The Music Thread

[aircanda]

Thank you Francis M., for sharing us your Kaleidoscope World and your Cold Summer Nights.. You will always be missed. (sigh)

[oca]

Share ko lang....

> http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2539741

[oca]

Pahabol lang....

Sabi nila sports is a great equalizer. Mahirap ka man, kung magaling ka, pwede mong talunin yung nakasapatos na nagkakahalaga ng 5 libo. Pero ang music, ang nilulupig ay yung racial, ethnic, language at economic barriers.

Lahat ng makapakinig, feeling panalo...

[Joescoundrel]

Truly the end of an era, and the man who can truly say, in the words of fellow crooner Barry Manilow, "I am music and I write the songs."

Agence France-Presse

September 26, 2012 | 11:14 pm

CHICAGO—American crooner Andy Williams, whose string of hits like “Moon River” and annual Christmas TV shows made him a national treasure, has died aged 84 after losing his battle with cancer.

Wildly popular in the 1960′s, with 18 gold and three platinum records to his name, the clean-cut master of easy listening and the sentimental soundtrack signed what was at the time the biggest US recording contract.

“Legendary singer Andy Williams passed away last night (Tuesday) at home in Branson, Missouri following a year long battle with bladder cancer, it was announced by his family,” his publicist said in a statement.

Born in Wall Lake, Iowa, a son of a railroad worker, Howard Andrew Williams sang in his family’s church choir with bothers Bob, Dick and Don — a precursor for what was to become a 75-year professional singing career.

After World War II, they joined entertainer Kay Thompson in her innovative and sophisticated nightclub act. In his 2009 memoir “Moon River and Me,” Williams admitted a long affair with Thompson, 18 years his senior, as she coached him professionally.

On his way to earning more gold albums than any other solo performer bar Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis and Elvis Presley, Williams won an Oscar for his rendition of “Moon River” in the 1961 hit film “Breakfast at Tiffanys.”

That led to NBC’s signing of Williams for his popular “Andy Williams Show” in 1962, which was on the air for almost a decade, until 1971.

A frequent host of the Grammys and Golden Globes, Williams was also known for his television Christmas specials and in later years, decked out in his trademark red cardigan, he became an annual fixture in American homes.

Williams was survived by his wife Debbie, and his three children Robert, Noelle and Christian, with French-born dancer Claudine Longet.

He and Longet divorced in 1975 and the following year she was charged with fatally shooting her ski racer boyfriend Spider Sabich in Aspen. Williams stood by her side throughout the trial. He wed Debbie Meyer in 1991.

Williams’ birthplace in Iowa is a tourist attraction and in the 1990s opened a theater in his adopted hometown of Branson, Missouri — it is called Moon River Theater after the song he made so famous.

“In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network,” publicist Paul Shefrin said in a statement.

[Sam Miguel]

Dave Brubeck, worldwide ambassador of jazz, dies at 91

By Matt Schudel, Dec 05, 2012 05:23 PM EST

The Washington Post Thursday, December 6, 1:23 AM

In his seven-decade career, Dave Brubeck was both an artistic and a commercial success, a pianist and composer who expanded the musical landscape and who crossed other borders as one of the world’s foremost ambassadors of jazz.

He had an inventive style that brought international music into the jazz mainstream, but he was more than a musical innovator: He was an American original.

Mr. Brubeck died Dec. 5 at a hospital in Norwalk, Conn., one day before his 92nd birthday. His manager, Russell Gloyd, said Mr. Brubeck was on his way to a regular medical checkup when his heart gave out.

Considered one of the greatest figures of a distinctively American art form, Mr. Brubeck was a modest man who left a monumental legacy. His 1959 recording “Time Out,” with its infectious hit “Take Five,” became the first jazz album to sell 1 million copies. He toured once-forbidden countries in the Middle East and in the old Soviet empire and was honored by presidents and foreign dignitaries.

He wrote hundreds of tunes, including the oft-recorded “In Your Own Sweet Way” and “The Duke.” His quartet, featuring alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, was one of the most popular jazz groups in history, and he kept up a busy performing schedule into his 90th year.

