Everybody Needs A Hobby

Among the Sheffield Lab productions that I downloaded from YouTube were two compilation albums from Greece, apparently not released elsewhere because they weren't listed in any of the Sheffield Lab discographies.  One was called "Sheffield Jazz" and it's four tracks each from three different Sheffield Labs albums, one of which I had and the other two I didn't. It's a nice selection and excellent recordings so I cut it into individual tracks and burned a CD.

The other was called "Hitech3" and includes a wide variety--pop, jazz, classical--and so it doesn't work as well as a listening experience.  Listening through it, there were a few bands I'd never heard of, like the "Freeway Philharmonic", an LA quartet that existed 1988-1994 and released four albums.  It's an interesting quartet: viola, Chapman Stick, guitar and percussion.  Their music rides the no-man's land between jazz and classical, with a touch of country/bluegrass thrown in. The cover compares them to Dixie Dregs and Bela Fleck.  Lots of really great musical moments in their oeuvre.

Another discovery was Pat Coil, a pianist with an open melodic style.  One of his albums was produced by, and features, Lyle Mays of the Pat Metheny Group.  I'd seen his name before, but never heard his music.  It's pretty wonderful too.

Another of his albums is called "Java Jazz" and is probably a Starbucks production.... because his name is nowhere on the package!  Apparently his profile is so low that they, or somebody, figured the best marketing scheme is to present the music anonymously.  Too bad.  It's one of the best recorded piano trio albums I've ever heard, and delightful from start to finish.

Coil's style reminds me a lot of John Lewis, the late leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet.  John's ambitions always went beyond jazz.  The MJQ recorded some semi-classical music, played a lot of classical themes (jazzed up), and John recorded four CDs of Bach preludes played absolutely straight.  Although I have several MJQ albums, and albums by their vibraphonist Milt Jackson and bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Kay, for some reason I didn't have any solo albums by John.

Easy to rectify.  He done dozens, including one with a brass band, and a couple of neo-classical Third Stream albums.  I picked out a selection of the best and burned two CDs worth of material.

All thanks to Sheffield Lab.

Third Stream Music

NoCoPilot wrote:

So I had to research Giuffre and download some more albums.  One I remember from my LP days was called “Piece for Clarinet and String Orchestra” (1960) which isn’t quite jazz, isn’t quite classical either.  Right up my alley IOW.

Over on the classical discussion board, one thread is "what jazz are you listening to" and somebody posted a link to a Gary McFarland album from 1963.  He died young (auto accident I think) and I was only vaguely aware of him.  Turns out he did some nice jazz, some awful vocals, and one album "The Gary McFarland Orchestra" with a neo-classical extended band of brass and strings.  This kind of jazz-classical hybrid was briefly popular 1957-1964, led by Gunther Schuller and his New York Conservatory students.  Schuller named it "third stream music" because it as neither jazzed-up classical, nor classed-up Jazz but rather something outside either stream.

Checking Wikipedia there were several examples of third stream music listed, a couple of which I already had (like Guiffre and Brubeck Octet and John Lewis above). I have "The Rise and Fall of Third Stream Music" by Joe Zawinul and "Third Stream Music" by the Modern Jazz Quartet.  Others I added tonight.  Two excellent albums by Schuller. An album by Keith Jarrett (not quite as terrible as the rest of his output). An album by Gary Burton (which sucks, despite excellent personnel.  Good thing it was free). Most of the rest I could easily live without.  

The formerly unclassifiable has a name.

Chinese Concertos

Yesterday I downloaded some tracks by The Boston Typewriter Orchestra which is, yes, a bunch of guys banging away on typewriters in complicated rhythms.  Just weird enough to register on my weirdometer.

Filing it away this morning, I was reminded of an old LP I used to have, which had been filed under "Boston Symphony Orchestra" for lack of a better alternative.  All I could remember about it was that it had a yellow cover, and said "Boston Symphony Orchestra" at the top, and included more than one composer.

Checking my spreadsheet of the LPs I sold, I saw the subtitle was "People's Republic of China," which reminded me the main piece was a concerto for orchestra & Chinese pipa, a stringed instrument (the "Chinese banjo") written by a composer who was hard to alphabetize (吳祖).  Found a listing for the album online, and of course it's never been reissued on CD.  The other tracks on it were by Liszt and Sousa, but it was the pipa concerto that was the keeper.

