Maggie's Farm

Submission #4 from our Youth of Today Czar. Dr. Dog's My Old Ways

1969:

Lena Horne, 1969. Damn, this is good:

Viking wonders whether country music is the new rock and roll. I stole this Youtube from him because it's touching as hell. Taylor Swift:

Recorded live in the Schauspielhaus on Christmas Day, 1989, this Choral Symphony celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And it’s some of the last work Bernstein did – he died in November the following year.

An ‘Ode to Freedom’, rather than the usual ‘Ode to Joy’, Bernstein felt authorised ‘by the power of the moment’ to change the word ‘Freude’ to ‘Freiheit’ (which may be closer to Schiller’s original intention). So this is very much the record of an occasion.

In the choral finale, the performance really takes off, with choirs and soloists singing at full stretch. The first cry of ‘Freiheit!’ ('Freedom!') and the choral answer are completely thrilling, and must have galvanised the audience in what was still officially East Berlin.

 

Some Wiki info below the fold about Beethoven's most famous work -

Duane Allman (h/t Riehl)

"Get up in the morning', I believe I'll dust my broom..."  h/t, Englishman.

Herman's Hermits made a big hit out of this song, but here's the original excellent version by Frankie Ford:

and here's John Fogerty:

I will post some more on board ship pictures in a few days. I am always up for taking somebody on a sea cruise.

I was fortunate to attend a private party at which New Orleans' Sonny Landreth played this weekend. A few guys wore their Rock and Bowl bowling shirts: you don't see those too often up here. Mr. Landreth performs at Rock and Bowl regularly.

I guess slide-guitarist Landreth can play anything, but he does like to rock the blues with a Louisiana twist. He's the kind of guy who is in the music, not the audience. Here's a Youtube, with the band he plays with now. He writes songs and sings too, but not on this piece in which he sings through his guitar. Turn your volume to max:

Does music get more dramatic than this? Via a piece at Right Wing Prof:

Managed to find my way to the delightful town of Lucca two weeks ago, the home of the beloved Jack Puccini and his illustrious musical ancestors. More than a tunesmith - but what a tunesmith. Here's his family church in which he first performed:

 and here's the house he grew up in (second one in from the right corner):

 More Lucca photos later...plus lunch, of course.

J. S. Bach

Stella By Starlight. Keith Jarett (h/t, Little Green a while ago):

Chris Kenner never made the charts with his (the first) version of this great tune. (H/T somebody. Maybe Sipp, but I forget):

Cool (h/t, Neatorama):

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Carlos Santana turns a young 62 today. I was fortunate to hear him play in recent years. Here's a delicious Samba Pa Ti:

  Brief history of European Music, Part 3 - with some perfect morning music.

It gets no better than this.

Thanks for these from the Golden Gate Quartet, AVI, from your fine music post. Real American music:

The Jewish-born Roman Catholic convert Czech composer Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser Von Atlantis was his last composition in the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague before he was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed on arrival.

One of the remarkable stories of the era is about all of the music in the camps, and Terezin had more than its share of talent. The Nazis and even the SS loved music and thus encouraged camp musicianship. Mrs. BD recently heard a Terezin survivor speak about being in the choir there at age 11. (140,000 passed through Terezin: 20,000 were liberated at the end.)

In this short (50+ min.) modernist opera, the Emperor of Atlantis (a thinly-disguised Hitler-type) declares total war on the world. (As one would expect from a prison camp opera, the "Loudspeaker" has a major role and, instruments being limited, it's like a cabaret band.) Death goes on strike out of resentment at the competition from the Emperor, but love reappears on the battlefield and, in the end, Death is persuaded to resume his merciful task of erasing pain from the world when the emperor himself agrees to die.

Here's a snippet of the opera on YouTube, the Emperor's farewell aria:

A lunchtime tune from from Levon Helm's new record. It has some of the old Band sound. Pure, cheerful, Christian, sentimental Americana. The guy can play anything, but he loves his drums - and he thought he was a lousy singer even before his throat cancer. 