He also composed ambitious classical and choral works, released nearly 100 albums and remained a charismatic and indefatigable performer into old age. In December 2010, the month Mr. Brubeck turned 90, his quartet won the readers’ poll of DownBeat magazine as the best group in jazz — 57 years after he first won the poll.

A bespectacled cowboy who grew up on a remote California ranch, Mr. Brubeck was known for his complex rhythmic patterns, which he said were inspired by riding his horse and listening to its syncopated hoofbeats striking the ground.

He studied in the 1940s with the experimental French composer Darius Milhaud, who encouraged his interest in jazz. Mr. Brubeck was among the first jazz musicians to make wide use of polytonality, or playing in more than one musical key at a time. He was also an early advocate of “world music,” adopting exotic sounds that he heard in his worldwide travels.

After forming his quartet in California in the early 1950s, Mr. Brubeck sought to branch out from the dank nightclubs of San Francisco and Los Angeles. His wife, Iola, suggested that the quartet perform on college campuses, which produced a nationwide sensation, with record sales to match.

“We reached them musically,” he told the New York Times in 1967. “We had no singers, no beards, no jokes. All we presented was music.”

With their curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses, Desmond and Mr. Brubeck looked like professorial brothers and were unlikely jazz stars. The two had an instant musical bond and could anticipate each other’s bandstand improvisations, as Desmond’s ethereal, upper-register saxophone soared above Mr. Brubeck’s driving keyboard attack.

With the release of “Time Out” in 1959, Mr. Brubeck had the first jazz album to sell more than 1 million copies. It reached No. 2 on the pop charts, and its eternally catchy signature tune, “Take Five,” became a surprise hit.

[Sam Miguel]

^^^ Continued

The tune, written by Desmond but heavily arranged by Mr. Brubeck, built a memorable melody over a complex rhythm in the unusual time signature of 5/4. “Take Five” became a staple of his concerts and helped make the Dave Brubeck Quartet the most popular jazz group of the 1950s and ’60s.

“Every once in a while,” jazz historian and critic Ted Gioia wrote in an e-mail exchange with The Washington Post, “jazz is blessed by one of those great figures who can do it all. They give us a body of work that is full of musical riches . . . but the music also can appeal to the average listener. Dave Brubeck is one of those figures.”

Mr. Brubeck’s position in musical history has often been debated. He was born the same year as Charlie Parker, the tortured genius of the bebop movement that brought a new rhythmic and harmonic sophistication to jazz in the 1940s, but Mr. Brubeck was never a true bebopper himself. He defied the raffish image of the jazz musician by being a clean-living family man who lived with his wife and six children.

He was considered a seminal force in the West Coast’s understated “Cool Jazz” school of the 1950s, but he disdained the “Cool Jazz” label and preferred to forge an original musical path of his own.

After early struggles, Mr. Brubeck was reportedly earning more than $100,000 a year by 1954, the year he became the second jazz musician to be featured on the cover of Time magazine (after Louis Armstrong in 1949).

Some musicians and critics openly resented his success, and others questioned his prominence in a form of music that was created primarily by black musicians.

But Mr. Brubeck was an outspoken advocate of racial harmony and often used his music as a platform for cross-cultural understanding. He once canceled 23 of 25 concerts in the South when local officials would not allow his African American bass player, Eugene Wright, to appear with the rest of the group.

On a tour in the Netherlands in the 1950s, the African American pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith was asked, in Mr. Brubeck’s presence, “Isn’t it true that no white man can play jazz?”

Without answering at first, Smith gestured toward Mr. Brubeck and said to the reporter, “I’d like you to meet my son.”

In 1958, Mr. Brubeck and his quartet undertook an arduous international tour for the State Department, spreading the improvisatory spirit of jazz to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka, among other countries. In Poland, they were among the first U.S. jazz musicians to perform behind the Iron Curtain.

In each new country, Mr. Brubeck mingled with musicians, absorbing local rhythms and melodies. Long before the term “world music” gained currency, he was writing compositions that borrowed elements he had heard in Mexico, Japan, Turkey, India, Afghanistan and other countries.

