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 9 Jun 2010 @ 09:10, by Unknown. Music
CALL IT CANADA
There's a land, lying North, to the West, of the Sea.
Made of ice, made of stone, flowered meadows, timbered trees.
Its briny coast lines, Niagara Falls, It's blue skied prairies and Rockies tall.
Its web of rivers, and great divide, gallons of sunshine and Northern Lights.
Chorus:
Its a land of peoples, its a land of Awe,
And they call it, Canada.
Its milk and honey, its fruit and wine, Its maple leafs, that brightly shine,
Its rights and freedoms, its rule of law, a democracy, for one and all,
Chorus
So teach the children, yes teach them well, and all the stories, do them tell.
of noble histories and just today's, that Faith may guide them, on their way.
Chorus
Words and music
by Alfred G. Jonas
(c) 2010 June Canada More >
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8 Jun 2010 @ 06:39, by johnjoseph. Music
Music Theory/Pythagoreanism/Numbers More >
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6 Jan 2009 @ 04:50, by Unknown. Music
Was just reminiscing about my grandparents
and wrote this tune
enjoy
ed
Grandmas Kitchen
Well I remember those Sunday dinners, at Grandpas and Grandmas Place,
Well the folks would come from miles around dressed in suits and fancy lace.
Well the men would sit at the table, and the women would hover about,
And us kids would scurry underfoot till to be sure there was a shout.
Chorus
Grandmas kitchen sure smelt good with them roasts and gravies too,
And Grandmas kitchen had more love than any place I ever knew.
Well the years they kept on passing, as the years well they will do,
and there was never no shortage of Sundays so the family it grew and grew.
And even in the days fore her passing, the clan would still oh gather nigh,
and Grandma fed us all till God took her up oh to the Heavens side.
Chorus
Grandmas kitchen sure smelt good with them roasts and gravies too,
And Grandmas kitchen had more love than any place I ever knew
than any place I ever knew..
Words and Music
By Ed Jonas (c) 2009
Canada More >
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 2 Nov 2008 @ 11:55, by jazzolog. Music
My epitaph? My epitaph will be, "Curiosity did not kill this cat."
---Studs Terkel (May 16, 1912-October 31, 2008)
A school of trout
passed by:
the color of water!
---Buson
People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.
---Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
The vote gets sung out in Ohio. Photo by Michael Gruber.
Maybe it was the Depression, and how all the people had to pull together to get us out of it. Maybe it was the New Deal, and all those agencies planting trees, building dams, cleaning up towns, cities, the countryside, encouraging art, literature, music, theater, movies. Maybe it was uprooted people, from the Dust Bowl and lost jobs, traveling around, bumming around, looking all over this great land for a new home. Maybe it was whole families of folk music collectors and performers: the Seegers, the Lomaxes, the Carters. Maybe it was radio, broadcasting jazz and country from small towns, heard by producers passing through, who stopped and brought them to the big cities for us all to hear. Maybe it was Woody Guthrie, riding the rails, writing down and singing out what he saw. Maybe it was World War II, making us all get together again to fight Fascism. After all that there was such relief, we just had to celebrate ourselves.
So it was that we kids, just entering school in the mid and late nineteen forties, got taught folk music in our classes. In my small city in western New York, where Sicilians and Swedes shared each other's very different cultures in order to manufacture furniture, we didn't sing that stuff every day. A few classes had pianos and teachers who could play them, but most of the time we had to depend on just one itinerant music teacher who visited each of our half dozen neighborhood grade schools once a week. But when she came she taught us the great American cowboy and folk songs those families of collectors had found in the mountains and prairies. We developed a pride in being American by learning our heritage that way.
By the early 1950s, folk music had gained such popularity we heard it on the radio. You could hear live performances like the Grand Ol' Opry and big bands and jazz groups from Chicago and New York and New Orleans at night, when AM radio carried a long way. But there were records on the juke box too. Probably most popular of all was a singing and playing quartet called The Weavers. Their records were on Decca, and they had big arrangements, with dozens of violins and choral singers, of tunes we had sung in 3rd grade. Wow! On Top Of Old Smoky...and then one we hadn't heard before, called Good Night Irene. And around that time, I heard them sing another "new" song, which was called This Land Is Your Land...and I loved it so much I was overjoyed to learn some people even wanted it to replace our National Anthem. More >
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 4 Aug 2008 @ 18:17, by koravya. Music
*-_*-*-_*
Trillium
www.trilliummarimba.com
Cerrilos, New Mexico More >
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 30 Apr 2008 @ 09:54, by jazzolog. Music
Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers.
