Zoopraxiscope

Harry Nilsson had some big hits, but none of them were as good as this early number.

It’s snowing as I type this¹, and the temperatures will soon be subzero. I’m impatient to hear the voices of spring.

Presenting “Django Johnny.”

The Sadistic Mika Band were the first Japanese band to tour Great Britain, and were influenced the likes of Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Every website discussing them has a different explanation of their name, none of them convincing.

Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum in their early days.

Enrique Granados‘s 1911 Goyescas is one of the two great suites of Spanish piano music. (Albeniz’ Iberia is the other one.) Granados was killed in 1916 when the boat he was crossing the English Channel on was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

A spooky tune from 1962. Pentangle covered it several years later.

An example of Japanese “group sounds” from 1968. The bass player, Masayoshi “Louis” Kabe, would later turn up as “Glue” in Speed, Glue & Shinki.

A simple tune in a characteristically straightforward arrangement by Gentle Giant.

“Ma mère l’oye” began as a piano duet for children. Ravel subsequently orchestrated it, which is the version here. Joe Walsh recorded his own version of the introductory “Pavanne.”

Members of The Blues Project joined with fiddler Richard Greene, a Bill Monroe alumnus, and a few other musicians to form Sea Train (two words). Their 1969 self-titled debut had possibly the worst cover of any album — it wasn’t even ugly² — and it sold miserably. I’ve never met anyone other than myself who bought a copy. This is a pity, because it was a fully-realized example of progressive rock, intricate, complicated and ambitious. It’s almost completely forgotten. Sea Train is not even mentioned on Prog Archives.

The band subsequently underwent personnel changes, altered their name to “Seatrain,” and came to George Martin’s attention. The resulting album was better-produced and easier to listen to, and it yielded a small hit, but it was less interesting than the one that preceded it.³

The music of yokai metal band Onmyouza is mostly a Japanese echo of the NWoBHM, but they occasionally pause the mayhem for a moment for Kuroneko to sing a ballad.

Gary Moore may have been the homeliest of the Great Guitarists, but that didn’t matter when he played this homage to Roy Buchanan.

(The live version is better, and it’s originally what I had here. However, that video is no longer available, grr.)

This early Roy Wood tune was the first song played on Britain’s Radio 1.

Some space music: the final piece of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos I. The score is below if you would like to play along.

Written by Ross Bagdasarian, a.k.a. “David Seville,” and William Saroyan, and first recorded in 1951 by Rosemary Clooney, who hated it. Dan Hicks installed the trampoline.