Category: Music

If Robert Fripp were a Klezmer musician, and Tony Levin played tuba, King Crimson might have sounded something like this.

Orientalism? Cultural appropriation? Who cares? It’s fun, and that is enough.

Modern Renaissance music, featuring Brian Gulland on lead bassoon and hysterical laughter.

Alkan is notorious for fantastically difficult piano music, but he could be simple and graceful when he wanted.

Deranged Americana by archetypical hippie freaks, before their minds capsized.

“Even the moon and the stars
Have gone off to drink some wine.”

A historical document from 1989.

A different approach to the Clash classic.

Atomic Ape did an ambitious cover of this, but the original rocks harder.

Motorcycle music of a different sort. This was featured in the twelve-episode Honda commercial Super Cub.

Vai-esque motorcycle music, by another candidate for the title of “best guitarist no one has heard of.”

Brave Combo plays the cheerful Doors tune as a “psychedelic hora (Yiddish polka).”

The only Pink Floyd song I ever listen to.

The Canterbury school of prog rock, as exemplified by Caravan, is distinguished by playfulness, jazzishness, and whimsical, often downright silly lyrics.

May is seven months away. While you’re waiting, you can listen to alumni of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span.

Some pianistic fun from Jakob Ludwig F.M. Bartholdy.

I don’t have a translation, but I doubt that you really need one.

Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman weren’t the only keyboardists of note back in the golden age of prog rock. There was Rod Argent, for instance.

James Huneker: “I never thought I should live to hear Arnold Schoenberg sound tame, yet tame he sounds—almost timid and halting—after Ornstein who is, most emphatically, the only true-blue, genuine, Futurist composer alive.”