Monday, December 29, 2008
Anniversaries
It's Marianne Faithfull's birthday. She's awesome. Listen to something by her today.

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 2:03 PM

Sunday, July 20, 2008
Leonard Cohen
Nice piece on the awesome, wonderful, moody, melodious, verbal Leonard Cohen here, a pleasantly written consideration of his philosophical, emotional and musical history.

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 10:35 AM

Thursday, July 3, 2008
Passing it on
Passing it on from D.S. and with thanks also to Rene's Apple whence it originated: Sergei Nakariakov, playing Bach's "Air on the G String", on fluegelhorn.



One of my favorite pieces and so beautifully played. Have a wonderful day.

Update. Here's a 7+ minute clip of him playing part one of Mozart's KV495 for horn and orchestra. It's as mellow as the Bach but longer. And it's astonishing to hear a flugglehorn so beautiful, for those of us who remember it from jokes more than beauty.

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Permalink | 1 comment(s) | posted by jau at 9:22 AM

Wednesday, April 23, 2008
A.I.7 Two singers and four mucker-uppers
Andrew Lloyd Weber night at American Idol could have been a total train wreck, a disaster of the first order. Instead, he really truly mentored them. He was amazing. He was instructive and quite clear in his guidance, making apt and accurate comments and making it apparent why his shows are so successful, emphasizing words and meanings. And I loved that he convinced Carly to switch songs. (Too bad he didn't lean on Brooke and David A.)

I thought David C. and Carly were terrific and I thought Jason, Brooke and David A. were dreadful. Syesha was upbeat and sexy (Syesha?) in such a Broadway theater way that I don't know how to love him characterize the performance for this show.
Brooke White - 6 - "You Must Love Me" from Evita the movie - Weber's instructions to her were enthralling. Made me think I should watch the movie which I have heretofore assiduously avoided doing. This was the actual train wreck with injuries. For a second time, Brooke started over but then it got really painful. I thought she was going to break down, even more than last week, and you can see her shaking again. I can't imagine what's happened to take her from the smiley, cheery soul she was at the beginning, to this. Her voice is so lovely but she seems on the brink of a nervous breakdown with all the crying and trembling. I hope her adrenaline deficit doesn't cause major problems when/if she's eliminated tonight.

Jason Castro - 6 - "Memories" from Cats - If you hear this song in the show, even if you hate it as much as do in lousy renditions on the radio, or if you get into the song and hear it as coming from an aging former beauty who is quietly sad, it is chilling and deeply moving. Jason totally didn't get it and sang it badly. Idol winners, even Idol finalists, have to be able to get inside their songs.

David Archuleta - 6 - "Think of Me" from Phantom - Holy cow, man, this was a bungle. Ryan didn't help any by starting things off with teenies flocking up to hug David, which seemed really unfair whichever way it felt to him (although one assumes they got his okay for it), but AWL songs should have been his pig-heaven. I expected him to soar with something from JCS or even Phantom or Chess. Instead, as Denise said, "By the end, he’d turned it in to pure Josh Groban schmaltz, and I was nauseated."

Syesha Mercado - 5 - "One Rock and Roll too Many" from Starlight Express - With her hair and dress just perfect, and high atop the grand piano, Syesha did herself proud. She was sexy and joyous, though often off key. It would seem that this is her niche.

(I'm skipping 3rd and 4th places because there was such a big jump from Carly/David C. to everyone else.)

Carly Smithson - 2 - "Jesus Christ Superstar" - This is one of my all-time favorite songs by anyone, let alone by ALW. The juxtaposition of sauciness and J.C. has always seemed nothing less than brilliant to me, and the combined bouncy melody and religious demands have always knocked me out. That said, I thought Carly seemed to 'get' the song - though Paula was right (what did I say?) about the key being about one step too high. She hardly ever frowned and actually looked as if she was having a fantastic time in her pert paisley 60's dress.

David Cook - 1 - "Music of the Night" from Phantom - Not my favorite nor his best (as the judges like to say) but he can hit notes so perfectly, neither sharp nor flat, which made for a nice musical tone that wasn't as melodramatic as it's usually done - which is a good thing as far as I"m concerned - and for a brief moment right in the middle, right at the intense climax of the song, he let himself be wrapped (rapt?) in the words and forgot his self-consciousness. For at least that moment he was wonderful.
My prediction is that the bottom two (I doubt they'll do three with only six altogether) will be Jason and Brooke, and I think Brooke will be sent home. I also want to say again that I dreaded the ALW night but ended up loving it for his comments and for the excuse to listen to guilty-pleasure music.

