Everybody Needs A Hobby

NoCoPilot wrote:

They had a version by guitarist Julian Bream, a 1963 album that has never been issued on CD.  Why they had it, I'm not quite sure.  But on listening to it I realized this was one of my dad's albums, one I loved as a kid, and the reason the "Courtly Dances" sounded so familiar.

When I ran across a double CD of the best of Julian Bream for only $4.99 at Half Price Books after lunch Friday, I had to bring it home.  Dangnation!  Most of it is familiar from my childhood, so my parents must have had more Bream albums than I remembered.  The music ranges across the centuries from Renaissance to Baroque to Contemporary, on guitar and lute, Spanish and English and French and Italian, recorded 1959 to 1983, 150 minutes of material.  I always thought Andrés Segovia was the undisputed king of classical guitar (so I have a dozen of his reissues) but dangnation Bream gives him a run for his money.  Lovely lovely stuff.

For a long time I've had channels on Pandora for "Female Blues" and "Male Blues," and they've turned me on to several artists I'd never have heard of otherwise.  Lots of lesser-known contemporary artists* are working the genre with a lot of feeling and inventiveness.

The other day, I heard a song by Keb' Mo' (Kevin Moore), who I've always been aware of but nothing of his ever grabbed me before.  He's like a low-rent Taj Mahal (hey, I made a joke!)

Anything, this song ("Tell Everyone I Know") was so cool I had to create a Keb' Mo' station on Pandora to explore more.  After a couple of days of non-stop play, I realized he has a deep catalog with quite a number of really excellent songs (that never get played on the radio).  I mined his back catalog at my download site for 80 minutes, 21 tracks, of fabulous acoustic slide guitar, bottleneck guitar, National Steel guitar, and occasionally a bassist and/or drummer.  I listened to that CD-R five times in a row yesterday, and loved every minute.

So this morning I went back to the Pandora station for another bucket o' blues from the well (Hey!  I made another joke!)

This station has a uniform feel: slow, mostly acoustic, contemporary but respectful of the past.  Tons of discoveries I wasn't familiar with, both male & female.  Some of the females I'd already discovered off my female blues station, but I'd forgotten I'd discovered them, and the 2nd time around is almost as sweet because I realize already have CDs I've made of them:

• Keb' Mo'
  
• Taj Mahal (lesser known gems)
  
• Melody Gardot
  
• Eilen Jewell
  
• Andy McKee
  
• Eric Bibb
  
• Joanna Connor
  
• Debbie Davies
  
• Devil Doll
  
• Bonnie Raitt
  
• Susan Tedeschi
  
• Lucy Woodward
  
• Matt Dusk
  
• Gin Wigmore
  
• Jeff Touhy
  
• and many more...
  

Anyway, I've been groovin' off the walls for three days.  I get into these moods, where I go off on jags, and I can't get enough of something for days on end.




* - Anytime one looks for "contemporary blues" in any kind of search engine, all that comes up is B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, and maybe Jeff Healy if you're lucky.  They're in the bottom 5% of the quality scale IMO but -- as usual in the music biz -- they get 95% of the attention.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Played a bit of Bonzo Dog yesterday while I was reading, which led to me playing a CD I have of '20s and '30s novelty songs that were later covered by the Bonzos.

Made me think I want more jazz from that era.  That was before swing or bop.  What'd they call it?  Le Hot Jazz maybe.  Baritone saxophones, banjos, washtubs, chunkachunka guitar, clarinets,  trombones... actually come to think of it this is Tuba Skinny and Island City Jazz Band territory.  

Anyway, I found a 3-hour playlist on YouTube and another 2-hour playlist.  Burned an MP3 disc with five hours of music to read Eric Idle to.

On the theory that "Too Much Is Never Enough," I took my MP3 disc of "Jazz of the '20s & '30s," my regular CD of my parents' "Wartime '78s," the 3-CD set I found of "Songs of WWII," the "Entartete Musik" CD I made, the "Songs The Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us" (mentioned above), a Gus Viseur CD I'd made years ago, the 4 CDs of a Django Reinhardt boxed set, and a CD I made years ago called "Novelty Songs of the '20s. '30s and '40s" and combined them all onto one USB stick.

And I still have 28.5 gigs open on the 30 gig stick.

Erik Braunn

The talented guitarist of Iron Butterfly, who was only 17 when "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" was released, never reached the same heights again.  Fame and fortune and intra-band enmity broke up the band barely two years after they formed, splintering into a bewildering (and entirely forgettable) series of spin-off bands.  Periodic reunions, featuring one or two original members, continue to this day.

