Trivia that matter
The company that released the American edition fifty-some years ago got the sides reversed so all the titles are wrong, an error that was repeated in the CD releases. This tune is called “Jive Grind” here, but the correct title is “Vienna Breakdown.”
Bass: Colin Hodgkinson; Sax: Ron Aspery; Drums: Tony Hicks.
A footnote to Dr. Boli’s notes on our kinder, gentler slavery.
I spent one summer of my childhood back east visiting the Martian side of my family. While I was there, I listened to my Aunt Margaret’s records, including this one. Years later at a Steven King concert (not that King; the other one (another Winfield winner)), King would play a bit of an old tune and give the first person to identify it a set of guitar strings. This was one of the tunes, and I was able to give a guitarist friend a new set of strings.
Happy the Man, featuring Kit Watkins on keyboards, was active in the later 1970’s, when radio had become hopelessly stupid.1 I didn’t learn that they had existed until I finally got online around the turn of the century and discovered websites devoted to prog rock.
The masks are not part of the original score.
Written by Al Kooper to give Andy Kulberg an opportunity to show off.
Stephane Grappelli plays Prokofiev in the otherwise disappointing rock version of Peter and the Wolf masterminded by Jack Lancaster and Robin Lumley.
Something a bit different for Halloween. Joe McDonald knew some really weird chicks.
Michael Chapdelaine was the only guitarist to win both the fingerpicking championship at Winfield and the the Guitar Foundation of America International Classical Guitar Competition.
Caution: this tune is a dangerously tenacious earworm. Think before you click.
A classical disc jockey once commented that, no matter what one’s taste in music is, everyone likes Dvořák. So far I haven’t come across anyone who doesn’t.
What happens when you turn an avant-garde composer with an engineering degree loose on a player piano? There’s a discussion of the piece here (advisory: math). The sonorities are interesting, but can this really be called music?
Back in ancient times the local freak radio station often played this along with The Velvet Underground and Harry Partch. Years later I heard bits and pieces of it behind Peter Jones’ narration in the original radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so it was a natural choice for tune #42.
There are some historical background and the lyrics you don’t hear here, but the music stands on its own.
Some of this later turned up in Ive’s Three Places in New England. That scandalized an acquaintance, who didn’t believe that humor belonged in music. See also Dr. Boli.
During the Civil War, a Union general and his troops marched into Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the intention of destroying the little Confederate town. Looking at a beautiful mansion, the general walked in, saw a fine grand in the parlor, and began playing. Upon hearing the music, a beautiful young woman descended the long staircase. After a few minutes of conversation, the pair discovered that they had both studied in New York with the same teacher. The very next day, he again came to her home and they played duets. On taking his leave he said, “You and your piano take the credit for saving Holly Springs.”
I am amused by present-day politicians who mourn the death of what they call “family values.” I would tell them to call for the return of the piano in the home. Before the endless proliferation of canned music, mothers played for family and friends a variety of music, from hymns to sentimental popular songs, while feet moved to the current dance craze, and many a romance began near a piano. There may even have been flashes of radiant beauty when mother played the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. D. H. Lawrence describes almost unbearable nostalgia for a mother playing to her child in his magnificent poem “Piano”:
Softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
The most musically interesting competition at Winfield is the fingerpicking championship. Don Ross has won it twice.
Most of the offerings on OverClocked Remix fall in the twilight zone of better-than-amateur but not-quite-professional, and are often in styles I dislike. Occasionally something surprises me, like this goofy Final Fantasy fantasia.
Blistering fusion, featuring Kido Natsuki, another candidate for the title of best guitarist no one has heard of.
Stravinsky originally wrote this as a song for soprano and piano in 1907. In 1933 he arranged it for violin and woodwind ensemble, as heard here.