Friday Miscellanea

Every now and then the Wall Street Journal puts up quite a good article on music. The latest is about some compositions for solo violin written late in life by Eugène Ysaÿe.

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And just to further underline the astonishing quality of the WSJ music coverage, Dave Barry has a piece up explaining why Van Morrison's "Gloria" is the best song ever, way better than Beethoven's 9th.

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And now, one of the most awkward album covers of all time:

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This is a pretty interesting essay about how Jimi Hendrix' cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" came to be. One of my favorite songs... Here is the original, from the album "John Wesley Harding":

And here is Hendrix' cover:

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I'm not familiar with the Japanese film Akira, so all this might be super-cool and I'm just not noticing, but the video at the link, of a performance of the theme from the film for cello, piano and percussion, seems to nicely summarize what is wrong with a lot of music these days: creative and exciting video, performers in engaging poses but a really dull and dreary musical composition that goes nowhere:

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Here is an essay in The New Yorker commemorating the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles film "A Hard Day's Night" which stands up very well when seen today. I lent my copy to someone a while ago and never got it back! Here is a clip of the opening sequence from the film.

It was little more than a year and a half from the Beatles playing in a Hamburg strip club to their incredible climb to fame, helped along by this film. In that brief time they went from being an obscure band to being, not the most famous musicians in the world, but the most famous persons in the world.

[I just checked to be sure and the Beatles' last gigs in Hamburg were in December 1962 and "A Hard Day's Night" was filmed in March/April 1964 and released in July, so exactly a year and a half.]

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While we are talking about pop, Pink Floyd are going to release their first album of new material in twenty years. I used to be a big fan of Pink Floyd. A friend and I would sit around listening to this album while playing chess:

Click to enlarge

The photo on the left, the back cover, is still one of my favorite band photos. I love how all the gear is laid out like the armaments of a fighter jet:

But I understand they issued some other albums after "Ummagumma"?

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Want to boost your brainpower by 400%? Read about this neuroscience-based music app that will do it for you. Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!

Now, I understand you are in the market for a bridge? Brooklyn has a lovely one and it just went up for sale. Bargain!

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And what better to end this miscellanea with than one of those immortal tunes from early Pink Floyd: "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun":