Mrs. Fibonacci came to mind when I found Indian-American pianist Vijay Iyer’s recent essay, Strength in Numbers—which followed and partly explained his trio’s fascinating 2009 album, Historicity. Iyer’s graceful essay is a great read even though its subtitle, “How Fibonacci Taught Us to Swing,” brought back uncomfortable memories of math majors at school dances. The real-life Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa) was a rabbit breeding-obsessed 13th century Italian mathematician. His signature sequence starts with 0 and 1 and gets each remaining number from the sum of the previous two ( 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc.)

The ratios of consecutive Fibonacci numbers approach the golden ratio (i.e., 1.6180339887 and change). That number (phi in Greek and geek-speak) has captivated everyone from Euclid to Le Corbusier and Dali–as well as conspiracy theorists, sellers of bad stock market tips, readers of Dan Brown novels, and people who’ve spent too long playing Dungeons and Dragons or Spore.

Iyer’s essay describes the recurrence of the golden ratio in settings ranging from the architecture of the Parthenon to the opening chords in “Billie Jean.” But he isn’t some boneheaded numerologist. Having grown up with American R&B and the karnatak music of South India, Iyer makes music for the body as well as the brain. Iyer argues that the golden ratio also appears in the rhythmic durations and pitch ratios used by Bartók, Debussy, and Coltrane, as well as his former collaborator Steve Coleman.

Historicity includes a cover of Ronnie Foster’s seventies soul number Mystic Brew, a song some will recognize from its sample in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Electric Relaxation.” Iyer gives “Mystic Brew” a Fibonacci-inspired makeover, getting surprising warmth out of a pair of asymmetric chords (three beats followed by five)—and I can almost hear Beavis and Butthead snickering at this sentence. So let me be more direct: Historicity rocks, dude. Bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Markus Gilmore are fierce and fluid throughout; the pulse swirls around but never relents on the title track and numbers by the likes of Stevie Wonder and Andrew Hill.

Two other knockout covers on Historicity deserve special mention: the slow-building, smoldering funk of Julius Hemphill’s early cult classic “Dogon A.D,” and a blowout version of M.I.A.’s amazing “Galang.” For the three minutes of “Galang,” Iyer seemed more magician than mathematician, since he fooled me into into thinking that my favorite rhythm track of the Zeroes may really have been written for a piano trio of math majors.

Vijay Iyer Trio, “Galang”

Vijay Iyer discusses “Historicity”

Jacques Dutronc made being a mocker into an art form. The dapper Dutronc drew energy from sixties-era youth rebellion at the same time he skewered its narcissistic excesses in songs like the brilliant breakthrough single “Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi,” said to be an answer song to the Franco-Dylanisms of Antoine’s “Les Élucubrations d’Antoine.” Set to an insanely catchy thumping backbeat, Dutronc rattles off increasingly surreal population statistics (700 million Chinese, 50 million imperfect people, 500 billion little martians), while always placing himself in the forefront (“et moi”).

Whether he’s tackling prickly everyday problems (“Les Cactus”), flipping the bird to hypocritical swingers (the bachelor sendup “Les Playboys”), or lampooning armchair hippies (the sitar-tinged “Hippie Hippie Hourrah”), Dutronc is also smart enough to capture what’s compelling and cool about his subjects. As with his closest British counterpart, the Kinks’ Ray Davies, Dutronc’s ironic swagger would have fallen flat if his music weren’t equally forceful, and diverse enough to capture an occasional tender subject, like his affection for Paris in the morning (“Il est cinq heures, Paris s’eveille”). Too suave to really play garage rock, he still understood enough about its simple power to deliver on songs like “La fille du père Noël,” a Gallic spin on Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” that can hold its own with the Yardbirds’ cover of the Diddley ditty.

Two other central figures in Jacques Dutronc’s world deserve special mention. First, Dutronc’s longtime muse, collaborator, and wife of almost three decades is Francoise Hardy, the classiest and arguably the most talented of the French ye-ye pop singers (their son is the jazz guitarist Thomas Dutronc). Still gorgeous well into her sixties, Hardy became an accomplished singer-songwriter who has remained open-minded enough to collaborate with everyone from Blur and Air to Iggy Pop.

