Trivia that matter
The 12โ freeze Monday morning blasted the new growth on the roses and brought the daffodil and hyacinth shows to a premature end. However, Phlox grayi1, one of last year’s experiments, brushed off the cold and is blooming now. It’s a mat former, and it should eventually get about three inches high and a foot across.
Update: Still going strong.
I made several hammered dulcimers in years past. Dalglish was one of the musicians I listened to while figuring out how to play the things.
Another forgotten ’60’s band. This one features guitarist Paul Cotton, who would later join Poco.
Carl Maria von Weber wrote “Aufforderung zum Tanz” in 1819. Berlioz orchestrated it in 1841. That orchestration was used by Michel Fokine for the ballet Le Spectre de la Rose.2 Karl Tausig, probably Liszt’s most brilliant student, took Weber’s “Invitation to the Dance” and made it a virtuoso showpiece.
I figure most bloggers are posting jigs and reels today, so here are the nocturnes of Irish pianist John Field. The video should start with the “Nocturne in B-flat major, H.37,” which I played when I was first learning the piano, but they’re all worth hearing.
There was no escape from the original back in ancient times, and I’m sick of it. Driscoll, Auger and company make the tune listenable.
… and this makes six months of daily tunes. There are six more months to come.
It’s too soon to say that Mancuso is one of the greats, but he is pretty good and worth keeping track of.
The queen of rockabilly, with Roy Clark on guitar.
The Dutch band Supersister, featuring Robert Jan Stips on keyboards, were among the best exponents of the Canterbury school of prog rock.
It’s an old story: man meets mermaid, and the inevitable happens. It’s not quite like Hans Christian Anderson.
Szymanowski’s take on the Scheherazade story is quite a bit different from Rimsky-Korsakov’s.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released five albums in 1917, each with a different gimmick. Polygondwanaland‘s is that it’s “name your price,” i.e., free.
Country Joe McDonald, who was named for Joseph Stalin, died Saturday.
The archetypal Raymond Scott piece, as arranged for Paul Whiteman’s orchestra.
From Holdsworth’s first proper solo album.3
Although Arthur Farwell wrote settings of Emily Dickinson poems and music for a play by Lord Dunsany among many other works, he is probably best-known today, insofar as he is remembered at all, for his “Indianist” music.
Using AI to generate images does not make one an Artist ….
AI image generation is clever, but it is not creation. I have spent years mastering the demanding craft of watercolor and claim the right to call myself a true Artist. The word artist implies depth of creativity, skill, and craftsmanship โ qualities not fully exercised by typing prompts into a machine. Many participants here, with no training, practice, or esthetic discipline, effortlessly generate striking images. Platforms like NightCafe boldly call them โAI Artists,โ but they are, at best, Conjurers with DigitalMagic wands. Prompt-writing does take some imagination and skill, but it cannot compare to the work of those who paint, work with wood, stone, cloth or clay, with human hands. Comments like โBrilliant!โ or โAmazing Creativity!โ ring hollow when the skill belongs to the tool, not the operator. AI image generation is fundamentally the curation of output from a machine trained on the scanned labor of millions of artists.
All that saidโฆ using NightCafe is damned good fun โ and Iโve been happily addicted for four years.
Pioneering fusion by the fiddler who worked with both Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin.
I’ve never been able to take Metallica seriously.
It’s hard to sit still listening to The Bothy Band.