Penguin Cafe Orchestra

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The Penguin Cafe Orchestra's eponymous album of 1981
The Penguin Cafe Orchestra's eponymous album of 1981

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra was a loose assembly of musicians headed by classically-trained guitarist, composer and arranger Simon Jeffes (Sussex, England, 1949-1997). Only Jeffes and cellist co-founder Helen Liebmann were core members; other musicians were drafted for the requirements of particular pieces or performances. Its sound does not fit easy categorization, but has elements of exuberant folk music and a minimalist aesthetic occasionally reminiscent of Philip Glass.

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra recorded and performed for 24 years until Jeffes died of a brain tumour in 1997.

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[edit] History

After becoming disillusioned with the rigid structures of classical music and the limitations of rock music, in which he also dabbled, Jeffes became interested in the relative freedom in ethnic music and decided to imbue his work with the same sense of immediacy and spirit.

Describing how the idea of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra came to him, Jeffes said:

“ In 1972 I was in the south of France. I had eaten some bad fish and was in consequence rather ill. As I lay in bed I had a strange recurring vision, there, before me, was a concrete building like a hotel or council block. I could see into the rooms, each of which was continually scanned by an electronic eye. In the rooms were people, everyone of them preoccupied. In one room a person was looking into a mirror and in another a couple were making love but lovelessly, in a third a composer was listening to music through earphones. Around him there were banks of electronic equipment. But all was silence. Like everyone in his place he had been neutralized, made grey and anonymous. The scene was for me one of ordered desolation. It was as if I were looking into a place which had no heart. Next day when I felt better, I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out 'I am the proprietor of the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you things at random' and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what's most important. Whereas in the Penguin Cafe your unconscious can just be. It's acceptable there, and that's how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves.[1] ”

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra's first album, Music From The Penguin Cafe, was released in 1976 on Brian Eno's experimental Obscure Records label, an off-shoot of the E.G. Records label; a collection of pieces recorded in the years 1974-1976, it was followed in 1981 by Penguin Cafe Orchestra, after which the band settled into a more regular release schedule.

The band played its first major concert in 1977, supporting Kraftwerk at The Roundhouse. It went on to tour the world and play at a variety of music festivals as well as residencies on the South Bank in London.

In 2007 the band was re-formed to mark the 10th anniversary of its dissolution, playing three sold-out shows at the Union Chapel in London.

[edit] Famous pieces

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra's most famous piece may be "Telephone & Rubber Band", which is based around a tape loop of a UK telephone ring tone intersected with an engaged tone, accompanied by the twanging of a rubber band. The piece is featured on the soundtracks of Nadia Tass's film Malcolm (1988) and Oliver Stone's film Talk Radio (also 1988), and in a long-running advertising campaign for telecoms company One2One (now T-Mobile). The 1996 single "In The Meantime" by English rockers residing in New York City, Spacehog, featured a tweeked and fine-tuned sample of "Telephone and Rubber Band". The tape loop was recorded when Jeffes was making a phone call, and discovered that he was hearing a combination of a ring tone and an engaged signal at the same time, due to a fault in the system. He recorded it on an answering machine.

Another famous tune featured in Malcolm, along with other films including "Napoleon Dynamite", is "Music For A Found Harmonium", which Jeffes wrote on a harmonium that he had found dumped in a back street in Kyoto, where he was staying in the summer of 1982 after the ensemble's first tour of Japan. He wrote that after installing the found harmonium "in a friend's house in one of the most beautiful parts at the edge of the city", he "frequently visited this instrument during the next few months, and I remember the time fondly as one during which I was under a form of enchantment with the place and the time". The piece gained exposure when it was released on the first Café del Mar volume in 1994. Its rhythm, tempo and simple structure made it very suitable for adaptation into a reel, and it was subsequently recorded by many Irish traditional musicians, including Patrick Street, De Dannan, Kevin Burke and Sharon Shannon. An Irish traditional version was used on the soundtrack of the film Hear My Song, made in Ireland in the early 1990s. In 2004, the work was featured in the film Napoleon Dynamite and the following year in the film It's All Gone Pete Tong. It had been featured as far back as 1988, though somewhat obscurely, as music for the trailer and promotional features for John Hughes's film She's Having A Baby.

Simon Jeffes also composed the music for the ballet Still Life at the Penguin Cafe, largely based on earlier compositions for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. The piece was first performed by the Royal Ballet in 1988.

