Music Diary

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…

Image courtesy of Ted Kurkland Associates Considering most of my recent coverage of Pat Metheny has been about his behemoth technical undertaking with his Orchestrion, this new project seems like quite an about-face. Whereas the Orchestrion project (I also reviewed the Orchestrion Live performance I saw) was about creating an automated orchestra that would respond live to his commands, his new recording ‘What’s It All About’ is an intimate set of solo acoustic guitar recordings made in his home studio. This isn’t the first such recording for Metheny – back in 2003 he used his newly created ‘Baritone Guitar’ with…

Last week Coldplay released a new single called “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall”. Amazon had it as a ‘free single of the day’, and Rdio also featured it. My kids and wife have some Coldplay in their collection, so I figured I would give it a spin. I started streaming it in the kitchen while my older son was having a snack, and within a few seconds my younger son appeared from upstairs and said ‘is that Coldplay’? We barely made it through the songs, since it was as my younger son described it ‘utterly generic pop trash that sounds…

The history of music is littered with great artists who carry the moniker ‘died way too young’. Too often that death is self-inflicted and due to … well, mostly drugs. But there are plenty who succumbed to illness, or lost to tragedy. Lee Morgan is such an artist. I never thought of Lee Morgan as being that young, as he had a career that started strong in the late 1950s and continued until his death at 33 in 1972. He was 18 when he broke out as an already-established vituoso side-man and released his first solo recordings. He produced a…

If you are of a certain age, you recall Peter Frampton’s live record ‘Frampton Comes Alive’ exploding onto the scene in 1976. He had been releasign solo albums for a few years, but the live recordings of his songs brought his energy and the quality of the songs to new light. Hits such ‘Baby I Love Your Way’ and ‘Do You Feel Like We Do’ cemented his place in rock history, and remain staples of classic rock radio stations. This week Wolfgang’s Vault is featuring all of their Peter Frampton concerts for purchase at great prices – $5 for high…

I have gotten some flack from folks who see bias in my choices between ‘Music Diary Songs of Choice’ and ‘Pop Goes the Music Diary’: in short, they see me giving jazz and rock high praise, while being brutally critical of pop music. Well, given that one category is made for the money while the other is made for the sake of the music (if someone is playing jazz for the money alone they are terribly deluded), that shouldn’t be surprising. But there are more than a few examples of dreadful jazz music made for the sake of pandering to…

If you are a jazz fan of any sort, chances are when you hear the word Nefertiti in the context of a song … you think Miles Davis. More specifically you recall the version of the Wayne Shorter composition that was the title and opening track of the epic 1968 Miles recording. Yet many other jazz fans might say ‘hey wait, there is a great 1976 Andrew Hill recording by that name’ – and they would be correct. So would those who point to the classic ‘Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come’ by Cecil Taylor. I have been listening to…

Way back in the mid-70’s the music played on shows like Saturday Night Live represented the same sort of off-beat, out of the mainstream approaches as the show itself. In contrast to the Katy Perry/Lady Gaga/Bruno Mars list of generic corporate-rehash pop ‘Johnny Bravos’, you could hear Leon Redbone, Frank Zappa, Betty Carter, Captain Beefheart, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and on and on. Really creative music that crossed cultural and musical boundaries instead of the latest ‘pop trash’. And on one night in late 1975, with Richard Pryor hosting, a guy named Gil Scott Heron came on…

Have you ever just had a song come on and you and your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other just start dancing? Last night the song Skywriting by a never popular British group ‘The Bible’ came on my wife’s iPod, and we had a nice little dance … to the amusement and embarrassment of our kids. I makes me think back to one of my favorite moments from The Cosby Show – at the end of an episode, Cliff drops a record on the turntable (look it up, kiddies), and on comes a gorgeous song and then he and Claire begin playful snuggling and…

OK, so my family has been on a Dark Angel kick lately, plowing through the entire series on DVD (which I grabbed on Goozex). One of the best things is the endless stream of quips from ‘Original Cindy’ (OC). She always seems to have a comment to match the situation, such as when Normal gets involved with a transgender woman who discovers she is a lesbian … “Original Cindy is just too straight to hook up with a science-fiction girlfriend.” Anyway, this weekend we watched some of the Billboard ‘Awards’ show, which largely tossed out popularity prizes and reminded us…