Erik died in 2003 of a congenital heart defect.  Lee Dorman died in 2012.  Ingle and Bushy are still alive.

Erik was born "Rick Davis"(?) and was variously known as "Erik Brann" or "Erik Braunn."  Why?  No explanation forthcoming.

When Erik died he had recently started a website, but it didn't look finished.  It's very primitive -- and it remains online, unchanged, eighteen years later.  He had a section on it called "Jukebox" with seven solo songs he was working on, but they're only samples.  They cut off unexpectedly.

Today I decided to dig back into them, and see if finished versions were posted anywhere.

The answer is no.  Surprisingly.

I did find a bootleg, available several places online for free, of some 1973 demos he did for MCA Records, never officially released.  The music is finished, but not very memorable.

He also did a half dozen demos in 1988, for which I could find titles but no audio.

His widow Gail self-released an album in 2011 of finished tracks, no indication where or when recorded.  Different titles than above and below.

And somebody released a bootleg of some acoustic demos he did, probably in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but for some reason they're only available in France.  One French website has 30-second samples, and they're not worth further research.

Funny.  Usually after a famous musician dies, all of his or her effluvia spills out all over the inter webs. Erik seems to have gotten MORE obscure since he passed. For such a creative musician, he left precious little evidence of his last 35 years on earth.

Brand X

Brand X, if you're not familiar with them, was an instrumental rock band from 1975-1980.  It was made up of session musicians and Phil Collins, taking breaks from their "day jobs" to cut loose with some fun music that challenged them more than the crap that paid the bills. They put out five albums (plus a sixth of outtakes from the fifth) and toured England and the US.

Since their official breakup in 1980, there has been a nightmare of semi-reunions, with some members creating new bands under that name without permission, and the two members who officially own the name suing everybody.  Lots of bootleg concert recordings, and unauthorized releases, some official live recordings of dubious audio quality, albums with fake "Brand X" bands, albums from authorized (but completely different) "Brand X" bands, endless compilations and repackagings (some authorized, most not).  It is, to say the least, a hot mess.

Which is too bad, because most of the music is excellent.

I have all of the official releases, of course, and most of the unofficial ones.

I spent the whole day today, checking to make sure I had everything available that I wanted.  Not easy to do, with the rampant confusion.

I started with one of the compilations -- a 4-CD reissue of their six albums, with four unreleased tracks buried in the middle, recorded by the BBC (in excellent sound) for the John Peel show.  I was able to download just these tracks, making 25 minutes.  I next checked the boots, and YouTube videos, and online postings, and found DOZENS of options to check out.  Now, as an instrumental band -- one who improvised frequently -- it was not always easy to identify the tracks or where they came from.

Eventually I weeded out the tracks I already had on one of the many commercial compilations I own, which left me with fragments from a 1976 show at Ronnie Scott's in London*, and three unidentified tracks from an unidentified source, and two single "B" sides that were otherwise unreleased.  Also several concert recordings that were too horrible to ever listen to.

I discovered there's another band called "Brand X" which is unrelated (crappy pop), and Apple Music has a couple of their releases misidentified as my band.  Oy.

I started editing all these tracks, to standardize the sound, and was able to make great strides despite the disparities in origin and sound quality.

I eventually identified the unidentified tracks as 1976 live recordings from The Marquee Club in London, two of the three having been already released (albeit radically remixed). I took that remaining track, plus the BBC tracks, plus the Ronnie Scott tracks and the two B-sides, and made a 1:14:09 CD-R.  Bingo, a new Brand X album (sorta)!



* - Incidentally, the band (the "official" band) released the entire Ronnie Scott's show in their "official bootleg" series, but they used an execrable audience recording rather than the excellent soundboard recording.  Alas only four tracks from the soundboard mix could I find.  Pity.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Sofia Gubaidulina

Sofia's name is thrown about everywhere in 20th Century classical circles, and I could've sworn I had a couple pieces by her.  Well, maybe I do somewhere, on CDs under other primary names.

Discovered I had a whole CD of her bassoon concertos, filed under "b." I moved it to "g."

Audio Fidelity Stereo Spectacular Demonstration

Back in the day I had a small collection of early stereo demonstration albums, many inherited from my dad.  Audio Fidelity introduced the first stereo LP in November 1957, and over the next couple of years several labels put out demonstration discs not only with music samples, but also sound effects like people walking down a flight of steps, cars driving past, airplanes flying past, firetruck sirens, buses, trains, ping pong games, bowling lanes, elevators, live-on-the-street recordings.  They're mostly pretty goofy (especially the faked special effects), but they bring back memories of my youth.  Turns out YouTube has quite a few of these old recordings.

