Category: Music

The Lancaster/Lumley project Marscape featured John Goodsall, Percy Jones and Phil Collins, in addition to Jack Lancaster and Robin Lumley, and can be regarded as the beta version of Brand X. Simon Jeffes plays the koto on this track.

I disliked Aqualung. I listened to Thick as a Brick all the way through — once — and lost interest in Jethro Tull forever. However, their first three albums, with Glen Cornick on bass and Clive Bunker on drums, are still worth listening to.

“Funk #49” got all the airplay ‘way back when, but #48, from their first album, is more fun.

Stravinsky is best-known for his big foot-stomping ballets, but I like his neoclassical works as well.

From the first Dan Hicks record I ever bought.

Le Orme, with Antonio Pagliuca on keyboards, could be considered the Italian counterpart of ELP, though they had a distinctive flavor of their own.

Bunky and Jake caught my ear a century ago when I first started listening to the radio. Few people remember them, but they still sound good to me.

Another one of the tunes I heard at my Aunt Margaret’s when I was eleven, and my favorite among them.

The closest thing to a hit that the band named for an imaginary breakfast cereal ever had.

Any list of the great pianists that doesn’t include Art Tatum is incomplete.

Some easy Bartok. His music is not all grating dissonances.

What “koeeoaddi” means, Robin Williamson himself probably doesn’t know.

The better Italian prog rockers were every bit as good as their English-singing coevals. It’s about time I posted some of their efforts. We’ll start with a piece by Premiata Forneria Marconi, aka PFM, from their second album, Per un amico.

Jellyfish were possibly the best power pop band of them all. Unfortunately, they were active early in the ’90’s, the age of grunge. They didn’t sound like neurotic, suicidal heroin addicts, so they didn’t catch on.

John Renbourn didn’t fit neatly into any category. Faro Annie doesn’t sound much like his work with Pentangle. Sue Draheim plays fiddle; Danny Thompson and Terry Cox from Pentangle are on bass and drums.

If Yuki Kajiura had written nothing else, she’d still be remembered for this pretty, chilling tune from Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica. The lyrics are in Kajiurese; any translation you find is probably more imaginative than accurate.

A brief history of classic Yes. Drummer Tatsuya Yoshida organized the zeuhl bands Ruins and Koenjihyakkei and has probably worked with every prog rock musician of note in Japan. Guitarist Kido Natsuki has been part of Bondage Fruit (a very interesting instrumental band, despite the questionable name) and Umezu Kazutoki Kiki Band. I don’t know anything about Nasuno Mitsuru; he might be worth investigating.

Many years ago I thought I might be able to economically enlarge my classical music collection by checking out records from the Wichita public library and taping them. Nope. While the selection was good, most sounded as if they had been cleaned with steel wool. However, a few of the more obscure ones were listenable. These included Raymond Lewenthal’s first Alkan album and this one.

Godowsky is probably best known for his 53 Chopin paraphrases, in which he took the demanding Chopin etudes and found ingenious ways of making them even harder. He also wrote more approachable music, such as his “Java Suite,” which includes this impression of the gamelan.

Doris Pines, the 1947 Christmas Ball Beauty Queen of Julliard, recorded only two albums, one devoted to Godowsky and the other to Agathe Backer-Grøndahl and Cécile Chaminade. Both are overdue for rescue on CD.

If you had asked me half a lifetime ago who my favorite guitarist was, I would have said Steve Morse. I’ve heard a lot of music since then and I can no longer pick just one, but I still have more music by Morse in my collection than by any other single artist, except possibly for Jeff Beck.¹ Of course, I never heard the Dixie Dregs on the radio, except once as backing music in a cheesy commercial for a wet t-shirt club — for which I will never forgive that radio station.

My introduction to Leo Kottke, courtesy of the local freak radio station a long, long time ago. He recorded the tune again for his next album with added bass and drums (Larry Taylor and Paul Lagos, if I remember correctly), but I prefer it plain, with just guitar.