Since I wrote my last post, my boss has flooded me with more music. She moved out of Africa and into Asia. But we are going to stay in Africa for now. (She also said that I make her sound much more interesting than she is. But then, she would, wouldn’t she?)

Today we have Mariem Hassan. She was born in what was then Spanish Sahara — part of Morocco now. She just died a couple months ago. She had bone cancer. It’s very sad. She was only 57. Regardless, her music is very beautiful. In addition to being a singer, she was a lyricist. And she was also quite political and wrote a lot about female empowerment. Or so I’m told. She generally sang in Arabic, and when she didn’t, she was singing in another language I don’t know.

The following is “Haiyu” off her 2010 album, Shouka. It is gourgeous and upbeat — I’ve been led to believe that the lyrics are similarly sunny. I believe it is an old folk song that she updated.

In my regular work, I have two bosses. One is the owner, but I don’t deal with him directly all that often. So I think of my boss as Toni. She’s a really interesting person. Really. Interesting. She’s a mother of three, but wilder than I’ve ever been. She picks up homeless people and lets them sleep on the couch. She’s a juggler who busks on the street. Whereas I close the drapes and hide inside, she rushes to meet the world head on. In fact, she has recently had run-ins with black bears and a cougar. She terrifies me, but I enjoy living in a small way through her.

She’s very interested in what she refers to as “African blues.” It is mostly music of the Sahara — most especially Mali. You may remember that I featured some musicians from the region some time ago, Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté. But I don’t know much about it. And so I thought it would be interesting to do a week of my boss’ favorite music. She sent me a collection that is focused in Africa, but isn’t exclusively so.

We start with what I believe is her favorite band, Tinariwen. They are definitely influenced by Touré — but I doubt there are many musicians from the region who haven’t been. You can definitely hear why she calls them African blues. It’s incredibly compelling music. Sometimes, when people listen to foreign music, they don’t get much out of it. For example, when Ravi Shankar performed at the Concert for Bangladesh, the audience applauded after his group tuned up. He famously said, “If you like our tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing even more.” But this music is distinctly western, so the listener can appreciate what is different about it.

Here is “Islegh Taghram Tifhamam” off their most recent album, Emmaar. It’s very laid back, but they can rock. I might come back to them later in the week with another tune. They deserve it.

At last, we reach the end of our Tiny Tim week. And we go out with a bang. If I have only one song to introduce someone to him with, I go right to the big guns — the one song that shows everything that is great about him. And that song is his cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s a perfect song.

Let’s start with the music. It is a light jazz version of the song with a relentless walking bass and a wonderfully syncopated drum. On top of this, is this wonderful 1940s style male vocal quartet, which allows Tiny Tim to play around a bit. The main thing is that the song is done completely seriously. But the critical thing about it is that no one doing it thinks the song is serious. It is about as serious as Mickey the Monkey.

This is our second day on with Tiny Tim’s last studio album, Girl. As stated before, the title refers to The Beatles song. But he did another of their songs, “Hey Jude.” But unlike the original version, which is over-serious and grand, Tiny Tim’s version is pure Latin fun — “Cha cha cha!” I think that’s a critical element to his work. He loves the songs. He respects the songs. And he’s not afraid to play around with them.

Of course, now I expect to get someone coming on here explaining to me that I am an awful person for not holding the original version of the song in high enough esteem. Indeed, I see that Weekend Edition highlighted the song in, Annoying Music: Beatles Cover Songs. But really, is there anything more annoying than Paul McCartney taking a one minute ditty and pushing it past seven? Tiny Tim’s version makes me want to get up and dance. Cha cha cha!

Finally, we get to Tiny Tim’s last studio album, Girl — from the first song on the album, an excellent cover of the Beatle’s tune of the same name. I think it is the best thing he ever did. That’s most especially true because he was paired with the great Brave Combo — a band that defies classification, but that can apparently play anything at all. This was the band that Tiny Tim always deserved.

It contained some familiar tunes that he had been doing for years like the wonderful, “I Believe in Tomorrow.” But I want to focus on some of the new material. And it’s hard! There are 14 songs on the album and they all deserve to be listened to. In fact, you should just click on that album cover there and buy the CD. You’ll be glad you did.

Let’s start with a simple one, the Carole King and Gerry Goffin classic “I Want To Stay Here.” I especially like Tiny Tim when he works with other vocalists. It’s probably because he has such a unique voice, that it is nice to have something standard to tie it to. Also, I love the Richard Nixon vocal here. Regardless, this is a wonderful version of the song.

In the Jim Carroll song “City Drops Into The Night,” there are a couple of lines that I really like:

It’s when the body at the bottom
That body is my own reflection
But it ain’t hip to sink that low
Unless you’re gonna make a resurrection

That’s a reference to drugs and the drug life. But the words are eternal, because everyone has their low points. It’s nice to end strong. And that was very true of Tiny Tim. He went through a couple of decades of nothing much — at least in recorded music. But then he came back in the 1990s and showed that he had plenty left to offer the world.

In 1995, he released I Love Me. It is such a great album that it really is hard to pick one. For example, you really should hear, I Saw Mr Presley Tip-Toeing Through the Tulips. It’s hilarious and could well have been recorded by Mojo Nixon. There is “The Laughing Policeman” — which sounds like it could have been written for him, even though it is from the early 1920s. The title song is fantastic. It even has a charming (and sad) song of his own, She Left Me With the Herpes.

But we have to listen to his cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2).” I just lover it. He has an amazing ability to interpret other people’s music. We are going to see that for the rest of the week. Be prepared to be impressed:

In 1969, Tiny Tim put out his third album, For All My Little Friends. As it’s title suggests, it was a children’s album. And it is delightful. But it is perhaps a specialized taste. Mark Deming at AllMusic described it in a way that probably has wider resonance, “Ultimately, this album suffers from a severe case of the cutes.” He says that like it’s a bad thing.