YouTube had several performances, all live (though none by the BSO) which, with minor editing of applause, were perfectly suitable.  Rather than duplicate the LP with Liszt & Sousa, which I really didn't want, I dug deeper into YouTube for more Chinese concertos.  Found another pipa concerto "Hua Mulan" by Gu Guanren, and an erhu concerto by He Zhanhao.  Marvelous stuff!

The soloists in these recordings are nothing less than astonishing.

I'm filing this masterpiece under "Boston" even though it has nothing to do with Boston anymore, but that's the way I remembered it and I'll never remember the Chinese composers' names. Another puzzle for my heirs to ponder when I pass away.

Gaslighting

Remember that old Monty Python record, where they scratched out the Beethoven cover art and hand-wrote "Another Monty Python Record"?



Many years ago -- mid seventies -- I have a DISTINCT memory of running across that original Beethoven LP in a shop and thinking, "Huh, I should buy this" but I didn't.  Now I'm starting to question whether it actually ever existed.

There *IS* a National Philharmonic Orchestra, and they *HAVE* done lots of Beethoven.  However Dietriech Walther was never their conductor.  There *IS* a Dietrich (no 'e') Walther who is a German printmaker (b. 1959) but  he's not a musician.  The soloist, Justus Pankau, was a Prussian cinematographer (1923-2017).  ZDF Records Ltd of London does not exist, but there is a ZDF German Television in London, started in 2011.

In short, either the world is gaslighting me or my memory is faulty.  I'm leaning toward Fawlty.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Today I put together a CD-R of a couple tracks from Sigfrid Karg-Elert on harmonium, the tracks from "Alpenlander" featuring squeaky defective pump organs, some tracks on reed organs from my various Renaissance Dance Music CDs, and a couple more reed organ tracks I found on Apple Music and YouTube.  Most feature some kind of extraneous noises / wheezes which aren't supposed to be there.  Several caused me to check my surroundings for suspicious goings-on.

I called it "Music for Small Organs."

I got to wondering today if Mozart had written any music for organ, which he had although it's a surprisingly small amount.  Some of it was for something called a "clock-organ":


Ms Els Biesemans does not apparently have any recordings of Mozart's clock-organ music, aside from this YT video, but searching for it led me to the website of Rodney Jantzi, who repairs old reed organs, and has about an hour of MP3s of him playing his finished products.  It's lovely lovely stuff, not dissimilar to the Karl-Elert harmonium recordings.  I wonder if I should do a USB stick?
https://www.rodneyjantzi.com/

Robert Reed

Just ran across a multi-instrumentalist from Wales I'd never heard of before. He's done three albums ("Sanctuary I, II & III") and a bunch of singles in the style of Mike Oldfield. He uses the same structures, the same instrument sounds, & similar music as Mike.

After Oldfield had a huge hit with "Tubular Bells," he had a falling out with Richard Branson over royalties and the fact that Branson wanted him to keep milking the same formula over and over and Mike just wanted to move on, and so he refused. When he finally got free of his Virgin Records contract, to spite Branson he immediately put out "Tubular Bells 2, 3, and 4." They were okay, but you could tell his heart wasn't really in them.

Robert Reed sounds like "Tubular Bells 5, 6 & 7." Identical structures, identical guitar style, and similar decline in inspiration. Yet apparently Reed has been doing this Oldfield schtick for a decade, and has many followers.

I wonder why Richard Branson hasn't signed him.

B3 Hammond

While looking for something else today, I ran across a jazz trio, apparently from Seattle, called the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio.  They play originals which are a very funky mix of The Meters and Booker T & the MGs.  Delvon is an incredible organist.  For an instrument without any velocity -- unlike a piano, the organ is either on or off -- he gets incredible expression out of it through gracenotes.

That reminded me of another organ trio I ran across a couple months ago, Organissimo (from Philadelphia I think) who did an incredible Beatles tribute album (or "B3tles" as the cover styles it).  I scanned the internet for other good stuff and found enough to make a 2-CD compilation.

I then realized I had very little by the "king of the jazz organ" Jimmy Smith, so I went looking.  A lot of his output is awfully schmaltzy, and/or overproduced with too many musicians.  But at least my Ukrainian site had about 40 albums to sample.  After an hour or so I had one CD's worth of the good stuff, plus -- I did not realize this -- he'd done a jazz version of Prokofiev's "Peter & the Wolf" (1966). More Third Stream music.  Cool.

