Category: MUSIC

“The First Quest” AD&D Double LP

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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?

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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?

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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

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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

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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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