009)

     In Search of Beethoven (2009) 3-part version of the bio-documentary, with lots of talking heads, photos and engravings of places and people, and performance snippets by many of the best interpreters of Beethoven. Well done, with much information new to people like me, who like classical music but haven’t learned much about the composers.
     Beethoven was a much more complicated man than the stereotypical bust suggests. He knew he was a pretty good composer, and felt he was competing with Haydn and Mozart, “our three great composers” according to contemporary music critics. Mozart was near the end of his life and Haydn was dead. Beethoven also had strong opinions, and believed that human beings were capable of much more than the slummy world of politics and commerce and social striving. He was furious when his hero Napoleon revealed himself to be just another power-grubbing arriviste, and erased Napoleon’s name from the dedication on the score of the Eroica so angrily that he left holes in the paper.
     We hear enough music to understand why so many people think of Beethoven as the greatest composer ever, and also why other prefer to give that prize to Mozart or Bach. There’s no question, I think, that Beethoven showed what music could be in ways that no one else ever did. His last compositions sound like late 19th or early 20th century works, with their broken chords, their fractured rhythms, and their searching and inconclusive melodic lines.
     One of the last comments was that Beethoven had so little lasting influence on later composers because no one could exceed him. There’s some truth to that, I think. “Serious” composers nowadays have to a large extent been reduced to experiments with new tonalities and abstract structures. Popular music has become the truly innovative source of new sound. Considering that well into the 19th century what we think of as classical music was actually contemporary pop, this is not surprising. Music endlessly reinvents itself. We rediscover old music in every generation, every generation recognises great work from all eras and every generation adopts and adapts the work of the old masters. This documentary demonstrated why Beethoven will last. The details of his personal life, and how his beliefs and feelings informed his music is interesting for anyone, but especially for the Beethoven fan. But in the end, the work itself is what matters. I don’t think that how it affects the listener depends on knowledge of biography.
     I think that Beethoven’s violin concerto in D Major is the most sublime piece of music ever written. Among my favourite versions are those by Itzhak Perlman, Yehudi Menuhin, and David Oistrakh.
     Good documentary. I wouldn’t have minded a longer version with more music. ***

Keith DiSantis. Sax in the Sand

     Keith DiSantis. Sax in the Sand With Dean Schneider (piano), Andy Lalasis (bass) and Clarissa Joy (vocals). Self-published CD ca. 2012. I first heard DiSantis at Niobe’s renewal of vows celebration, then a few days later on New Year’s Eve at a restaurant in Port Isabella, Texas. DiSantis is a skilled sax player, who knows how to make his instrument do exactly what he wants it to do. He and his sidesmen have played together many times, they know each other’s styles, and listen to each other. The result is a disk of standards that’s a pleasure to listen to. DiSantis doesn’t mark out any new ground, he just gives you lovely renditions of music you already know. A few of the eleven titles:  Lullaby of Birdland, the Girl From Ipanema, Misty, All the Things You Are. The cuts are longer than the 3-minute radio standard, you get about an hour of music. Recommended, if you can find it. Hang around Brownsville and Padre island, or look him up. He teaches at Los Fresnos High School. ***

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009)

Silence at the Heart of Things (2009) [Documentary by E. Thalenberg, by Stormy Nights Productions]
     Oliver Schroer died in 2008, one month after his last concert, which he devised and performed while waiting for his death from cancer. I knew nothing about this remarkable man until we saw the last few minutes of this film last summer on TVO. This time, we saw the whole movie. As a documentary, it’s very well done, intercutting archival footage, interviews, and the concert. The filmmakers have a good sense of how to stitch together the bits and pieces of other people’s relationships with Schroer and his own words (and music) to give us a portrait of a great human being.
     And it’s that human being, Oliver Schroer, that stays with us. He touched many lives, I think because he never hid himself from other people, he didn’t put on the masks that most of us use to protect ourselves from intimate contact. He understood that music is more than entertainment, it’s a means of creating community, and a path into one’s self.
     At one point he talks about music as a sacrament. Yes, it can be, and Schroer shows us why. Listening to his long flowing explorations of melodic lines, I felt that the music was familiar, that it took me to places that I recognised, but could not reach any other way. Susanne Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) quotes a musician: Music sounds the way feelings feel. Yes, and music can reveal ways of feeling that we didn’t know we were capable of. Feelings are the essence of what we think of as our personal experience; they make the world we live in. Schroer says that music grows out of the silence at the heart of things. His gift was to share his music so that we can follow him into that silence, where grief and joy are reconciled.
     You can find several videos on YouTube and Vimeo. ****

Christianne, a musician from Blind River

Find her music here.

John H Clarke on guitar

John H. Clarke plays guitar, acoustic and amped. Great stuff. Visit his website or his YouTube channel. His own compositions are strongly influenced by the Spanish music he plays. Recommended.

