Tag: Music

The Early Morning Music Express Presents: Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer whose collaborations with Western classical musicians as well as rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India’s traditional music, died Tuesday in a hospital near his home in Southern California. He was 92.

Mr. Shankar had suffered from upper respiratory and heart ailments in the last year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday, his family said in a statement.

Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

His instrument, the sitar, has a small rounded body and a long neck with a resonating gourd at the top. It has 6 melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings (which are not played but resonate freely as the other strings are plucked). Sitar performances are partly improvised, but the improvisations are strictly governed by a repertory of ragas (melodic patterns representing specific moods, times of day, seasons of the year or events) and talas (intricate rhythmic patterns) that date back several millenniums.

Mr. Shankar’s quest for a Western audience was helped in 1965 when George Harrison of the Beatles began to study the sitar with him. But Harrison was not the first Western musician to seek Mr. Shankar’s guidance. In 1952 he met and began performing with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he made three recordings for EMI: “West Meets East” (1967), “West Meets East, Vol. 2” (1968) and “Improvisations: East Meets West” (1977).

Mr. Shankar loved to mix the music of different cultures. He collaborated with the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and the jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, who had become fascinated with Indian music and philosophy in the early ’60s. Coltrane met with Mr. Shankar several times from 1964 to 1966 to learn the basics of ragas, talas and Indian improvisation techniques. Coltrane named his son Ravi after Mr. Shankar. — New York Times

News Roundup Here

The Thursday Morning Music Express Presents: Dave Brubeck

I will not lie to my readers, Jazz is really not my thing. I am a rock and roller. However, I always show mad respect to the great ones in music. Jazz is an American thing, and we invented it, and people overseas wanted to sound like us. This was back, when America was a great Nation and people around the world wanted to be like us.

Enjoy the music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faJE92phKzI

Dave Brubeck, the pianist and composer who helped make jazz popular again in the 1950s and ’60s with recordings like “Time Out,” the first jazz album to sell a million copies, and “Take Five,” the still instantly recognizable hit single that was that album’s centerpiece, died on Wednesday in Norwalk, Conn. He would have turned 92 on Thursday.

He died while on his way to a cardiology appointment, Russell Gloyd, his producer, conductor and manager for 36 years, said. Mr. Brubeck lived in Wilton, Conn.

In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck brought a distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility that won over listeners who had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single.

Mr. Brubeck experimented with time signatures and polytonality and explored musical theater and the oratorio, baroque compositional devices and foreign modes. He did not always please the critics, who often described his music as schematic, bombastic and — a word he particularly disliked — stolid. But his very stubbornness and strangeness — the blockiness of his playing, the oppositional push-and-pull between his piano and Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone — make the Brubeck quartet’s best work still sound original.

Outside of the group’s most famous originals, which had the charm and durability of pop songs ( “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” “It’s a Raggy Waltz” and “Take Five”), some of its best work was in its overhauls of standards like “You Go to My Head,” “All the Things You Are” and “Pennies From Heaven.” — Source

Others Remembering — Left and Right: BBC, Gothamist, Los Angeles Times, The Maddow Blog, Gawker, Truthdig, Stinque, The Week, Blazing Cat Fur, Balloon Juice and Althouse, The Atlantic Online, Los Angeles Times, Outside the Beltway, Gimme Noise, The Democratic Daily, The Reaction, Power Line and The Volokh Conspiracy, FIRST DRAFT

Talk about a throwback!

Just my reaction to the video in this posting here. 

Kerry Livgren was a founder of Kansas, in the 1980’s he was a part of a band called AD.

This is “The Fury” from AD’s album “Art of the State”.

Man, taking me back to my youth days in southwest Detroit. I used to jam this song all of the time.

*shakes head*

Sorry, got a little sentimental there. 😀

The Monday afternoon afternoon music club presents: Ted Nugent

This is dedicated to the Femi-nazi’s and other knuckle-dragging idiots on Twitter, who attacked me for having an opinion.

I am an anti-feminist. Sue me, you knuckle-dragging nimrods.

I present the greatest Conservative, and defender of the second amendment ever!

Ol’ deadly teddy.

I post this to stick it in the eye of the femi-nazi’s on the right. They’re not Conservatives, at all. Period, end of story. Tampon wearing broads, who want to be treated special. Not this white boy! 😀

The Saturday Night Music Express Presents: The Dixie Chicks

That’s right the Dixie Chicks! Yes, I know what they were singing about, and you know what? They were absolutely right! 

This is dedicated to the atheist prick and his friends, who seem to believe that I should just die off the face of the earth or just get a job.

This is also dedicated to the a-hole buffoon liberals, who think that I ought to just forget about happened with the housing market, shut down my blog and “get a f’ing job” as they told me.

This is dedicated to the a-hole, who left me the comment saying, “F*** You you’re an idiot!”

This is dedicated to the so-called “Conservatives” who ignore this blog and still hold grudges against me, because I was once a Democratic Party voter and because I dared to take on one of your darlings who happens to be nothing more than an “affirmative action” mouth piece, who is, was, and always will be a bought corporate shill!

This is dedicated to those who call themselves “Conservatives” who hold grudges against me, for something I did, which I regret 6 years ago! Screw you all!

This is dedicated to the idiot, a-hole, Neo-Nazi, who pretended to be my friend, while all the while stabbing me in the back. You know who you are, you fedora wearing son-of-a-bitch! You’ll get yours, one day, bank on it!

This is also dedicated to that servile dog bitch ex-girlfriend of mine, who likes to read my blog and laugh about it with my cousin. You worthless hoe! I hope you take your husband for as much as you took ME for!

and Yeah…

I’M NOT READY TO MAKE NICE, NOR WILL I EVER BE!