Michael Rother

German guitarist, was a member of Neu and Kraftwek and did a series about about ten excellent solo LPs in the 1980s.

Went dormant for a while.

A couple years ago I caught up with him, and found he'd put out 2 or 3 albums in the early 2000s which were pretty lame.  By picking and choosing I was able to put together a compilation that was just okay....

But here's the thing.  There's no guitar (to speak of) on these albums.  It's all synthesizer and rhythm box.  And the beautiful melodic sense is gone.

Just checked again, and he released a new album in 2020.  It's repetitive and full of crappy singing on every track, and still no guitar.  The singer must be his daughter? She obviously wasn't chosen for her ability to sing.

Wot happened?  Did he have a stroke?  Have his hands amputated?  There's absolutely no signs left of how great he used to be.

Pink Floyd

A guy I used to work with 40 years ago collected bootleg albums.  He had a couple hundred Jimi Hendrix boots, and a hundred or so Pink Floyd boots, and many hundreds of others.  They were mostly audience concert recordings in execrable quality, and while the idea was intriguing -- especially with Hendrix and Floyd often playing jams and/or half-finished pieces that never made it to studio releases -- the low sound quality mostly kept me away.

Several years ago I discovered my favorite Ukrainian download site carried bunches of Floyd bootlegs.  In the intervening years, more soundboard recordings have emerged (decent-to-great quality), and the technology to clean up lesser recordings has improved immensely.  With modern digital distribution, more and more bootlegs have become listenable fare.  I added about a dozen of the better ones to my Floyd collection.

Every now & then when I think of it I check back in to see what's been newly posted.  They're up to I'd guess a hundred releases now.

Most are the same old London, Amsterdam, and US concerts.  No need to duplicate.

But somebody dug up a bunch of "Zabriskie Point" soundtrack outtakes, and those were interesting.  Somebody compiled all sorts of different radio and TV edits of various songs, which are repetitive but interesting once.

I went through all 100+ releases and pulled out two CDs worth of otherwise unavailable stuff, including two long jams from the "Let's All Make Love In London" soundtrack, a bunch of single B-sides, and a 29-minute version of "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast."  

APB, if you're not familiar with it, was a concert feature in 1969-70 when PF were playing 4-hour continuous concerts featuring bits and pieces of what became "Meddle," "Dark Side of the Moon," "Atom Heart Mother," and others under various different names.  They developed a lot of this material in concert, carefully keeping track of what audiences responded to.

During the course of a 4-hour concert, the boys got a bit tired and thirsty.  Being good English lads, they decided to introduce a "tea time" to the middle of the concert.  Instead of lowering the curtain and walking backstage, they had their roadie Alan Styles wheel a cart onstage, with biscuits and tea.  The band laid down their instruments and indulged in a brief picker-upper on stage.

A 13 minute studio version of this eventually turned up on the "Atom Heart Mother" release, although the 6-minute version on the boot "The Man & The Journey" recorded in Amsterdam September 1969 (with an additional two minutes of cups clinking edited out for time) has been, until now, the definitive version. This unique 29-minute version, never before released anywhere, with lots of clinking and band (& audience) chatter, recorded in Sheffield December 1970, is just weird enough to peg my weirdometer.


Absolutely Ambient
The other Floyd boot I discovered is a fan remix, where bits and pieces of released studio recordings were excerpted, slowed down, remixed, had a drumbeat added, and became in effect a completely different album.  Several years ago a duo called "310" released an album called "Prague Rock" where they took snippets of Pink Floyd, snippets of Yes, snippets of King Crimson and snippets of Jethro Tull to create four long droning dancefloor pieces which, if you listened closely, had recognizable bits in otherwise new compositions. It was a fascinating exercise in musical archaeology, and "Absolutely Ambient" does them one better by creating a whole album of Floyd-Not-Floyd.  To a geek like me this kind of stuff is fascinating.

Mind the Gap

I heard a piece on the radio this morning by George Butterworth, "The Banks of Green Willow," a delightful pastoral tone poem, so I wrote the name down at the stop light.  I was pretty sure I had it -- a couple years ago I did a pretty deep dive into English tone poems -- and I did, two different recordings.

Looked for any other Butterworth I didn't have, didn't find anything.  His wife makes good syrup though.

After "Green Willow" the radio station played two lesser-played movements of Holst's "The Planets," which were light English-sounding tone poems as well.  I always thought Holst was German, so I looked him up when I got home.  Nope, English through and through.  I guess I was mixing up Gustav Holst (1874-1934) with Gustav Mahler (1860-1911).  It made me want to explore Holst more; I only have "The Planets" (two versions, five if you count the two-piano (original) version and the two on synthesizers by Tomita and Gleeson) and the military band suites.  If he's a fine English composer from the turn-of-the-century (fin de siècle) he ought to have some more lovely tone poems.