Second, most of the credit for Jacques Dutronc’s droll commentary is owed to his songwriting partner Jacques Lanzmann, a twentieth-century Renaissance man whose odd career found him, at various times, as a welder, truck driver, copper miner, painter, founder of a men’s magazine, travel show host, and author of 40 novels. Lanzmann, whose brother Claude directed the Holocaust epic Shoah, also escaped a Nazi death squad as a teenager, reputedly because he was determined “not to die a virgin.” Now that’s French resistance!

Jacques Dutronc, ““Et Moi, Et Moi, Et Moi”

Jacques Dutronc, “Les Cactus”

Jacques Dutronc, “La Fille Du Père Noël”

There’s a barn burning, baby
No I can’t say who’s to blame
No one knows who did it, baby
And you’d best not ask my name.

I can’t listen to Dave Alvin’s King of California without thinking about the fascinating book of the same name by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman. The King of California explains how a family of relocated cotton farmers from Georgia maneuvered to build one of the world’s largest agriculture enterprises in the world in California’s Central Valley. Often operating under the radar, the Boswells wielded such power that they were able to make rivers run backward and drain to dust Tulare Lake, which had been the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. The “king” of the book’s title, J.G. Boswell, who passed away earlier this year, was a study in contradictions: a rugged individualist who grew his empire with government subsidies; an agricultural visionary who displaced scores of family farmers; a Stanford man who lost two fingers in a cattle roping accident. He’d make a great subject for a Dave Alvin song.

Dave Alvin, “Fourth of July”

Dave Alvin, “Barn Burning”

Dave Alvin, “King of California”

As a teenager, Andrade became entranced with the music of one of my favorite singers, Brazil’s Caetano Veloso, whose fluid shifts between the breathy parts and the rapturous parts are echoed on Navega. She also had the opportunity to work with Orlando Pantera, credited in his country with revolutionizing the traditional Cape Verdean batuque. Sadly, Pantera died in 2001, reportedly on the day before he was supposed to go to Paris to work on his debut record.

The album version of Andrade’s “Lua” has the rhythmic intensity Pantera became known for, but the acoustic version below provides a clearer opportunity to focus on Andrade’s otherworldly voice.

Mayra Andrade, “Lua”

An unlikely trio of covers, missing from the Disney-dominated official soundtrack, gives the movie its real spark. The music teacher, played by the almost-famous chanteuse Zooey Deschanel, leads the kids through “Someday” by Steve Earle, “Why Can’t We Be Friends” by War, and “Ooh Child” by the Five Stairsteps. War’s socially conscious low-riding funk and the Stairsteps’ wide-eyed Chicago soul can hold their own on any playlist. But “Someday,” Steve Earle’s early anthem of longing and escape, has acquired a magical power for my daughter and me. I pull out an acoustic guitar, stumble through a few clumsily played licks, and listen to my urban-dwelling, public transportation-loving little girl belt out the lyrics—“I’ve got a ’67 Chevy, it’s low and sleek and black/ someday I’ll put her on the Interstate and never look back”—like she has just discovered the missing link between Haggard and Springsteen. I have no idea how or why they make perfect sense to her, but I know it must be time for a really good road trip.

At this point, Zooey is better known for being ridiculously charming than for her singing and songwriting. But last year’s minor classic She and Him (she wrote most of the songs, with music by M. Ward’s “him”) resonates more than I expected. The music mixes Motown-inspired soul (right down to the Smokey Robinson cover) with the urbane country shuffle of George Jones and his duet partners. Not everything works, but the best of these, like the subtle “Black Hole” and the sparkling “This is Not a Test,” sound timeless rather than simply nostalgic. These songs won’t set the house on fire, but Zooey’s voice has a quiet power that reminds me ever so slightly of—dare I say it?—Karen Carpenter. There, I just said it.

For a video of Steve Earle’s “Someday,” click here.

For a video of War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” click here.

Zooey Deschanel, “Someday” (from Bridge to Terabithia)

She and Him, “Black Hole”

Five Stairsteps, “Ooh Child”

Cox, who records beguiling solo records as Atlas Sound, occasionally posts excellent micromix playlists on his website that underscore his unpredictability (one recent list has Aaron Neville, Lee Hazlewood and Shuggie Otis brushing shoulders with the Residents and Robert Wyatt). Despite these, I was a bit behind the curve warming to Deerhunter. Even though I admired the mind-melding sonic collages on 2007’s Cryptograms, they exuded a chilly air that, in my more curmudgeonly moods, left me running for the nearest vinyl slab of Al Green or Merle Haggard. I had them pegged as a shoegaze band, and I’m just not that interested in footwear.

