Music news and reviews, music videos and tittle tattle, with a lingering look at the past from Anorak. A source for rock, pop, album and live music, new releases, artist interviews and features.
To mark the 70th anniversary of jazz publishers Blue Note Records, the label animated Reid Miles’ fabulous era-defining album covers.
And The Bella Vista Social Pub, looking to promote its own summer jazz concerts in Siena, Tuscany, came up with a smart idea. Why not pay tribute to Blue Note (and promote the Italian concert series) by animating the cool cover designs that graced Blue Note albums during its heyday.
Take it away, Dolly Parton. Her she is belting out a death metal version of her timeless hit, Jolene. It was created by Andy Rehfeldt – check out his Mary Poppins singing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
As Christmas rolls up we wonder about the atheists. Steve Martin is here to help. Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers perform at Merlefest 2010.
Until now!
A little tune called “Athiests Don’t Have No Songs”
(Christians have)
Christians have their hymns and pages.
(Hymns and pages)
Hava Nagila’s for the Jews.
(For the Jews)
Baptists have the rock of ages.
(Rock of ages)
Atheists just sing the blues.
(Romantics play)
Romantics play Claire de Lune.
(Claire de Lune)
Born agains sing He is risen.
But no one ever wrote a tune.
(Wrote a tune)
For godless existentialism.
(For godless existentialism)
For Atheists,
There’s no good news.
They’ll never sing,
A song of faith.
In their songs,
They have a rule.
The “he” is always lowercase.
The “he” is always lowercase.
(Some folks sing)
Some folks sing a Bach cantata.
(Bach cantata)
Lutherans get Christmas trees.
Atheist songs add up to nada.
(Up to nada)
But they do have Sundays free.
(Have Sundays free)
(Pentecostals sing)
Pentecostals sing, sing to heaven,
(Sing to heaven)
Gothics had the books of scrolls,
(Numerologists count)
Numerologists count, count to seven,
(Count to seven)
Atheists have rock and roll.
For atheists,
There’s no good news.
They’ll never sing,
A song of faith.
In their songs,
They have a rule.
The “he” is always lowercase.
The “he” is always lowercase.
Atheists
Atheists
Atheists
Don’t have no songs!
(Christians have)
Christians have their hymns and pages.
(Hymns and pages)
Hava Nagila’s for the Jews.
(For the Jews)
Baptists have the rock of ages.
(Rock of ages)
Atheists just sing the blues.
Catholics,
Dress up for mass.
And listen to,
Gregorian chants.
Atheists,
Just take a pass.
Watch football in their underpants.
Watch football in their underpants.
Atheists
Atheists
Atheists
Don’t have no songs!
(Don’t have no songs)
To Massachusetts, where police are searching for two men challenging passers-by to rap battles.
Charlton police said a black SUV with two or three men in their late teens or early 20s inside, pulled up to three young teenage boys on Dresser Hill Road at about 3pm on Saturday.
One of the men, described as having brown hair and a pale complexion, wearing a grey T-shirt, gray pants and open-toed sandals, got out of the vehicle and started rapping while the other men asked the boys if they wanted to “spit some bars” with them.
When the boys declined, the SUV drove off.
Open-toed sandals. Singing. Brown hair… pale. Hanging out with other men. It’s the second coming!
Investigators say the deaths of all four members of British band Viola Beach was an “accident”. The driver “did not intend to kill himself or the group” from Warrington. As the Times reports:
Kris Leonard, River Reeves, Tomas Lowe, Jack Dakin and Craig Tarry, the manager who is thought to have been driving, died when the vehicle plunged off a bridge, 18 miles from Sweden’s capital Stockholm early on February 13. A preliminary post-mortem examination found that the driver did not have drugs or alcohol in his body. Detectives believe the driver did not intend to kill himself or the band. The crash was due to unfortunate circumstances, they said.
Lars Berglund, of the Swedish police, says: “It looks like the drive acted deliberately… There is no suggestion that it was intended to kill himself or the band.”
And how does the Star report on the tragedy? It yells: “Brit Band Bridge Plunge: It Was Deliberate.”
Vocals Only: David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sing Under Pressure:
bbb
9th July 1973: Pop singer David Bowie is seen off at the station by his wife Angie. (Photo by Smith/Express/Getty Images)
David Bowie performs his final concert as Ziggy Stardust at the Hammersmith Odeon, London. The concert later became known as the Retirement Gig. (Photo by Steve Wood/Getty Images)
Make-up artist Pierre La Roche prepares English singer David Bowie for a performance as Aladdin Sane, 1973. Bowie is wearing a costume by Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto. (Photo by Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
British rock singer David Bowie performs with an acoustic guitar on stage, in costume as ‘Ziggy Stardust,’ circa 1973. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
3rd March 1965: British pop star Davy Jones before he changed his name to Bowie following the success of the Monkees and their lead singer Davy Jones. (Photo by Potter/Express/Getty Images)
When Brian Eno’s Obscure Records closed in 1978, the ten albums he recorded for the label became tricky to find. Now Ubuweb has links to all ten albums.
circa 1925: Russian-born US composer Irving Berlin (Israel Baline, 1888 – 1989) at the keyboard with violinist Jascha Heifetz. (Photo by Henry Guttmann/Getty Images)
Have yourselves a happy Christmas, folks. Here are the top five Christmas songs written by Jews:
“White Christmas” – Written by Irving Berlin. Bing Crosby’s version is the bestselling single of all time
“The Christmas song” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”) – Written by Bob Wells and Mel Torme.
“Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” – Sammy Cahn.
“Santa Baby” – written by Joan Javits.
“Winter Wonderland” – written in 1934 by Felix Bernard.
Cynthia Robinson has died of cancer. The musician played trumpet with Sly And The Family Stone Roots drummer Questlove salutes her life:
… she wasn’t just a screaming cheerleading foil to Sly & Freddie’s gospel vocals. She was a KICK ASS trumpet player. A crucial intricate part of Sly Stone’s utopian vision of MLK’s America. Cynthia’s role in music history isn’t celebrated enough. Her & sister Rose weren’t just pretty accessories there to “coo” & “shoo wop shoo bob” while the boys got the glory. Naw. They took names and kicked ass while you were dancing in the aisle. Much respect to amazing CynthiaRobinson.
A human skull keeps watch over US soldiers encamped in the Vietnamese jungle during the Vietnam War. (Photo by Terry Fincher/Getty Images)
In We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War,Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, narrate the story of the music that whirled about the heads of American fighters.
The deeply unfashionable cardigan wort by Kurt Cobain on MTV: Unplugged in 1993 has been bought at auction for $140,800. The seller was a “friend” of the Cobain family.
Four months after the show, Cobain committed suicide.
Julien’s “Icons and Idols: Rock N Roll” auction advertised it thus:
A blend of acrylic, mohair and Lycra with five-button closure (one button absent), with two exterior pockets, a burn hole and discoloration near left pocket and discoloration on right pocket.
American pop trio The Ronettes, comprising Veronica Bennett (later Ronnie Spector), Nedra Talley and Estelle Bennett, UK, 21st October 1964. (Photo by Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Listen to The Ronettes sing Baby Love You in 1963 – no instruments. Just the sweet voices:
Mark Steyn celebrates his Sinatra Centenary series with a look at the making of a hit song:
It was 1966. Enter Bert Kaempfert “the German kaiser of kitsch”:
He eschewed the standard 32-bar A-A-B-A song, possibly on the grounds that a middle section was way too much work. Instead, his tunes are built on the slightest of melodic themes, endlessly repeated. Yet they are, as the Germans say, Ohrwürmer – or earworms: maddening tunes that insinuate their way into your head and refuse to get out. “L-O-V-E” is the über-Kaempfert, a tune so simple that its lyricist Milt Gabler turned it into a spelling lesson, an “Alphabet Song” for grown-ups:
L is for the way you look at me
O is for the only one I see
V is very very extraordinary
E is even more…
So Kaempfert had form. And so Jimmy Bowen listens to Hal Fine’s bunch of Kaempfert themes and something called “Beddy-Bye” comes up. And Bowen plays it again, and again. And then he says, “Man, get me a lyric on that, and I’ll do it with Sinatra.”
“Beddy-Bye” sounds to me like yet another minimalist Kaempfert tune: the five-note title phrase, reprised a tone up and a tone down, is about 50 per cent of the tune. Yet a remarkable number of other people claim to have had a hand in its creation. The last time I mentioned the thing in this space David C Tobin of Washington, DC wrote to say that it was composed by Avo Uvezian, a Beirut-born Armenian-American pianist cum cigar manufacturer. He does indeed claim to have written the music, but so does the late Ivo Robić, the crooning Croat, who insisted that he’d composed it for a folk music festival in Split, Yugoslavia. M Philippe-Gérard, the Brazilian-born French composer of “When The World Was Young”, sued on the grounds that the tune was stolen from his “Magic Tango”, but lost in court.
So until these various Croatian-Armenian claims are as litigated as the Franco-Brazilian ones, we’ll stick with the official narrative. In 1966, Bert Kaempfert wrote this tune for his first Hollywood movie score, for the aforementioned A Man Could Get Killed, directed by Ronald Neame. And all it needed now was a lyric and Jimmy Bowen would make good on his promise and get Kaempfert a recording by Frank Sinatra.
Bowen had never made such a pledge before – for a fairly obvious reason: He was in no position to promise any such thing. “Obviously,” he explained subsequently, “nobody knows what Frank is going to do till he says what he’s going to do.” But he knew that that “Beddy-Bye” theme smelled like a hit, and Hal Fine took him at his word. He farmed the tune out to various writers, and submitted a couple of lyrics. Jimmy Bowen didn’t like either of them.
So Hal Fine tried again, this time with Eddie Snyder and Charles Singleton….
For “Beddy-Bye”, Eddie Snyder took his cue from the film and the James Garner/Melina Mercouri characters: They’re strangers, exchanging glances, and, by the time the tune’s reprised in the final moments, you know that, as the song says, they’re “in love forever”. “We had the scene,” recalled Snyder. “A man is sitting across from a girl in a bar. That was it.” But that was all they needed:
Strangers In The Night
Exchanging glances
Wond’ring in the night
What were the chances
We’d be sharing love
Before the night was through…
