OK, if you skip over the unpleasant first paragraph of this article from today’s NY Times about President-elect Obama’s inauguration, things improve substantially in the 2nd paragraph. The first lady of soul, Aretha Franklin, is going to be a featured performer, and Itzhak Perlman (violin), Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Gabriela Montero (piano), and Anthony McGill (clarinet) will perform a new quartet by John “What? No trumpets?” Williams of Star Wars fame.
There are probably, oh, 800 billion CD review sites out there, but one that I particularly like is Black Grooves, a monthly site hosted by the Archives of African American Music & Culture (AAAMC) at Indiana University. They focus, as the title might suggest, on “gospel, blues, jazz, funk, soul, and hip-hop — as well as classical music composed or performed by black artists.”
The December issue includes the usual assortment of funky Christmas tunes (although, to be honest, I can’t for the life of me figure out how Bela Fleck and Spyro Gyra made the list). At any rate, Black Grooves covers good music and usually includes some in-depth commentary on the important historical releases of the month.
The page with canned links for finding holiday music (divided by recordings, scores and videos) is once again up on the music library homepage.
Greetings On that Note readers!
To help spread some holiday cheer I thought I’d tip everyone off to Amazon.com’s offering of 1 free mp3 download per day through December 25th. They’re all holiday-related and some of the recent artists featured include the ever-popular Mannheim Steamroller and the Barenaked Ladies with Michael Bublé (wow!)
It’s also the season when the music pundits start offering up their year-end best-of lists. One of my favorite indie-type online music magazines is offering its year-end best-of lists from regularly contributing writers. Dusted Magazine publishes daily (M-F) reviews of new music, artist interviews, and show reviews, covering a variety of genres. It was co-founded by Otis Hart, a fellow Middlebury Alum, to boot! End of the year reviews for 2008 and previous years are in the Features section.
Happy listening and reading!
My co-worker Jess noted that I’d written my previous two posts on music genres that I “wasn’t the biggest fan of,” and suggested politely that perhaps I write about something I was a fan of. Well. It does seem to be a radical idea, but I’ll bite…
I am a big fan of blues, electric blues in particular. And the greatest of all electric blues record labels has got to be, no, not Alligator, but Chess. As it turns out, there is a new movie, Cadillac Blues, based on the history of Chess and some of it’s most famous artists — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, and so on. I can’t wait to see it, actually (the NY Times praised Beyoncé’s performance as Etta James very highly), but until then I’ll probably get reacquainted with some of this incredible music. You might want to, too….
Folk singer and civil rights activist Odetta (Holmes) died Tuesday. I’m not the biggest fan of folk/protest music, but her voice was truly a marvel.
Here is the obituary from the New York Times and here links to recordings in our collection and in NExpress.