A revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Now we just need for Commander Cody to reconstitute the Lost Planet Airmen.

This is a beautiful time of year for flowers and rejuvenation. So what better time to post two of my favorite saddest songs.

Some of the images in this video do evoke a chuckle or two.

And John Prine.

Gerard Vanderleun posts unusual, beautiful and interesting things at his site, American Digest. This is one of them.

Opening act was Otis Taylor. Great blues, rock and “trance blues.” Here’s his version of Hey Joe. Ann Harris, on fiddle is a gifted musician and performer.

They set up Robert Randolph Presents the Slide Brothers. Randolph is a virtuoso on the pedal steel guitar, coming from a musical tradition in black Pentecostal churches called “sacred steel.” The concert featured Randolph and three older virtuosos, men who he looked up to.

The clip below is from 2002. There are clips on Youtube of last night’s performance shot with iPhones, but this clip best captures the joy of his performances.

In the late 1960s, the cultural divide was defined, at least in the media, by the hippies and the “hard hats.” The latter were blue-collar working people (rednecks to NY media).

So Merle Haggard through down the gauntlet with this song:

Which was answered by this:

He’s not for everyone, but Tom Waits is a truly unique performer. It expires 1/19/2013

The full episode is here.

Watch Tom Waits on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

No one ever accused Cocker of phoning it in.

This was the first jazz cut I ever connected with, waaay back when. What stands out now is that Brubeck the pianist essentially plays percussion on this song.

Written by Louis Prima, made famous by Benny Goodman and now performed with exceptional spirit by a Japanese girls’ school band.

HT: Susan Gertson

I’ve linked to singer Rana Farhan before, but came across her video yesterday. I’m normally bored by the visuals but the imagery in this one is fascinating.

Andy Williams was my parents’ music, playing on the Hi-Fi years before WiFi.

I used my iMac — the one I use only for photo and video editing — to put music on my mother’s iPad. So the music collection is Williams, Sinatra, Mel Torme and so on.

For some reason, from time to time, it will launch iTunes spontaneously and start playing this tune. Andy Williams, dead at 84, a very fine voice indeed.

The video is a bit hokey, but had the best audio quality.

The Ventures’ Walk Don’t Run was the first album I ever owned, bought at the base exchange in Wiesbaden, Germany. This clip is from 1998.

From the BBC Jazz 625 series, March 19th, 1965.

Bill Evans fans will be happy to learn:

Eight days after jazz pianist Bill Evans opened at New York’s Top of the Gate in October 1968, his manager let a determined college student tape the trio. The student arrived early on Oct. 23—lugging a 50-pound, two-track Crown recorder and four pricey mikes—and he left with 90 minutes of near-flawless music. The tape was heard only once on the radio—and then forgotten.

On Tuesday, the rare material will finally be released on “Bill Evans Live at Art D’Lugoff’s Top of the Gate” (Resonance)—a two-CD set that rivals Evans’s revered Village Vanguard recordings for Riverside in June ‘61. The unearthed music is frighteningly vivid—like being seated at a table on stage amid the musicians.

Today, Evans is a cult figure among jazz fans. Easily the most exquisite pianist of the 1960s, Evans redefined the piano trio after departing the Miles Davis Sextet in late 1958. Painfully introverted and sublimely subtle, Evans during this period performed with his forehead inches from the keyboard and his mouth slightly agape.

Sir Paul McCartney wasn’t always the gentle liberal. Unreleased versions of the song Get Back had a decidedly anti-immigrant point of view.

“Who what that black man? Don’t dig no Pakistanis, taking all the peoples jobs.”

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.

Ronan Relimun, was a Puatarican, working in another world.
Want it thrown around, Se patiha mohican, livin’ in the USA.

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged.

Pretty Ado Lamb, was a pakistani, living in another world,
Want it thrown around, don’t dig no pakistanis, taking all the people jobs.

Etc.

Listen to an audio version at the link.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Why does it make you cry (or at least sit up and listen)?

…”Someone Like You” that has risen to near-iconic status recently, due in large part to its uncanny power to elicit tears and chills from listeners. The song is so famously sob-inducing that “Saturday Night Live” recently ran a skit in which a group of co-workers play the tune so they can all have a good cry together.

What explains the magic of Adele’s song? Though personal experience and culture play into individual reactions, researchers have found that certain features of music are consistently associated with producing strong emotions in listeners. Combined with heartfelt lyrics and a powerhouse voice, these structures can send reward signals to our brains that rival any other pleasure.

Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an “appoggiatura.”

The LA Times tells how Tony Bennett’s famous song was divisive 50 years ago and still is.

“Thanks to Tony Bennett, people have been experiencing the magic of San Francisco for 50 years no matter where they are in the world,” Lee said in a written statement announcing the festivities. “The song reminds us of why we love our city so much and when we are away, it calls us home.”

At least two people, however, are all but guaranteed to spurn the noontime chorus: the men who together dethroned the onetime official song of San Francisco, who stopped those little cable cars from climbing halfway to the stars, more than a quarter-century ago.

That’s when then-Supervisor Quentin Kopp — who described “I Left My Heart” as “a schmaltzy jingle,” the fault of the “hippie-love movement” and unworthy of the city it aimed to honor — introduced a resolution to instead make the theme from the 1936 earthquake movie “San Francisco” the official song of Baghdad by the Bay.

Read the whole story. (Given San Francisco’s silly politics, I think their song should be “It’s a Small World After All.”)

The article notes that Los Angeles does not have an official song. True, but if you watch a Laker’s game you’ll hear Randy Newman’s “I love LA” played to wild enthusiasm.

