This piece is from the album "Jin Jin / Firefly" by Takashi Hirayasu and Bob Brozman. It always makes me smile. It is also good to listen to when you need to get up and deal with a task you have been putting off for a while.
If vegetables be the food of music
I had bought lots of vegetables to make minestrone tonight but then I came across this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpfYt7vRHuY So now I have got my tools out and am making my own orchestra. One can always cook the vegetables afterwards (and maybe the soup will taste better after you have played some Haydn or Mozart -... Continue Reading →
Handelitis and The-sun-is-shining Road
Every now and then I have an attack of musical fever and have to listen to a piece of music a hundred and thirty-seven times in a row. Examples of past episodes are Dylan singing Blind Willie McTell, Carlos Gardel singing Milonga Sentimental, Tupelo Honey sung by Cassandra Wilson as well as Uri Caine and... Continue Reading →
Wee Klinks 3
It's raining today where I live and it rained so much yesterday that when you ask someone for the time water pours out of their sleeve when they look at their watch. There are glum expressions all around me, but I am actually fond of rain. I think the reason must be my childhood memories... Continue Reading →
Eyes in the City – Kurt Tucholsky
In Edgar Reitz's Second Heimat there is a scene where one of the main characters, Clarissa (Salome Kammer), is singing a song at the piano inside a villa which is full of people milling around. I kept on going back to the scene to watch it again and finally found that the text was a... Continue Reading →
The Whole Country Dances – The North Korean Music Scene
(This article was first posted in February 2008. I think it is time for people to be reminded of North Korean music. Nordkorea.info.de doesn't seem to provide songs any longer, which is a great pity, but there is a good selection here. In particular, I would recommend Heroic Workers' Factory, which has an English translation.... Continue Reading →
Wee Klinks 2
When things don't work properly one classic strategy is to continue doing the same thing and call it by a different name. Having trouble with the Global Strategy ? Launch the World-Wide Initiative. Is the Post Office falling apart ? Forget about repairing the roof, just call it a Data Communications Hub. This was the... Continue Reading →
Improvisation on improvisation in desperation
After a few months of amazed bewilderment, I have finally worked out how to represent the way the recent Republican Vice-Presidential nominee's thought processes and verbiage generation function. Think of a car at speed trying to negotiate a twisting track covered with thick ice. That's it. This was brought home to me by the following video which features a... Continue Reading →
Music for eating peaches to (and papayas and mangosteens as well)
Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about Vietnam and even less about Vietnamese music, but I have been wanting to share my appreciation of Huong Thanh ever since I heard her cd Mangustao. In it she blends Vietnamese music with jazz in a way which joins hands surprisingly. There is a lilt in her singing which reminds me of... Continue Reading →
Tossing salt peanuts into the air for free – Steve Coleman
In these times, people are busy inventing ways to sell things or bits of themselves nobody should need to want and half the economy seems to be driven by packaged zilch. I recently saw that there is a company selling bottled water in the United States which freely admits on the label that it is... Continue Reading →