“The First Quest” AD&D Double LP

UPDATE (18 Feb 2019): More information on this album was emailed to me by someone named Michael (‘Mick’) Baker, after my spamblocker apparently ate his attempt to post it as a comment. Here is the email in full: Thanks for a nice article, I actually have the ‘First Quest’ album and i got it in the mid 80s on a hunch that one track on it, may be the one i was looking for, and it turned out right :), The track The Living Dead is a slight variation of the intro into the awesome 85 film ‘The Return of …

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Team Sports and Values?

I always find it funny, seeing parents talk about the value of team sports: they’re always, always people who play team sports as adults, and how they loved playing them as kids. That’s fine, and I don’t contest that a kid can, while playing a team sport, develop his or her teamwork skills, discipline, understanding of the virtue of sacrifice, and grasp of the value of hard work. But… I value those same things, though I didn’t enjoy—and never really played—team sports after elementary school (and even in grade school, I never played them much). So then where did I pick up those values? The …

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How Do You Play Careless Whisper on the Sax?

Ah, the things people on Quora ask sometimes: Read Gord Sellar's answer to How do you play Careless Whisper on sax? on Quora I haven’t been asked to do this often, to be honest. Once in a while someone will bring up Kenny G to me, and I’ll have to explain that Kenny G is sort of the M. Night Shyamalan of the saxophone world. (There’s a good bass solo—as in a fairly “metal” one, in fact—on the Kenny G Live album. We have now reached the limits of nice things I’m wiling to say about Kenny G and his …

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Modern Day Vaudeville

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

I’ve been trying to stay off Facebook, but somehow this has just gotten me started answering questions on Quora. Frying pan, fire, right? The funny thing is, sometimes I’ll answer a really stupid question there, just because it gets me thinking about things in a new way. And then I realized something about my whole long-ago post on popular music as a hybrid performance art, rather than a musical genre: The whole popular music paradigm is, in some sense, just the modern-day form of vaudeville. Popular music (a term I use for basically all the stuff North Americans think of as “music”—rock, pop …

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On Listening

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

A little over a year ago, someone posted this question on Quora: Why does John Coltrane’s music sound like someone just erratically blowing on a sax sometimes? The short version of my answer, I suppose, could be this: Except with the word “LISTEN” underlined and circled in red pen. But here’s the longer answer that I actually posted:

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What do the Starfish Think?

I haven’t made an update here for the last few weeks, and a lot of long-promised (albeit probably not long-expected) posts languish unfinished. People are probably wondering if I went for a swim in the ocean and didn’t come back. Rest assured: I fear the ocean as much as I ever did, and am safe and (mostly) dry… just busy. That’s the nature of job-hunting, and it’s a bit like writing: lots of sitting at a computer fiddling with details, hoping your intended meaning comes across, sending things off into the void and then waiting for responses… so you send out more things …

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Baude Cordier, Pando, and The Lifecycle of Radical Music

The composition on the left is “Belle, bonne, sage,” composed by Baude Cordier, a musician who fell into the “Ars subtilior” school — that is, the “more subtle” school of music, which flourished briefly right around the end of the 14th century, in southern France and Northern Spain: you’ll see some sources call that “late medieval” and others “early Renaissance,” though I think of it as the former in most terms… but in music, it’s kind of a toss-up, or rather, at that time and place, music straddles the divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The comparative (“more subtle”) refers to the Ars …

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Clueless Reviews, Complicit Academics, and Hallyu Nationalism

Update (1 May 2015): My more formal review of The Korean Popular Culture Reader was published in Kyoto Journal 82, for those interested. Original Post: First, the clueless book reviewer: I’ve submitted my own review already–it’s apparently somewhere along the process toward becoming forthcoming, over at The Kyoto Journal–and I can say  found the book disappointing, but not for the same reasons as Bradley Winterton: I am sorry to have to say it, but The Korean Popular Culture Reader is close to the most disappointing book I have ever had to review. Not long ago I found myself engrossed in a Korean TV …

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Monk, Amblyopia & All

Wanting to check one detail about Monk’s life, I picked up my copy of Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse, and searched… and an hour later, I discovered I’d happily read a big chunk of the book. So far it’s a very balanced treatment, from what I can tell: Gourse doesn’t shy away from the few unpleasant things that come up, but doesn’t dwell on the either. It’s not a particularly musical biography, so far: no analysis of Monk’s music. (There’s more of that in Gabriel Solis’ Monk’s Music, which I’d dive into next if it weren’t …

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