Most do not realize Newman was making fun of LA. Sample lyrics:

Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man
He’s down on his knees
Look at these women
There ain’t nothin’ like ‘em nowhere

Century Boulevard (We love it)
Victory Boulevard (We love it)
Santa Monica Boulevard (We love it)
Sixth Street (We love it, we love it)

I love L.A.
I love L.A.
(We love it)

A lovely moment. This was near the end of Desert Storm.

Maggie’s Farm has collected video performances of

…the famous aria O mio babbino caro, sung by the little manipulator Lauretta to her dad. “Daddy dearest, I’ll have to die if you won’t let me go out with Rinuccio anymore.”

The trick of it is to sound like you really want to twist Dad’s heartstrings. If you can sing like these ladies to your Dad, I’m sure he’ll let you do whatever you want. Here’s the bake-off:

Follow the link to watch the videos.

They’re all divine to me.

Mark Steyn interviews the daughter of Irving Berlin for a touching, fascinating look at the man who wrote White Christmas.

Listen here.

WSJ:

Sitting at a chic wine bar in the Flatiron district, Rana Farhan lounges back in her chair—a cup of hot black tea in her hand on this balmy August day. “It’s very hard to take classical Persian poetry and make it sound like Al Green or Billie Holiday,” she says in her husky voice. But this has been the Iranian jazz singer’s pursuit since 2005, when she stumbled upon an intoxicating and utterly fresh musical combination: singing the exquisite Persian verses of mystical poets like Rumi, Hafez and Omar Khayyám to the rhythms of cool American blues, jazz and soul.

Her latest album, “Moon and Stone,” is an expressive tribute to soul music. “I’ve been listening to a lot of Teddy Pendergrass and Otis Redding lately.” Through her raspy Iranian accent, she adds, “Oh, and Sam Cooke. I love him.” On Saturday, Ms. Farhan will be celebrating the release of her CD with a performance at Caffe Vivaldi here, followed by a tour in the coming weeks with stops at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles and Yoshi’s Jazz Club in San Francisco.

While Ms. Farhan has been a renowned musician in Iran for several years now, it was not until 2009 that she grabbed the attention of the international scene with her sultry jazz song “Drunk With Love.” The song was prominently featured in the heart-wrenching Iranian movie “No One Knows About Persian Cats.” The film, which won an award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, tells the story of Iran’s underground indie-rock scene.

Sung passionately in Farsi, “Drunk With Love” is from a Rumi poem that celebrates a sensual—even erotic—passion for the divine: “Oh love . . . the king of kings has gotten drunk, / Get up, grab his curls and pull him near. / Every thought that comes into my heart speaks of the Lover, / I’ll put my life before him, I want to kiss him and fill his mouth with gold, / face like a rose, voice of a nightingale, / I want to fulfill all his desires. . . .”

Hear her sing it.

She didn’t just sing. She opened a vein on stage.

A charming goodbye.

Another highlight.

Phoebe Snow is best known for Poetry Man but I’ve always had a soft spot for her version of Sammy Cahn’s Teach Me Tonight, a wonderfully crafted song from 1953, which benefits from her respect for lyrics and her voice, a precision instrument.

She gave up her career to care for her brain damaged daughter, who remained mentally a child for 31 years, dying in 2007.

The Jazz stamp designed by Paul Rogers.

My old stomping grounds gets a world-class concert venue.

…Miami Beach’s New World Center, the home of the New World Symphony. The space was designed by Frank Gehry, who, Ross writes, “is at once deeply attuned to classical music and keenly skeptical of its surrounding culture.”

Gehry collaborated with the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas to create a space that they hope will “take away the barriers that invisibly seem to stand in the way of so many people entering into the world of classical music.” Here Ross discusses the New World Center and Gehry’s work.

Slideshow here.

Heather MacDonald writes about the potential and the challenge of broadcasting classical music into movie theaters.

On January 9, the Los Angeles Philharmonic broadcast a live concert into 450 movie theaters in North America, becoming the first orchestra anywhere to do so. The main conclusion to draw from this venture, which will be followed by two more broadcasts this season, is that Gustavo Dudamel, the orchestra’s 30-year-old Venezuelan conductor, really does deserve all the hype lavished on him. As a spokesman for classical music, Dudamel is, quite simply, adorable—unapologetically enthusiastic and seemingly unaffected by the media storm that has swirled around him since he climbed onto the Los Angeles podium two years ago. Yet the broadcast also unwittingly revealed the limitations of filmed orchestra concerts, which must be overcome if the full potential of this effort to spread Dudamel’s magic is to be realized.

Where to point the camera?

…management’s inexplicable stumble [came] in directing how the concert would be filmed. Once Dudamel left the cramped backstage area and walked to the podium, the camera suddenly forgot that he was the only reason that movie audiences had come to the theater that day. Rather than concentrating on Dudamel’s conducting, the camera focused overwhelmingly on close-ups of individual musicians. It darted dizzyingly from one face to another, punctuated by the occasional upward swoop to Disney Hall’s sculptural ceiling. But a close-up of a symphony musician conveys nothing essential about the music being performed. His facial expressions are inadvertent, the product of physical exertion in producing sound, rather than an intentional registering of emotion. Even when the particular musician has been selected because a melodic line is emanating from his section of the orchestra or he is performing a brief solo, the incessant close-ups impede a listener’s understanding of a piece rather than expand it.

The challenge of turning music into film is much greater for a symphony concert than for an opera, since the visual elements of an orchestra performance are muted and the deliberate theatrical elements missing entirely. Thus the temptation to create false visual drama by an obsessive attention to an oboist’s fingerings or the intricate design of a French horn. (Rock concerts are obviously much more theatrical and thus camera-friendly, as Stop Making Sense, the great Talking Heads movie directed by Jonathan Demme, demonstrates.) Yet there is inherent drama in a single individual’s standing alone before a large body of musicians and trying to realize his understanding of extraordinarily complex music.