Gotta love it, Sipp:

Eric Anderson. I thought Tin Can Alley was his best album.

Patty Griffin (h/t, LGF). Stunningly simple lyrics about life here.

Roxy Music in 1976 with Let's Stick Together, plus a cameo appearance by the appealing Jerry Hall. (h/t, the Englishman)

For biographical reasons, this tune brings me back to the Kentucky Bluegrass. This is from 1991:

The "hang" is a very ancient Swiss drum-like instrument which looks like a wok with dings - similar to a modern steel drum. Swiss mythology tells that the idea was born of children playing with kitchen pots and pans. Here is Liron Man playing one:

I may be one of the few guys around this site who bought the Band's Big Pink the day it came out. I brought it over to a girl's house, and made her listen to it twice on her dad's record player, and then we had tea. I still have the vinyl.

Re Big Pink, said Robbie Robertson: "This is emotional and this is story telling. You can see this mythology. This is the record that I wanted to make."

I didn't think of "The Weight" as being the centerpiece of the record; I thought the record was all of a piece.

Anyway songs and poems are not puzzles. They just are what they are. Still, it's diverting if pointless to look at their references. Vanderleun tracked down a piece on The Weight. The piece seems foolish at some points but interesting at others.

I liked this Robertson quote in the piece:

If I read the lyrics to some of my favourite songs, they don’t mean shit to me. But if I hear ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, it is so powerful and emotional. All I want out of any of these songs is the right emotion. I don’t give a shit what the lyrics are. Dylan rambled on way too much for my liking. I remember years ago saying to him: ‘listen to ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’; I like this more than any of the songs we’re playing. This is emotional to me; our songs are clever. I don’t care for clever. Let’s try and get somewhere that has an emotional thing.

Also got a kick out of this Rick Danko quote:

So Levon spoke to this chick he was dating. Her name was Kathy and she was the most beautiful girl in Toronto… 16 years old when he met her, and she was a gorgeous, gorgeous lady. She looked beautiful and no one could resist her. Anyway, Levon explained the situation to her, and she kindly gave this cop who was trying to crucify us a blow job. Then she told him she was 14 years old. He was the chief witness against us, but this was some weird shit for him, and he disappeared, we never saw him again. In the end everyone else got off, and I received a year’s suspended sentence on probation.

Sunday is the bicentenary of the death of our beloved Joseph Haydn. There is a good appreciation of him at Brussels Journal.

It's a good weekend to spend some time with him.

I have special and sentimental feelings about this fine state, including time in the elegant Bluegrass and at Keeneland (even saw Secretariat grazing in retirement) - and time working up in the wild hollers of eastern KY where everybody is a cousin of eachother and either works in coal, moonshining, or is on welfare.

I have seen many fine Kentucky mornings, with the mist rising from the fields and crouched in the valleys. I guess I was also only passin' through, but I had a true love there, and I still have her.

Ry Cooder, 1987:

Monotonic music mainly, with lyre, drum, trumpet and flute, with different "modes" to evoke different states of mind. The ancient Greeks considered their music and lyrics to be central to who they were as a civilization, and, of course, to be a gift from the gods. As best I can tell, poetry (the lyrics) was never offered without accompanying music.

The group Melpomen recreates the ancient sounds from surviving fragments. (Samples of the music at the Amazon site.)

Wiki has a fine summary of ancient Greek music. Interesting to read that Plato (c 400 BC) complained about the modern music which defied old forms.

Image: Music lesson, c.460 BC, from this site about ancient Greek music. 

This superb song was an outtake from his album Modern Times. I love it. Lyrics here:

Thanks to Gerard for posting this 1999 YouTube (audio only) of Susan with Cry Me a River.

More from Gerard on Susan. Yes, she is an icon for something.

Maybe the Brits aren't dead yet. From the Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover Department: Susan sings.

One unkind question though: Why do Brit women in their 40s tend to look like Monty Python guys in drag?