Of course he does.  I found a 6-CD retrospective on my Ukrainian site, with "Egdon Heath," "A Somerset Rhapsody" and suites from Brook Green, St. Paul's, Moorside, Hammersmith and an instrumental introduction to some liturgical work.  Also a whole lot of vocal pieces, songs and opera, which I avoided like the plague.  All together made a fine hour-ten of pastoral bliss.

But I was so mixed up on the composer I accidentally labeled the disc "Mahler"(!)

Something about Holst reminded me a lot of Berlioz (1803-1869), another composer I loved as a kid.  I knew I had two versions of "Symphonie Fantastique" (one of my favorite pieces ever) but realized there were other pieces from my past that I needed to track down.  In short order I had CD-Rs of "Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale," "Harold en Italie," "Romèo et Juliette" and a disc of overtures.  

Many happy hours ahead.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Only other soundtrack I can think of like that is the "Apocalyse Now" soundtrack.

Just found "another one like that" -- Neil Young's soundtrack to the Johnny Depp movie "Dead Man" is about half guitar noodling/string scraping sounds (not tunes) and about half dialogue and sound effects from the movie. A movie for your ears.

Sigfrid Karg-Elert

It started yesterday with me idly wondering if I could find any more music for antique pump organs, of the type I mentioned loving so much when discussing "Alpenmusik."  I found lots of YouTube videos of people playing various organs, but not any links to albums of the same.

One of the YT videos featured somebody playing a tune by a composer I'd never heard of, Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933).  Turns out he wrote a ton of organ music, along with some piano concertos.  Some of his organ music is ideally suited to small pump organs, also called harmoniums, because it is not grandiose like Bach or Reger but rather small and delicate and almost folk-music-like.  

I found a 4-CD set on Apple Music which allowed me to sample almost five hours of his harmonium music.  Not all of it was remarkable, but I picked out an hour's worth which, in my opinion, is.

Not grandiose and also not overly Baroque or ornamental.  In fact, it's not even heavily tune-based.  There are slow themes and melodies that come and go and interweave, but you don't get hit over the head with them.  The music is very melancholy, especially with the low-register reed organ, and it rides a shadowy no-man's-land between classical organ works, and folk-based almost-accordion-sounding music reminiscent of Guy Klucevsek or Pauline Oliveros. I've played this CD three times straight through now, and each time my opinion rises higher. It's a remarkable niche this composer has found.

I also made a CD of his pipe organ works.  That's next.

Ekseption

Ekseption was a Dutch rock band (1969-1975) who played rocked-up classics.  The keyboardist, Rick van der Linden, attended a concert by The Nice in Amsterdam ('67 or '68) where Keith Emerson played classical music with bass & drums.  He convinced Rein van den Broek, trumpeter and leader of the band they played in, The Jokers, to try some classical numbers.  Rick was, afterall, conservatory trained like Emerson.

They did, and it became a huge hit, locally and soon internationally.  They changed their name to Ekseption (Dutch spelling of "exception") and went on a wild ride of popularity, TV appearances, and touring the continent for the next six years.

The formula got old after six years.  Rein thought they had mined that vein dry, and wanted to go back to his jazz band roots.  Rick was drinking too much.  Rick was kicked out of the band (although he was the titular "star") and the band broke up soon afterward.  Rein formed a new band, Spin, which released two LPs which flopped utterly, commercially (although musically, they weren't bad jazz-rock).  Meanwhile Rick formed Trace, a trio like ELP (without the horns of Ekseption), which had some success, primarily in England.  After two years Spin and Trace merged agan to form the first of many Ekseption reunions, each one less successful commercially than the one before, and each one increasingly musically dire & desperate.  At one point the label even released an "Ekseption album" with none of the original members, using only studio musicians.  Numerous "best of" and "retrospective" albums were released by Philips to try to keep the band's name alive, until finally Rick died in 2006 (age 59) and Rein died in 2015 (age 69).

I used to have all their albums, good bad and ugly.  I made a "best of" 2-CD set for myself when I sold them.

Last year I discovered my Ukrainian site had them all for download for under $2 apiece, so I had to do that.

Today I looked again, to see what else might be out there.  There were a couple newer reunion albums I hadn't bothered with, and after listening to them I decided that was the right choice.  Both van der Linden and van den Broek had a handful of solo albums out I'd never heard of -- all of them the most awful "schlager" dreck imaginable.  Jesus, what a fall from the creative heights of the early 1970s.  If these two guys weren't the brains behind the good stuff, I wonder who was?

