Category: Tune of the day

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.

Continue reading “Tune of the day #47”

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.

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.

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.