Music Diary

This weekend my family was busy with a variety of stuff in our kitchen, which is a very large room including a separate island and our eating area and is generally abuzz with activities related to food, homework, computer use or who knows what else! We have a decent set of computer speakers on one counter that we generally hook our into our iPods. So I had my iPod Touch hooked up, and wanted to find something for all of us to listen to … so I pulled up the MOG streaming music app, searched Pearl Jam and then checked…

You know that commercial about ‘when once in a lifetime meant once in a lifetime’? Well, I just got an email about an event that is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity! As noted in the picture above, jazz guitar legend is going to be teaching a 5-day intensive workshop in Norwich, CT this August and bringing along his trio-mates Christian McBride (bass) and Antonio Sanchez (drums). Here are some details about the workshop : The National Guitar Workshop is proud to announce this exclusive workshop with world- renowned jazz musician Pat Metheny. This special event is a rare…

Remember the first time MTV aired Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video? It was a huge event that was wrapped around one of the greatest pop songs ever – but the video was even more! There was a story about a girl and a boy … who wasn’t an ordinary boy, which went on for a few minutes before launching into the great song with excellent choreography. Well, a couple of weeks ago there was a big deal made over the new Ke$ha music video for the song ‘Blow’. Featuring James Van Der Beek, there is some pseudo-story about two people…

Sunday would have been the 87th birthday of legendary singer Sarah Vaughan, who died in 1990. She is generally considered one of the great vocalists of the 20th century, and you can see that in the two videos I selected. I was fortunate to see Sarah Vaughan at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1984, where she put on an amazing set that showcased not just her great voice but also her love of performing for and interacting with an audience. One of my favorite songs of hers was a great interpretation of Errol Garner’s Misty. You can hear her doing…

Amongst the young artists performing at the Grammy Awards, Bruno Mars was one of the few who demonstrated the basic ability to … well, sing his songs. Everyone else simply showed how effective modern sound production tools are, and also that the Johnny Bravo phenomenon wasn’t just for the Brady Bunch! Growing up as a teen in the post-Vietnam era is very different than the world my own kids experience, so while we saw ‘War, what is it good for (absolutely nothing)’ and ‘buy all of your guns and explode them to space’,they get songs like Bruno Mars Grenade, in…

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….

When you look at the history of jazz drumming, there are many towering figures with names like Williams, DeJohnette, (Jo) Jones, (Philly Joe) Jones, (Elvin) Jones … and a guy from Springfield, Massachusetts names Joe Morello. Morello was a gifted drummer who had a great sense of time and adding appropriate color. His longest gig was with Marian McPartland’s band … But he is best known as the drummer laying down the tight beats on Dave Brubeck’s Time Out recording. The song Take Five was generally used as a solo vehicle for Morello in live performances, such as the Carnegie…

If you watched the Grammy Awards and saw the segment featuring Eminem, you might have noticed that Rihanna was terrible ‘singing’ Love the Way You Lie. In fact that whole song was pretty lousy, and it only got better when it transitioned into Dr Dre’s section. And even then for me the highlight was the haunting voice of Skylar Grey. She had some feeling reminiscent of Sinead O’Connor tied in with her own haunting and fragile sensibilities. Since then I was sent a link to a YouTube video of the original demo for the song by Skylar Grey who actually…

Until relatively recently, so-called ‘cover songs’ were a staple of every artist’s repertoire. Whether it was classical artists playing compositions of folks like Bach or Mozart or singers doing the ‘great American songbook’, historically artists have established themselves by working through the existing tradition. Not any longer – now the great songs of the past are merely another source of familiarity to be bought and sampled to give your new song a familiar tune to differentiate it from the other similar sounding club dreck. This came up as we were watching ‘Don’t forget the lyrics’ and the song Savin’ All…

Phil Collins is an interesting figure in popular music – he began as the talented drummer of the progressive rock group Genesis, then suddenly became the frontman when Peter Gabriel left in 1975, leaving the drummer’s throne for the microphone as Bill Bruford and later Chester Thompson filled his former role. As Genesis vaulted from experimental rock to pop superstars, Collins simultaneously launched a massively successful career as a solo artist. At times it became hard to separate Collins from Genesis, and as his pop ballads became more and more overplayed on radio his core fans started to desert him….

Billie Holiday is famous for two things: her amazing vocal talents, and her tragic downward spiral due to drugs and alcohol. Lester Young was a famous swing-era tenor saxophone player who never quite adapted to the new bebop and other post-war jazz stylings, yet had his best commercial successes in the late 1940’s before beginning his own alcohol fueled spiral in the 50’s. Billie & Lester began working together in 1939 and made a series of wonderful recordings together before all recording was stopped for a number of reasons for a few years. Those records are at the pinnacle of…

For more than 50 years the Billboard Hot 100 has tracked the most popular songs in the country. Of course, for nearly that any years there have been payola scams, chart manipulation and other industry shenanigans that have tainted the songs that appear on the list. But make no mistake – whatever means are used to get a song to #1, the result is a lot of recognition and sales. Last week on Buzzfeed a user had compiled in two segments five seconds of EVERY #1 song from the inception of the Hot 100 until 1992. Over the weekend someone…

After starting my ‘Music Diary Songs of Note’ I quickly realized that I wanted to look at both pop music for the music video trends, and also at some of the great jazz and other recordings I hoped to feature. So I’m going to use the ‘Music Diary Songs of Note’ label for the times I want to focus on the MUSIC, and now I’ll use “Pop Goes the Music Diary” when I am looking at the music industry. In case you didn’t know, Britney Spears has a new song out called ‘Hold it against me’. It sort of reminds…