Two Mexican pop stars

Julieta Venegas and Natalia Lafourcade went retro for their latest releases—in part as a reaction against the grim headlines often seen as defining their country in the present.

Bud Powell

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Parisian Thoroughfare

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Michelot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Brown_%26_Max_Roach

Max & Clifford: Cherokee

Max Roach Quintet Parisian Thoroughfare
I can't get started

Brownie: Smoke get sin your eyes
Quicksilver
Donna Less: Brownie's very last recording

Prez: Polka dots and Moonbeams

Extreme architectural makeovers

from a Time.com Tweet (Reading while eating, June 14, 2012), alink to a Flavorwire story: startling Frankenmuseums.

An example, from Dresden, Germany:

Tina Brooks

Heard a song, on Rhonda Hamilton's WBGO show, featuring his saxophone as I drove to work on Thursday 7 June.

Photo by Francis Wolff © Mosaic Images
Harold Floyd "Tina" Brooks (June 7, 1932 – August 13, 1974) was an American hard bop tenor saxophonist and composer.

Visitan más de 80 mil personas muestra de Botero

Euforia. Los visitantes admiran la obra del artista colombiano.. (Foto: Archivo )

Muy popular.


Más de 80 mil personas han visitado la exposición "Fernando Botero: Una celebración", en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, de la capital mexicana, la cual abrió sus puertas al público el pasado 29 de marzo, y que reúne 117 piezas de uno de los artistas colombianos de mayor proyección mundial.

Google Art Project

A story in El Universal lead me to this: Google exhibirá en línea más de 30 mil obras de arte. Subtitled En Art Project participan 151 museos de 40 países, entre ellos México, España y Argentina. El programa optimiza la consulta, la riqueza y diversidad de las obras presentadas.

Cada museo o institución asociada decide y elige qué obras quiere dejar para su libre consulta en Art Project. (Foto: Archivo EL UNIVERSAL)

Each participating museum or institution will be able to decide which works of art it wishes to have a prt in the Project.

Más de 30 mil obras de arte de 151 museos de 40 países, entre ellos España, México, Argentina, Colombia y Perú, serán accesibles a partir de ahora por internet dentro del programa "Art Project", que hoy presentó Google en el Museo de Orsay de París. 

Over 30 thousand art works from 151 museums from 40 countries, among them Spain, Mexico, Argentina Colombia and Peru will be accessible online beginning now, in the Project, which Google presented today in the Orsay Museum, in Paris.

Vibe and xylo

On the ride to work today I heard music of Thelonious Monk on WKCR. Specifically, a three song set (perhaps this one) that includes Milt Jackson set me to thinking: what is the difference between a vibraphone and a xylophone.

First, the vibraphone (also known as the vibraharp or simply the vibes) is a musical instrument in the struck idiophone subfamily of the percussion family. So even claves are an idiophone.

An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument's vibrating, without the use of strings or membranes.

The vibraphone is similar in appearance to the xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel. Each bar is paired with a resonator tube having a motor-driven butterfly valve at its upper end, mounted on a common shaft, which produces a tremolo or vibrato effect while spinning. The vibraphone also has a sustain pedal similar to that used on a piano; when the pedal is up, the bars are all damped and the sound of each bar is shortened; with the pedal down, they will sound for several seconds.

A xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden (not steel) bars struck by mallets. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use. The term may be used generally, to include all such instruments, such as the marimba and balafon or, more specifically, to refer to an orchestral instrument of somewhat higher pitch range than the chromatic marimba. It is sometimes mistakenly used of similar lithophones and metallophone instruments of the glockenspiel type such as the pixiphone.

A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave in contrast to a heptatonic (seven note) scale such as the major scale and minor scale.