New Pulse Jazz Band

In the early '80s keyboardist and jazz composer Galt MacDermot (1928-2018) released a series of big band jazz albums featuring synthesizer as the rhythm instrument.  It was a unique sound that I can't think of anybody else duplicating (though Baird Hersey comes close).

Galt was the composer behind the "Hair" musical (1967), and it turns out he did a TON of jazz records both before and after "Hair," many using "hair" themes and some of them gawd awful.  His NPJB continued on into the 2000s, using fewer and fewer musicians with each release and getting progressively closer to his "Hair" level of awfulness.

But I remembered his core of 5 or 6 early NPJB albums from when I owned copies, though they've never of course been issued on CD. Consequently they're not available on my Ukrainian site, but I found the tracks have all been posted to YT, in incredibly good fidelity.  It took a while to find and download them all, but free is the right price, and I've got nothing but spare time.

My collection is not gonna mean anything to anyone else after I'm gone.

That's okay.

Startled Insects

Startled Insects was a Bristol band 1983-1995, who released a couple of albums and a couple of singles of very iconoclastic jazz-rock using a lot of synthesizers and odd percussion.  They never "caught on" of course but they've been favorites of mine ever since.

Decided this weekend to see what else I could find.

In 1996 the band "split up" with two of the members continuing on as "The Insects" and the third going solo.  Although they continued to guest on each other's albums so it must have been an amicable split.

The Insects primarily did soundtracks (where the money is better and paid up front).  They have a website with 113 tracks posted.  Of those I picked 18 tracks, a half hour's worth, which stand alone.  The rest were too "soundtracky" by which I mean moody but not particularly interesting, musically, without the visuals.  And short.

The solo guy, Richard Grassby-Lewis, has also done several soundtracks as well as some albums which aren't soundtracks.  I contacted him through his website and downloaded most of them (for free, thanks Richard!). He wrote most of the Startled Insects material and several of The Insects soundtracks, so naturally his albums have a much higher wheat-to-chaff ratio.  And he's a nice guy.

None of their post-Startled Insects material sounds much like their Startled Insects days, which is a shame.  But there's still much to appreciate here, in a less adventurous realm.  The most recent release is 2020, so everybody is still active.

Grassby-Lewis also posted some rhythm tracks online, in 2019, and invited listeners to "finish" them.  He found an American drummer/lyricist/singer who took up the challenge, inviting a couple other musicians he knew into the fun.  The resulting four songs from the quartet "Holomen" (a bastardization of "The Hollow Men") are intelligent pop music, as pop music should be done.  COVID disrupted the online collaboration, but hopefully they'll be back at it soon and complete an album's worth.  It's addictive.

He's also done a "library music" album, which is license-free music for people to use in movies, plays, school productions, etc.  it's entirely short cues, 25 seconds to a couple of minutes, 55 tracks on one album.  "Moods" not tunes.  I just signed up with a production music vendor and downloaded it for free.  Hope they don't start bugging me about my next upcoming movie...

Peter Paul & Mary

My sister (r.i.p.) was a fan and had several LPs but they were a little too hootenanny for my elevated tastes.

Heard Dylan's "Don't Think Twice" by them on Pandora this morning though, and decided I needed some. A recent compilation "The Very Best of" was $4 on my Ukrainian site because it has so many songs (79:38 long), but it was only $2.49 at Goodwill so I did that instead.

My sister also had their coordinated solo albums "Peter," "Paul and" and "Mary" so I looked for them. The three have been re-released as a 3-CD box set, and Ukraine had them. Listening through there were a number of songs I decided I did not want, but just enough I did to make one good CD. Made a cover incorporating the original art and burned a CD.

For 1971-1972 they were surprisingly good recordings.

Warner Bros. Loss Leaders

In 1969-1972 Warner Brothers Records put out several sampler albums for a buck a disc ($2 for the doubles, $3 for the one triple they did).  They were full of unknown talent (natch) plus a few carefully-selected and strategically-placed hit songs, to move the product.  Many hours were spent in my youth poring over the hours and hours of selections, which had been sequenced in logical order and/or edited to fit as many as possible.  There was at least one side on each 2-record set devoted to "outside music" or the stuff I liked.  I discovered quite a few acts through these loss leaders, which was of course the whole point.

Over the years I've backfiled CDs of almost all of the bands I started following, but the Loss Leaders themselves remained unreplaced, unrereleased and fondly remembered.

So today I decided to duplicate them.