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 9:12 AM

Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Breaking up
Apparently Hillary and Celine are no longer engaged in a love fest. Hmm, I wonder who needed more space - isn't that the reason lots of people use for splitting? Anyway, VH1 took ample advantage of this "break up" to post the "40 most awesomely bad break-up songs ever" although many of them are so bad that they're really fabulous, especially in the overwrought way that one can jump right into at such moments. Course, it's mixing and matching real break-ups with a silly one, but why take such things as theme songs and background music terribly seriously anyway, right?

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Permalink | 1 comment(s) | posted by jau at 9:14 AM

Sunday, November 11, 2007
Peace in our time
Although I absolutely honor and respect the military - without whom there would be no peace or freedom because human nature is so idiotic so often - I also yearn for the peace and decency that idealism makes one think is possible. Folk music has often championed international and human peace, sometimes with a gentle touch that seems almost onomatopoeic. So, today, Veterans Day, JMBM brings you a lovely recent performance by Cat Stevens of his marvelous Peace Train (h/t Music and Cats, one of my favorite blogs). Steven's voice was and still is one of the most infectious ever, and I really love this song. Most happily for us all, Stevens has decided that he should not remain in hermit-like remove. Anyway, take a moment to listen, today especially. It's a real pleasure to hear. And its message to celebrate.

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Permalink | 2 comment(s) | posted by jau at 12:56 AM

Thursday, June 28, 2007
Unhappy souls
I referred to a song lyric yesterday and rare reader CGHill pointed out that I attributed it to the wrong writer. In fact "and I don't like anybody very much" is from "The Merry Little Minuet" by Sheldon Harnick who wrote the lyrics to some very important musicals (Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me and Umbrellas of Cherbourg, among them). Interestingly, Wikipedia mentions that this song "is in the caustic style usually associated with Tom Lehrer and is sometimes incorrectly attributed to him" and apparently Lehrer performed it with the Kingston Trio (who went on to have a big hit with it) and on his own, which adds to the association. Anyway, the lyrics are so apt that I have to reprint them:
They're rioting in Africa.
They're starving in Spain.
There's hurricanes in Florida,
And Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much.
 
In far away Siberia
They freeze by the score
An avalanche in Switzerland
Just got fifteen more.

But we can be tranquil
And thankful and proud
For man's been endowed
With a mushroom shaped cloud.
And we know for certain
That some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.
Can you tell when this was written? Except for the mushroom cloud reference, it's scarily identical to what would work right now.

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Permalink | 3 comment(s) | posted by jau at 9:24 AM

Monday, June 18, 2007
Opera and Wales, again
All right, all right, I'm on the bandwagon now, too, thanks to Spiced Sass's mention. He won the whole kit and kaboodle last evening and got himself a recording contract. Watch his first audition (here) and hoist yourself up beside me and the others. Plus, watching is worth it just to see the looks on the faces of Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden, and Piers Morgan and hear the audience. British reserve? Yuh. As Morgan (the editor of the Daily Mail) wrote:
One minute you're seeing someone make a complete imbecile of themselves, the next you see something so surprisingly talented that you feel your heart flutter with excitement.
It seems they got quite the real deal this year. Paul Potts' voice is extraordinary. Though never formally trained, there's no thinning or straining in the upper registers and, in fact, his tones through all the range are full. I hope they let him take his voice where aficionados pay him compliments, even if grudgingly, instead of being a sensation and leaving it there. It's all wonderful for him, of course, and good luck! Mobile phone salesman one day, singing sensation the next. Crazy world, this.

Anyway, read Morgan's whole piece and check out the show's website and various performances here (good luck getting on today, however). Plus, YouTube has several performances. And, by the way, what is it about music and Wales (Bryn Terfel, Charlotte Church, Mary Hopkin, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, John Cale, etc., etc.)?? Water? Geography?? What?

P.S. If you don't believe me, read what Wide Awake Café's husband's wrote. Wow.

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Permalink | 7 comment(s) | posted by jau at 11:02 AM

Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Apolo & Julianne
They did it! Apolo and Julianne won that glittery, schmaltzy trophy on Dancing With the Stars! On his 25th birthday, no less! They were SO good in every single dance and looked so fantastic all the time. And it's her first season, too! They blew me away and I guess lots of other people, too. I'm sorry that Laila didn't win but only one person can win (that's the thing about winning) and she definitely became a huge hit, too. (Who even knew there were professional women boxers? Well, I didn't.) Some shows get tired when they've been on for a while, but this one has gotten better each year. Maybe partly because more interesting 'stars' come on, now that it's been so successful. But it's incredibly hard work, so it's awesome that anyone is willing to risk life and limb (well, maybe not life and limb). Anyway, major congrats to A&J!!!