Woody welcomed home

 Oklahoma has always had a troubled relationship with her native son Woody Guthrie. The communist sympathies of America’s balladeer infuriated local detractors. In 1999 a wealthy donor’s objections forced the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City to cancel a planned exhibition on Guthrie organized by the Smithsonian Institution. It wasn’t until 2006, nearly four decades after his death, that theOklahoma Hall of Fame got around to adding him to its ranks. But as places from California to the New York island get ready to celebrate the centennial of Guthrie’s birth, in 2012, Oklahoma is finally ready to welcome him home. The George Kaiser Family Foundation in Tulsa plans to announce this week that it is buying the Guthrie archives from his children and building an exhibition and study center to honor his legacy.

While this poor folks’ hero and the richest man in Oklahoma might not seem to have much in common, Mr. Kaiser’s foundation, with its $4 billion endowment, is dedicated to helping Tulsa’s most disadvantaged. “I cried for an hour after meeting George Kaiser,” Ms. Guthrie said. “This puts together what I’ve always dreamed of.”

Bolívarian musicians

On new book cart. Dudamel is a shining star in orchestral music.
Tunstall, Tricia. (2012). Changing lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the transformative power of music.
New York: Norton.

78s, Photos, Even Sweat

Another fragment of Louis Armstrong’s legacy is back where it belongs. The Armstrong museum and archive in Queens has received a treasure-trove of rare 78-r.p.m. records, bootleg tapes, five personal letters, candid photographs, European posters, news clippings, discographies, even weight-loss tips — 192 cubic feet in all — from the estate of a Swedish man known as the world’s second-largest private collector of Satchmoiana.

Satchmoiana, now there is a word.


There is also a sweat-stained handkerchief that belonged to Armstrong, who was famous for theatrically wiping his brow between the trumpet solos he blew better than almost anyone else. “We’re excited about it because there might be some valuable DNA in it, what with cloning and all,” joked Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona.

One never knows.

The Armstrong Museum's archivist is named Ricky Riccardi; what a hoot.

[Library director] Mr. Cogswell, 58, is a Virginian who played saxophone gigs for a time, did graduate work in both jazz history and library science, and considers his current position his dream job. He shepherded visitors through Armstrong’s house last week, telling them how Armstrong, while on tour, asked his wife to buy them a home, which she did, picking one out in a working-class quarter and paying about $3,500. When Armstrong showed up by taxi from the airport at 3 a.m., he was dazzled by what he thought of as its grandeur, given the stark poverty he had been raised in. “Quit kidding me,” he told the cabdriver. “Take me to the address I gave you.”

Early Chet

One day I decided to look for renditions of "This time the dream's on me" and it was on this compilation. There are 4 CDs to the collection. The first one starts with live pieces, including a couple where Chet played with Bird: the fidelity is poor, but the talent shines through. Discs 2 and 3 have studio pieces. Disc 4 contains a few studio pieces, and a number of live pieces (in which Chet plays with both Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.

This box set is available for purchase, and is annotated online. For a public library to own it is a gift that, alas, too few will appreciate. Yet it is proof of a wonderful music collection, and the Port Washington Library has that.

A Hearing Aid That Cuts Out All the Clatter

Stradivarius violin raises £9.8m

Les Paul

Today's Google doodle honors the guitar pioneer.

Keeping Billie Holiday Alive

Today's concert at HWPL is by the Long Island Brass Guild.

The Long Island Brass Guild began in the 1970s, adding members and instruments along the way - In the 1990s, a tuba was added and a final trumpet was added in 2005 - today the group boasts 7 members: 3 trumpets, French horn, tenor trombone, bass trombone, and tuba - Their repertoire includes classical brass compositions - from Renaissance to Ragtime - and compositions written for the group.

Tenor trombone? Never heard of it (only of the 'regular' and the valve trombones). So I looked it up. The trombone itself derives from Italian tromba (trumpet) and -one (a suffix meaning "large"), so the name literally means "large trumpet". Trombones and trumpets share the important characteristic of having predominantly cylindrical bores. Therefore, the most frequently encountered trombones—the tenor and bass trombone—are the tenor and bass counterparts of the trumpet.

