Maggie's Farm

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.