Playlist for the Unpopular Music webcast for January 31, 2015

Well this is pretty much the show I had planned for last week, with a few of the more arbitrary choices replaced. Although instead of previewing the Bad Plus plays Science Fiction concert, I'll be reminiscing about it.

Unpopular Music - January 31, 2015 by Unpopularfred on Mixcloud

Also, while remaining "unpopular" there are appearances by Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and the Beatles.

The Bad Plus present Science Fiction at the Berklee Peformance Center, Jamuary 24, 2015

Here's an oversimplification of the difference between "classical music" and "jazz".¹

In classical music the performers are tasked with recreating a musical experience that has been recorded in a notated document for this purpose, whereas in jazz the performers create in the moment using some sort of predetermined framework as a jumping-off point.

In classical music, the performer transforms the prerecorded information into live sounds to the best of his understanding of the composer's intentions, bringing to life the music in the composer's mind at the time he wrote it down.² In jazz, there are various traditions to writing things down, from full fledged everything-notated-all-the-way-through, to some sort of "you play what you feel like when I point at you" approaches to all points in between.

Let's take Duke Ellington for example. It's obvious when listening to his music, there's a lot of stuff written out. But, if you've ever heard a recording of a rehearsal or recording session out-takes, you'll learn that things could change on-the-fly if a better idea came along. And there's always the spontaneity of the moment. For instance, at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Ellington determined that between the mostly written-out pieces "Diminuendo in Blue" and "Crescendo in Blue" there would be a "blues interlude" where Paul Gonsalves would improvise over the standard blues form for an indeterminate length of time. As it turned out, Gonsalves' momentum and the audience's frenzied reaction sustained this interlude for 27 choruses (or about six minutes).³

No. 1 song for January 27, 2015

looking out my kitchen window around 7:30 this morning

Isn't this a lovely day? by Fred Astaire w/ Johnny Green and his orchestra

Substitute snow for rain, of course. This is the version I heard (from the Brunswick Recordings) while walking home last night through the early bits of falling snow.

Number one for January 25, 2015

 

 

Carson McCullers describes the Eroica Symphony in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

This is one of those famous books of which I'd picked up a cheap copy somewhere intending to read "someday," only to have it sit around for a while before that day eventually came. While it's probably too lazy to equate McCullers' writing to William Falukner's in their depictions of time, and place, and language, I will anyway. But while I often admire and appreciate Faulkner's writing, I'm often not all that interested in what he's writing about, especially when it involves the precariousness of southern gentility, as in Sartoris and its related stories. Only after poking around the Viking Portable Faulkner a while until I came upon As I Lay Dying was I sucked in by its utter unusualness of story, form, content, structure, point of view, etc.

No Unpopular Music webcast for January 24, 2015

I arrived at SCATV headquarters only to discover that the building was closed due to the "inclement weather"

That akward moment

Oh, yeah, during last week's webcast, I start saying something regarding the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and then stop. It's merely that my brain and mouth were not exactly in coordination, and it was going to come out not so much as offensive, but just stupid and not what I really meant to say. I was going to mention that at the the time of Poulenc's composition and Garner's recordings, France was in its waning days as a colonial power in Muslim populated parts of North Africa. I was thinking of saying this only to point out that the violence doesn't exist in isolation, but was afraid it was going to come out as justifying the current violence with the past violence, which is something I assuredly don't believe. I abhor both terrorism and colonialism.

This a topic other people are better suited to discuss, and I'm sorry I brought it up.

Number One for January 21, 2015

 

To Miles, From Wayne on NPR's Jazz Night in America

From last year's Detroit Jazz Festival, Wallace Roney leads a jazz orchestra through some long languishing scores that Wayne Shorter wrote for Miles Davis. One was performed once, but none were recorded. A bit under-rehearsed, but still compelling. By the time the planned recording comes out it should be better, but what we have is still a great listen.

Cats for Net Neutrality

In the interest of keeping places like Boston Free Radio or Live365 as accessible as other Big Media sites, let me take a moment to an amusing moment where the group Free Press bought out some of the internet's most prolific "content providers" to protest for net neutrality at the FCC's Washington offices.

Read more about it here.

Webcast info for January 17, 2015

The SCATV compound is closed for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday so no new show today. Instead we will feature an encore of the May 10, 2014 episode that ended up not re-airing on Christmas Weekend.

