Music and Musical Gear

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…

It was an entirely different era … sure there was war and our kids were dying in far off lands for questionable causes, but everything about the way it was handled and perceived was different. And into the mess of the post-Woodstock Zeitgeist Marvin Gaye launched an album that simultaneously soothed and questioned. This week marks forty years since “What’s Going On?” hit record stores and the airwaves. To mark the anniversary, Motown is putting together a 40th Anniversary edition 2-CD/LP ‘super set'(Amazon link). According to his Motown Website: On May 21, 1971, Motown Records released an album unique to…

I have written loads about how music label consolidation has changed the face of the industry over the last decade. We have dropped from having a half-dozen large labels with many second-tier players and indies and other smaller labels, to having four majors … and that is about it. There have been reports about financial problems at two companies – EMI and Warner – potentially causing issues and shifting the power balance to an even smaller set of players. Last week we found out that Warner Music Group was being sold – but also that the outcome wouldn’t shift the…

2011 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of ‘Face Dances’ by The Who, the first studio release after the death of drummer Keith Moon. If there was any real doubt that the band would never recover from the loss, that tepid release with overly constrained Kenny Jones on drums was a pretty clear sign that the magic was gone – though it took the even-worse ‘It’s Hard’ the following year to REALLY kill the band. But even before the release of ‘Face Dances’ there were three signs that the remaining members of the band were headed in different directions:…

Every story starts somewhere … this one starts last Friday night after my kids got home from their middle school dance. They both had a great time with friends and overall had fun. The next morning my younger son said he was a bit disappointed, and when we asked why he said it was because he requested a song that didn’t get played. My older son reminded him that it wasn’t exactly ‘mainstream’, but agreed it would have been a great song for the dance. It reminded me of something I’ve written about before – my tastes in music tend…

When Apple introduced variable pricing, the purpose was for music labels to be able charge more for popular songs … and to push people o buy albums. There was supposed to be a huge library of $0.69 songs … but anyone who has browsed the store knows that most everything is either $0.99 or $1.29 – or is the crap on albums that nobody wants! This morning I hit up Amazon.com as usual (for the free Android app of the day), and I find that Amazon has launched a new $0.69 singles store! As the site says: Instantly buy all…

Last year I reviewed Katy Perry’s CD “Teenage Dream “ and said: Let’s just be honest here: I would bet that Katy Perry spend much more time keeping her body in shape than working on her vocal range, breath control, or pitch. But that is pretty much the point – Katy Perry is a pure pop sugar package: an attractive young woman who gets packed into skimpy, tight-fitting clothes (Daisy-Dukes, bikinis on top?), and sings very catchy songs written by others to work around her limited vocal skills and allow her to perform them live without sounding awful while strutting…