Tag: Something For Thursday

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Something for Thursday

 The other night I was looking for some new Celtic music to listen to, so I hopped on over to Google and searched for “Best Celtic Albums of 2020” (or maybe it was 2019). This brought up several articles, and in one of those articles I found mention of an album by a band called “Soulsha“. Soulsha hails from Boston, MA, and they aren’t just a Celtic band: they perform a fusion of Celtic and African music, which is a mix that just sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Can you imagine blending those two highly melodic and rhythmic musical heritages?

Well, Soulsha can imagine it. This is from their website:

Soulful call and response singing, masterful improvisation, traditional Senegalese and Scottish dancing and incredible energy make every Soulsha show an unforgettable live experience. Intricate rhythms, soaring bagpipe melodies, and New Orleans-infused horn lines come together seamlessly, and the joy of music rises above all differences, reminding us that we’re all in this together.

The band formed through a series of serendipitous meetings in the thriving and intersecting multi-cultural melting pot of Boston. Many of the members are virtuosic and highly esteemed tradition-bearers in their styles. In Soulsha, they saw a chance to bridge divides. The music they’ve created is a conversation between cultures that breaks down all the boundaries, moving the audience to abandon their assumptions as they lose themselves on the dance floor.

While it shares obvious roots with Afro-Celt Sound System’s electronic fusion, the funk-inspired sound of Soulsha puts tradition and interchange center stage, bringing the party energy of Rebirth Brass Band, and the cultural gravitas of masters like Malian Toumani Diabaté.

I listened to their debut album, Carry It On, and I found it an absolute delight. Their music just teems with energy, and the influences of both the Celtic side and the African side can be distinctly heard, and those two styles play together much more easily than one might think at first. Here is “Rhythm’s In the Melody”, a single from Soulsha’s debut album. Enjoy!

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Something for Thursday

“This is the weirdest three…combination of guys I’ve ever seen. One looks like a mechanic, the other one looks like he gets ALL the girls, and the other one looks like he’s book-smart. They just decided to get together, like, ‘Fuck it! We could all sing, let’s do it!”

 Here are four videos, all featuring the same song. But wait! There’s a reason for this.

Earlier this year (or maybe it was last year!), Sheila O’Malley started linking what are called “reaction videos”. In these, YouTubers record themselves in real time listening to something, usually a song, and they react in real time as they hear it for the first time. And it’s not just new music, new hits: these reaction videos often feature young people digging back into the archives, to listen to old music, older music from their parents’ or even their grandparents’ generations.

And they are wonderful.

These people are encountering this music with an open-mindedness that is stunningly refreshing; they are coming to each song as if it’s a new thing, and they aren’t judging or being harsh in their summations. They smile and they laugh and they groove along with the music that they are choosing themselves. They are exercising their curiosity in a way that quite honestly gives me just a little hope in this point in history where, quite honestly, hope is a wee bit hard to come by.

So here are four reaction videos, in which four different young people react to the Bee Gees and “How Deep Is Your Love”. They do occasionally pause the music to talk, they do swear, and the first guy is–gasp!–smoking.

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Something for Thursday (Diana Rigg edition)

 Actress Diana Rigg has died. She lived a long life (82 years) and did a lot of amazing work, but for me, she will always be Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo, also known as Tracy…who would, very briefly, be Mrs. James Bond. Rigg was the greatest Bond Woman in the long history of Bond Women, and she is a huge reason why On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the greatest Bond movie ever made.

Thank you for the wonderful work, Diana Rigg! Here’s Louis Armstrong with his signature ballad from OHMSS.

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Something for Thursday (Wakanda Forever edition)

 It’s strange about comets. Except for a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of comets come quickly, brighten our sky, and then disappear forever (or for so long it’s functionally forever). For the brief time they are in the sky, they are a wonder…and then they are gone, leaving us with only the memory of this wonderful thing that blazed amongst the stars for a short time.

That is how I keep thinking of Chadwick Boseman, a man of incandescent talent who blazed across movies and teevee for a few years…and now is gone.

Here is the End Credits suite from Black Panther, written by Swedish composer Ludwig Goransson.

Farewell, Mr. Boseman. You won’t be forgotten. How could you be? You shone too bright in the sky to be forgotten.

