Miles Davis - Fall

Happy birthday to Wayne Shorter, who turns seventy-five today. Here is one of my favorites of the many compositions that he crafted for his friend and bandleader Miles Davis in the 1960s.

As in so many of his songs, the underlying structure is rather long and not easily discernable, but the music never sounds awkward or forced. In fact it could easily fit into a "smooth jazz" playlist (God help us). Shorter has now outlived many of his colleagues (such as Davis and, last year, Joe Zawinul) and suffered more than his share of personal tragedy. Still he remains out there, a model of unshowy brilliance.

Photo: Tom Beetz

Birthday Greetings from Joe Cocker

This has been all over the Web, but sorry, I gotta post it anyway, cause it's so good.

They Might be Giants - Birdhouse in Your Soul

One of my favorite songs of the last twenty years. Hat tip to Atrios for linking to this vid and reminding me of it.

The nerdy quality of TMBG that gets the most notice is the quirkiness. Less noticed is another nerdy quality, that of being deeply knowledgeable about some topic. In this case, songwriting. These guys know what they're doing.

Wendy Carlos - Brandenburg Concerto #3: III - Allegro

Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the death of Bob Moog, creator of the eponymous synthesizer. While not the first synthesizer, it was the first to become well-known to the general public.

A big factor in that wider recognition was the 1968 release of Switched-On Bach. Here's the closing track from that album, which demonstrated once and for all that all those whirs and beeps could be used to actually make music.

It's worth pointing out that at the time, the Moog synthesizer could only play one note at a time, had no way of controlling the volume with the keys, and had no electronic memory for settings. Therefore what you hear in this track is the result of many hours of work, playing each part separately, changing all the parameters to get a different sound for the next part, and finally creating the crescendos in the final mix. That Carlos could produce a result that has all the sense of spontaneity found in the best music is remarkable.

Michael Tomasky on Obama's New Ad

Interesting take.

Louis Armstrong & Jack Teagarden - Rockin' Chair

Happy birthday, Jack Teagarden, who among other things seemed to have some cool friends.

Jimi Hendrix - Red House

I only got to see him play once, forty years ago this month. One of the things I can remember is that he played this song, probably in a version not much different from this one. Here it sounds like he's playing his usual Strat, but when I saw him he took off the Strat and played a Les Paul for this song, probably in a kind of homage to the humbucker-playing bluesmen he admired like Albert King. (If you think a Strat looks funny upside-down, you should see a Les Paul.) He stood on the wooden stage of the auditorium and knocked it out, aided by the same two Englishmen you hear on this version.