In 1988, Mr. Brubeck and his quartet performed at a gala dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Moscow during a summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

[Sam Miguel]

^^^ Continued

During “Take Five,” observers noticed that Gorbachev was tapping his fingers along with the music.

“I can’t understand Russian,” Mr. Brubeck said at the time, “but I can understand body language.”

A diplomatic stalemate soon dissolved, and the two leaders signed a historic treaty to dismantle nuclear weapons.

“The next day,” Russell Gloyd, Mr. Brubeck’s manager, recalled to The Washington Post 20 years later, Secretary of State George P. Shultz “broke through the ranks, gave Dave a big hug and said, ‘Dave, you made the summit. No one was talking after three days. You made the breakthrough.’ ”

A cowboy childhood

David Warren Brubeck was born Dec. 6, 1920, in Concord, Calif. He and his family lived on a 45,000-acre ranch near Ione, Calif.

His father was a champion rodeo roper, and his mother was a conservatory-trained pianist who had studied in London with Dame Myra Hess, a concert star. She gave her three sons a surprisingly advanced musical education, and Mr. Brubeck’s two older brothers, Henry and Howard, became music teachers and composers.

Because of early eyesight problems, Mr. Brubeck always had difficulty reading musical notation. He compensated by learning to improvise and to play by ear, which served him well in jazz.

At the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., Mr. Brubeck had planned to study veterinary medicine. But a zoology professor saw how much time he spent in the music department and suggested that the young Mr. Brubeck change majors.

He worked as a pianist in clubs through college, developing a powerful boogie-woogie style, but his sight reading remained rudimentary at best. A dean called him a disgrace but allowed Mr. Brubeck to graduate after a professor pleaded on his behalf, calling him a budding genius.

In college, Mr. Brubeck proposed on his first date with Iola Whitlock, and the two were married in 1942. She sometimes wrote lyrics for his music and managed their growing household.

During World War II, Mr. Brubeck was pulled from the ranks of an infantry unit by an Army colonel, who asked him to start a jazz band to entertain troops on the front lines. The group he formed was perhaps the only integrated musical unit in the military during the war.

After the war, Mr. Brubeck did graduate work at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., with Milhaud and wrote and performed avant-garde jazz. Based in San Francisco early in his career, he worked for low pay and scrounged for dented cans of food that he could buy at a discount.

“We lived in a tin, corrugated one-room shack with no windows,” he told The Post in 2008. “We were so broke, God almighty.”

Just when Mr. Brubeck began to develop a following, he damaged his spinal cord and several vertebrae while diving in the surf in Hawaii in 1951. He said emergency workers in the ambulance described him as a “DOA” — dead on arrival.

After a few months, he recovered and continued playing, although he had residual nerve pain in his hands for years.

Realizing he couldn’t handle the burden of being the sole leader of a group, he reached out to Desmond, whose dry, lyrical style on alto saxophone was a bracing contrast to Mr. Brubeck’s vigorous approach on the piano.

[Sam Miguel]

^^^ Continued

Drummer Joe Morello joined the quartet in 1956, followed by Wright in 1958, forming a group that recorded dozens of records and found international acclaim. Despite the challenging nature of Mr. Brubeck’s music, with its unusual rhythmic patterns and sometimes unfamiliar tunes, his quartet had a huge following until it split up in 1967.

“You could hardly find a less likely formula for popularity,” Gioia, the author of “West Coast Jazz,” wrote in an e-mail. “Brubeck, by all definitions, was a fringe within a fringe. Despite all this, he managed to achieve a rare degree of fame and popularity. How did he pull this off? Mostly through the sheer brilliance and audacity of his musical vision.”

Mr. Brubeck began to write more symphonic and sacred music, then toured with a quartet that included baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. The original quartet had occasional reunions before Desmond’s death in 1977, and Mr. Brubeck often performed with his sons, four of whom — Dan, Darius, Chris and Matthew — became musicians. Another son, Michael Brubeck, died in 2009.

