Music
The truth about that Baker Street saxophone riff
The song transcended the regular folk genre on account of its signature saxophone riff played by Raphael Ravenscroft, who received a one-off session fee of £27 (£169 today-Tim). The cheque bounced, and Ravenscroft had it framed and hung on the wall of his lawyer’s office.
So he wasn\’t even on Musicians\’ Union rates…..
Play this loud
And as our New Year Competition, what is the connection between the above and this second piece?
Not too tough….
Quote of the Day
I’ll continue to enjoy Lennon’s music. But his political ‘philosophy’ is to human enlightenment what, say, a rock concert by Milton Friedman would have been to human entertainment.
Line of the day
On the veneration of John Lennon:
Don\’t knock it. There\’s not many cargo cults that have an actual airport.
Music bleg
Years ago, more than I really care to remember, I was working as a waiter in a restaurant and there was one partiular track on the music tape that I thought was just astounding. No, not a tape you could take out and look at, this was one of those centrally made tape loops that were supplied to all places in the chain.
It was two, more likely three, boogie pianists really giving it some welly. It was being played (and recorded) live, in front of a large audience. And it was old (from the quality and also from the style of the playing. There are good boogie pianists nowadays but not really quite of the very top notch quality).
I\’d always pinned it down to being somewhere just pre-war. Style, audience, recording etc.
And I\’ve never really been able to find it elsewhere. OK, so I don\’t obsessively go into every jazz record shop I see and ask about it, but I have done a few times over the years.
And now I think (following a comment left here a day or two ago…which I cannot now find) that I\’ve found where it came from.
Here.
The Carnegie Hall \”From Spirituals to Swing\” concerts of 1938 and 1939.
Albert Ammons, James Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis.
Several different pieces.
Now, the thing that surprises me is that I can\’t seem to find this on the net. Oh, the CD I can, but I can\’t find a playable version. Spotify doesn\’t work for me (as with the other streaming services, they\’re country by country availability). Even though the mechanical copyright (ie, this version of the songs) is well out of date (and I would assume the songwriters\’ copyrights, although that\’s more moot).
So, if anyone does know where (I certainly can\’t find it on YouTube for example, and I would have expected someone to have uploaded that album really) there are versions of these, I\’d be most grateful.
So much for the dilettantes and the luvvies then, eh?
That is the paradox of the Chess story. The brothers were not musical visionaries; they were small-time \”indie\” record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America. But their cheaply recorded, bread-and-butter discs of local street musicians and bar bands still sound as fresh today as they did 60 years ago. By failing to be timely, they succeeded in being timeless.
Just don\’t think that any form of cultural commissars would have recorded that same music, somehow.
Quote of the day
\”Edgar Allen Poe wrote this thing about music where he said, \’People think that when they cry to music it\’s because they\’re being sentimental about the memories of a time gone past, but it\’s not true. The reason they cry is because they get a glimpse of the banquet that gods are feasting upon.\’ I completely agree with that.\”
84 today
As this blog\’s Maine based furniture maker says:
Bury us? We Berryed you
And I\’m told, but cannot confirm, that that\’s Marvin Gaye doing the backing vocals.
Happy Birthday Chuck.
Shocking news about the Rolling Stones!
The Rolling Stones were always more reactionary than revolutionary, as Keith Richards proves
Blimey, that\’s a revelation, isn\’t it? About a band whose first album was nothing but note for note covers of blues standards?
Boosting the troops morale
Yup, this\’ll do it:
JAMES Blunt is to belt out his hits on a morale-boosting trip to Afghanistan.
The You’re Beautiful singer, 36, will travel to the war-torn country in December to cheer up the troops.
Cheer up all the troops not in Afghanistan that is.
Were the 70s really this bad?
Even more astonishing is the way the musicians have shut themselves off from pop\’s recent past. You might have thought at least the Beatles\’ oeuvre had swiftly attained standard status, that Yesterday or Something might be precisely the kind of thing the balladeers with the shag-pile sideburns would gravitate towards, but no: it\’s still clearly considered too racy. During my light entertainment marathon, I hear two Beatles songs. One is courtesy of Little and Large: Syd Little sings Till There Was You while Eddie Large interrupts him doing impressions of Deputy Dawg. The other is Can\’t Buy Me Love, performed by the Morton Fraser Harmonica Gang: three men huffing away accompanied by a dancing midget in a wig.
Umm, yes, actually, they were.
Lovely piece btw, rtwt.
