Music and Musical Gear

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…

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…