Posts on “Music”

  • Come Out
    • by Bud Parr on 09/20/07 (1 comments)
  • Ciaccona
    • by Bud Parr on 07/28/07 (0 comments)
  • The Cello
    • by Bud Parr on 02/08/07 (1 comments)
  • On Jazz
    • by Bud Parr on 12/07/06 (0 comments)
  • 34.7 Days
    • by Bud Parr on 02/16/06 (10 comments)

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Good video piece with Eugene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet on Bach’s "Ciaccona" (scroll down) as it threads his story of a violinist made to perform in a Nazi concentration camp in his novel The Savior.

From MacWorld: “At a special event hosted jointly by the EMI Group and Apple, the companies announced plans to offer EMI’s catalog free of digital rights management beginning in May. You will be able to purchase these unprotected tracks—encoded as 256kbps AAC files—for $1.29 per track. If you wish to upgrade any protected EMI tracks you’ve already purchased from the iTunes Store you can do so for 30 cents a track.”

James Tata reminds me (as a point of departure from his post on Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau) how much I like the album Charlie Haden and Egberto Gismonti In Montreal.



The Pat Metheny Group’s American Garage, released in 1980, is, I suppose, a crossover record, but was my introduction to jazz (could it have been 27 years ago? Yikes!). Although I quickly moved on from his brand of jazz, he’s always worth paying attention to because he’s a precise and elegant musician.



As far as the Haden’s work with the Brazilian composer/pianist/guitarist Egberto Gismonti goes, it’s one of his finest collaborations partly due to the tension, for lack of a better description, in Gismonti’s music.

As intense as The Departed is (Scorsese’s best film since Mean Streets & Taxi Driver [although Bringing Out the Dead was great too]), Van Morrison’s rendition of Comfortably Numb with Roger Waters is a keeper, particularly since I’ve been hungry for some Morrison and didn’t like his country album. He recorded Comfortably Numb at the Berlin Wall in 1990, but I’d never heard it before.



You can’t download the song alone on iTunes from the soundtrack, but you can from his just released album The Movie Hits, which is otherwise a rehash of old music, although some welcome live recordings.

The Times on the trend toward downloading classical music: “it’s an irritating act of philistinism that every piece is called a ‘song’.”

They’re right and I’ve decided to go on hunger strike until iTunes changes “song” to “piece” or “movement” or some such thing for classical music. Someone get me a water.

All of Mozart’s 600 Scores Available Online at the Mozarteum. More of academic interest than anything, but interesting for the rest of us to be able to peruse. (article at Playbill Arts)

This NYTimes article on blogs covering 70’s and 80’s jazz is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a while and leaves the door open to exploration.



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