Sticky music thread

[Nigel]

I think someone posted Man of Constant Sorrow a while back - here's the brilliant Alison Krauss surrounded by the equally brilliant Union Station . Having seen them live twice I can say they make virtuoso look bloody easy . I think this (" Alison Krauss & Union Station - Live " ) is one of the best live albums ever made - 2 CDs, almost all them great songs and great renditions of them .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPc92XOC84M

A very good evening
Nigel

[alburt.c]

thank you Nigel. this one is vary good also. i am big fan for them.

[Manwithaview1]

[Manwithaview1]

[rod taylor]

Here ya go:

[rod taylor]

One for all you baby boomers: Zally screws up the start - they can't hear themselves over the screams. He opened a restaurant in Toronto called Chez Piggy and then had a fatal heart attack, but before all that he's having a great time here; my fault he says. John Sebastian wrote a series of very good, very catch songs.

It's tight - despite the intro - it looks fun. Like youth, like camaraderie - us against the world. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiaJZcfhfVQ with Charlotte Rampling. Robin Orton once played the Beach Boys on this here Jukebox - oh those days of youth - to have everything ahead...

[rod taylor]

“The sleeping town, you / My hand on your heart by you / Deep at midnight the bank, you / The double violet, you / The motionless eye that does not unravel your / Gaze, me.”

You and me. x

[rod taylor]

[rod taylor]

I wanted to add the Schubert Blues by Elena Kats-Chernin, an Australian composer, in the version played by Stephanie McCallum, but the youtube video seems to have been taken down. You can hear it on spotify and I heartily recommend it: it's the best thing new thing I've heard in the last year.

In its place is this - which is the polar opposite in terms of emotion, but nevertheless has that melancholy air that I seem to crave. It's a Rag and it's not annoying, who would have thought? I've recently been playing children's nursery rhymes on the piano (Black Sheep etc) and transposing them into minor keys. It makes them instantly palatable!

[rod taylor]

...and if you enjoy melancholy, listen to the new album by the Afghan Whigs. It is, in my opinion, their best.

The whole album has this wonderful scope - it seems to take the singer from birth to where he currently is in middle age. The two centrepieces of the album are Toy Automatic and Oriole. Toy Automatic has this fragile structure that feels like it is going to break at any moment. I love it.

Oriole, the video of which includes some rather Hollywood witchcraft, chugs along gently, but it is in the counter melody in the second half of the song that it grows wings and takes off. I could listen to that contrapuntal croon forever. Dulli seems to have discovered a graceful lyricism as well:

Through love I wander/Seek my thunder/Slip my number/Undercover
Free at last/Cage burned/Cages burn/So true, unglued/Where and when no matter/I will find you

I know it's an old trick but I love that tense shift/repetition of cages burn.

Anyway, just some tunes if you need some for the autumn.

[rod taylor]

I'd like to dedicate this to FLOTUS Melania Trump. There's a great piano version of Pat's Aria by Bruce Brubaker if you like elegies that are non-lyrical.


This is prophetic! I foresee a time will come when
luxury dissolves into the atmosphere like a perfume,
and everywhere the simple virtues root
and branch and leaf and flower.

On that bench there we'll relax
and taste the fruit of all our actions.
Why regret life which is so much like a dream?
Let the eternal plan resume.

[rod taylor]

A couple of years ago I put Philip Glass's 8th Symphony on here and Robin Orton called it minimalism masquerading as Sibelius and Captain Car Crash told me to "stick it up my Philip Glass".

I wonder if age has not mellowed you. Shall we try again?

I've been listening to Glass on repeat. Yes, he has his shtick - but I think this is a really exciting piece. I also love his 2nd metamorphosis piece. The world's greatest living composer?

[rod taylor]

Here's Nana singing Theodorakis' music with words by Yiannis Ritsos.

From the translator's note to the original poem:

"On May 10, 1936 Yannis Ritsos saw a newspaper photograph of a woman mourning over the body of a dead youth in the street. The youth was her son, a worker in a Salonica tobacco factory who had been killed by police during a march by strikers. Inspired by this picture, the 27-year- old poet composed a dirge which he imagined the mother singing."

Dirges are a wonderful Greek tradition - I was lucky enough to hear them being sung in the street in the mountains of the Mani last year.

[rod taylor]

I watched the whole of Scorsese's George Harrison film last night - 3.5 hours in one sitting.

I love incredibly long documentaries - you lose all track of time. The man himself came across as only moderately interesting in terms of his binaries: assertive truculence and calming self-absorption. Other than that it was the standard fare - he occupied the space of a third-wheel in the slip-stream of two greater talents and two greater egos.

Anyway, it was interesting because you started to think of Harrison as this living/breathing character making choices year on year, trying to find a world that made sense for him. It was almost a red herring that one of the most startling experiences anyone has ever had (being in the Beatles) happened to him, so devoted was he to discovering a way and a truth and ultimately, the light.

It struck me that you could categorise some artists thusly: for some there is a search for enlightenment. For others the light shines through them. Whoever is left is an utter charlatan.

So, Picasso just had to f*cking stand there and the light shone through him. The same with Amy Winehouse or Marlon Brando. You understand I'm talking in categories here - regardless of the individual merits of their work.

Anyway, like I said, beware of darkness.

[rod taylor]

I've always preferred this version of Beside You to the one on Astral Weeks, in part because it is rawer and the semi-improvised lyrics give off more of an approximation of dope-induced wondrous intoxication.

[rod taylor]

Well goodness me! Check out the guitar solo on this - just phenomenal; puts up the hairs on the back of your neck - make sure you have the speakers switched on.

Terry Kath was killed playing a Russian form of roulette - the sheer pointlessness of that can truly be felt as you listen to him rip into this. I love the eloquence of this guitar solo, the exuberance and positive release of energy and drama. Also, the ensemble playing - the crispness of the horn section and their enthusiasm as spectators during the Kath solo. Such a tight band, before they became bland and schmalzy in the 1980s.

[rod taylor]

I had a Russian girlfriend a few years back. She was an executive for Estee Lauder based in Moscow and I'd travel out to various European capital cities to meet her whenever she was at a conference.She introduced me to Vladimir Vysotsky and beluga caviar.

I never developed a taste for caviar - too intense, not subtle enough. Vysotsky is intense and not subtle also - like a Russian Brel. But I still listen to him from time to time. Koni Priveredlivye is great, whatever it means, and his performances were high voltage.

[rod taylor]

And now another Russian:



Rest in Peace Dmitri Hvorostovsky. He was always like this great big, barely contained silver substance moving across the stage.

[rod taylor]

A bit of middle of the road for y'all. Here's hoping for the best for you Chris...

Enjoy the snow today everyone.

[rod taylor]

Dedicated to the greatest drug on the planet - coffee. I don't know what I'd do without you.