• The 1969 Warner/Reprise Songbook (30 songs)
  
• The 1969 Warner/Reprise Record Show (31 songs)
  
• The Big Ball (34 songs)
  
• Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies (36 songs)
  

They went on to release several more of these things (Non-Dairy Creamer, The Big Limo, Hot Platters, Menu, Schlagers, Peaches, All Meat and several others), none of which hit the heights of that first quartet.

All 131 songs were downloaded for free off YouTube, except for one, which I had to pay $1.29 for on Apple Music.

It's a hobby.  Maybe an obsession.

Jeremy Spencer

One of the tracks on one of the Loss Leader samplers is a lesser-played song by Fleetwood Mac, where all three guitarists (Peter Green, Danny Kirwan and Jeremy Spencer) take extended solos.  Damn, that's nice I said out loud.

I already have almost all the FM, especially of this short-lived three guitar lineup.

I already investigated Peter Green's solo career.

But Kirwan and Spencer?  Not so much.  Luckily all their stuff is up on my Ukrainian site for sampling.  Kirwan has a half dozen solo albums, and all feature his (rather weak) singing rather than his guitar playing.  I can live without them.

I never investigated Spencer because when he left FM (1971?) it was to join a religious cult called Children of God.  I thought he'd given up the guitar.

But no.  He did two solos right after leaving, which featured his "Elvis impersonator" lounge singer act he was doing at the time (think Bill Murray or Tony Clifton).  No interest.

But I did not realize he started recording again in 2006, doing long blues instrumentals and occasional vocals.  I guess he also does the drums, piano and bass.  He's done a half dozen albums, largely distributed through his own website or BandCamp.  Not much publicity has accrued to them.

But they're excellent.  Long slide guitar sections (and you know I love me some slide) in the low-key very fluid style that is his trademark.  Not EVERYTHING was a keeper -- some vestiges of Elvis remain -- but enough for three long excellent discs.  Wowsa.

Filing Dilemma

Last night I downloaded three recent albums (2009, 2011, 2012) for free off YouTube by Lowell Levinger.  I stumbled across them while looking for something else.  They're some really nice bluegrass (dobro, banjo, fiddle, guitar, standup bass, National steel) with easy-going clever lyrics.

It started with the delightful solo track by John Sebastian on one of the Loss Leader samplers.  I already had a "best of" of John's solo stuff, but the other members of The Lovin' Spoonful (Jerry Yester, Joe Butler, Steve Boone, Zal Yanovsky) I hadn't investigated.  Yester did an album with his wife at the time, Judy Henske, and a track from that showed up on another Loss Leader.  But it turned out to be the only interesting track on the LP.  The other members hadn't done much since The Spoonful: a couple albums "re-imagining the Spoonful."  That well came up dry.

Then I thought of The Youngbloods.  I had all of The Youngbloods I needed, but no solos: Jesse Colin Young, Joe Bauer, Michael Kane, Jerry Corbitt & Lowell Levinger.  Well that's not true. I have a trio album by Kane, Bauer & Levinger which I've always enjoyed, and I have Bauer's only (1971) album.

Levinger (multiple stringed instruments) also did a solo album, in 1972, under the name "Banana and the Bunch."  He performed as "Banana" in The Youngbloods.  Why?  It was the sixties.  However on listening to it this LP didn't do anything for me.  Then I discovered his trio of self-released (& under-promoted) recent albums, and damn, they're pretty good.  He released them under the nom de plume of "Grandpa Banana" (he's 75 now, and white-haired). They're masterful tunes from a bunch of well-honed craftsmen:

Lowell Levinger, in the song, "I'll Do Anything For You But Work," wrote:

I'll sing your praise and hold your hand,
I'll tell the world I think you're grand,
I'll do anything for you but work.
I'll take you out to dine and dance,
Fill your ears with sweet romance.
I know I'm not good looking but what the heck,
I'm all yours if you pay the check.

Lowell Levinger, in the song, "The Bigger The Fool, The Harder The Fall," wrote:

Her long legs looked like trouble
As she sashayed through the door
And my mind flashed a warning sign
...That I chose to ignore.
Ah, the prize that I thought I could win
The risks seemed mighty small
The bigger the fool, the harder the fall.

So I burned the three CDs and came up with a dilemma.

• Do I file under "Levinger"?  He never used that name professionally, and I might have trouble remembering it a year from now
  
  
• Do I file under "Banana"?  That was his stage name, and the name I knew him as in The Youngbloods.  But I elected to bypass his only album under that name
  
  
• Do I file under "Grandpa Banana"?  All three albums use that name exclusively on the covers
  

I decided to file under "Grandpa."  That way they can sit next to The Grandmothers, the band of ex-Mothers of Invention who banded together after Frank Zappa dissolved the band unilaterally (and against their will). Seems fitting, somehow.