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 11:57 PM

Friday, May 18, 2007
Politicians' theme songs
Over at Curtis and Kuby's radio show yesterday morning (on WABC radio), they mentioned an informal contest to suggest theme songs for the presidential candidates. Some suggestions were not entirely serious, but funny (e.g., Elton John's The Bitch is Back for Hillary and New York, New York for Rudy). Some were more serious but of course I've forgotten them. Anyway, it's an amusing past-time to ponder. What would Romney's be? McCain's?? And do you think the sounds around them make them more -- or less -- appealing?

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 2:45 PM

Saturday, March 3, 2007
Nice fact
How cool is it that Teddy Roosevelt's vice president (yes, THAT Teddy Roosevelt), Charles Dawes, wrote the lyrics to It's All in the Game, a #1 song that's been covered and sung by artists as diverse as Van Morrison, Cliff Richards, Andy Williams, Barry Manilow, and many others. (HT Dadvocate)

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Permalink | 3 comment(s) | posted by jau at 1:42 AM

Thursday, February 15, 2007
valentines, redux
Laura at Wide Awake Cafe wrote about favorite love songs, yesterday - hers and Jim Farber's. Her selections are spot-on, as they say across the pond, including Van Morrison's "Have I Told You Lately". That reminded me of another of Morrison's which totally did its job on me a number of years ago. A charming man pursued me intensely and used many tricks of the trade - such as various tuneful and meaningful melodies - and then disappeared almost immediately upon winning me over. (It's probably no surprise that I don't remember the name of the song.)

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Permalink | 1 comment(s) | posted by jau at 9:54 AM

Wednesday, January 24, 2007
music and ideas
At the risk of adding to the excessive amount of time I've spent recently referring Rare Readers elsewhere, I must mention a wonderful essay at Spiced Sass. I tried to leave a comment there, telling Ligneus how much I like the piece, but comments rejected me no matter what I did, yesterday and today. So I hope he reads this. Anyway, This and That starts off with pop and jazz (Rodgers and Hart [and Hammerstein], 40's big band singers, Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller, Elvis's Sun recordings, Billie Holiday. . .), moves on to Brahms' awesome Third Symphony, and lands on poetry (Philip Larkin but mainly Thomas Hardy). Hardy's novels have begun to wear thin for me, being so endlessly depressing and glum - I mean, how much of that can a girl read before she seeks a mill on a pond of her own and does herself in? Hardy's poetry is everything good poetry can be, however, and the cited poem is worth the price of admission all by itself. This is the kind of post that exemplifies why blogging holds at least some of the future of literature in its verbal, egalitarian, exciting hand.

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Permalink | 1 comment(s) | posted by jau at 10:30 PM

Sunday, December 17, 2006
sassy spice
Whew. One of my favorite bloggers is "back to work" with his writing. Spiced Sass is never predictible, always interesting, sometimes writing about culture and sometimes about science and sometimes about politics. This morning's piece on Scubert is a wonderful example of why I'm so glad he's there with something to say nearly ever day.

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Permalink | 1 comment(s) | posted by jau at 8:43 AM

Monday, December 11, 2006
classical trumpet?!
Thanks to Dustbury, I've just heard something I never expected - a trumpet playing classical music. Just a quick listen to the mini-website version of Paganini's Caprice by Alison Balsom is enough to make me buy the cd - and you can listen by clicking on her name. My classical music purist aunt might have been appalled at the idea of transcribing the Caprice for trumpet, but I think it's cool and quite lovely. Besides, shouldn't we stretch our imaginations in as many ways as possible??

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Permalink | 3 comment(s) | posted by jau at 9:13 AM

Tuesday, October 31, 2006
happy pumpkin day!


Click here for some wonderfully eerie music and click here to carve a pumpkin online, amazingly enough.

For the carving-pumpkin side, thanks to Kitty Litter (who is back to posting, happily for us!) and for the lovely kitty amid pumpkins, thanks to chezmaya.com.

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 11:56 PM

Wednesday, May 24, 2006
idol5 final final
The main thing that struck me tonight was how rich and interesting the girls sounded and how uninteresting and amateurish the boys sounded. All that crap that Randy laid down at the beginning of the cycle about how wonderful the boys were.... He wanted the boys to be wonderful but they were not. The Emperor's New Boy Singers. The boys were actually off key a lot of the time all season and especially tonight. Even the loud cheering and glamorous clothes couldn't mask that the boys just plain sounded worse than the girls.