What’s interesting about this album is that Jonathan Richman spent several years trying to make this album, and generally failed (although it led to better later albums). There is a natural fit for Tiny Tim in this material. But I don’t even know where most of these songs come from. There is “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” And there are a couple of Bing Crosby songs from the 1940s. But the rest are not well know. A number are like public service announces: “Two Times a Day” (brushing your teeth); “They Always Pick on Me” (bullying); and “Remember Your Name and Address” (just what it says).

Most of the songs, however, are about animals. I’ve picked “Mickey the Monkey,” mostly because I really like the production on it. But other favorites are: “Chickery Chick” and “I’m A Lonesome Little Raindrop” and “Bill The Buffalo.” You can listen to the whole album with a YouTube playlist. It’s a pleasant way to spend a half hour.

It isn’t my intent to go through Tiny Tim’s recorded career. The truth is that he started strong and he ended strong. And I really want to get to his last studio album, Girl, which he did with Brave Combo, the band he always deserved. But let us linger in his early days a bit longer.

We are going to listen to two songs off Tiny’s Tim’s second album, cleverly titled, Tiny Tim’s Second Album. The first song on the album is, “Come to the Ball.” It is from the a 1910 musical, The Quaker Girl. Songs from this period really were the focus of Tiny Tim’s career. He always mixed it up, but songs of the first half of the 20th century were what he seemed to most love.

In this performance, he also does the 1945 Doris Day hit, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.” The music for the song was written by Vic Mizzy — known for writing the themes for Green Acres and The Addams Family. The lyrics were written by Manny Curtis, who is known for writing the lyrics to Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” and the English lyrics to “Je t’Appartiens” as “Let It Be Me.”

Last week, I realized that I had to do a week of Herbert Khaury. You know him better as Tiny Tim. But if you are like most people, you really don’t know him at all. He was an amazing talent — not just the novelty act that he was reduced to on so many television shows. To begin with, he was something of a musicologist. He had a great knowledge of popular song history and was reputed to have a working repertoire of over a thousand songs.

What’s more, he actually had quite a nice and deep voice. This will be well on display this week. But I want to start at the beginning with God Bless Tiny Tim. It really is an amazing album. It is filled with great tunes and something that was fairly rare on most of his albums: great production. I encourage you to check out his version of Irving Berlin’s antiwar song, “Stay Down Here Where You Belong.” But I want to highlight the duet (he sings both parts), “On The Old Front Porch,” which is just unbelievably great:

To me, the Romantic period really ends with Brahms. Clearly it did go on, but even by end of his life, the Impressionists had come to dominate classical music — at least as a going concern. And you can hear the continuity between Brahms and Claude Debussy, our featured artist today.

I don’t want to get far into his career — he really came into his full power in his early thirties with pieces like, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. And he created great works up to shortly before his death of rectal cancer at 55, like arguably the greatest piece ever written for solo flute, Syrinx.

Debussy is really were classic music starts to become un-linked from standard tonality. Harmony becomes much more a matter of setting an emotional tone. He is also the first composer that I know of who really understood chromaticism, and was able to make it work in the context of the larger work. We see some of this in the following early work that he wrote around the age 25, Petite Suite — a work for piano with four hands. It’s also be transcribed for other groups of instruments. I think it is notable just for having such a broad range of colors. It’s a gorgeous work.

And here again, we get to enjoy Martha Argerich on the piano. She is joined by the Romanian pianist Cristina Marton.

The Romantic period brought out the worst in mediocre composers. Pretty much any Classical composer could grind out an acceptable piece of music. But that just isn’t so in the Romantic period. I blame Beethoven who inspired many people who shouldn’t have been inspired. Although in a fundamental sense Beethoven was the greatest composer of this period (transitional though he may have been), I prefer to listen to Johannes Brahms.

Brahms was a protege of Robert Schumann, who was probably the biggest influence on the young composer. They became friends when Brahms was only 20 years old. This may be why Brahms was considered a conservative composer, at least compared to the other dominant composers of the time. But this gets to my general problem with Romantic music. The excesses of the period are well on display in Wagner and Liszt. What’s more, I find Brahms constantly innovative, just not in such a flashy way. His Symphony No 1 is a great example of restrained brilliance. Not that he couldn’t be more ostentatious as he is in the Violin Concerto in D.

But of the most interest to modern listeners is probably Brahms’ work with folk tunes. That’s especially true of the Hungarian Dances. And since I know from experience that people will not listen to hour long symphonies or concertos, here are numbers 5, 6, 7, and 17 — used in the Merrie Melodies classic, Pigs in a Polka:

I guess we have to discuss Robert Schumann. To me, he is the Romantic period. He is also the reason that I don’t like the period. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a great composer. What’s more, he was a huge influence on Johannes Brahms, who I like rather more.

For the first ten years of his career, Schumann wrote exclusively for the piano. He had intended to be a pianist, but injured his hand and so turned to composition. At the peak of his abilities, he composed the Piano Concerto in A minor. I have to admit, it is an exquisite piece. At the same time, you can hear the kinds of things that bother me — its overly dramatic parts. But his use of the full orchestra for all its colors really is masterful. And you can certainly hear the beginnings of impressionism that would come with later composers.

This performance features one of the greatest pianists alive, Martha Argerich.

It may be of interest to you to know that Robert Schumann came by his music honestly. He was manic-depressive and slipped into paranoia later in life. He died at the age of 46 in an insane asylum.