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I’m reading The Uncool by Cameron Crowe right now. This book, which came out last year, is pretty much an answer to the question: “Hey, Crowe, we know that you based Almost Famous on your own life experiences as a kid, so why don’t you tell us the real story?” And I’ll have more to say when I finish the book, but here’s a passage that really stuck with me already: “Take It Easy” hit the airwaves a few weeks later, like a blast of California sunshine. The band was called Eagles. (You were not supposed to call them the Eagles back then.) TheDown the rabbit hole….

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Back before The Six Week Gap, I had started a series of posts in this category exploring the work of Japanese composers. I think I only lost three of those posts, but those were all the posts in the Japanese Composers series, so I guess now we’re just going to start over. Yay! [bangs head on desk] Japan is a fascinating culture in just about all respects, but musically as well. It has its own music traditions that date back thousands of years, but since Japan’s opening to the West in the middle of the 19th century, the influence of WesternDown the rabbit hole….

Tuesday Tones! (The title of the music series over a bit of music score.)

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Well, if you remember back to before the Great Functionality Disaster that ate six weeks of content of mine, I was in the midst of a series of works composed by Japanese composers. And I’m going to get back to that, but for now, here’s an old favorite of mine. Why am I choosing this one? Because of a certain sonic effect in the third movement! Yes, it’s relevant to something I’ll be posting in the near future. Here is The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. (This is a very fine performance, by the way, but what appears to beDown the rabbit hole….

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With this new format on this site, I’m experimenting more with Featured Images and such to make the front page a bit easier to follow…but anyway, I don’t have a lot of time because we’re off in a few minutes to go see a REALLY BIG TRAIN. So in keeping with that, here is my favorite train song of all time. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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As I continue working through this site’s new look and functionality on the back end, I suppose it’s time to figure out how posting music looks and works here. I haven’t listened to this in quite a while, but it’s always a delight to come back to: the ballet “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. The opera is one that to this day I’ve never heard, but it’s still a mainstay on the international repertoire, even though full stagings are infrequent because the opera’s complexity and scale makes it expensive to do. Ponchielli is almost entirely knownDown the rabbit hole….

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Jessie Montgomery’s atmospheric and cyclical work “Rounds” is up this week. The piece, for piano and strings, takes inspiration from poet TS Eliot: Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines : At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline.Down the rabbit hole….

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One of my favorite James Bond theme songs is Gladys Knight’s title tune for 1989’s Licence to Kill. Both the film and the song tend to be underrated, but I think both are fantastic. The Licence to Kill song starts with the same horn riff that opened the song to Goldfinger, an homage which necessitated royalty payments to that song’s creators. But Gladys Knight’s singing is the real star of the show here. She has one of those big voices that can fill whichever room she’s in, and fill it here she does. This is one of the best of all Bond songs.Down the rabbit hole….

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Here’s something fascinating: an entire album comprising a ballet written by a prominent rapper! RZA is the leader of Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop collective that has been around for over thirty years now. That is, I admit openly, the extent of my knowledge of RZA. Hip-hop has never been a musical genre to which I have paid much attention, though not out of dislike in any way. I’ve found, pretty consistently, that when I am exposed to hip-hop in any extended way, I find myself intrigued by it and respecting it. So why haven’t I explored it? Well…time, mainly. IDown the rabbit hole….