LONG LONG SLEEPYTIME YESTERDAY.. what was WRONG with me I went to bed at two p.m. had to get up at 4.30, back to bed at 6pm didn't get up till PAST MIDDAY what is WRONG with me...
... surely not just a couple of drinks early yesterday morn..??
Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Going On was playing round and round and round all last night...
The story about that album is Sly Stone whiskey and cokeing (not the fizzy variety) in a Winebago mobile home that was set up as a recording studio... the musicologists will have you believe it drove through the desert in a cloud of dust, mastertapes clogged with priceless once-only jamming sessions trailing in its wake...
... the OTHER story goes that he had ONE mastertape for the entire album and rerecorded and erased so much that on CD especially you can hear the demagnetized wooliness... in fact it kind of gives some masterful quality so that the plucking of guitar strings and the sinking voices seem actually to have risen from the tape itself... you can hear this on Family Affair if you care to click. So I think the second story's true. Also bonus track 13, the single version of Runnin' Away (click to see the famously dreadful Pan's People perform in a central London shoe department) is suddenly crystal clear which implies a totally different tape from the rest of the sessions... musos don't half talk a lot of *******s.
My piano playing career is coming along in leaps and bounds. Not only have I made progress in Moonlight Sonata (glockenspiel setting: right hand only!) I even had a good stab (stab being the operative word) at Pachabel's Canon this morning in a brief waking "window" before sleep reclaimed me... Tomorrow I tackle Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Minor... sorry Major (what is the difference?). Wish me luck bc I don't even know the tune.
Do you like today's videos.
Elgar's Nimrod.
Nimrod is to me the most "English" of musical pieces. I imagine if they played that in a 2nd world war concentration camp it would have reduced grown men to tears... which just begs the question WHY did he name the piece after an ancient middle Eastern dictator - semimythical founder of Babylon - whose mother Semiramis (Sammu-Ramat), so the story goes, proclaimed herself Queen of Heaven?!? THAT's not very English IS it?
The second choice if You Had a Vineyard is from Sinead's Theology album... it took a long time to grow on me. What do you think?
Thirdly Bananarama's Venus. This was recently used on a TV ad for ladies' razors... it's also default tune, rather weirdly on my Yamaha synth... don't ask me why ask them...
Strangely as I watched the making of the video vid... a strong smell of bubblegum seemed to rise up and accost me from all around ...
Right I gotta go I might well be missing an appointment at the drugs clinic...
Byee
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Videos str84wRdly listed:
Elgar's Enigma Variations: Nimrod (Chicago Symphony Orchestra)
Sinead O'Connor: If You Had A Vineyard
Bananarama: Venus
Bananarama: Venus (Making Of)
Playing a clarinet concerto on the piano will be really impressive, Gleds. Major or minor will dim into ... I think I've been taking some of your drugs ... I can't remember words ah got it! insignificance. But well done on the Moonlight Sonata.
ReplyDeleteYou're right about nimrod - although watching the video i keep thinking the conductor's going to burst into, 'Oh we do love to be beside the seaside' at any moment.
haha! see!!
ReplyDeleteah... but... i kind of failed to mention my version of moonlight sonata also "harmonizes" with ... as well as plays spot-on to the main piano-plunked CD tune...
ReplyDelete... if u know what i mean ...
no liz NO! I just read back that comment... I'm not playing the concerto ON the clarinet... just clarinet SETTING on that yamaha synth
ReplyDeletei've always thought clarinet sounds better than the sax... why didn't they make saxophones out of wood with just the funky trumpet end attached... if I were a sax player, that's what I'd ask for from the instrument manufacturers... i'd get one specially made! a one off amalgam instrument!