But last year’s sprawling double whammy, Microcastle/ Weird Era Cont., adds more than real guitars and real songs; it has a fluidity and humanity that I thought was beyond them. You can hear familair strains on almost every track, but the band’s playbook is now covering new ground, turning the field into a dizzyingly blurry hybrid of ambient drone (Can, Stereolab, 4AD bands) and thumping avant-rock (Velvets, Television, Feelies, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and even Cox’s beloved Echo and the Bunnymen). At a time when most of us probably feel like we could be blown down in the next storm, it’s weirdly comforting to know that you don’t have to be Metallica or Motorhead to compete in the big leagues.

Deerhunter, “Nothing Ever Happened”

Deerhunter, “Agoraphobia”

Last week, when Aretha Franklin put on her oversized bow hat and melted fire with her inaugural version of “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)”—Samuel Francis Smith’s 19th Century rewrite of a German rewrite of “God Save the Queen”—a piece of my heart held the memory of another queen of soul, one generation and half a world away, who met with a more tragic fate. Blessed with a voice of equally staggering power and beauty, Ros Sereysothea rose from poverty and illiteracy to become the most beloved singer in her native Cambodia during the sixties and early seventies. Thanks to the excellent Los Angeles combo Dengue Fever, discussed below, the music of Ros and her contemporaries is finally experiencing a rebirth on both sides of the Pacific.

Ros’s story carries a distinctive rock twist. Along with the cherub-faced godfather of Khmer soul, Sinn Sisamouth, a former Royal Court crooner turned unlikely garage rocker, and the more playful female vocalist Pan Ron, who makes me think of Martha Reeves, Ros meshed Khmer music with the range of Western sounds that made their way across the Pacific during wartime—everything from Motown and classic R&B to surf, psychedelic and garage rock. Eastern sounds from Bangkok to Bollywood also entered the mix. The resulting Khmer rock underground was like nothing else heard before or since. A track like Ros’s “Chnam Oun 16” (translated as “I’m 16” or “Sweet 16”) virtually defies description, but to me it sounds a bit like an even more intense Asha Bhosle performing an upbeat Aretha number, backed by the 13th Floor Elevators. The song sounds so alive that it seems to mock death itself for its weakness and cowardice.

Ros Sereysothea, “Chnam Oun 16″

As John Swain captured in his Indochina memoir River of Time, Khmer rock’s seminal figures remained upstarts in their heyday; even Ros and Sinn scrounged for cassette sale revenue and never reached the upper echelons of Cambodia’s economic elite. But their musical revolution came to an abrupt end after April 1975, when Pol Pot’s forces overrode Cambodia. Few of the leading Khmer musicians survived the genocide. Sinn Sisamouth was sent to a work camp and executed. Pan Ron disappeared. Ros Sereysothea’s demise remains the subject of conjecture, but Greg Cahill’s short film about her life, The Golden Voice, concludes that after her discovery in a slave labor camp, she was forced to sing pro-Khmer Rouge songs and marry one of Pol Pot’s henchmen, who later had her killed. In another account, she died from malnutrition in a Phnom Penh hospital weeks before the Vietnamese invasion ousted Pol Pot. Either way, this achingly beautiful and surprisingly rocking music—which often paired melancholy sentiments with sparkling melodies—virtually disappeared, preserved only because fans risked lives and livelihoods hiding priceless cassette tapes. The musical history of a generation went undercover in the face of what Hannah Arendt, commenting on a different genocide, termed “the banality of evil”: ordinary people following orders confiscated and destroyed the tapes, even as they were silently humming these same songs under their breath.

Sinn Sisamouth, “Ma Pi Noak”

Pan Ron, “Rom Ago Ago”

After the click-through: Dengue Fever and the renaissance of Khmer rock and roll.

Part Two: Dengue Fever and the Khmer Rock Renaissance

For years, the golden age of Khmer rock remained virtually unknown in the west. The occasional exceptions included Parallel World’s 1996 Cambodian Rocks anthology (first released without any artist or track information), and the several classic tracks that appeared in the soundtrack to the 2002 film City of Ghosts. But the music’s renaissance is largely due to Dengue Fever, whose uncharacteristically mellow Khmer language cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” was featured in City of Ghosts. The band has one of the more improbable histories in recent memory. Ethan Holtzman, a California-based keyboardist, traveled to Cambodia in the 1990s, and while his traveling companion was contracting dengue fever, he was filling his backpack with classic Khmer cassettes. Inspired to form a band performing Cambodian rock covers, he recruited several stellar musicians, including his brother Zac, the former Dieselhead guitarist who should have won last month’s battle of the beards. Traversing the karaoke clubs of Long Beach, California’s Little Phnom Penh, they became entranced by a beguiling young singer, Chhom Nimol, who had already become a teenage sensation back in Cambodia. Incredibly, they persuaded her to join the band, which has progressed from a Cambodian covers-only format to equally impressive original material that brings in everything from homegrown California psych-pop to Ethiopian jazz.

If you simply listened to Dengue Fever’s hilarious 2008 ode to troubled transcontinental romance, “Tiger Phone Card,” you might think that Dengue Fever was merely a really good international novelty act. But as shown on most of the recent Venus on Earth album, the band deserves better than to be consigned to the “world music” ghetto. A rock band every bit as much as Radiohead or TV on the Radio, Dengue Fever serves as a reminder that, due to the prominent American R&B and rock influence, the lost years of Cambodian rock are also a lost part of our own collective memory deserving of rebirth.

John Pirozzi, the director whose film Sleepwalking Through the Mekong chronicles Dengue Fever’s surreally rewarding 2005 tour in Cambodia, is working on a broader movie called Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten on the lost history of Cambodian rock and roll. Four volumes of Cambodian Rocks reissues are available on the Khmer Rocks label, and a wealth of Khmer rock classics are also available on YouTube and elsewhere on the net. These efforts bear witness to the stunning musical contributions of a strife-torn country, intertwined with our own tangled war-torn history, deserving recognition for something richer and grander than killing fields and donut shops. Rather than retreating in the face of evil, past or present, we have the opportunity to become educated about our country’s complex history in southeast Asia, while also cranking up the volume and letting freedom ring.

Dengue Fever, “Tiger Phone Card”

Dengue Fever, “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong”

Dengue Fever, “Seeing Hands”

Dengue Fever, “I’m 16″

I’m only slightly embarrassed that my most-played “new” album of 2008 was Matador’s re-release of Mission of Burma’s 27 year-old Signals, Calls and Marches. Meticulously produced by Ace of Hearts svengali Rick Harte, it doesn’t sound remotely dated. Since the Zeroes have already seen the likes of Interpol, Kaiser Chiefs, Ted Leo, M.I.A., and just about everyone else channeling the early Eighties underground, the time is ripe for a Burma renaissance. Mission of Burma is enjoying a surprisingly productive second life since its 2002 reunion; if you think the band is a nostalgia act, play 2006’s scorching The Obliterati right after any other recent release. One of the best shows I saw in 2008 was Burma’s San Francisco performance of everything from Signals, which reached even further into the band’s back pages with the dark and mysterious “Peking Spring.”

Matador’s 2008 reissue of Signals actually improves on and completes the original version. This year’s model adds four tracks to the original EP’s length, including both sides of one of my all-time favorite singles (Clint Conley’s wonderfully grumpy grad school anthem, “Academy Fight Song,” and Roger Miller’s frenetic “Max Ernst”) and two formerly instrumental tracks from the same sessions (“Devotion” and “Execution”) that the middle-aged Burma gang gave a vocal makeover sometime after recording The Obliterati. Without the dynamics of the original Signals‘ signature number, “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” the reworked songs still blend beautifully, sharing a style that has one foot in the conservatory and the other in the mosh pit. The sum total is thirty-five minutes of heavenly bliss disguised as punk rock. About the only thing I miss is the lyric sheet from the original release, which arranged all the words in alphabetical order.