E. Schikaneder. Die Zauberfloete. (Ed. W Zentner 1962)

     E. Schikaneder. Die Zauberfloete. (Ed. W Zentner 1962) The complete libretto in German, with a couple of scenes from Goethe’s projected Part 2. The story of this opera is sillier than usual, partly because it appears to have been radically restructured in the writing, so that the plot points adumbrated in the first few scenes are contradicted or simply dropped later on. This I did not know before reading the introduction. The story is relatively simple: Tamino finds himself in a strange place dominated by the Queen of Night, whose daughter Pamina is held by Sostrato. He has to undergo a series of trials, which appear to consist mostly of not talking, in order to become an initiate. Later, Pamina also becomes an initiate, they marry and live happily ever after. Along the way, Tamino picks up Papageno, a commedia-style clown, who provides comic relief (and the only realistic character).
      The script is presented in typical continental format, with scenes changing with the entrances and exits of characters, not with changes in location. I found this format peculiar and irritating even before I encountered the English one, because some “scenes” are only one or two speeches long. I suppose it has its roots in rehearsal styles and schedules or some such; or else it’s another one of those unreasonable rationalities the French are so fond of and have foisted on their imitators.
     The verse is for the most part numbingly banal and sometimes silly, with sadly rare signs of wit. The higher philosophy expressed by Sostrato and his priests consists of New Age guff.
      If it weren’t for Mozart’s music, this opera would long ago have been forgotten. Salieri-like, I wonder how such silly stuff could have been joined to such sublime music. As it is, probably far more people have heard the music than have heard the opera. I heard it when I was around 11 in Graz, and all I remember was Papageno, who was costumed like a giant green parrot, very impressive. He also had the funny songs, but it’s the music I recall, not the words. Opera lovers claim that the music is what matters in opera, but my taste is for good strong stories that depend on and are enhanced and nuanced by the music. A Wagnerian idea, I know, and I do not like Wagner at all! Auden claims that the sound of the verse must be adapted to the music, hence what we look for in poetry we should not expect to find in a libretto. I can accept that, but the verse should tell a clearly plotted story, and preferably one with some sense. * (2004)

La Diva by Natalie Choquette.

     La Diva by Natalie Choquette. A one-woman show about opera. Lots of fun. If you get a chance, go see and hear it. Choquette sings the familiar hits in different costumes with commentary in different accents to suit the sources of the songs. She sings beautifully, and can conjure the scene and mood so well that we don’t notice the absence of the production values that seem to play such a huge role at the Met.
     Most of the songs were more or less happy or romantic, but Un bel di vedremo from Madame Butterfly was seriously affecting. At several points, Choquette came into the audience and focussed on one person, or brought him on to the stage. I don’t usually like this kind of audience participation, since it can feel forced, but Choquette does it so naturally that it works. Disclaimer: I was one of the lucky ones, and thoroughly enjoyed it . It was easy to follow her lead.
     Here is Marie’s e-mail to our friends’n’family:
     The link at the end is to a sample of the show we saw by Natalie Choquette, la Diva. She is an opera singer with a big voice. She loves to interact with the audience. She talked, and talked, in many exaggerated accents. She changed costume 4 or 5 times. All costumes were exaggerated and stunning.
      When she first came out in her multi-layered big dress with hooped over skirt and scarf, she told us she was a Diva and the audience must yell "Bravo, Brava" and throw flowers at her, "like this" (and she threw out a bunch of flowers). Her Queen of the Night solo was great!
     The first person she chose from the audience was Dennis Jacques. She brought him on stage and had him take off his jacket and help her shed her big dress and hooped skirt, while she sang. Underneath she had a close fitting sequined gown.
     The only back-up person travelling with her was the piano player who first came out suited in tails, wearing a gray, fuzzy wig. (In real life he is an organist and choir director).  Later he changed to a Liberace wig and had extra lace, candles, rose etc. The Diva made many attempts to "distract" the piano player, while he was playing and she was singing.
     In the Moscow Olympic set he wore his shaved head and a black tank so he could show his muscles.  For that set, Natalie wore a short, red athletic dress and bare feet. She climbed on the piano to sing, lay down and did a head stand, all while singing.
     Her Madam Butterfly solo was beautiful. Later she summed up the story and told how it could have had a better and happy ending. "The trouble is the women always die in opera... That is why I sometimes like to sing the tenor parts". She spoke for the DLM or "Diva Liberation Movement". Her happy ending for La Boheme was for the artist to get enough money to buy aspirin to cure Mimi. She chose Ron Gauthier to be the artist. She gave him a floppy hat, a big smock and a pencil and easel. He drew while she sang.
     The piano player got to play "his music" when she was off stage. One good piece was Bach's Toccata and Fugue on piano!
     While she was walking among the audience she chose Wolf to be her partner for the tango part. She wore a black, knee length dress which was open from waist down and showed a pink and gold lining and ruffled white pantaloons. She chose Pat Fortino to come to stage at the very end and dance with her while she sang. She made each man the romantic-centre-of-attention while he was on stage.
There's a video of “Nessun dorma” and others on YouTube.
    A great evening. ****

Update 2025-06-21: Choquette has a new version of her show "... et le Maestro", and issued several CDs.

Links: music and theatre blogs

If you like classical music, look at Ken Stephen's blog: 
http://offthebeatenstaff.blogspot.ca/
Ken is a former colleague: he taught at Elliot Lake Secondary School, and retired a few years after I did. He was and is much involved with theatre, and has a blog on that subject, too
http://largestagelive.blogspot.ca/

Links: Time-travel movie and music

Found this link to a movie in progress on Scientific American:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2012/04/19/quantum-casimir-effect-inspires-indie-filmmakers/
And then looked for the band that provides the music for the trailer:
http://www.bluegillespie.co.uk/
Cool stuff.

Wild Turkeys (Music Review)

The Wild Turkeys are a country band located in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. They call their variation "swamp stomp country", but it sounds more bluegrass to me. Their concert on 11 February in Blind River was fun. Young (Sheldon Jääskeläinen appears to be under 30, he plays a mean fiddle) and energetic, they do a good show. Their hollers are quite funny. Only downside: their pieces all have pretty much the same tempo and licks, which gets a bit wearing after a while. Devin Alexander on bass guitar did a good cover of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, and Jay Case on guitar did a creditable blues. So they do have the versatility that would raise their show from very good (***) to excellent (****).

They have pages on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/thewildturkeys) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Wild-Turkeys/23002227647).

Update 2026-05-08: The band's last Facebook post was in 2013, so I guess it's defunct. There's another band with same name that has a YouTube presence.