(image credit)

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Something for Thursday

 It’s funny about “one-hit wonders”: sometimes the hit is a genuinely enduring song, but other times the hit somehow endures despite being a very clear time-capsule piece that could only have come at a certain point in time. “Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners is clearly an 80s song, but there’s nothing about it other than its general sound that ties it to the 80s. But is there any other time than 1974 when “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas could have come out? I very much doubt it.

Here’s “Kung Fu Fighting”. Such a catchy tune that you couldn’t begin to get past the culturally-aware producers of today!

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Something for Thursday (Farewell, Leon Fleischer)

Pianist Leon Fleischer has died, at the age of 92.

Fleischer was one of the greatest American musicians of the twentieth century (and a chunk of the 21st!), and his story is one of consummate musicianship along with triumph to overcome and live with disability. Fleischer was already a pianist and teacher of great renown by 1964, when a neurological condition made playing with his right hand impossible. Fleischer didn’t lose a step, though: because one-armed pianists are hardly unheard of, there is a substantial amount of repertoire for them, including today’s feature piece.
Maurice Ravel, the great French Impressionist composer, was commissioned by an Austrian pianist named Paul Wittgenstein to write a concerto for him. Wittgenstein had lost his right arm in World War I, however, so Ravel wrote his Concerto in D for Left Hand. It’s an amazing, bravura work, with such impressive piano writing that it is never obvious that only one hand is playing.
Wittgenstein appears to have been a rather prickly individual; he clashed with Ravel about the Concerto, revising it himself before playing it, to Ravel’s displeasure. Later he commissioned another Concerto for Left Hand from composer Paul Hindemith, but Wittgenstein decided he didn’t like the piece, so he refused to play it–but he also owned the rights to it, so he never let anyone else play it, either…until long after his death, when Hindemith’s score was found in Wittgenstein’s papers. The work was finally premiered in 2004, more than 40 years after Hindemith’s death. The pianist who premiered it?
Leon Fleischer.
In the 2000s, even though he had a long career of left-hand piano playing, conducting, and teaching, Fleischer began undergoing experimental treatments in hopes of regaining control of his right hand. These treatments proved somewhat successful, enough for him to resume two-handed piano performance. In 2007 Fleischer was a Kennedy Center Honoree, inducted by President George W. Bush.
Here is Leon Fleischer performing Ravel’s Concerto for Left Hand in D Major.

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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Yeah, the usual disclaimer: a busy week full of activity has led to a day’s delay. I don’t have a great deal to say about this song, so just listen to it. This is one of those songs that takes you places, which is fitting given its title and lyrics. Here is “Midnight Train to Georgia”, by Gladys Knight and the Pips.

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Something for Thursday

I have to admit something: it took me years to warm back up to this song, after a college professor ruined it for me. She used a cover of it as the background song to a video she had put together showing photographs of homeless people. I cannot for the life of me remember the point of that video or what she was trying to convey to us, but it was a class about politics or society or…something. The class was called “Person and Society”, and I really couldn’t tell you what the point of the class was at all, these many years later. It was one of three classes Wartburg College had at the time that were required of every student, summed up under the label “Foundational Studies”. This class might have been about political expression…or…hell, I don’t know. All I really recall from this class is this godawful video, and the fact that one of our textbooks was a ranty volume by a guy named Dinesh D’Souza. (Yeah…I know.)
So yeah, it took me quite a long time to warm up to this song again, and when I did, it was to the original, by Bill Withers. It really is quite a good song, after all — too good to be ruined by a weird A/V presentation in a college class.
Here’s “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers.

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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

Yesterday was a pretty busy day in my world, as I was getting ready for a nice long weekend. Ahhhhhh!!!

It’s Independence Day Weekend, when we’re supposed to be celebrating America. In 2020 that’s…well, frankly, it’s a pretty tall order. The American brand is not having one of its best years, but it can at least be hoped that perhaps this year is something of an acceleration year as the country starts to again pivot toward the country it should be.
Anyway, here’s something purely American: Wynton Marsalis playing some jazz. It’s a piece called “Perdido”. Written by trombonist Juan Tizol, it’s a jazz standard that goes all the way back to Duke Ellington. I’m not always the best jazz listener, but the big band stuff from that era usually makes me happy, and Wynton Marsalis is, of course, a genius.

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