The recent passing of David Sanborn (it happened back in May) recently got me thinking about the TV show he cohosted with Jools Holland back when I was a teenager. It was called Night Music. Well, apparently, the show was originally titled Sunday Night, and I’m not sure when the name changed, or whether I caught any episodes of it back when it was called that. I do vividly remember tuning in to watch Night Music, though.
Tag: MUSIC
“Monk Suite”
I recently mentioned a bunch of ongoing projects, including multiple musical ones. I figured I’d post about a few of those right now, one at a time. This is the first of a few that will be getting posted by scheduling, between today and the weekend. Short version: I’ve been inputting an old arrangement of some jazz tunes by Thelonious Monk for jazz quintet plus chamber orchestra using Musescore, and it’s going well. I have no audio of that to share at the moment, but hopefully will in the coming months!
O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen (1994)
Today, I heard for the first time Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium (1994), and was amazed by it. I’m not a religious person at all, but sacred music is such a massive part of the history of music—Western music, yes, but really all music across cultures—that it’s just one of those things you can’t get away from, if you care about traditional music forms at all. For European classical music, especially, the role of sacred music is huge: a vast amount of the earliest written music was church music, and even into the 19th century you find composers writing masses. Hell, …
Word of Mouth
When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time trawling through city library’s LP collection. At the time, I didn’t realize how unusual it was that the collection included so many of jazz records, including albums from such a wide range of artists. The CD collection was really good, too, but I didn’t have a CD player, and was dependent on my buddy Mike to dub CDs for me so I could listen to them (which he generously did, but I tried to avoid doing it too often to avoid abusing his generosity). LPs, on the other …
Muse Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes by Ian Brennan
As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. This one, I read not long ago, after purchasing it through a book bundle. This is the first thing I’ve read by Ian Brennan. As John Waters states in his foreword to the book, even when one disagrees with Brennan, what the guy has to say is interesting. I didn’t find myself disagreeing with him all that much, to be honest—certainly less than I expected to. The book has two sections, with the first part being basically …
“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 …
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 …
On Listening
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:
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 …
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 …