Thinking Inside The Box
I was an odd little kid, about four-years-old, during the 1960s in California when my mom and dad got a new refrigerator. It arrived in a giant cardboard box. The box ended up in our living room and for a few weeks that summer (indulgent parents!) it became my private retreat.
When I receive my daily Google Alerts, I usually cringe when I need my name invoked in web properties beyond which I control because it usually means I’m dead again, or being accused of something that isn’t true.
Continue reading → The Difference in Performance: Interpretation and Improvisation
The Blues has lately become a “modern musical ghetto” for non-Blues performers like Cyndi Lauper and Hugh Laurie and their ilk who are bored with their current lot in life and so they take the next easiest route back to feigned admiration by “making a Blues album” as a one-off for fun. Hugh Laurie’s latest musical miasma landed on September 6, 2011 and I am absolutely confounded by his mock singing style and his cynical delivery. The guy cannot loft a tune, so why make an album? Why did Hugh Laurie think we’d want to pay $10.00USD for his musical masturbation in the public square?
Continue reading → Hugh Laurie: Pandering in the Blues Ghetto with Let Them Talk
The Deaf must now be allowed to interpret all live theatrical stage performances for members of their own community. For too long, Hearing interpreters have taken over the role of live theatrical interpretation when there is no such need for that facilitation today.
Continue reading → Why the Deaf Must Interpret for the Live Stage
Charlie Hunter is an amazing guitar player. He’s most famous for playing an 8-string guitar with John Mayer. Sometimes he plays a 7-string guitar. His latest album — Public Domain — is a ton of magical fun as you listen to Charlie take on all the old musical standards that are now in the Public Domain while simultaneously playing the bass line and the melody on a non-6-string guitar.
One of the most beautiful, but tragically haunting, songs ever written is John Prine’s — Angel From Montgomery — because it is steeped with a bitter love-gone-lost yearning that is universal, irrevocable, and palpable. The song is simple but harshly complex. You can play the song with four guitar chords — G, C, D and F — but there’s nothing easy about the joyous melody that leaps from those four chords.
Continue reading → John Prine and Angel From Montgomery in Performance
We love the Kinks, and we especially adore Ray Davies. Ray has been making music for popular culture for over 45 years. One of the more pristine songs Ray sings is “Waterloo Sunset” and watching him in performance of that song, over the years, tells us precisely what we need to know about longevity, historical station, and how celebrity singers must sustain their craft in performance over a decades-long career — and you do that by bringing something new to the song each time you sing it.
Continue reading → Ray Davies Sings Waterloo Sunset in Performance Over Time
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