Jazz Music.

Watched Ken Burns Jazz on tv earlier this year. PBS ran it over about 10 weeks.

Interesting stuff. I knew most of the players already, but not all. Had music by a lot of them already.

And now I have about 30 new CDs of them.

The film begins approx 1900 and runs to about 1975. I missed the first episode, so I didn't hear that earliest part.

Weeks later, I couldn't tell you much about the details, but good music.

New Stuff: Basie, Parker, Gillespie, Duke, Miles, Monk...other assortments. Good stuff, should have had some of this before.

Concerts I've been to

This is a newly created list, so it's incomplete, and incorrect, but covers a bunch of them:


There are of course other things...seen Brave Combo at least a couple more times that didn't involve tickets, so I can't list them properly...once was Lewisville TX, outside at some amphitheater, another time was outside at the Kennedy Center, DC.

At some point soon I will photograph the concert tickets and add them to the shows.
Click here
Later: OK, I'm missing like 3 tickets. There's a concert I've remembered and forgotten, no ticket there, and there were several shows that were free and didn't HAVE tickets. So this is pretty complete.

July 5 2021. And now the viewer is broken. As amazing as the Internet actually is, this sorta shit bugs THE CRAP outta me.

Young female guitar players

been You-tubin some the last few days...cause a friend pointed me at Joe Bonamassa on YouTube. OK, so I don't know who he is...he's good, but obscure. His better work seems to be when he's playing with someone else more famous and with better tunes. (Later: just found out that YT app is available on iphone from Google--yay! After Apple punted theirs)

and then I happened on Orianthi. and then Desiree Bassett.

Wow.

Neither of them is really old enough to play the blues, in terms of the negative life experiences that hammer your soul the right way. So their original "songs" aren't that great...so you're really there to listen to the guitar work. And that part is phenomenal, most of the time (example where it's not: Desiree plays Jeff Beck's "Because We've Ended as Lovers", pretty much note perfect, as though she had learned it from sheet music--problem is, that's supposed to be a really mournful, melancholy tune, and she plays it with way to sharp an edge, too upbeat)

I wanted to be that kinda good on guitar, but I'm not.

There are a few others...Ariel...Juliette Valduriez.

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Been therefore digging on a few other YouTube things...Clapton's Crossroads festivals, which I hadn't heard of before (with DVDs now on order)...Concert For George (which seems not to be available in full on DVD, but the whole thing is on YouTube? [although blocked])

Later: concert DVDs arrived, that is some nice stuff. Now to rip the audio and import into ITunes.

Free Music again

turns out there are a couple of classical music sites, I just learned...

MusOpen a bunch of these MP3s require either emusic or napster, which I don't want to mess with.

and

Classic Cat

Mind you, these two don't much include the great stuff we all know and love...what's available tends to be somewhat obscure.

Look up Rimsky-Korsakov. You don't get the entirety of Scheherazade, you get a couple of very short excerpts. Shubert: full Ave Maria, and a lot of others I never heard of (well, I'm hardly an expert, but I do like I reasonable amount of classical). And you apparently can get different versions of things: two complete Beethoven's Fifth's different in length by three minutes. Are these different arrangements, or different tempos?


Apparently Wikipedia can lead to some free classical...I haven't looked at that yet.

Jamendo and BeSonic continue to be favorites.

BAD music

back in 1993, Dave Barry published a story in which he declared "Howdy Hooty Sapperticker" by "Barbara and the Boys" to be the worst song ever.

Well, here it is:

Hooty Sapperticker

it's definitely bad.

and apparently here's the B-side of the 45 of that. it's an instrumental, so not as interesting.

Cobra

Who'd have thought?

more free online music

This is a fabulous site: Wolfgang's Vault

you have probably never heard of or seen it. apparently the creator(s) somehow have access to all of Bill Graham's concert recordings from Fillmore East/West and Winterland. (Bill's birth name was Wolfgang)

so this website is how you get to listen to them all. It is an unbelievable collection of absolutely classic performances, a few of which have been released on CD in the past, and are known masterpieces (i.e., Allman Bros at Fillmore East).

there is of course some junk on there, but the things that are great are superb. The concerts play as flash-movies, so you can't just grab an mp3 file to download. A few are available for purchase, I don't know what file format you end up with. If you can rip an audio stream, that's likely to be a better approach.

Free online music

Interested in free music? It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out how to get good stuff without breaking the law. I want stuff to put on my iPod, to listen on the subway.

It really bugs me that there's so much reported tendency for music or movie piracy. Napster, etc. Of course this occurs because the market is being violated.

For comparison: you want the new CD by [whomever], it's $15, because people are used to paying that kind of price, from 20 years ago when the actual production cost was higher. Now...that production cost is near zero. 20 years ago LPs didn't cost nearly that much, even though the same monopolies existed. But it's still high, because there's no competition.

Example: if you want to buy a CD of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you can get that for less than $5. Why the diff? Because the 5th is long out of copyright and into the public domain. Anyone can perform and record it. Many do, so there's actual competition, which keeps the cost low. Market forces at work.

So where the cost is high, it's because market violations (sanctioned monopoly) exist.

Don't want to pay that much? Find something else, don't pirate that one. Plenty of alternatives. Vote with your wallet.

Well, where should you look? MP3.com used to be a good place, until someone thought there was money to be made there, bought it, shut it down, and later re-opened with a lot of old stuff gone and prices that I thought weren't competitive.

My favorites are:

http://www.Besonic.com/, a German website, reborn a year or two ago, a year and some after a disastrous disk crash that wiped out eveything and their backups. Besonic has somewhat more traditional grouping/organization. I discovered this website by accident a few years ago, enough before the disaster that I was able to grab an interesting amount of stuff. Most of which was really weak on the ID3 tags, so I have a bunch of tunes with no info...and following their disk crash, no way for me to find out. You have to register to do downloads, but you don't get a big load of spam as a result, just the occasional email mentioning new things.

http://www.jamendo.com/, a Polish website (or maybe it's French), not nearly as much content, but some very nice stuff. Jamendo uses tag clouds as the grouping mechanism, it's weird getting used to. Downloads are via BitTorrent, no registration required. I'm listening to this stuff a lot right now, lots of nice work there. There's a lot of French stuff on here, but they aren't any better at rap than anyone else, which is to say, lau-zee.

Then do the right thing and send the artist some money, if you keep the stuff and listen to it. Nothing encourages the struggling artist like getting some cash :)


Both are highly recommended.

Update on Aug 3, 2007.

http://www.soundclick.com/ is also an excellent source. I had forgotten about this one...

Update on Oct 17, 2007.

found out about another one: Wolfgang's Vault, apparently this has many/most/all of Bill Graham's archive of recorded shows at the Fillmores, etc. OMG! You have got to check this out. There are some AMAZING shows on there: Genesis, Allman Bros, Derek & Dominos, Pink Floyd...most are only available for listening, but if you can rip an audio stream...