Puck

A one-take music video par excellence by OK Go, directed by Brian L. Perkins. Booooooom asks,

Can we crown them kings of the one-take music video yet?

Hell yes.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Leonard Bernstein, early mass media star, gave millions of people a long string of sophisticated lessons in music. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Bernstein appeared on all three major television networks many times as brilliant educator and glorious composer, all the while and just off screen he was also a glamorous bon vivant. Bernstein was a man who lived large and looms large still in the musical consciousness of the United States, and the world as well.

From 1958 to 1973, Bernstein delivered four TV music performance/lectures per year, illustrated lavishly with the likes of the New York Philharmonic: the Young People’s Concerts series is still one of the longest-running programs on classical music. Earlier in the 1950s, he delivered for Omnibus a handful of performances that are considered among the finest of the so-called “golden age of television.” Omnibus was a dignified, mid-century monumental series hosted by Alastair Cooke that explored art, science and the humanities. Read the rest of this entry »

Booker T. and the MGs were the house band for Stax Records and provided the backbone for many a hit record. Here they in a performance in Oslo, Norway, in 1967.

Holy smokes, never seen a geetar fingered like this before. Go, Ronnie, go!

Music sales topped a record 1.5 billion units in 2009, and overall music purchases were up 2.1 percent. Then why shouldn’t the music industry be celebrating?

In 2009 sales figures released this week by Nielsen SoundScan, a decade-long trend continued: digital sales were up while sales of physical product, including compact discs, were down significantly. Though overall sales increased, most of these increases were in digital singles, which cost a fraction of an album. The biggest sales losses were in albums (both CD and digital), down 12.7 percent overall to 374 million.

via Turn It Up: Music sales for 2009 are up — but numbers are deceiving.

You can get the track from Portishead here.

Portishead – Chase The Tear from Mintonfilm on Vimeo.

When guitar player Dave Carroll travelled to Nebraska for a tour with his band Sons of Maxwell, he witnessed his Taylor guitar being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago.

The guitar was severely damaged and after a lot of communication he was told that United wouldn’t compensate him for his loss.

He promised the last United person he spoke with to make 3 songs and videos about the way United Airlines handles luggage.

via The Jazz Guitar Blog: United Airlines Breaks Guitars.

Here’s the first of three videos:

Nice fingers, man, love the chords.

When the Clash sang “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” I did a little jig. I’ve never had much use for the mop-tops. As time passed, and the only two good Beatles became dead Beatles, I figured the rest of the planet would give up on them, too.

I mean, we still have the Rolling Stones, and how many self-cloning sixties copy-cats do we need?

And then there was Paul McCartney’s pro-war, post-9/11 song, “Freedom.” (“I don’t know what came over me,” he later said. I do: he’s always been a jerk.)

Now, the biggest-selling album of the decade is by…. gods dammit! The Beatles. Could we have some integrated pest management, please? I mean, before things get ugly?

I’m amazed by people who have the ability to build a musical instrument of any sort. I’m gob smacked by instruments hybridized from existing ones or invented from whole cloth. I just stumbled upon a site that shares this amazement; it’s called Odd Music. But it’s not really the music that’s odd (though some if, frankly, is to me unlistenable) — it’s the instruments. There’s lots of MP3 samples of these different invented instruments.

Here’s my favorite (so far; I haven’t finished clicking everything clickable on this site) — the Penciliana, invented and played by Bradford Reed. (The guy needs someone to help him name his instrument, though, then again, maybe not; I don’t think he’s trying to sell this thing; he appears to have enough trouble and fun trying to wrangle it.

But I also want a Hapi Drum, a tuned percussion instrument that looks really easy to play and also like it would travel well (read: tough as hell). I also want a bamboo Maui Xaphoon (a Pocket Sax would also be nice) — these tenor-sax-reed using whistles sound amazing and are so affordable! Even though I’ve played B-flat clarinet and sax for decades, I’d get a C Xaphoon, as it’d drop right into a jam with guitar and keys players without having to transpose.

Maybe the most amazing thing on Odd Music, though, is the intrepid violin player, Jon Rose. Besides having some serious chops (check out his site), this Aussie’s been traveling around Australia for years playing the Great Fences. If you don’t know what Australia’s Great Fences are, you really need to see Rabbit-Proof Fence — the title says what the fences are (or were, they don’t work as intended and only corralled people, not rabbits) and the film has great music by Peter Gabriel. Here’s a very short example of fence playing by the amazing bow-master, Jon Rose.