Small New Year’s resolution:
•Reactivate the blog.
•Focus more on music, less on work.
•Be happy.
Category: Journal
Overgrown Path
I’ve added classical music blog Overgrown Path to my blogroll. As tempting as it is for classical music people to engage in false nostalgia for golden years gone by, one must remember that never before has there been so much good information so easily accessible for so many.
This blog will be coming back to life soon. Sometimes life just gets in the way.
I’ve enabled the “ephemera” features of this wordpress theme. I’d be grateful for feedback from anybody that subscribes via RSS; posting too often? is it annoying? do the “aside” posts show up in the feed at all?
Talented Tenth
There are some times when critical thinking goes out the window, when the sheer spectacle of a musical talent overrides every other consideration. I had one of these experiences when I stumbled upon a video of Prince playing keyboards.
Prince is one fucking amazing musician.
One of my favorite videos is of Prince playing a beastly solo while playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with a crowd of rock elder statesmen at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony:
My favorite two things about this video are
1) Dhani Harrison’s shit-eating grin.
2) The sedate expressions on Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty and the rest of the band as they phone in their performance which transitions to
2b) a borderline embarrassed expression as they realize that Prince is actually going for a real performance which transitions to
2c) a quasi-religious frenzy, like whirling dervishes of strings, keys, and sticks, and everybody on that stage feels like a rock star on the power of the solo alone.
It will be the project of my life to be as proficient on my instrument like Prince is on both guitar and keyboard.
Team Awesome
Noel Murray has an essay up at the A.V. Club about coming around to Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell. In the course of the essay, he drops this tidbit:
This is one of the joys of The Wikipedia Age: finding unexpected facets to an artifact of popular culture that had previously seemed to be completely catalogued and encased. During this year’s Tony Awards, for example, Paul Shaffer introduced a performance of his song “It’s Raining Men” from The Adventures Of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, and talked a little about his own early days on Broadway. I’ve long known that Shaffer co-wrote The Weather Girls’ disco classic, and I’ve long known that he was one of the many future stars who cut his teeth on the Canadian production of Steven Schwartz’s Godspell. But when Shaffer mentioned on the Tonys that he’d worked with Schwartz on Broadway in ’74, I went to Wikipedia and learned about The Magic Show, the breakthrough stage vehicle for beloved ’70s magician Doug Henning, which originated in Toronto as Spellbound, a show produced by Ivan Reitman, with a book by David Cronenberg and a score by Howard Shore. (The production reportedly changed dramatically once Schwartz got involved.) It’s like “Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon,” remade not as a party game but as a way of seeing formerly remote entertainers as enthusiastic artists trying to make the most of their shot in the spotlight.
How crazy does this project sound, on the basis of personnel alone?
hammer & jack 