typeracer

Over the past couple of years there's been a quiet trend of people making oddly affecting videos that recreate the ambiance of music being heard in empty shopping malls, or which mimic the aesthetic experience of hearing a song from other displaced environments. It doesn't necessarily matter what mall has been imaginatively located, or even what song is playing from these artificially engineered rooms; it's the shared human experience of inhabiting similar sonic spaces from which the videos derive their emotional effect. In 1975, composer and multi-instrumentalist Ernest Hood self-released his sole album, Neighborhoods. Notice the plural "s." Though the album drew its inspiration and actual sound from the Portland neighborhoods in which Hood spent most of his life, he hoped the emotions and associations in his compositions and recordings would transcend their geographical origin. While Neighborhoods documents a specific neighborhood in one sense, like the contemporary videos mentioned above, it was consciously created with universal touchstones in mind. By combining field recordings Hood captured of neighborhood events with an array of multi-tracked zithers and synthesizers, he tapped a deep well of nostalgia that runs through all of us. In the liner notes Hood originally wrote for the back cover of Neighborhoods he states that the record is meant to "bring joy in reminiscence," while acknowledging the "bittersweet" taste of the music. Pain is inextricably bound to nostalgia though, directly referenced in the Greek root of the word, and there is a subtle undercurrent of melancholy running through this music which recreates a world that can no longer exist for its maker. born in 1923, Ernest Hood grew up in a time when kids were largely free to run wild and unsupervised. It was the Big Band Era, and his mother was a singer who had worked in radio. His brother Bill was an accomplished session musician connected with the famed Wrecking Crew. Ernest, or Ern, as he was mostly known to friends, started making music at a young age. His primary instrument was guitar, and as a teen he was playing rhythm in a group that performed at local ballrooms and dance halls. He was hired by jazz legend Charlie Barnett in 1945, and accompanied this group on a six month tour. A Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal newspaper article from the time of Ernest's death in 1991 states that the band he was playing with was doing well enough to have booked a world tour. Tragically, it was a tour that would not come to pass. Ernest was unexpectedly stricken with polio in his late-20s, an outbreak which was disabling, and killing, thousands in the U.S. at that time. He spent one year in an iron lung, and from then on used either leg braces assisted by crutches or a wheel chair for mobility. Ernest could no longer play guitar, but continued to focus on writing and producing music and sound. He was a force in Portland's burgeoning jazz scene in the mid-to-late 1950s. In 1961, Ernest and trumpeter Jim Smith collaborated in a thirty minute television program, with their large, tight ensemble providing breakneck contemporary jazz for an action painting by famed West Coast modernist Louis Bunce. An abstract film-within-the-film made by Ernest features evocative images of different Portland locales, soundtracked by the ensemble's improvisation. However, the biggest revelation of the film concerns Ernest's use of tape recordings, with one of the ensemble's performances prominently employing bird sounds Hood had collected on portable reel-to-reels. In a brief interview with Bunces during the show, Hood talks about using tapes for natural sounds to accompany music fives years previously, nearly twenty years before he would weave them so artfully into the fabric of his masterpiece. According to Ernest's son Tom Hood, Neighborhoods is "a composite whose sum is greater than its parts." Many of the album's field recordings were collected over the course of a couple decades. When Tom listens to it now he can still pick out and identify a number of the individuals who make brief cameos, including a four-year-old version of himself in the mid-50s. Ernest began collecting sounds with a primitive wire recorder, but eventually upgraded to a Roberts reel-to-reel and parabolic reflector attached to a microphone. Blacking out the windows of his car with a dark cloth to act as a wind breaker, Ernest would park his car around Portland and discreetly capture the sounds of families at play. This unfortunately resulted in misinterpreted intentions, with a West Linn police bulletin warning citizens to remain alert for a mysterious man in a darkened car. Tom laughs about it now, "I don't think he even realized how it would look!" As he collected sounds, Tom says Ernest "knew he was saving things for the future," and in 1974 he began the task of weaving all these strands into a unified whole. Using an Otari 4-track tape recorder and a cheap Radio Shack mixer and microphones, he would work at home, using the arms of his wheel chair to prop up and play his zithers, accompanying the acoustic thrum with with synthesized Roland SH-3 and Crumar Orchestator sound. Sat in front of him, he would tune the zithers to perfection for hours, then close mic the instruments from his lap as he built up layers of multi-tracked sounds. Tom remembers how his family would deliberately leave him alone, disconnecting the telephones to "give him dead quiet to record for hours." Russ Gorsline, a longtime local Portland studio engineer who helped mix Neighborhoods, recalls Ernest as "the most memorable person I ever worked with." He remembers Ernest as being "always interesting, and doing something unexpected" and that "he was a quiet person, but there was an enthusiasm about the way he approached things... though he faced limitations he didn't let it destroy his spirit, and continually found ways to be creative." Possessed of a curious mind, Ernest excelled at adding unconventional sounds to this music by inventing techniques like putting scotch tape on the capstan of the 4-track, which would then wiggle the tape and create a tremolo effect, or removing plastic propellers from a small personal fan and then attaching soft yarn which would gently brush the strings of the zither to create long, sustaining chords. Once completed, Ernest pressed a few hundred vinyl copies of Neighborhoods for his own label, Thistlefield. He distributed some via mail, but according to Tom, Ernest's "idea of promotion was giving things away for free," and most copies in circulation were ones that initially landed with friends. Though extremely creative, Tom posits that like many artists his father "didn't know how to have a career." Though Gorsline thinks Ernest had been largely satisfied with letting the "product speak for him." Both Tom and Gorsline speak of Ernest's story as being one of conquering disability, of a remarkable artist being unbowed by adversity and with a deep need to experiment and create. The story we are telling here only scratches the surface of music he left behind. Unfortunately, after years of prolific work, he eventually develop post-polio syndrome in his sixties, which greatly deteriorated the quality of his life and his ability to communicate. Ernest would eventually be forced to become a face of the right-to-die movement, in which individuals had to fight for the right to be able to face death with dignity, on their own terms. His ashes were scattered at his farm and the Rogue River, places of play and family whose sounds live on Neighborhoods.