---Alfred, Lord Tennyson
What is beyond, is that which is also here.
---Ancient Indian aphorism
The Emperor's chief carpenter, Ch'ing, once made a music stand so perfect that all who saw it marveled. When Lu asked him to reveal the mystery of his art, Ch'ing demurred, saying: "No mystery, your Highness, though there is something. When I am about to make such a stand, I first reduce my mind to absolute quiet. Three days in this condition and I am oblivious to any reward to be gained. Five days, and I am oblivious to any fame to be acquired. Seven days, and I become unconscious of my four limbs and body. Then, with no thought of the Court in mind, all my skill concentrated and all disturbing elements gone, I go into the forest to search for a suitable tree. It contains the stand in my mind's eye, and then I set to work."
---Chuang-Tzu
If you've ever been in a choir, particularly the church variety, you may appreciate Dave Walker's cartoon, from the UK's Church Times. [link]
On Saturday, in San Rafael, California, there will be a national competition you may not be aware of. It's the 24th Annual Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Festival. Actually this is the final contest, as there already have been 8 elimination contests held in cities all over the country. Now the winning groups there are being flown to Marin Veterans' Auditorium for this big deal over the weekend. It's interesting there are hundreds of these groups involved, and probably not too many are of the barbershop variety anymore. As you can see from these photos and group descriptions, the music is all over the place [link] , but you can be sure of one thing: most of these participants have heard of Phil Mattson and The Foothill Fanfairs.
A couple years ago I stumbled into the best argument I know for writing personal stuff on the Internet. I merely related the coincidental sighting of a name of a musician on a CD set a friend generously gave me, with an LP I had bought years earlier. The name Michele Weir connected me to somebody name Phil Mattson, then I began to find out things about him, and finally I thought somebody somewhere might be interested in this so I wrote about it. [link] What followed here, elsewhere I post, and in emails has been a continuous flow of messages from people who studied and performed with this great teacher. Most recently I heard from someone named Roy Turpin, who happens to be a therapist now out in California (isn't everybody?) and he has provided me a rare opportunity.
A month ago Gene Puerling died. His passing went largely unnoticed in the media, but those of us who love acapella singing know he formed The Hi-Lo's in the early 1950s, and then Singers Unlimited a decade later, and we mourned appropriately. Phil Mattson appreciated the Puerling genius, which was a style and technique completely original, and had the brilliance himself to begin teaching it to young people. Well, I suppose some folks must have thought he was crazy to attempt it...because certainly those of us who also loved Puerling thought such singing clearly was impossible---even where there it was on records. It really was impossible, because Gene began to experiment with multi-tracking and eventually had 4 singers sound like 8, then 12, or a whole choir. Phil's challenge may have been tougher, because he used real people...and they were kids. More >
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 5 Apr 2008 @ 20:29, by jhs. Music
The other day I finished a conversion from a 'normal' guitar to a fretless one, giving me the inspiration to consider anew some unresolved questions:
- whereas the ability to 'classify' is the hallmark for human intelligence (some schools using it as its actual definition), continued use appears to result in a degrade of the original ability to perceive what was classified).
The most dramatic example is human language, of course. Count Alfred Korzybski was going so far to base insanity in general upon the misuse of identifying (literally) an actual object (thing) with the word that is representing it. (see [link] )
Earlier this year I was experimenting with a new rundown to "remove the bias on perceptions". The results were astonishing and clearly demonstrate that language is just one example of self-imposed limitations and the problem lies deep in the Being's loss of the ability to differentiate perceptions.
But back to the 'fretless guitar': playing with frets only allows for playing combinations of the Western tone scale (if tuned to usual standards). Of course, one could detune the entire guitar but that would result in yet another closed framework of sounds. Like painting only with 7 colors in 3 or 4 shadings. On the other hand the modern guitar works exceedingly well the way it is. Going back, at least for the experiment, is quite a feat. Forces to listen carefully instead of just playing mechanically.