[edit] Uses of the band's music by others

The music of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra has been used in advertisements for Eurotunnel, The Independent, Hewlett Packard, Knorr and One2One. This American Life, a popular show on public radio in the United States, has often used the band's "Perpetuum Mobile" to accompany its stories, and news programs on National Public Radio have at times used the ring tone from "Telephone & Rubber Band" as bumper music between pieces. The Economist magazine has used "Perpetuum Mobile" in its weekly podcasts.

"Perpetuum Mobile" was also used in the pilot episode (entitled "Lost For Words") of the American television show 3 lbs starring Stanley Tucci, and in an episode ("Touch of Greatness") about the American educator Albert Cullum in the ITVS/ PBS series Independent Lens.

The song "Nothing Really Blue" was used during the final scene of the German film The Princess and the Warrior (2000) .

"Scherzo and Trio" is the theme music for BBC Radio 4's Round Britain Quiz.

[edit] Personnel

  • Simon Jeffes - acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, cuatro, ukulele, bass, voice, Omnichord, Dulcitone, penny whistle, pitch pipes, harmonium, shakers, drums, ring modulator, rubber band, electronic organ, milkbottles, triangle, violin, drum, Linn Drum computer, soloban, spinet, Prophet V, fretless guitar, Bluthner and Bosendorfer pianos, zebra drum, tape, pianica, mandolin, electric aeolian harp
  • Helen Liebmann - cello
  • Steve Nye - electric piano, cuatro, Bluthner piano, Wurlitzer piano, harmonium
  • Gavyn Wright - violin
  • Geoffrey Richardson - viola, slide guitar, bass, bongos, metal frame, ukelele, mandolin, electric guitar, penny whistle, clarinet
  • Braco - shakers, drums, bongos
  • Neil Rennie - ukelele, cuatro
  • Marcus Beale - violin, electric violin
  • Peter Veitch - accordion, violin, piano
  • Giles Leaman - oboe, stick percussion
  • Emily Young - vocals
  • Julio Segovia - cymbals, percussion
  • Kuma Harada - bass
  • Trevor Morais - hi hat, wood block, cow bell
  • Fami - drum
  • Mike Giles - drums
  • Dave Defries - trumpet, fluegelhorn
  • Annie Whitehead - trombone
  • Bob Loveday - violin, bass, kalimba
  • Danny Cummins - percussion, shakare
  • Elizabeth Perry - violin
  • Ian Maidman - percussion, bass, cuatro
  • Paul Street - cuatro, ukelele, guitar
  • Barbara Bolte - cor anglais, oboe
  • Peter McGowan - violin
  • Steve Fletcher - piano
  • Sabir Rizaev - clarinet, soprano saxophone
  • Kurban Kurbanov - accordion
  • Nigel Kennedy - violin
  • Khakberdy Allamurdov - drums
  • Nana Vasconcelos - clay pot, twigs
  • Kathryn Tickell - Northumbrian small pipes
  • Pat Kierman - violin
  • George Robertson - viola
  • Katy Wilkinson - viola
  • Martin Loveday - cello
  • Chris Laurence - bass
  • Roger Garland - violin
  • Pete Oxer - violin
  • Rita Manning - violin
  • Wilf Gibson - violin
  • Jim McLeod - violin
  • Barry Wilde - violin
  • Belina Bunt - violin
  • Bogustav Kostecki - violin
  • Tim Good - violin
  • Roy Gillard - violin
  • Steve Tees - viola
  • Roger Chase - viola
  • Tony Pleeth - cello
  • Paul Kegg - cello
  • Roger Smith - cello
  • Paul Cullington - bass

[edit] Discography

[edit] Albums

[edit] Collections

  • Preludes, Airs & Yodels (A Penguin Cafe Primer) (1996)
  • A Brief History (2001) CDV 2954
  • History (2001) Virgin Records LCO 3098
  • The Second Penguin Cafe Orchestra Sampler (2004)

[edit] Also

  • Piano Music (2003) - Simon Jeffes solo pieces, collected after his death. ZOPFD 003

[edit] Soundtracks

  • Malcolm (1986)
  • Oskar und Leni (1999) (10 songs, all previously released)
  • Slim Susie (2003) ("Perpetuum Mobile")
  • Napoleon Dynamite Official Soundtrack (2005) ("Music For A Found Harmonium")
  • It's All Gone Pete Tong Official soundtrack (2005) ("Music For A Found Harmonium")
  • Hewlett Packard - Advert (2006) ("Perpetuum Mobile")
  • 3 lbs - "Lost For Words" (2006) ("Perpetuum Mobile")
  • Year of the Dog (2007) ("Music for a Found Harmonium")

[edit] See also

[edit] External links