Well tickle me pink. The Grandmothers of Invention have a couple new albums out, including a 2014 live gig in Bremen in excellent sound. They play Frank Zappa's songs, but substantially re-arranged and mostly instrumental. They're still an incredibly hot little band.

The only two ORIGINAL Mothers left in the band are Don Preston and Bunk Gardner, but they're 81 and 82 at the time of this recording, and sound just as good as they did in 1967. They're both still alive, according to Wikipedia (88 and 89 now).

Don once called me out of the blue after I ordered one of his CDs, just to chat. He seems to really like connecting with his fans. We must have talked a half hour.

Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

I was listening to some old electronic music, which led me to Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff who put out two LPs in the early '70s as Tonto's Expanding Head Band.  Looking online to see if there was anything else they'd done, I found they'd backed Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson on an album called "1980."

I used to have a GSH album.  He was a jazz singer & beat poet who could plausibly be called a progenitor of rap.  His track "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was a concise and intelligent summation of Black Panther-era consciousness raising.  Decided to put together a new "best of" for my listening pleasure.

He raps about & sings about how cops shoot black men without justification, about how no matter how much money and education Black Americans have, they're still seen as black first.  About how rich African Americans have a responsibility to their communities.  About how politicians and policemen talk a lot about equality, but actively work against it.

Not much changes in fifty years.

Robert Rich

Robert used to conduct all-night "sleep concerts" in the Bay area where he encouraged his audiences to doze off.  He's released two of these long droning synthesizer-and-nature-sounds concerts, one on DVD entitled "Somnium" (seven hours long) and one on Blu-ray ("Perpetual," eight hours long).

The CD player in my music room plays CDs and CD-Rs and MP3 discs, but not DVDs or Blu-rays, so I have heard these discs only about once each, playing them on my TV system in the living room.  Not convenient for listening.

So yesterday I had a brilliant idea: why not dub them to MP3 so I could play them in my music room?  My Apple "Superdrive" on the computer plays DVDs (but maybe not Blu-rays?) and it should be possible to extract the tracks and reburn them???

Alas.  The disc was read just fine and began to play, but none of my various audio or video software packages was designed to extract audio only from a DVD (& this is a standard DVD, not a DVD-Audio, which is a slightly different format.)  Kind of a niche request I guess (Robert's are the only two "audio-only DVDs" that I know of, that aren't DVD-A format).

Robert sells downloads of these albums for $20 apiece, but since i already owned the DVDs that seemed somewhat excessive.  And they wouldn't be in MP3 format anyway.

So I popped over to YouTube and sure enough everything was posted there in high-def (320) MP3 format already, just needed to extract the audio (which I do all the time).  YT has everything!

Alas, a 7-hour audio file turns out to be 828 Mb of data, and an 80-minute CD-R blank maxes out at 737,280,000 bytes.  Wouldn't fit!

Used my editing software to chop off the last two hours (I'll never miss it) and make (1) 5-hr 4-min CD-R and (1) 5-hr 7-min CD-R.  The stats show I actually got 737,731,392 bytes on the discs, more than they were rated for... but they work.

So yay, I can conduct my own sleep concerts right here in my music room.  I've actually already done this, with various 1-, 2-, 3- or 4-hour environmental recordings dubbed from YT.  It's nice to fall asleep to a meadow with crickets and a distant dog barking.

People Like Us

One of my favorite British saxophonists Elton Dean had a short-lived band in the sixties called People Like Us. In my collecting of his music, I accidentally bought a CD called "No ... Really!" by a different band called People Like Us. According to Discogs there are at least four or five bands that have used that name.

I held onto "No ... Really!" over the years because, although it wasn't Elton Dean's band, it was some pretty nice jazz featuring baritone saxophone. Turns out the keyboardist in the band, Joel Forrester, is the driving force behind The Microscopic Septet, another jazz band I've followed. Never made that connection before.

The baritone saxophonist, Claire Daly, also has a quartet with a few albums out, including one dedicated to Motown hits and one featuring lesser-known tunes of Thelonious Monk. She's apparently taught reed instruments and appeared as a studio musician for decades. Odd that I'd never noticed her before, in my long-running love of the bari.

While researching her I ran across some YT videos of BJ Leiderman. Leiderman wrote a bunch of theme songs for NPR, including Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, Marketplace, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Car Talk and others. He was paid a fee up front for these jingles, and doesn't get residuals. He did write into his contract though, 40 years ago, that his name had to be mentioned in the credits. Therefore he has had enormous name recognition even if he never did anything with it. For the past four decades he's been playing in bar bands for fun, writing TV and radio advertising jingles, and keeping a low profile. A couple years ago (2016?) he put out his first album, written over the whole 40 years, featuring his singing and piano playing. Most of the songs are earnest but forgettable.