Besides his wife, of Wilton, Conn., survivors include his four sons and a daughter, Catherine Brubeck Yaghsizian; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Brubeck formed a new quartet, with which he toured until shortly before his death. Even in his final years, when he was physically frail, he exuded energy at the keyboard.

A solo piano recording from 2007, “Indian Summer,” won many awards and was considered one of his finest albums.

In 1996, Mr. Brubeck received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement, and he was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2009.

When he reached his 80s, Mr. Brubeck stopped traveling overseas. But if his jazz diplomacy could help unite superpowers, it could also bring families together.

In 1971, Mr. Brubeck gave a concert in Honolulu that marked, President Obama wrote in one of his books, the last time he ever saw his father.

When Mr. Brubeck received his Kennedy Center award at the White House in 2009, Obama recalled that concert and said, “You can’t understand America without understanding jazz, and you can’t understand jazz without understanding Dave Brubeck.”

[Sam Miguel]

Heat is on South Korean rapper Psy for anti-American rap

By Max Fisher, Dec 08, 2012 01:17 AM EST

The Washington Post Published: December 8

Psy, the South Korean rapper whose viral pop hit “Gangnam Style” has been viewed more than 900 million times on YouTube, participated in two anti-American performances about a decade ago, a story that finally trickled into English-language media this week. Although the K-Pop star quickly issued a public apology, the controversy could build, as Psy is slated to perform Sunday night at “Christmas in Washington,” the annual holiday concert held at the National Building Museum, with President Obama and his family in attendance.

The concert is an annual charitable event benefiting Children’s National Medical Center, and it is a longstanding tradition for the president and first lady to attend. As of Friday evening, Psy was still scheduled to perform, according to a publicist for the program.

"Kill those f------ Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captive / Kill those f------- Yankees who ordered them to torture / Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers / Kill them all slowly and painfully,” Psy sang at a 2004 concert in South Korea, held in protest of the United States and its military. The lyrics are not his — the song, “Dear American,” is by South Korean metal band N.E.X.T. — but the performance is in stark contrast to the smiling, good-natured pop star that Americans have been introduced to over the past six months.

“Gangnam Style” recently became the most-viewed video in YouTube’s history, and the song — along with its silly accompanying “horse dance” — has been largely inescapable since it starting dominating the Internet this summer and eventually became the subject of countless pop culture parodies and references.

The performances that have gotten Psy — the 34-year-old whose real name is Park Jae-sang — in trouble come from a time when he, like others of his generation in South Korea, was caught up in a wave of anti-Americanism, driven by complicated cultural and political circumstances, including the Iraq War and a 2002 incident in which a U.S. military vehicle struck and killed two 14-year-old girls walking along the side of a road outside Seoul.

“The song I was featured in — eight years ago — was part of a deeply emotional reaction to the war in Iraq and the killing of two Korean schoolgirls that was part of the overall antiwar sentiment shared by others around the world at that time,” Psy said in a statement released Friday afternoon. “While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted. I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.”

The 2004 concert was the second incident in which Psy expressed anti-American views. Two years earlier, Psy — who attended Boston University and Berklee College of Music in the late ’90s — walked onstage at a performance that protested the large U.S. military presence in South Korea. He wore an outlandish, glittery red costume and gold face paint. As the crowd cheered him on, Psy lifted a large model of a U.S. tank and, to cheers and applause, smashed it against the stage.

A Gallup poll at the time found that 75 percent of 20-something Koreans said they disliked or hated Americans. Many charged that the United States was making South Korea its pawn. Psy’s 2002, gold-faced performance was, for all its shock value when seen in isolation, nothing atypical of the year’s backlash. More protests erupted in 2004 because of South Korea’s support of the Iraq War and the widely held view that America pulled the country into the conflict against its will.

But there were some deeper cultural forces at work, including South Korea’s Sunshine Policy, a pursuit of rapprochement with North Korea from 1998 to 2008 that put the country at odds with the United States. A 2003 Congressional Research Service report warned that the policy had saturated South Koreans with political rhetoric and media coverage that was breeding anti-Americanism. And this was preceded by Korea’s transformation from a poor dictatorship reliant on outsiders to a developed democracy able to stand on its own, which led to what historian Jinwung Kim called “new stirrings of nationalism.”