On my long, long list of actual perceptions (much much longer than Hubbard's confused arrangement of 57 perceptions) is the perception of the archetype of a person. Which is another perfect example of a lost ability even amongst most of those who think of themselves as experts, for example in the field of 'Orishas'.
Resetting the classification and 'refinding' it from scratch provided a great way to enhance perceptions.
Now I gotta get back to practice the guitar for some months (years?)...
oh well, hope my hands&arms don´t fall off... More >
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 21 Mar 2008 @ 19:52, by jewel. Music
Prince wrote this song of songs for Matika. There is supposed to be an amazing story behind it. Tamar used the lyrics for it as the finale' song in the Rooftop Serenade event we put on in the summer of love 2005 on the rooftop of S'Amuser and on the street, literally stopping traffic!
"No longer can I resist (no..) the guiding light (guiding light)
The light that gives me the power to keep up the fight
I couldn’t be more satisfied (no…)
Even when there's no peace outside my window
There's peace inside
And that's why I can not longer run
Love thy will be done..."
And this is the continued Quest.
And this is the eternal Promise.
Love Thy Will be DONE.
To choose this, to know, gno, this - aint that what it's all about?
In order to do that, there must be a continued Point of Choice, that we move eternally back forth towards,
and reset IN... for that is our making.
More >
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 28 Dec 2007 @ 16:03, by judih. Music
musicians coming together to hear ancient rhythms resound More >
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 21 Jul 2007 @ 11:21, by jazzolog. Music
Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time---that is the basic message.
---Pema Chodron
Awakened, I hear the one true thing---
black rain on the roof of Fukakusa temple.
---Dogen
I should be content to look at a mountain for what it is, and not as a comment on my life.
---David Ignatow
On the set of Shall We Dance, 1936, are dance director Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire, director Mark Sandrich, Ginger Rogers, George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin and musical director Nathaniel Shilkret.
Saturday morning, and I'm delighted to read the cover story of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review. Garrison Keillor writing about George Gershwin. I've neglected to report how wonderful I thought Garrison was in the Robert Altman movie about his radio show. I had put off seeing it because Prairie Home Companion can get too cute at times, and I thought a cast of Kline and Streep and Tomlin and Harrelson might be too great a temptation in that direction. And I've heard Keillor personally is pretty aloof and out there, in his own world...so I thought probably this movie is going to be painful.
Besides, for those of us who grew up in front of a huge radio that was bigger than we were---with glowing, radiating tubes in the back that looked like a Flash Gordon outer space city---how many times had we gone to the movies to see an adaptation of a favorite radio show? Yuck! How many were any good? The Shadow? The Lone Ranger? The Fat Man? Arthur Godfrey? A wonderful voice comes out of that dumb guy? Most were about as flat as a Lux radio version of a movie.
But, except when Meryl Streep tries to loosen him up a little, Garrison Keillor is wonderful in the movie. In fact, he makes great fun of himself as someone totally out in his own world. And he nails radio when he tells Lindsay Lohan---who also is wonderful---that nothing ever ends in radio, nobody gets old, nobody ever dies.
But of course the kind of music on the show---oh god, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly singing Bad Jokes is worth the price of admission...and by the way, The Behind-The-Scenes feature on the DVD may be better than the movie---I say, the music ain't exactly Tin Pan Alley. Tin pans galore, but we don't hear In The Still Of The Night. So why does anyone think Garrison Keillor should be reviewing a new book by Wilfred Sheed about Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Arlen, and Kern?
It's probably because, like me, Garrison grew up in the '40s and listening to radio, so what has come to be known as The Great American Songbook is imprinted in our neurons. If we're walking through Central Park with a girl, and Dancing In The Dark begins to play, we may have to turn our walk into a dance that will be legend in the minds of anyone who sees us. Those songs do that to people. They still do it...maybe more than ever. Many rock singers just have to try an album...like jazz players want that one with strings. Opera singers too...and while it used to be horrible to sit through, some of them are starting to get it. I heard Renee Fleming sing You've Changed the other day...and I had to nudge Billie Holiday over in my mind to make room for her.
So Garrison, like Guy Noir, has blues in the night in his sinews. He can set 'em up, Joe, with the rest of us. The rest of us who have heard a tune on the juke box...a tune so devastating there was nothing more to do but get up off the stool, reel toward the door, and out into the lonely night. Maybe she'll be there. More >
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