Art Lande

Found and downloaded a new (2020) album by one of my favorite piano players.  It has a very odd title: "Resist The Eel Panda."

Obviously this is an anagram.  Art likes anagrams, earlier albums have mentioned "Earl Dant" or "Red Lanta."  My first move was to subtract "Art Lande" from "Resist The Eel Panda," leaving ESISTHEEP.

Next it seems logical to subtract "The" leaving ESISEP.

Nothing can be made of ESISEP.  In fact, nothing useful can be made from ESISTHEEP: sheep ties, pee heists, tepee hiss, he is steep, pee shiest.

Okay I'm stumped. "Pieces" is spelt with a C.

Frank Sinatra

When I sold all my LPs I made myself a Sinatra compilation, from my own and my dad's records, just the top hits that I remembered from my childhood.  

One LP boxed set I did not copy to CD was a set of his work with big bands during the swing era.  For some reason I was thinking about it yesterday, remembering that the 75 tracks were not all familiar, but they were all marvelously done.  Frank was a very good singer, always exactly on pitch, never over-sung with melisma or exaggerated emphasis, and the band arrangements -- mainly by Nelson Riddle -- were clean and efficient without being schmultzy.  In short, I decided I wanted the set again.

Checking my (only?) local CD store, they had the 3-CD box for $5.99, two bucks a disc, eight cents a song.  Couldn't pass that up.

Arrived today.  Can't read to vocal music, but it's marvelous music for just listening.  It has like a 60-page booklet too, with a long essay by Nancy and track-by-track recording details (personnel, date, studio, and notes on significance).  This is way more than one day's entertainment.

Fully embracing my old man persona.

I remember reading a piece a long time ago. Somewhere, somebody asked why the Beatles were the only group that engendered the widespread hysteria known as Beatlemania.

The answer, of course, is that they weren't. It's true that Beatlemania went further and louder than the crazes for other singers/bands, but that was mostly an accident of timing. The Beatles arrived when TV was really hitting its stride in the UK, and radio was getting into the "transistor radio" period where teenagers and young adults could get exposed to the music and the group hysteria pretty much 24/7. Other singers and bands have had their own rabid followings since, but few (if any) have so truly bizarre. And perhaps the reason for that is that after that period, people were a little more attuned (sorry) to the media.

So the follow-up question readily presents itself: who was there before the Beatles that was the least bit comparable? And the suggested answer was Frank Sinatra. As a teen idol, he had a lot of similarities: mobbed appearances with crowds of hysterical girls crying and fainting just because they were near him, etc etc. Arguably, the only reason he didn't hit it as big as the Beatles was because he was just a bit too early for the mass media effects.

That part of his career was before my time, of course.

Ukrainian Composers

Past couple of days on my Classical Music forum we've been suggesting "Ukrainian composers," in quotes because the state of Ukraine has only existed 1916-1922 and 1991-today.  Many composers born in the region of present-day Ukraine are known as Russian composers (Prokofiev, Gliere, Tiomkin, Roslavets, Bortnyansky) or Polish composers (Szymanowski, Kilar, Paderewski, Bortkiewicz) or Romanian composers (Porumbescu, Vlad).  Only a few are known as Ukrainian composers (Sylvestrov, Krutoy, Marton, Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, Klebanov, Lysenko, Lyatoshynsky, Kosenko, Skoryk, Stankovych).

The case of Mikhail Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky is an interesting one, because that composer did not exist.  The Symphony No.21 attributed to him was a hoax, perpetrated by a Ukrainian/Soviet Jew named Mikhail (Michael) Goldstein whose own success was limited by his ethnicity in the 1940s.  The music, however, is quite delightful.

Researching other works by Goldstein I discovered he's published as Balakirev, Glazunov, Tartini, Reicha, and Khandoshkin in addition to his own name.

