Music and Recording Features

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David Bowie: Curated

Phil Brett Jan 06, 2021 First Published: Jan 06, 2021 0 comments

I remember when I first heard that David Bowie had died. I was half-listening to the radio as I prepared for work. I was stunned. I just looked at my partner. To my surprise, a tear ran down my cheek. I had always been rather sniffy about people who got emotional when famous people died, people they had never met, who had never heard of them, who had lived lives of wealth.

Music and Recording Features

Looking Back at Fleetwood Mac

John Swenson Dec 10, 2020 First Published: Dec 10, 2020 0 comments

I've just recently finished reading guitarist/vocalist Walter Lure's autobiography, To Hell and Back. Walter has a great story about his days in Johnny Thunders's Heartbreakers and his own Waldos. Until he died in late August, you could still hear him playing with the Waldos and running periodic tributes to Johnny. But he also took some space to write about his first band, a hard-rock dance band called Bloodbath that pounded the risers in the North Bronx at the dawn of the 1970s.

Music and Recording Features

The Classical Voice: Finding Your Way In

Jason Victor Serinus Dec 08, 2020 First Published: Dec 08, 2020 0 comments

How to explain the power that trained operatic voices hold over many of us? For me, the pull began days after I was born, when acoustic 78s of tenor Enrico Caruso and coloratura sopranos Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini played in the background. There was something about the way the dramatic-to-the-core Caruso sang, as if his life depended on it, while the high-flying coloraturas skipped lightly through impossible strings of notes. It moved me like little else.

Music and Recording Features

Rudresh Mahanthappa: The Time Is Now

Thomas Conrad Sep 04, 2020 First Published: Sep 04, 2020 0 comments

An outburst of saxophone flurries sits you straight up in your chair. The tone is rich but with a cutting edge.

It has to be Rudresh Mahanthappa. The riveting cry of his alto saxophone is one of the most recognizable sounds in jazz.

But those darting runs coalesce into Charlie Parker's "Red Cross." So it can't be Mahanthappa, can it? He has made 15 straight albums of original music. He doesn't do covers, right?

Music and Recording Features

Sheltering In Place In New Orleans

John Swenson Jun 30, 2020 First Published: Jun 30, 2020 0 comments

New Orleans, Louisiana  As I write this, my city is locked down. To make sure of it, the National Guard is encamped in Louis Armstrong Park, site of Congo Square, where in former times enslaved Americans gathered to dance and play music, and tourists gathered to watch them. People still gather there when the city is not locked down; they gather at other places, too. No one's gathering now.

Music and Recording Features

Jim Campilongo: Telecaster Master & Audio Enthusiast

Ken Micallef May 08, 2020 First Published: May 08, 2020 0 comments

In a 2014 profile in the New Yorker, Paul Elie, author of the book Reinventing Bach, wrote, "There it was again: the stinging treble, the spooky overtones, the strings snapping and booming under his handsthe sound of a Tele being played as skillfully and exuberantly as it can be played."

The musician in question was Jim Campilongo . . .

Music and Recording Features

Being There: Reflections on Ways of Experiencing Jazz

Thomas Conrad Apr 07, 2020 First Published: Apr 07, 2020 0 comments

I remember the only time i ever saw Chet Baker. It was at Parnell's, a jazz club in Pioneer Square in Seattle, long since defunct. It was a few years before Baker died under mysterious circumstances, in Amsterdam in 1988, after a life of creativity, notorious dissipation, and addiction.

Emaciated, with a caved-in face, he already looked near death. He played like an angel. I remember something that happened to me toward the end of the night. Sometimes last sets in jazz clubs, when the crowd has thinned, seem to exist outside of time.

News

Streaming Salvation for the Sequestered--UPDATED 5/5!

Jason Victor Serinus May 05, 2020 First Published: Mar 25, 2020 0 comments

Specific Live Streams (Scroll down for ongoing series):

Thursday, May 7 10pm EDT: The Noe Music Listening Club features composer Jake Heggie discussing and performing his music and that of his music heroes. Sign up here.

The Metropolitan Opera streams live performances for 25 hours. This week’s schedule is:

May 6 Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin

May 7 Strauss’s Capriccio

May 8 Puccini’s La Bohème

May 9 The Opera House

May 10 Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana / Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.

Music and Recording Features

When Britain Went Postal: a Post-Punk Survey

Phil Brett Mar 12, 2020 First Published: Mar 12, 2020 0 comments

Few would have predicted that the Sex Pistols' first gigin November 1975, at the Saint Martin's School of Art in central Londonwould be the start of an explosion of music. Not many even knew it was happening. That soon changed. Punk would create a space that other bands rushed to fill. Inspired by the DIY ethos and the rejection of the notion that pop music had to be a 30-minute conceptual track on the lives of elves, punk was just grab an instrument and form a band.

Music and Recording Features

Welcome to the EDM Jungle

Ken Micallef Mar 05, 2020 First Published: Mar 05, 2020 0 comments

In the mid-1990s, record labels were cash-flush and music magazines plentiful. Warner Bros., Capitol, Universal, Mercury, RCA, Arista, Mute, and Astralwerks shuttled US-based music journalists across the Atlantic to cover England's burgeoning Britpop, trip hop, drum and bass, and techno music scenes. The latter three genres were hailed by the press as the "electronic dance music revolution."