(All "holiday" references pertain, of course, to Mother's Day)

Here's some interesting holiday reading just in case this is not enough.

Playlist for the Unpopular Music webcast for January 10, 2015

 Greetings from Boston, city of curmudgeons!! (or right next door actually)

Olympics in Boston, what could go wrong? We love giant infrastructure projects, building new stadia, the little inconveniences of hosting large media events, outsiders, and change.

Don't let Greg Louganis talk you into it. Especially in these days when it's possible for a man to give birth. Or let's just have a big pin-trading festival instead.

Unpopular Music - January 10, 2015 by Unpopularfred on Mixcloud

Anyway, enough curmudgeonry, here's today's playlist, after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music webcast for January 3, 2015

For your post-New-Year's celebrations, the first Unpopular Music webcast of the late-teens! ... and the last chance to announce Sun Ra saxophonist Pat Patrick as "the Governor's father".

Unpopular Music - January 3, 2015 by Unpopularfred on Mixcloud

Playlist, after the break...

Webcast info for December 27, 2014

photo from www.pazsnewyorkminute.com

No new show this week. I'm out of town and the SCATV studios are closed anyway. So Unpopular music will proudly present a repeat of the episode from May 10th. 

Update: It seems no show aired today. There will be a new live show next week, so please check back.

The playlist is can be found here. This program also features program notes. (I should do that again sometime)

Playlist for the Unpopular Music webcast for December 20, 2014

As threatened promised, a program of unpopular Christmas music. (Well some of it may not be actually unpopular, but at least it's, perhaps, less than ubiquitous.) Plus, a few more links than usual for your Christmas stocking.

Unpopular Music - December 20, 2014 by Unpopularfred on Mixcloud

Don you now your gay apparel, and rest ye merry after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music webcast for December 13, 2014

We have a kind of all over the place show today. The second hour features a set of some of my father's favorite recordings to mark what would have been his 100th birthday, so a bit more piano music from the Romantic Era that usual (not that that's a bad thing).

Unpopular Music - December 13, 2014 by Unpopularfred on Mixcloud

See the whole playlist after the break...

A welcome and triumphant return

One of my radio heroes, Charlie (of Busy Doing Nothing on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio stream) recently returned to the fiber-optic waves after taking a year or so off, and has quickly returned to top form with a show dedicated to the shopping insanity that consumes (no pun intended, but there it is) America all year long, but particularly in December.

Not everyone can segue from Philip Glass to Fannie Flagg without flinching (or causing flinching), but including this in a set that also includes Nat King Cole, the Monkees, Biz Markie, Hank Williams, Paul McCartney, motivational speakers, and an story about the racist packaging of frozen vegetables (among other things),  all while making a sharp sociological commentary, I can only hope to ever do something like this.

Bravo. Welcome back.

Playlist for the Unpopular Music webcast for December 6, 2014

So it's only December 6th, and I'm already fleeing businesses playing either post-Beatles Christmas song (ever grateful that George became a Hindu). You'll have no such trouble with this week's playlist, pretty much a jazz show as I'm not feeling terribly ambitious this week.


Swing along after the break...

Playlist for the Unpopular Music web cast for November 29, 2014

No Thanksgiving, Christmas, Black Friday, food coma, football or even Star Wars references in this show (I even regret referring to them in this sentence), just a relatively jazzy playlist after the break for the last Saturday in November.

Unpopular Music - November 29, 2014 by Unpopularfred on Mixcloud

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because an international cartel of executives have scientifically determined what shade of green you prefer.

An article by Derek Thompson from the Atlantic  looks into the ways the major media companies use Shazam, Spotify and other digital music services to quantify the audience's preferences, and use them in the marketing, and sadly, even the production of what he calls the "dispiriting sameness in pop music".

I encourage reading it as the article confirms several suspicions of mine. But, I'll break out a few points for comment. 

Playlist for the Unpopular Music web cast November 22, 2014

Here's the playlist for the first show of the non-squeaky chair era of Unpopular Music.

Unpopular Music - November 22, 2014 by Unpopularfred on Mixcloud

Video for today

DakhaBrakha is a Ukrainian ancient-to-modern group who are playing in Cambridge on Saturday. Here's a performance from Prarie Home Companion. Almost as entertaining as the music are the not impressed audience members (?) in the background, waiting for Garrison Keillor to hilariously (?) expound on potato salad or something wild like that.

Ticket info, and a few more videos are here.