In memory of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, here’s a fellow New York type who left town too soon:
Take the H Train Jam
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Tag Archives: music
ALDLAND Podcast
ALDLAND is back on the podcast track after a month-long break. Holidays kept us down, but they could not keep us away forever, and so we are back to talk NFL playoffs and NFL coaching changes. Expect podcasts to be more weekly from now on.
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Winter Birthday Jam
Stephen Stills is one of my most favorite musicians and, like with Steve Winwood, I’ve enjoyed tracing his career through different ensembles and solo ventures and musical styles and phases. Somehow lesser-recognized today than bandmates David Crosby and Graham Nash, Stills was the guitar and vocal muscle that drove and textured CSN’s harmonies. Even though it eventually left him, relatively speaking, Stills’ songwriting muse burned bright in those early days too.
I could write another essay just on Manassas, my favorite Stills band, and their two albums, the first of which has been called “a sprawling masterpiece akin to the Beatles’ White Album, the Stones’ Exile on Main St., or Wilco’s Being There in its makeup.” Stills also played a critical role in bringing to life Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield’s Super Session, which, like Sgt. Pepper’s, “ushered in several new phases in rock & roll’s concurrent transformation.” Even before all of that, he had penned one of the most lasting 1960s protest songs, “For What It’s Worth,” for Buffalo Springfield. While Crosby and Nash were off on one of their collaborations, he got together with Neil Young for the underappreciated Long May You Run, a quiet offering that ultimately failed to hold Young’s interest, as Winwood and Blind Faith ultimately failed to hold Eric Clapton’s. Although the strength of his later solo recordings wavered over the years, I enjoy his self-titled solo debut, which coyly hides guitar offerings from Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. I also enjoyed his 2005 solo-comeback-of-sorts, Man Alive!, with its cameos from Nash, Young, and Herbie Hancock. In 2007, Stills issued one of the few truly insightful and valuable archival releases in recent memory, and if you’re still with me at this point, you’ll want to read more about Just Roll Tape.
For all this, though, there’s no better Stills winter record than 1975’s Live, a somewhat brief offering with an electric A side and an acoustic B side. (And by “winter record,” I mean a disc to which you repeatedly turn when you’re trying to use the CD player to kickstart your Blazer’s chronically dysfunctional heater core in January in Michigan.) Today is Stills’ sixty-ninth birthday. Here’s the meat of that A side:
Phish leads the Seattle Seahawks into the playoffs
It’s only January 3, but I can’t imagine anything else that could dethrone the following as the most ALDLAND video of the year. The marriage of NFL Films and Phish is a culminating moment.
(HT: Brett)
Winter Jam
Bruce Springsteen is a prolific recording artist and live performer, but if you had to limit yourself to just one of his albums, the decision process would be easy: it’d be his Live at Hammersmith Odeon without question. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Springsteen and the E Street Band than that album and today’s selected Jam, which includes a literal introduction, in particular.
Without thinking about it too much, the E Street Band might be the tightest loose band I’ve heard, and on this album, which spans two compact discs, they play every song as if it’s their last– and this was 1975! Since then, sadly, a few members of the band– Dan Federici and Clarence Clemons– have played their last songs. Thankfully, however, high-definition video of this concert, during the band’s first overseas trip, exists and brings the Big Man, the Boss, and everyone else to vibrant life. Here’s the door:
Multidirectional Jam
Two fine bits of musical interaction made themselves known this week, and because neither are, so far as I can figure, embeddable, I’ll offer links to both of them.
The first Jam is multigenerationally interactive, just not for you. Watch it here.
The second is an all time great, and you get to play along. Click here (and keep clicking).
Dia de los Muertos Jam
Following his death on Sunday, today’s Jam features the lately departed Lou Reed. I’ve already posted some of my favorite selections, and there’s an obvious choice for this post, but in the spirit of the week’s holidays, today’s selection is a celebration.
Reed’s wife, Laurie Anderson, published a short obituary in the East Hampton Star yesterday. It concluded:
Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.
Lou Reed, Rock & Roll Animal, Purveyor of the Perfect Day, passes on at age 71
Legendary American musician Lou Reed died yesterday on Long Island at the age of seventy-one. Rolling Stone called Reed’s first band, Velvet Underground, “the most influential American rock band of all time.”
I first heard Reed in high school when I was on the air at WYCE and someone from a local hippie shop phoned in a request. I can’t recall the album or the song, but I still remember the moment, because I was surprisingly and immediately hooked. By the time I was on WHCL and living with one of Reed’s modern-day disciples, VU’s Loaded was in heavy rotation, and, stretching traditional conventions about linear time, I’d tell listeners that Reed, a Syracuse grad, wrote “Rock & Roll” about that little radio station. In 2008, ALDLAND Podcast co-host Chris and I saw Reed in live performance at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
You can read about the power and reach of Reed’s influence on music across the web today. Here are a few songs and an original photograph for your listening and viewing remembrance: Continue reading
Utility Jam
The Detroit Tigers clinched first place in the American League Central division this week, and with that, a spot in the playoffs. For a variety of reasons, this season saw an increased role for utility player Don Kelly, and while a proper update on the full team as the playoffs loom remains forthcoming, today’s Jam, performed by the Don Kelley Band at one of my favorite music venues in the world, is a nod to Donnie K.
Mashed Music
Bandwagoning on the wild success that our dear leader AD’s most recent music post created, I’m contributing a mashup I recently found between George Gershwin’s famous piano concerto “Rhapsody in Blue” and Freddie Mercury’s (for Queen) hit single “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
I hope that most readers are familiar with one or both of these works and I hope that readers will comment on the connection to each piece and the new composition by itself (for example: “I’m really only familiar with Rhapsody in Blue and think that he nailed it” or “I don’t know either but the piano sounds nice”).
I’m rather familiar with each and think that in most parts he blended the two songs beautifully. I had a hard time determining if it would stand alone, as I was too busy collecting reference after reference (or, often, reference on top of reference: the melody from one piece with a baseline or voicing from the other).
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