This is one that I owe to pitchfork (damnit, I'm not going to hate them just because their coverage is so comprehensive!) and, indirectly, to David who, having read the same review (I think) put one of the songs from these sessions on a mix cd for me a while ago. The music, recorded in the 70s, is basically vocal, with a bit of fairly primitive instrumentation (mostly clangorous percussion, with a bit of piano and the occasional acoustic guitar) - and all made up of popular songs done by pretty much untrained kids ranging in age from 9 to 12.
It's largely choral, though two of the highlights are solo renditions of "The Long and Winding Road" and, especially, "Desperado", and great to listen to; the numbers include "God Only Knows" (my favourite Beach Boys song), "Good Vibrations", "Sweet Caroline" (my favourite - ahem - Neil Diamond song), "Space Oddity", "To Know Him Is To Love Him", and so on...it's hard to listen to the recordings independent of the story - these songs recorded in two sessions as part of student 'musical education', in a school gym, with the most basic of production tools and with numerous flaws and imperfections and yet arguably grasping something transcendent in their simplicity.
The liner notes suggest that the project "echoes Brian Wilson, Carl Orff, Eno, and Phil Spector, with traces of Philip Glass, Moondog and Gregorian chant", and while I'm not familiar with all of those artists and styles, I don't think the comparison to those which I do have a handle on is too great a claim. Writing that really makes one think about music, though, and what it is about music that we find valuable and worthwhile. More than most forms of art, perhaps, there's a necessary tension between design and chance in the creation of music, and the precise relationship between the two is, it seems, rather fluid. And it does seem to call into question the standards by which we evaluate music - and, more fundamentally, the validity of holding to any such standards in the first place...