Louie Louie
I\’m laying there in a half stupor, trying to remember what the hell day it was, and all I can think of is: That version of Louie Louie coming out of the radio is the worst version ever; who the hell is that? They should be horsewhipped.
As I fumbled for the off button, I realized it was a demo tape that someone had sent to the radio station, and I was playing on it.
Sir Pterry ahead of reality once again
But it has emerged that Sir Edward Elgar, the composer of Land of Hope and Glory, penned the world\’s first football chant.
Titled \”He Banged The Leather for Goal\”, the theme was written more than 100 years ago in honour of his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers.
And of course in Terry Pratchett\’s recent Unseen Academicals there is a running joke of a classical composer trying to create football chants.
No one knows whether the tune was ever played during his lifetime but yesterday it got its first-ever known public performance at a charity concert in the city.
The choirs of St Peter’s Collegiate Church, under the baton of Wolverhampton Symphony Orchestra conductor Peter Morris, belted out the chant at a concert to raise money for the church’s organ restoration fund.
Sung by the Unseen University choir.
This sounds a little unlikely though:
The Pomp And Circumstance composer would cycle from Malvern to Wolverhampton to accompany her to Molineux,
Yes, I know, our forefathers were tougher than us and all that. But expedia tells me that is 41 miles which seems rather a long way to go on a bicycle circa 1900 for a middle aged man.
Jerry Lee
\”I\’m completely self-taught,\” Mr. Lewis said. \”I took a single lesson. My teacher, Mr. Griffin, had me play one note at a time, very slow. I said, \’Wouldn\’t it be better if I played more like this,\’ launching into boogie-woogie. Mr. Griffin hit me, and that\’s the last lesson I took.\”
Right choice then
George David Weiss was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1921. He wanted to be a musician. His mother wanted him to be a lawyer. The ensuing emotional battle, he later said, drove him to consult a doctor.
As Mr. Weiss recounted in a 1995 interview with The Miami Herald, the prescription was simple. The doctor asked: “Mrs. Weiss, what would you rather have? A live bum of a musician or a dead lawyer?”
One of his is here.
In an interview with The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1995, Mr. Weiss described the making of one of his early hits, “Oh! What It Seemed to Be” (1946), written with Mr. Benjamin and Frankie Carle.
After finding a publisher for the song, the writers went in search of a singer. They called on Frank Sinatra, and a nervous young Mr. Weiss played it through for him.
“Before I had finished it Sinatra was on the phone calling the record company and telling them he just heard a great song and wanted to record it,” Mr. Weiss recalled. “You can imagine what happened to me — I froze at the piano. I just kept playing. See, the publisher had told me that no matter what happens, I should keep playing to make sure the tune got into their heads.”
He continued: “So everyone sat down and discussed horses and women and gossip for a half hour or so, and I’m still playing that song at the piano. Finally, the publisher comes over to me, lifts me up under the armpits and says, ‘Say goodbye to Frank.’ I said goodbye and they led me out like a zombie.”
Musical moments
This piece is quite fun. Musicians retelling their favourite moments of their career.
My favourite is of course Gary Kemp about Live Aid:
I thought I\’d speak to Bowie, but he didn\’t know who the fuck I was. I got in his way at the bar. I introduced myself and he gave me one of those looks that suggested I was stepping too close to his radar…….Meanwhile, I was drooling over Pete Townshend. He told me to follow him up on stage to stand on the side and watch the Who – the greatest rock band in the world – doing Won\’t Get Fooled Again. Then I got a tap on the shoulder. It was Paul McCartney. He said he thought we\’d done a great gig and gave me the thumbs up.
Not a bad memory of a musician\’s life really, Macca telling you you done good….whether it\’s true or not.
My own, from a very short and unsuccesful musical career, was from the last gig I played when I was 18. In a trad jazz band playing at a ball in, umm, Roehampton maybe? Some country club style place outside London anyway. I was just on form, dunno why, hitting the notes right, tone perfect, just really enjoying it….\”in the groove\” you might say even if that\’s more normally used to refer to beat than the music as a whole.
The saxophonist, Gerry Keen, leans over in a break and whispers in my ear that you\’re supposed to build up to that sort of playing, not waste the sweet stuff on them early in the evening. Quite made my day.
And no, I wasn\’t good enough to ever trouble the adult world of music but it was all fun at that point.
Tuba Solo!
Just right for a Sunday afternoon*.
*Err, no, I don\’t know why it\’s just right for a Sunday afternoon either. But it is.