In his apology on Friday, Psy mentioned the U.S. military he has previously spoken out against.

“I have been honored to perform in front of American soldiers in recent months . . . and I hope they and all Americans can accept my apology.”

[Sam Miguel]

The innovation of Dave Brubeck

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Dec 10, 2012 12:50 AM EST

The Washington Post Monday, December 10, 8:50 AM

It was a conversation representative of the era: Somewhere around 1969 or 1970, my dear, conservative Uncle Ray asked his son and me why we liked music by Jimi Hendrix and the Doors but we never listened to Dave Brubeck.

Uncle Ray never budged an inch on politics, but he was not doctrinaire about music. Eventually, he came to like at least a few songs by the Doors. And it saddens me that I never got to tell him how much Brubeck’s music would one day mean to me.

Brubeck, who died last week one day short of his 92nd birthday, wasn’t my first love in jazz, yet I have come to see him as a genius whose music gets more interesting as it’s heard again and again. I have a hunch that my own discovery of the power of jazz — my awakening came courtesy of Miles Davis in his “Kind of Blue” and “Seven Steps to Heaven” period — parallels the experience of so many who have come under its spell. It’s the exceptional American music that we will keep coming back to.

“Kind of Blue” led inevitably to an engagement with Davis’s brilliant collaborators: John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams. They are among the architects of our distinctly American contribution to music.

Yet that “distinctly American” idea points to something odd about the recent history of jazz that my uncle seemed to understand: For a long period into the mid-1970s, rock pushed American jazz far into the background. Jazz continued to win a wide following in Europe and Japan, but young Americans largely ignored it.

I didn’t pay much attention to jazz until I was a grad student in Britain. My friend Paul Taylor (later an editor and columnist at Reuters) took me one cold, foggy night to a small pub on the North Sea in a village called Seahouses, near his hometown of Newcastle, to hear a jazz band led by one of his friends. I was entranced. Later, my high school friend Jack Risko introduced me to “Kind of Blue,” and to Bill Evans’s work. I was hooked.

At that time, American jazz musicians faced a kind of exile. The celebrated tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon — he became well-known thanks to the 1986 film “Round Midnight” — left the United States in the early 1960s and spent some 15 years in Europe, where he said he found more love for jazz and less racism. He returned to the United States in 1976. His session at New York’s Village Vanguard was dubbed his “Homecoming” and was released under that name as an album.

And it was around then that jazz itself came home as Americans began to embrace it again. Contrary to some who contend that jazz is dying, I would insist that the past three decades or so have been dynamic and fertile. If you doubt this, consider the work of (among many others) Cyrus Chestnut, Roy Hargrove and, of course, Wynton Marsalis and his family.

Through all this, there was Brubeck. The paradox is that the popularity he won with “Take Five,” the tune everyone knows, and his 1959 “Time Out” album probably got in the way of the respect that he (along with Paul Desmond, his essential collaborator on the alto sax) deserved. Too often in the arts, the fact that someone is accessible is taken to mean that he isn’t truly creative. This is a very wrong idea, and it’s especially mistaken in the case of Brubeck, an extraordinary innovator in rhythm and meter. His music is now so familiar that we forget how daring he was as a composer.

He also defied the romantic image of the troubled and distant artist. It’s almost as if his being a generous soul, a loyal family guy, and a quietly and thoughtfully religious man — “Forty Days,” one of his best pieces, was inspired by Jesus’ wanderings in the desert — were held against him. Yet over the years, earthly redemption came his way. It turned out you could be both good and great.

“Art may not have the power to change the course of history, but it can provide a perspective on historical events that needs to be heard, even if it’s seldom heeded,” Brubeck said in a 2009 interview with Commonweal. “After all the temporary influences that once directed the course of history have vanished, great art survives and continues to speak to each generation.” Brubeck’s music will keep speaking.