Mission of Burma, “Academy Fight Song”

Mission of Burma, “This is Not a Photograph”

Also worth owning are Matador’s re-releases of Burma’s 1982 album Vs., whose rawer aesthetic comes closer to the band’s live sound, and the then-posthumous 1985 live album The Horrible Truth About Burma. The latter’s two covers—the Stooges’ “1970” and Pere Ubu’s “Heart of Darkness”–make fitting bookends for Burma’s aesthetic reach. All the reissued CDs also feature DVDs and concert-footage from early Burma, circa 1979-1983. And if you want to go back even further, YouTube now has footage of Miller and Conley in their pre-Burma band, Moving Parts, doing a prototype version of “Max Ernst.” The keyboardist who looks like he floated in from a Yes concert is Erik Lindgren, who went on to join Roger Miller in his avant-garde ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. Lindgren also played in the Space Negros, a band responsible for of one of the all-time great album titles, The Space Negros Play Generic Ethnic Muzak Versions of All Your Favorite Punk/ Psychedelic Songs from the Sixties.

Moving Parts, “Max Ernst”

Mission of Burma, “Peking Spring”

Mission of Burma, “All World Cowboy Romance”

No disrespect for the Bee Gees, who started out as a rather classy British Invasion band, but I suspect the disco-loving doctors stacked the deck on this one. Quick review of an online bpm directory reveals that the medical authorities strangely bypassed plenty of songs registering exactly 100 bpm, including such life-affirming ditties as “Straight Cadillac Pimpin‘” by 8-Ball and MJG and “No Shelter” by Rage Against the Machine. But I’m probably just getting defensive because I had to give a guy CPR once, and the song I recall hearing in my head was “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones, which races along at a frightful 175.8 bpm. Miraculously, he survived. For years, I’ve harbored the delusion that the Ramones helped save his life, when the life they helped save was mine.

One song I’d identify as a “lifesaver” without resorting to mathematical determinism is “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There” by the Four Tops, whose lead crooner Levi Stubbs passed away yesterday. It’s as thorny as a hook-laden love song can get, with “confusion” rhymed with “illusion” and an outstretched hand offering solace in a “world crumbling down.” Almost as good is the 1986 British hit that Stubbs inspired, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears,” which probably ranks as Billy Bragg’s finest moment. The song is a bittersweet character study of an enduring woman that says more about living with dignity in hard times than a dozen of Bragg’s wordier political anthems. “When the world falls apart, some things stay in place/ Levi Stubbs’ tears run down his face.” When the nameless woman in the song quietly places the Four Tops tape back in its case, her world remains bleak, but she’s managed to survive to face another day, a little wearier and a little wiser. Call me corny, but at a time when the world sure seems like it’s falling apart, keeping the heart moving a little may be the most subversive impulse available. And it’s not just based on math.

Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”

Four Tops, “(Reach Out) I’ll Be There”

Billy Bragg, “Levi Stubbs’ Tears”

Don’t let the “avant” part turn you off — this music is accessible, fascinating, utterly beautiful, and works as well in the foreground as it does in the background (i.e. you can as easily close your eyes for deep listening as you can use it as a backdrop for hours-long coding sessions). There’s nothing wanky about it.

Zoe Keating: Tetrishead

Back-story: Keating was a classically trained cellist, on a fast track to the symphony. But despite her prodigious skill, debilitating stage fright kept her from advancing. In auditions, she’d forget entire compositions, drop the bow, and fall to pieces. But when playing solo, or playing her own work, she took flight. So “I bailed on the thing I loved the most.” Zoe ended up at Sarah Lawrence, creating film soundtracks for her art-major friends, who happened to have lots of effects pedals and sequencers laying around. It was there that Keating began to create her own sound, somewhere between Pablo Casals and the Kronos Quartet. Working on her own terms, not having to execute someone else’s compositions note-for-note, Keating’s stage fright virtually vanished. For her, experimenting with music was therapy. And her therapy is delicious to hear.

Her work with sequencers enables her to play live as though an ensemble unto herself, with one or two lines of classical cello and one or two lines of … something hard to put your finger on. Something warm and wiggly and textural, a romp through wonderous green clouds.

Keating’s cello sounds like these Mammatus clouds look

Despite the pedals and laptops that surround her in performance, Keating’s work never sounds electronic – it sounds like cello music, pure and simple. It’s not Bach, and she’s no Paolo Beschi, but I find Keating’s music every bit as warm and engrossing as that of the masters.

Her music is available on iTunes and Amazon MP3.