• Tag Archives music

  • Marriage is jazz.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                             New (Bloodroot) Moon

    Jazz at Tryg’s.  Wenso Ashby.   His trio was perfect for a celebration of our anniversary.  Marriage is jazz.  So much improvisation on old standards with the occasional solo performance that comes back, blends in, continues the melody.

    This was a benefit for KBEM, the local jazz station that has hit the big time since its inception as an internet radio station.  Kevin Barnes, a KBEM DJ, made the interesting point that being a jazz station was incidental to the stations primary purpose, training young people in the various skills necessary for careers in radio and media.

    In fact, this event was a fund raiser for the intern program.  Lucky for us that this educational organization happens to sponsor a damned good jazz station.


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  • Ear Buddied

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

    Found the Ipod shuffle.  I mentioned it a few posts back. As I finish the last rearranging in the study, I’m listening to music through earphones.  Becoming part of the current generation.  A soundtrack for the activities helps.  I’m not sure what I think of the tendency younger folk have to soundtrack their whole life.  Does it add or detract?  Don’t know.

    I’m listening to it right now and it does demand at least some attention, so I imagine it does distract me from certain trains of thought.  But.  Does it stimulate others that I wouldn’t have had?

    My suspicion, though only that now, is that the music is a distraction from contemplation, from moving below the surface of things to a different level.  I base that notion on the firmly identified limits on multi-tasking.  Listening is a task.  On the other hand I think nothing of writing with music coming out of loud speakers.  In fact I just ordered a new set of speakers for the study so I can do just that.

    Does having the earbuds in change the experience? I think it does.  Makes it more immediate, blocks out the outer world.  Which I sense is its primary attraction to those rarely seen without the wiry appendages.  For me, unless I’m involved in manual, non-intellectual labor, I’m not sure.  Gonna experiment for a while.


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  • And some more misc.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                    Waning Planting Moon

    A fine tribute to Michele Yates.  Merritt did a tour of various galleries and played music appropriate to the era.  Plain chant in the medieval and renaissance gallery, madrigals and recorder music in the Tudor Room, a movement from a Mozart concerto next to Ganymede and the Eagle, romantic music by Mendelssohn  in the large gallery with Theseus and the Centaur, Delacroix’s Fanatics of Tangiers and Silenus, ending with Debussy in the impressionist gallery.

    Merritt is a musicologist by profession, now retired, and has a keen appreciation for the interplay between the musical and visual arts.

    Today’s a bit fragmented in that I took my nap at 11:00 am.  Now I’m going to go work on some more Ovid.


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  • Ramblin’ On

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    81 bar falls 29.98  1mph SE dew-point 47  Summer, hot

    Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

    Give me the beat boys and free my soul, I want to get lost in your rock and roll and drift away.  Talk about rock anthems.  I heard this on the way into the MIA today and it had me pounding the roof.  Music can take your spirit and yank it around, up and down, deep into the past or put you right in this moment.  Just before I heard Give me the beat, the dj(are they digital jockeys now?) played Somebody to Love.  Man, that one always throw me right back to college.  Grace Slick, lsd, radical politics, sex and, oh yeah, classes.

    Once in awhile I get into a golden-oldie phase (now that I’m becoming a golden oldie myself).  This often results in the purchase of CD’s.  Nobody buys them anymore except us old folks who were dragged kicking and screaming from the vinyl disk.  The ironic thing of course is that the younger generations do not buy CD’s, but they do buy vinyl disc.

    So I have Surrealistic Pillow, the Jefferson Airplane’s first album.  I also have 3 disc collections of Janis Joplin, Bob Dyland and Joan Baez.  I have not, for some reason, purchased any of the Beatles or Led Zepplin or the Doors, all favorites of mine at the time.  There’s a Dead album or two.  In general though the lectures from the Teaching Company or the audio books from the library take up the car time now in which I listened to music.

    I attended the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for over 20 years.  I met Kate there, but we haven’t been for many years.  Sleep comes  too easily in warm, dark places with soothing music.  Then there’s the drive.  This means that my life is unusually music poor right now.


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