Whilst looking for more Goldstein I ran across several new (2009-2017) free (YT) recordings of Moisei Vainberg (1919-1996), a Polish/Russian composer I first encountered on a Melodiya record about 1971.  I remember being teased for talking about "Moysha VAINberg" in my first job out of college by the mouth-breathing apes I worked with.  Vainberg's name is spelled many different ways: Moisey Vainberg, Moishe Weinberg, Moisey Samuilovich Vaynberg, Mieczysław Weinberg, Mojsze Wajnberg.  That explains why, in the intervening 51 years, I haven't found any other pieces by him besides the Trumpet Concerto I initially fell in love with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mieczys%C5%82aw_Weinberg


And you know what?  All these other recordings I just found are completely wonderful too.

Harp Music

Now that my sister and I have figured out how to play USB sticks on our personal stereos, I asked her what USB sticks she'd like me to make.

She said "harp music." I like harp music but have only a few harp concertos, and a couple solo albums by Yolanda Kondonassis (which she already has), and a couple jazz harpists my sister wouldn't like.

So I've been searching, off and on, for harp music online. But here's the thing: the VAST MAJORITY of what's posted as "harp music" online isn't harp music at all, it's synthesizer playing a harp patch. The sound is obvious.

And misleading.

I eventually found 247 tracks 20 hours 34 minutes of (real) harp solos and harp concertos.  I think that's enough.  On shuffle play it makes for a nice variety.

But I feel like I've died and gone to heaven.

Radio Dramas

Many years ago (May 1, 1983) my local NPR station broadcast a 5-hour radio adaptation of "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back," with a couple of the original cast members (Mark Hammill, Anthony Daniels, Billy Dee Williams) and sound-alikes for Han and Leia. It was done by NPR Playhouse and was fully fleshed out with John Williams music, sound effects, elaborate recording (sounds best on headphones) and a very professional script. Not exactly the same as the movie, but still canon.

Anyway, I taped the show, and transferred the cassettes to an MP3 CD-R twenty years later in 2003. I've listened to it a couple of times since, and always marvel at the awe-inspiring scope of the production.... though I rarely have five hours in a row to devote to it.

Today I decided to see what else was out there, and found the first Star Wars radio drama (1981) and the third (1996) on YouTube for free download. Neat-o.

Now I'm thinking I'd like to find some other radio dramas, with full production values, that could serve as a couple hours' diversion. So far have sampled "The Red House Mystery" by A.A. Milne, some Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, Saturday Night Theatre... still looking for something persuasive.

The BBC was big on radio dramas, many years ago. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy started out on radio, I think.

Klaus Schulze

German electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze passed away Tuesday, on my birthday.  He was 74.

He has released literally hundreds of albums; it seems like in the 1970s and 1980s he had a tape recorder running all day every day and everything he recorded he released.  A lot of it, okay almost ALL of it is pretty dire. I stopped following him in 1975, after his sixth or seventh album.  I checked in once every few years, just to make sure he still sucked, and never bought anything else.

A friend of mine was pretty close to him, they worked together on many of the releases.  He was of course a big fan though I could never understand why.  Schulze was fond of re-releasing his entire catalog in ever bigger and bigger boxes.  I think the last one was over a hundred discs.  He must've sold enough to live on (and support his reportedly legendary drinking habit).

So, nein danke.

But now that he's dead -- and coincidentally my Ukrainian music site is having a sale weekend where everything's $0.10 instead of $0.16 -- I decided to put together an MP3 disc of the early stuff I didn't have (1975-1981).  It came out to about 11 hours of stuff, 10 albums, 27 tracks (they're long so they're cheap, the whole kit & kaboodle only came to $2.70).

Dunno if I'll ever make it all the way through all ten hours, but at least I can say I have it.

More Chinese Erhu Music

NoCoPilot wrote:

Chinese Concertos

I was reminded of an old LP I used to have, all I could remember about it was that it had a yellow cover, and included more than one composer.  Checking my spreadsheet, I saw the subtitle was "People's Republic of China," which reminded me the main piece was a concerto for orchestra & Chinese pipa, a stringed instrument (the "Chinese banjo") written by a composer who was hard to alphabetize (吳祖).
I dug deeper into YouTube for more Chinese concertos.  Found another pipa concerto "Hua Mulan" by Gu Guanren, and an erhu concerto by He Zhanhao.  Marvelous stuff!

Yesterday on the way home from lunch I stopped at Half Price Books and found a Chinese CD of erhu pieces performed by On Yuen Wong (Americanized = Wong On-Yuen).  His playing on the 2-string fiddle (accompanied by piano) is nothing short of astonishing.  The CD I found is "Vol. 2" of Hu-Qin Music...

