2011

I have made my love for the Jazz Session well known in my music reviews – Jason Crane does a great job of finding lesser known folks from a broad spectrum of jazz styles and getting them to open up and talk about all sorts of stuff. He also integrates music into the interview in a way that allows you not only to hear the tunes but get inside what is happening. Over the last few years Jason has interviewed more than a hundred jazz musicians, and now his show has passed 1 million downloads! Here are the basics about…

If you grew up watching Eddie Murphy and Jo Piscopo parody Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra, or have only seen recent performances by Wonder in which he looks almost like a self-parody of what Murphy was doing, you probably don’t ‘get’ why so many call Stevie Wonder one of the great geniuses of modern popular music. When you look back at the period from the early and middle 1970s in particular, his compositions – songs like You Are the Sunshine of My Life, Higher Ground, Superstition, My Cherie Amour, Signed-Sealed-Delivered, and the entire albums Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale,…

Last week on Glee, the ‘Abstinence Club’ wanted to provide counterpoint to the raw sexuality of Gwenyth Paltrow’s Holly Holiday character, and chose the song ‘Afternoon Delight’ by the Starland Vocal Band. If you are old enough to remember the song, you know that it is amongst the most bright & cheery songs of the 70’s … and also blatantly sexual as it describes grabbing an afternoon ‘quickie’ rather than waiting until the night time. It is a classic representation of a song that sounds upbeat but is really very different, masking a message with an innocent harmony and innuendo….