Instruments related to the trombone include:

• Sackbut -  medieval precursors to trombones

• Buccin - a visually distinctive trombone popularized in military bands in France between 1810–1845 which subsequently faded into obscurity.

• Trumpet - has the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE.

• Bass Trumpet - a type of low trumpet which was first developed during the 1820s in Germany.

• Euphonium - tenor-voiced

• Tuba - largest and lowest pitched brass
• 
  

33 Revolutions Per Minute

 Lynskey, Dorian. (2011). 33 revolutions per minute: a history of protest songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day. New York : Ecco.

The lively British rock critic Dorian Lynskey — he writes for The Guardian, among other publications — spends some time in his new book, “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” chewing over why most protest songs are heaped with scorn. They can be “didactic, crass or plain boring,” he writes. Those who warble them onstage can seem “shrill or annoying or egotistical.” Lester Bangs didn’t single out James Taylor’s politics in his hilarious 1971 essay “James Taylor Marked for Death.” (That essay is barely about Mr. Taylor.) But bad protest songs really do make you want to throttle someone.

Afro-Cuban Jazz

IF there is such a thing as a first family of Afro-Cuban jazz, the O’Farrill clan has a right to claim that distinction. Its members helped invent the hybrid genre back in the 1940s, when Chico O’Farrill came to New York from Havana, and in recent years they have worked to reinvigorate the music despite barriers in both Cuba and the United States. “We’re kind of people caught between two worlds,” said the pianist Arturo O’Farrill, Chico’s 50-year-old son. As such, he added, it’s his obligation to encourage “an evolving relationship between two countries that should never have been separated culturally” and to “pay a debt forward” in his father’s name.

I've long wondered about the name itself: Irish? 

The musical story of the family, which immigrated to Cuba from the British Caribbean colony of Montserrat in the 1700s, begins with Chico, who was studying at a military academy in Georgia in the mid-1930s when he fell in love with jazz. A decade later, after playing trumpet in Cuban orchestras, he moved to New York, where he quickly became an A-list composer and arranger, working with Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Count Basie and Machito, among others.

The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite is one of the greatest musical compositions I have ever heard, especially when it features Bird.

“Simply put, Chico O’Farrill is the greatest Afro-Cuban jazz figure of all time,” Leonardo Acosta, the author of “Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba,” said in a telephone interview from Havana. “His way of using the orchestra as an instrument, his ability as an arranger and composer and his skill in converting Cuban music into jazz and vice versa gives his work a kind of chemistry that no one else, neither Cuban nor American, has. He achieves another dimension.”

Arturo  on YouTube.

Who will remember Paul Simon?

At first I thought he might have died, with that headline, but it is an analysis of his person and music, musical criticism.

There may be legitimate reasons for the chasm between Mr. Simon and younger audiences. Some of his lyrics portray him as an upscale urban intellectual who shields his emotions behind a well-considered phrase; when he writes at street level, there can be a sense that he's revealing research rather than experience. For all his musical explorations—gospel, reggae, Mexican folk, South African mbaqanga, Afro-Brazilian batucada and electronic soundscapes, among them—Mr. Simon's recordings often polish away needed bite and edge.

His popularity does not equal that of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, is a criticism.

His métier, it turns out, is life's often-baffling twists and triumphs, joys and jolts, and though some Simon compositions may be cryptic, they are easily deciphered. Mr. Simon has been hiding in plain sight since Simon & Garfunkel's debut disc was released some 47 years ago.

In performance, Mr. Simon was, as he's been for most of his career, a man who spends little time with image, preferring to lead with his songs, voice and guitar to transmit a knotty, deeply felt worldview. His place in the pantheon of American song long ago secured, Mr. Simon said as he left the stage, "I had a good time." So did we all, as anyone would have who has an abiding interest in musical adventure and lyrical excellence.