I also discovered, on digging a little deeper, that BJ had some "production music" jingles online, just short 0:40 to 1:20 jazz sketches designed to play underneath an advert or program intro. Just quick once-and-out.

There were also several long (9 to 34-minute) interviews with BJ on the occasion of his album release. He's a funny, low-key self-deprecating guy.

Since all this stuff was available free of charge on YT, and the NPR themes are engraved on my brain from years of exposure, I put together a CD of the best of his instrumentals. It's pleasant listening. Like he says in the interviews, he discovered he has a knack for writing "ear worms" that stick with you for years.

The Musical Saw

In my years of collecting weird music I have run across (and collected recordings of) several ideophones, including the Waterphone and the musical saw.

The Waterphone is a water-filled metal gourd with steel tines coming up all around the perimeter.  The body can be tapped as a percussion instrument, and the tines can be struck or bowed as pitched vibrators.  The sloshing water inside gives it a very ethereal otherworldly sound.  It was invented by a San Francisco mad genius named Richard Waters in the late 1960s.

Waters has recorded one album with it -- good usage of the instrument, but not much in the composing department.  A SF-band he was in, Gravity Adjusters Expansion Band, has released two albums with it, of which the first was reissued on CD a couple years ago (and so is readily available) and the second has never been reissued, so I'm still looking for it (if you have a copy). Quite a few other bands (Oregon, Robert Minden Ensemble, Jim Nollman [who played it in the water to whales], John Carter Octet, Yoshiyuki Hiraoka and many others) have used it, and it's appeared prominently in several science fiction films due to its Hitchcockian tone.

Another older ideophone is the saw.  Loggers discovered a long time ago (1920s?) that a long steel saw, bent under pressure, emits an eerie wail when struck or bowed.  The musical saw was featured prominently in the soundtrack to "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" (1975).  It sounds very similar to a theremin, and is similarly very hard to control precisely.  That hasn't stopped a lot of people from trying, and some of them getting very good at it.

I ran across an album online from an accomplished musical sawyer named Kev Hopper, bassist for the band Stump.  That reminded me of a mostly-classical LP I used to have, from 1971, of musical sawing by a Boulder musician named Jim Turner, on the tiny and soon-defunct record label Owl Records.  It of course has never been reissued on CD.  So I found a copy online and am cleaning it up this week.  The pure pure tones of the saw are perfect sine waves -- which makes them easy to repair -- but the ultra-high frequencies of Turner's "high soprano saw" mean that there are a lot of waveforms to repair.  This may take a while.

Goody.

Incidentally, for reference here's the acknowledged master of the theremin, Clara Rockmore.  Note how often she is exactly on-pitch (somewhat obscured by her extravagant use of vibrato), and the incredible articulation she achieves.

Fast & Bulbous

NoCoPilot wrote:

Well tickle me pink.  The Grandmothers of Invention have a couple new albums out, including a 2014 live gig in Bremen in excellent sound.  They play Frank Zappa's songs, but substantially re-arranged and mostly instrumental.  They're still an incredibly hot little band.

Both Frank Zappa (1940-1993) and Captain Beefheart (Don Vliet, 1941-2010) left "hot little bands" behind, and some of the band members did not want to stop when their bosses died.  Hence there are several Zappa tribute bands, some having ex-MOI members (and some not), and there's at least one full-time band (and a lot of one-off tribute albums) devoted to the music of Captain Beefheart.

Here's where it gets weird.  I was aware of and have the two albums (2005 & 2009) by the Beefheart tribute band called Fast 'N' Bulbous, put out by Beefheart's guitarist and featuring a stellar crew of red hot musicians.*

But yesterday I discovered an Italian band called Fast & Bulbous, with an ampersand instead of an 'N'.  They also have two albums out (1997 & 2016), playing the music of Frank Zappa.  Now, "fast and bulbous" is a line from a Beefheart song -- why would a Zappa tribute band use it?  Probably because they're Italian.  There's a little singing on the one Fast & Bulbous album I could find (still looking for the first one), and on this album -- and in the YT videos of the band online -- the singer sings English lyrics learned phonetically.  They're almost entirely indecipherable, sounding NOTHING like the English. "The totu neba stabs, the totu neba stabs" ("The torture never stops").

It's HILARIOUS.

* - Incidentally, in the "small world" division, Fast 'N' Bulbous (the American band) includes three members of The Microscopic Septet, mentioned above.