Penguin Cafe Orchestra

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Penguin Cafe Orchestra
General information
origin London , England
Genre (s) Chamber music , jazz , neoclassic , folk , new age , minimal music
founding 1972
resolution 1997
Website Penguincafe.com
Founding members
Simon Jeffes († 1997)
Helen Liebmann

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra was a loose association of various musicians who were brought in by the classically trained guitarist, composer and arranger Simon Jeffes as required for the current piece. Since Simon Jeffes death, the project has been continued under the shortened name Penguin Cafe by his son Arthur Jeffes.

Band history

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra recorded and performed for 24 years until Simon Jeffes passed away from a brain tumor in 1997.

Only Jeffes and Helen Liebmann, co-founders and cellists, were permanent members. Further musicians were called in according to the requirements for certain titles or performances. The music of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra is not easy to categorize. Comparable she is with the French multi-instrumentalist music Yann Tiersen , of that of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra Music elements of exuberant folk and occasionally to Philip Glass reminiscent minimalist shares aesthetics.

Disillusioned by the rigid structures of classical music and the limitations of rock music , which he had also tried, Simon Jeffes began to develop an interest in the relative freedom of folk music and decided to provide his music with the same directness and mood from then on .

Jeffes at the moment when he got the idea for the Penguin Cafe Orchestra:

“I was sunbathing on the beach when suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started with 'I own the Penguin Cafe, I will tell you about things randomly' and continued with the precious goods randomness, spontaneity, unexpectedness and irrationality in life are. And if you suppress it in order to lead a nice, orderly life, you kill what is most important, while in the Penguin Cafe our unconscious can simply be itself. Like everyone else, this is welcome there. There is a willingness to take in, which goes hand in hand with being able to live the now without any inner fear. "

The first album Music from the Penguin Cafe was released in 1976 on Brian Eno's experimental label Obscure Records, an offshoot of EG Records . It was a collection of pieces recorded between 1974 and 1976. This was followed in 1981 by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra . Since then, the band has released albums at more regular and shorter intervals.

The Penguin Cafe Orchestra gave its first major concert in 1977 as the opening act for Kraftwerk in the Roundhouse . The band then performed worldwide and played at a variety of festivals, including a performance at the 2nd international Artrock Festival in Frankfurt am Main, which took place in 1989. During their appearances on the London South Bank , the live album When In Rome… was recorded in the Royal Festival Hall in 1987 .

Arthur Jeffes, Simon Jeffes' son, continues the style of music developed by his father with his group called Penguin Cafe . In early 2011 the album A Matter of Life… was released .

Philosophy and ideas of the band

Simon Jeffes saw the band as “a very big yes to the survival of the heart in times when it is attacked by the forces of cold, darkness and repression ” (“a very big yes to the survival of the heart in a time when the heart is under attack from the forces of coldness, darkness and repression "). Jeffes described the style of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra as "imaginary folklore" and "modern semi-acoustic chamber music". He justified the fact that he called in musicians depending on the piece with "I write music for people rather than for instruments".

origin of the name

Simon Jeffes was inspired by a television documentary about penguins. He was particularly fascinated by the natural behavior of animals, which he compared with the natural behavior of humans.

Well-known pieces

The most famous piece by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra is Telephone & Rubber Band , which is based on an endless loop of a telephone dial tone. This piece was used in the soundtrack of the Australian film Malcolm by Nadia Tass (1986), Talk Radio by Oliver Stone and in a long-running advertising campaign for the telecommunications company Mercury Communications. The endless loop was recorded by Jeffes when he made a phone call and found that he was hearing a combination of a ringing tone and a busy tone at the same time. He recorded this on an answering machine.

Another well-known piece occurring in Malcolm is Music for a Found Harmonium , which Jeffes wrote on a harmonium that he found parked on a side street in Kyoto during the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's first Japan tour in 1982 . According to Jeffes, he wrote the piece after he had installed the harmonium he found "in a friend's house in one of the most beautiful parts of the suburbs" and kept returning to this instrument for the next few months. The piece finally became particularly well-known when it was heard in the first part of the Café del Mar series in 1994 . Its rhythm, tempo and simple structure make it very suitable for adaptation into a reel dance composition and has subsequently been recorded by many exponents of Irish traditional music, such as: B. Patrick Street , De Dannan , Kevin Burke and Sharon Shannon . In 2004 the piece was used in the film Napoleon Dynamite , a year later in the Australian film It's All Gone Pete Tong . Uses of the piece go back to 1988, when it was used - in a rather obscure way - for the trailer and commercial of John Hughes' film She's Having a Baby .

Others

The music from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra has been used in commercials by Eurotunnel , The Independent , Hewlett-Packard , Knorr , One2One and Coop (Switzerland) . This American Life , a popular show on public radio in the United States , has often used the song Perpetuum Mobile as musical accompaniment (e.g. in the film Mary & Max - or: Do sheep shrink when it rains? ). The National Public Radio network occasionally placed the Telephone & Rubber Band ringtone between successive reports in its news programs .

In Aberystwyth ( Wales ) there is a cafe with the name for over 30 years Penguin Cafe . The Australian band My Friend the Chocolate Cake , which the Penguin Cafe Orchestra counts as one of their influences, dedicated one of their songs to this café.

In 2006 the weekly magazine The Economist used Perpetuum Mobile in the version from the album Concert Program in its weekly podcasts .

Discography

  • Music from the Penguin Cafe EEGCD 27 (1976)
  • Penguin Cafe Orchestra EEGCD 11 (1981)
  • The Penguin Cafe Orchestra Mini Album (1983)
  • Broadcasting from Home EEGCD 38 (1984)
  • Signs of Life EEGCD 50 (1987)
  • When in Rome ... EEGCD 56 (1988)
  • Still Life DECCA 425 218-2 (1990)
  • Union Cafe ZOPFD 003 (1993)
  • Concert Program ZOPFD 002 (1995)
  • A Matter of Life ... DPC 101 (2011) as Penguin Cafe without Simon Jeffes
  • The Red Book DPC 104 (2014) as Penguin Cafe
  • The Imperfect Sea ERATP 097 (2017) as Penguin Cafe
  • Handfuls of Night ERATP (2019) as Penguin Cafe

Soundtracks

  • Malcolm (1986)
  • Oskar and Leni (1999)
  • Napoleon Dynamite - Official Soundtrack ( Music For A Found Harmonium ) (2005)
  • It's All Gone Pete Tong - Official Soundtrack ( Music For A Found Harmonium ) (2005)
  • Hewlett Packard Commercial ( Perpetuum Mobile ) (2006)
  • 3 lbs - Lost for Words ( Perpetuum Mobile ) (2006)
  • Mary and Max ( Perpetuum Mobile , Prelude and Yodel ) (2009)

Sampler

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

Simon Jeffes solo

  • Piano Music ZOPFD 003 (2003) - Solo pieces by Simon Jeffes, compiled after his death

swell

  1. ↑ Quoting from Simon Jeffes on the official website ( Memento from May 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ The Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Simon Jeffes. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on May 8, 2013 ; Retrieved October 14, 2013 .
  3. ↑ Interview with Simon Jeffes on Youtube

Web links