7/4

Magnificent.

Probably Michael Musto from the Village Voice.

at least he didn't call 'em a fuckwad.

they should be banned too.

I knew Brownie was a dead head. Knew it all along...

floating p/u, it's screwed into the pick guard, not the body.

they need strong role models .

The only way to really solve this problem is to go right to its core and ban the penis. Sounds hemispheric to me.

This!...from someone who plays the "organ"in a group called "Organissimo".

Poindexter. The Professor. Rock Bottom. Master Cylinder.

Since Thanksgiving: Abercrombie, John - Structures Bach, JS - Comlplete Orchestral Suites, Concertos Beethoven, Ludwig - Complete Piano Sonatas Beethoven, Ludwig - Complete String Quartets Burrell, Kenny - Guitar Forms Burrell, Kenny - Midnight Blue Christian, Charlie - Genius of the Electric Guitar, the Coryell, Larry - Spaces Debussy, Ravel - Orchestral Works Debussy, Ravel - String Quartets Dixon, Bill - Papyrus, VII Gentle Giant - The Power And The Glory Hackett, Steve - Please Don't Touch Haynes, Phil - Live Insurgency, set 1 Hemphill, Julius - Fat Man and the Hard Blues Hemphill, Julius - Five Card Stud Mahavishnu Project, the - Return to the Enerald Beyond Martino, Pat - Remember McLaughlin, John - Thieves and Poets Prokofiev, Serge - 7 Symphonies Radulescu, Horatiu - Intimate Rituals Rudhyar, Dane - Works for Piano Satie, Erik - Piano Works

I was reviewing post-classical/"new" music for DMG for a while, but it's been almost a year. Personal issues take up too much time to write reviews.

10pm on 13 in NYC!

[rim shot][cymbal crash]

When did he go off the deep end?

space cadet?

How did I miss this? Happy #40!

February 5, 2007 Music Review | 'Morricone in Concert' Fistful of Themes, No Clips, From a Soundtrack Maestro By STEPHEN HOLDEN If the Italian composer Ennio Morricone has a musical signature, it is probably the wild-turkey squawk of the ocarina in his theme music from the 1966 spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” That squawk, an anarchic battle cry that evokes a warped yodel and is sounded over martial equestrian drum rolls, was heard again on Saturday evening at Radio City Music Hall, where Mr. Morricone conducted 200 musicians performing excerpts from his film scores. Although he has written music for 400 movies, the musicians had prepared so little material that the last fourth of the two-hour event billed as “Morricone in Concert” was devoted to reprises of highlights from the previous 90 minutes. In sheer size, the forces arrayed onstage were impressive: the Roma Sinfonietta of about 100 was augmented by the Canticum Novum Singers, an ensemble of roughly the same size. The solemnly presented event was the latest salvo in an international Morricone blitz whose climax will be an honorary Oscar later this month. (Over the years he has been nominated five times.) By most measures this was a strange event: frustratingly short, the music unaccompanied by film clips or any other images. Although a program listed the selections, there were no annotations and no introductions to the themes, which were grouped in blocks with titles like “The Modernity of Myth in Sergio Leone’s Cinema” and “Social Cinema.” The orchestrations were conspicuously billed as “the same as the original soundtracks.” What that meant acoustically was a blend of the natural sound of a large string orchestra with instruments like a heavily amplified harp. If the sound was passable, it was texturally thin, and it all seemed manipulated on a mixing board: unfortunate for a composer of some of the most voluptuous movie music ever created. If it’s odd that Mr. Morricone’s music for westerns, which constitutes less than 10 percent of his output, has been so fetishized, while his more overtly symphonic film music has been relatively ignored, it’s understandable from an American point of view. His scores for Sergio Leone westerns revolutionized the vocabulary of western movie music standardized by Hollywood. His introduction of rock ’n’ roll guitar descended from surf music out of Duane Eddy was an American cultural export. And the resulting hybrid, a slightly cheesy mixture of rock ’n’ roll and European formality, created a dramatic tension that energized movie music around the world. Without the synergy between music and images that a visual component would have provided, Mr. Morricone’s Mediterranean variant on that European formality loomed large. If the musical forces were widescreen in size, the textures were simple and emphasized transparency and repetition. Melodic themes were short and tuneful, with the strings often doubled by a soprano (Susanna Rigacci) singing without words. The romantic, contemplative side of Mr. Morricone’s film music found its richest expression in excerpts from the movies “Cinema Paradiso” and “Malèna,” in which he evokes an Old World nostalgia in sweet, dreamy passages that often feature a single wind instrument plaintively standing in for a character looking back. This particular emotional atmosphere is a specialty of Mr. Morricone, whose scores for “Bugsy” and “Lolita” locate the yearning little boy inside the corrupted adult. Unfortunately neither score, nor the great end title theme from “In the Line of Fire,” was included in the program. What we heard of that style would also have been better served had the scores been rearranged as suites with themes and variations that evoked a narrative. This was also true of the concert’s abbreviated final block of three themes from “The Mission,” the 1986 film for which Mr. Morricone wrote one of his finest scores. For the few minutes it lasted, this pop pastiche of Mahler’s Second Symphony sounded magnificent, but it was over almost before it began.

