Articles by Michael Anderson

Billie Holiday has always been a fascinating and captivating story for many reasons – she was a jazz singer of immense talent, an African-American women who rose to super-stardom … but then crashed and burned due to her own personal tragedy and ended up destitute and exploited to feed her addiction. She was more than ‘just’ a singer – her methods of interpreting melody and harmony were immensely influential in every field of music, both with vocalists and instrumentalists. There is not a singer today who doesn’t bear some influence from the woman Lester Young nicknamed Lady Day. There have…

This is simply amazing stuff – I have been listening all afternoon in the background at work, and the video and sound quality are excellent! This is a full-length concert from 1958, appparently the earliest known such event recorded on film! A couple of years earlier Duke had experienced what he called his ‘second birth’ at Newport, a concert famously recorded and available on CD. Here is the full blog post: The film I’ve put on my YouTube channel features the earliest known filmed full-length concert by one of the 20th Century’s greatest songwriters and bandleaders. Filmed at Amsterdam’s famed…

Have you heard the analogy ‘throw it all against the wall and see what sticks’ as used to see what works from a bunch of ideas without using critical thinking? It is based on the cooking test for pasta – you throw a piece against the wall and if it sticks it is done. You see it all the time in entertainment – movies that try to appeal simultaneously to all demographics by dumping in elements they assume will appeal to those groups without considering the greater context. That approach is fairly typical in music videos, where the goal is…