I was watching tonight with a friend who hasn't watched most of this season and for the first hour she kept saying how awful everyone sounded, and then the six girls came out in those bright red dresses and sang the pants off everyone else. (Well, okay, Dionne Warwick sang the pants off everyone else, but you know what I mean. And while we're on the subject of Dionne Warwick, what crazy photo and tape recording do you suppose she has in her attic that she looks and sounds so terrific, forty-five years later?!) Didn't you think it was weird to hand out trophies for the most idiotic auditions in a show leading up to honoring someone's good performing? I guess that's part of the less-than-high art that some people loathe about AI. But all in all, it was an interesting experience and I'll definitely do it again. Besides, as my friend pointed out when Prince performed (he who said "never, I'll never contribute my talent to them!"), it is a whole lot of fun to see the holier-than-thou performers sidle up so they can reap some of the popularity and financial benefits of the AI phenomenon (~200,000,000 people watching on one night).

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Permalink | 1 comment(s) | posted by jau at 11:06 PM

Tuesday, May 23, 2006
idol5 final, part 1
Oh boy oh boy. My first idol final. But listen, since they both have record contracts, what exactly is the point of picking a winner? What will he or she get that the so-called loser won't? More promotion, I suppose, plus the hip-hip-hooray factor, but I'm not sure it matters. It's a choice between a slightly paunchy slightly goofy lounge singer (did you SEE the purple jacket and silk chantung tonight?!) and a slightly goofy gorgeous-hair-beauty-pageant contestant who sings fantastically in low registers but keeps singing trills in high registers instead. And what was with Simon's mismatched grays (t-shirt and jacket)? And why do Randy and Paula keep talking about the "bad song choice"? As if the kids choose their own songs for goodness sake! The contestants should start saying "tell that to the producers!!!" instead of nodding pleasantly. Yeah, and I'll be tall thin and blonde in the morning. Anyway I hope Katharine wins because (a) I find Taylor silly, throat-singy, boring and monotonous and (b) I like Katharine's voice, although I wish her facial expressions were less superficial, and I like how she moves around a lyric. Wednesday night's show promises to be a good old fashioned variety show what with all the people coming (to perform?). Could be loads of fun. And the winner, tie though it really is, is . . . .
My prediction:
Taylor
Dial Idol's results:
1. Taylor
2. Katharine
My choice:
1. Katharine
2. Taylor
Actual results:
Taylor

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 11:55 PM

Thursday, May 18, 2006
idol5 and politics
I don't mean to be obsessed by this but since the media are, why not me too. Anyway, Good Morning America just did a piece about how the AI winner comes down to politics. Aside from thinking this is making waaayyyyy too much of everything, taking it all much too seriously, I found it weird. They compared Hicks (Southerner, gray hair, gyrating soul-ish singer) to Bill Clinton (Southerner, gray hair, occasional gyrator and saxaphone player) and McPhee to a generic politician (kissing babies (her goddaughter), greeting crowds at her high school and the mayor's welcome). I didn't think these seemed like campaigns but like relishing their more-than-15 minutes of fame. GMA concluded by saying that Simon Cowell is the ultimate determiner, which seems logical given that he's one of the producers, but he predicted Pickler and Daughtry would be finalists with Hicks - so much for his accuracy. He also compliments McPhee's voice all the time and derides Hicks. What are your theories?

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 7:50 AM

Wednesday, May 17, 2006
idol5 (and then there were 2)
Well, goodness gracious, heavens to murgatroyd, golly golly miss molly. Turns out that Elliott is going home. I really thought the groundswell the last few weeks would put him into the finals. He's a gracious and decent guy and I wish him all the best. He'll definitely do fine, much better than he would have before this adventure. A real American story, as a matter of fact.

As for the other two, my 20 weeks (yikes) began with thinking Taylor would win it all after he came to the results bouncy and playing his harmonica. Aside from Melissa McGhee and Mandissa, after a while I thought Katharine would win it all because I listened to her and really liked her voice most of the time (except when she smiled inappropriately or bounced her hair once too much) and I realized I'd consider buying a cd of hers. A while later I thought voters would reject Taylor cuz of the gray hair and his age, but I admired him for not darkening his hair or sucking up to teenieboppers. Then I thought voters would reject Kat for her gorgeousness and cheeriness but I admired her for not trying to be sultry and moody just to satisfy the grousers. Bottom line: I have no idea who will win. Taylor has a huge fan base but Katharine's singing voice is better and, as that fella Simon says often, it's a singing contest! On to next week....!

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Permalink | 0 comment(s) | posted by jau at 10:11 PM