February 5, 2007 Music Review | Composer Portraits: Frank Zappa The Other Frank Zappa, Chamber Music Composer By ANNE MIDGETTE, NYTimes Frank Zappa was a kind of Rev. Howard Finster of music: an outsider artist eventually discovered and embraced by the establishment without ever losing his outsider cachet. A brilliant self-taught musician, Zappa needed to justify what he did as serious music at a time when rock was not seen as serious, and he produced a string of “classical” pieces that were taken up by European luminaries like Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Modern. The pieces are fiendishly difficult to execute, with lots of surface complexity to dazzle the ear, as was demonstrated at the composer portrait devoted to Zappa at the Miller Theater on Friday night, two weeks after another concert devoted to one of his idols, Edgard Varèse. The program had three parts. First came music for smaller chamber ensembles, played by Zephyros Winds and a string quintet, including music originally written for the Aspen Wind Quintet (“Times Beach II” and “Times Beach III”) and the Kronos Quartet (“None of the Above”). Then came music for chamber orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, some of it, like “The Girl With the Magnesium Dress,” arranged from pieces Zappa wrote on an instrument called the Synclavier. Finally there were arrangements of music for rock ensemble — including “G-Spot Tornado” — performed by the Fireworks Ensemble, the eight-member group that set up the whole concert. Despite the program-note allegations that these pieces were equally just plain music, the sense that rock had to assume some kind of classical mantle to gain respect still lingered around the first two parts of the program, which felt like a dinner jacket pulled out of mothballs for a formal occasion, not least because the players seemed on their best, slightly subdued behavior. And while the music was filled with striking gestures — breathtakingly fast unison passages, moments when the supporting instruments held a note while a flute scampered off on a rapid phrase, plenty of adroit quotations echoing other composers — its complexities didn’t weave together to make a coherent statement. Epitomizing this tendency was “The Perfect Stranger,” Zappa’s longest work for chamber ensemble, an illustrative piece about a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman (opening with the doorbell’s ring) that disintegrated into a pile of isolated individual moments. Like an ornate frieze adorning a simple one-room house, the decoration was more sophisticated than the architecture. But with the change of nomenclature and mood in the rock part of the show, a whole new feeling came into the auditorium, as if, formalities now concluded, everyone could kick off shoes and dance till dawn. Brian Coughlin, Fireworks’ director and bass player, produced some hell-for-leather arrangements that the players, now relaxed and grooving, played the heck out of, down to show-stopping solos in “The Purple Lagoon/Approximate.” Finally labels did indeed cease to matter: this was just music, and it sounded like music to keep.

and then Jaco. Read his interviews.

I don't have it.

Aura is a unique one, worth hearing.

Fabulous!