So of course I had to look for Vol.1 online.  Found it on YouTube (yay) as well as Vol.3, and two more CDs of On-Yuen's erhu with symphony orchestra.  All are fab.

I'm just a girl that cain't say no.

The Apprehension Engine

Horror film soundtracks are kind of a special genre, lots of creepy sounds and scrapings and moanings.

Today I was looking for the sound of a large piece of metal -- a safe, or a backhoe bucket or something -- being dragged across cement.  I did all kinds of googling, investigated lots of videos of cars drag racing, and instructional videos on how to safely move a safe -- before I stumbled onto some YouTube videos by a guy named Mark Korven.

Mark has built himself an "instrument" he calls The Apprehension Engine.  It includes lot of metal bits that can be scraped, and long bass guitar strings, and some panels that can be thumped, all of whom are connected to reverb springs so the whole thing sounds like a horror film soundtrack.


One of the videos mentions he's done a soundtrack for a film, called "The Lighthouse" (2019), and sure enough the tracks are on YT.  Lots of really scary noises and a creepy atmosphere.  Just up my alley.

I started downloading the tracks and discovered I already had a file folder with the name "Mark Korven."  Seems I downloaded another soundtrack of his, called "The VVitch," about 6 months ago.  That one uses unusual folk instruments and odd sounds to evoke the same eerie atmosphere.  I'd completely forgotten I'd downloaded it.

The two make a nice pair.

This morning I woke up with an album in my mind.  It was an LP my father had of piano jazz, by Barbara somebody.  With her picture on the cover.

Not much to go on, but I searched for "Barbara" in the spreadsheet of LPs I sold in 2015, which included his collection.  Found her last name, "Carroll," and confirmed online that her 1976 self-titled album was the one I was thinking of.

It HAD been re-released on CD, but only in Japan and only in limited issue.  I could find only three tracks from it online.

But lots of other tracks from other albums -- she was active from 1953 until shortly before her death at age 93 in 2017.  I found enough really good piano jazz to do a nice 2-CD compilation.  She's also done some albums with orchestra (not interested) and some where she sings (not interested).  

Listened to those three tracks from my father's album and you know what?  They're fabulous.  I went ahead and ordered the Japanese CD for $16, more than I usually spend.  But they're REALLY nice music and wonderful recordings.

This morning I ran across a big band singer I'd never heard of before, who sang really interesting novelty songs.  She was a really good singer too.

Dorothy Shay, "The Park Avenue Hillbillie" (1921-1978) was popular from WWII to 1959, when she quit singing. In the 1970s she re-emerged as a character actress on TV, until her death. Her gimmick was dressing up as a high-class society girl, but singing really low-down gutsy songs.

Her lyrics are a hoot:

Quote :

I never knew that our romance had ended,
until you poisoned my food
And I thought it was a lark when
you kicked me in the park
But now I think it was rude
I never knew that our romance was finished
until that bottle hit my head
Though I tried to be aloof
when you pushed me off the roof
I feel our romance is dead.

Quote :

You've been my steady feller since a year ago last June
You often sent me presents C.O.D.
And when I did your laundry every Sunday afternoon
T'was something more than friendship you'll agree
You rode in my jalopie and I bought the gasoline
I staked you when your funds were runnin' low
And now you show your gratitude by springin' a routine
about a wife and kids in Kokomo
Don't you think you should have mentioned it before?
It's little things like that we can't ignore
with a trousseau on my hands now I'll have to change my plans
but I think you should have mentioned it before

Shay sounds a lot like the (unidentified) singer on Durwood Douche's "Big Banned and Blue" but that extremely rare underground collection of dirty songs (done in a big band style) was recorded sometime after 1978 (a single from it is dated '78) by an unidentified band led by (it's been reported) a pianist named Dick Shreve.  The liner notes to the albummention 1983, and the copyright is 1997.  So if Shay died in '78 it can't be her.

Heh.  The album isn't listed at Discogs (or nearly anywhere else, though I managed to track down a real copy a number of years ago) but the single, "Why Me God," is listed on Discogs.  As I mentioned, it's listed as published in 1978 as a limited edition of 400 copies.  Discogs has a picture of the cover:

It took me several minutes to notice that Dick Shreve has his fly open, and his penis is showing!