Category: Music

Redux post of the day

First posted here five years ago today.

This Is Just His Opinion

“The Big 5 of all time, musically, are probably Mozart, The Beatles, KC and the Sunshine Band, Beethoven and The Gap Band, though some could argue that Bach deserves to be in there somewhere. Maybe sub out Beethoven?”

Joel Achenbach

NewMexiKen would include The Kingsmen.

There may be hope yet

Jill has yet another new post at Dinner without Crayons. She begins:

Sometimes I worry about my kids’ taste in music. I’ve introduced them to all the classics – and by classics I don’t mean Tchaikovsky but rather The Beatles, Elvis, Fleetwood Mac, Motown.

But despite my attempts to steer them towards quality tunes, they have an unrelenting tendency to embrace the trashiest current music they can find.

The Great Dust Storm

On the 14th day of April of 1935,
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky.
You could see that dust storm comin’, the cloud looked deathlike black,
And through our mighty nation, it left a dreadful track.

From Oklahoma City to the Arizona line,
Dakota and Nebraska to the lazy Rio Grande,
It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down,
We thought it was our judgement, we thought it was our doom.

The radio reported, we listened with alarm,
The wild and windy actions of this great mysterious storm;
From Albuquerque and Clovis, and all New Mexico,
They said it was the blackest that ever they had saw.

From old Dodge City, Kansas, the dust had rung their knell,
And a few more comrades sleeping on top of old Boot Hill.
From Denver, Colorado, they said it blew so strong,
They thought that they could hold out, but they didn’t know how long.

Our relatives were huddled into their oil boom shacks,
And the children they was cryin’ as it whistled through the cracks.
And the family it was crowded into their little room,
They thought the world had ended, and they thought it was their doom.

The storm took place at sundown, it lasted through the night,
When we looked out next morning, we saw a terrible sight.
We saw outside our window where wheat fields they had grown
Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.

It covered up our fences, it covered up our barns,
It covered up our tractors in this wild and dusty storm.
We loaded our jalopies and piled our families in,
We rattled down that highway to never come back again.

Lyrics as recorded by Woody Guthrie, RCA Studios, Camden, NJ, 26 Apr 1940
Transcribed by Manfred Helfert
© 1960, Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY

Redux post of the day

Three years ago in an experiment, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s great violinists played as rush hour commuters hurried by in a Washington Metro station. The article about the event was fascinating. I posted this little bit three years ago today.

Fascinating

Simply fascinating.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Muddy Waters

… was born on this date in 1915. His real name was McKinley Morganfield.

The following is excerpted from Waters’ obituary written by Robert Palmer in The New York Times, May 1, 1983:

Beginning in the early 1950’s, Mr. Waters made a series of hit records for Chicago’s Chess label that made him the undisputed king of Chicago blues singers. He was the first popular bandleader to assemble and lead a truly electric band, a band that used amplification to make the music more ferociously physical instead of simply making it a little louder.

In 1958, he became the first artist to play electric blues in England, and while many British folk-blues fans recoiled in horror, his visit inspired young musicians like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones, who later named their band the Rolling Stones after Mr. Waters’s early hit “Rollin’ Stone.” Bob Dylan’s mid-1960’s rock hit “Like a Rolling Stone” and the leading rock newspaper Rolling Stone were also named after Mr. Waters’s original song. …

But Muddy Waters was more than a major influence in the pop music world. He was a great singer of American vernacular music, a vocal artist of astonishing power, range, depth, and subtlety. Among musicians and singers, his remarkable sense of timing, his command of inflection and pitch shading, and his vocabulary of vocal sounds and effects, from the purest falsetto to grainy moaning rasps, were all frequent topics of conversation. And he was able to duplicate many of his singing techniques on electric guitar, using a metal slider to make the instrument “speak” in a quivering, voice-like manner.

His blues sounded simple, but it was so deeply rooted in the traditions of the Mississippi Delta that other singers and guitarists found it almost impossible to imitate it convincingly. “My blues looks so simple, so easy to do, but it’s not,” Mr. Waters said in a 1978 interview. “They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.”

Muddy Waters, The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection

Whistle while you work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf0I5s-Ghhk

According to Boing Boing:

This is music made by four postal workers as they cancel postage! When I listen carefully, I think I can actually hear the spring mechanisms as the stamps hit the ink. I love it as an example of music turning what is normally seen as a boring, repetitive task into something this joyful.

Mesmerizing.

Making a List (and checking it twice)

At Oh Fair New Mexico, Karen talks about Rosanne Cash’s The List (an NMK recommended CD BTW — see right sidebar). Anyway, she and a BFF decided to make some music lists of their own. Go read Karen’s post, but here is my favorite part:

Her idea for sorting the songs is by category. Her first volume is “Songs You Wanna Dance To.”

There will be a “Songs You Wanna Drink Beer and Cry To.”

There will probably be a “Songs You Wanna Get Frisky To.”

And then, perhaps just a, “If You’re Gonna Be My Kid, You’d Better Know These Songs” CD as well.

The earthly Pandora

Two excerpts from an article in The New York Times on Pandora’s financial arrival.

Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos that could one day, Pandora hopes, make it as ubiquitous as AM/FM radio.

Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits. Listeners pick a song or musician they like, and Pandora serves up songs with similar qualities — Charlotte Gainsbourg to Feist to Viva Voce to Belle and Sebastian.

You can also select on the basis of a song or genre or classical composer. It’s free; ad supported.

Alas, Pandora is not among the internet services on my new Sony TV.

More Kate McGarrigle

From a tribute by Hendrik Hertzberg for The New Yorker:

The voices and songs of Kate and her older sister, Anna, have been a consistently gratifying part of my life for thirty-five years, beginning with the appearance of their first album. Every one of the dozen songs on that 1975 recording is a thing of beauty and intelligence, and several of them—“Kiss and Say Goodbye,” “Heart Like a Wheel,” “Go, Leave,” “My Town,” and (especially perhaps) “Talk to Me of Mendocino”—were as emotionally acute as anything I have ever heard. They still are, and since then hardly a week has gone by without my listening to their music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fcBEGjK3cM

Kate McGarrigle

A nice tribute Kate McGarrigle who died yesterday from cancer (sarcoma). She’s the mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Kate McGarrigle was 63.

The descriptors “Canadian icon” and “national treasure” are often used as lazy shorthand to refer to those artists who’ve made some sort of impact on our country’s music scene. But Kate McGarrigle was one of the awe-inspiring few who truly deserved those epithets — and then some.

Moi, j’me promene sur Ste Catherine
J’profite d’la chaleur du métro
J’ne regarde pas dans les vitrines
Quand il fait trente en d’ssous d’zero.

Me, I walk along St. Catherine [street]
Getting the warmth from the Metro
I don’t look in shop windows
When it’s 30 below zero.

“Complainte pour Ste. Catherine” (1977)

Video of Kate McGarrigle, with Rufus and Elvis Costello a year ago.

Surely one of the great live albums

Johnny Cash performed his historic concert at Folsom Prison on this date in 1968.

I hear the train a comin’
It’s rollin’ ’round the bend,
And I ain’t seen the sunshine,
Since, I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison,
And time keeps draggin’ on,
But that train keeps a-rollin’,
On down to San Antone.

[The song itself was originally recorded at Sun in 1956.]

The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings

From the All Songs Considered Blog:

Over the past few months, contributors to NPR Music have been combing their collections, reading listener nominations and putting together a list of the Decade’s 50 Most Important Recordings. Not our favorites, but the music that made an impact.

Here’s the full alphabetical list:

John Adams: On The Transmigration Of Souls
Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
Arcade Fire: Funeral
The Bad Plus: These Are The Vistas
Beyonce: Dangerously In Love
Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
Bright Eyes: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
Burial: Untrue
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: S/T
Kelly Clarkson: Breakaway
Coldplay: A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Danger Mouse: The Grey Album
Death Cab For Cutie: Transatlanticism
The Decemberists: The Crane Wife
Eminem: The Marshall Mathers LP
The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Osvaldo Golijov: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (Saint Mark’s Passion)
Green Day: American Idiot
Iron And Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days
Jay-Z: The Blueprint
Norah Jones: Come Away With Me
Juanes: Fijate Bien
LCD Soundsystem: Sound Of Silver
Lil’ Wayne: Tha Carter III
Little Brother: The Listening
Yo-Yo Ma: Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet
Mastodon: Leviathan
M.I.A.: Kala
Jason Moran: Black Stars
OutKast: Stankonia
Brad Paisley: 5th Gear
Panda Bear: Person Pitch
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss: Raising Sand
The Postal Service: Give Up
Radiohead: In Rainbows
Radiohead: Kid A
Shakira: Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1
Sigur Ros: ( )
Britney Spears: In The Zone
Sufjan Stevens: Illinois
The Strokes: Is This It
The Swell Season: Once Soundtrack
Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate: In The Heart of the Moon
TV On The Radio: Return To Cookie Mountain
Various: Garden State Soundtrack
Various: O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack
Kanye West: The College Dropout
The White Stripes: White Blood Cells
Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Amy Winehouse: Back To Black

And here is where you can read about each.

I did it

Seventeen days ago I told how I had made a playlist of all my Christmas music (468 tracks). The list was designed so that once a song was played, it dropped off. Sometimes while I was blogging, sometimes while I was reading, sometimes while just listening, the playlist dwindled down, like a musical Advent calendar.

It’s on the next-to-last song right now, “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby. Really, the best-selling Christmas song ever.

[To be fair, there were two copies of “White Christmas” by Crosby among the 468 tracks, so the odds were a little less. The very last song was something I’d never heard of or care to hear again, a new-age kind of composition.]

Tim McGraw Ropes Decade’s Most Played Single

[T]he most-played song on any [radio] station from Jan. 1, 2000, to Dec. 17, 2009, was Tim McGraw’s “Something Like That,” released in 1999. It received 487,343 spins, beating out the most popular song on Top 40 radio, Usher’s “Yeah!,” from 2004, by a fair margin. “Yeah!,” featuring Ludacris and Lil Jon, has been spun 416,267 times.

ArtsBeat Blog has the top song in each genre.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” on the radio 487,343 times.