Tag: music

Finding Joy in Music

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Yesterday afternoon we went to two events. This is the report of the first: a concert at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica of Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard.

First, the venue… This was my first time at The Broad Stage. It was built in the last three years to be the performing arts center for Santa Monica College. It is moderate size, perhaps 450-600 seats in a pleasant, moderist building. Inside it is all warm blond woods and curved surfaces, with a main floor, a few mezzanine boxes, and a small balcony with a few boxes. We had a balcony box, and it had good sight and sound lines. About my only complaint with the building (other than the high-priced snacks) was that there was an occasional acoustic echo of the music.

Turning to the music: As noted above, this was a concert of Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard—both modern jazz musicians. I’m not a big fan of modern jazz. I find it at big rambling with no regular rhythm. But it is pretty in its own sense… and what made the afternoon even better was that my wife loved the music. It was worth the afternoon for the smile on her face.

The first half featured the Branford Marsalis quartet: Branford Marsalis on saxaphone, Joey Calderazzo on piano, Eric Revis on bass, and Justin Faulkner on drums. The music was modern jazz—I have no list of songs as I didn’t write them down. Marsalis was interesting to watch. Mostly, he let his band have fun. When they were jamming, he would walk to the back and just listen. As his portions came up in the music, he would walk up, play them with gusto, and then go back to the back and let the band shine again. The fun here was watching the musicians. Caldarazzo really got into the piano music, tapping away and hopping along. Revis was a bit more staid on the bass, but did have a nice solo in one of the songs. The fascinating one here was Faulkner on drums. I especially enjoyed how he used every portion of a wire whisk to make music. Blanchard joined Marsalis on stage for the last song of Marsalis’ set.

The second half featured Terence Blanchard and his quintet: Terence Blanchard on trumpet, Fabian Almazan on piano, Brice Winston on tenor saxaphone, Joshua Crumbly on bass, and Kendrick Scott on drums. Again, the music was modern jazz: pretty, but not as rhythmic as I’m used to. The real standout here was Winston on saxaphone—he gave Blanchard a run for his money. Visually, the quintet was less interesting. Both the pianist and bassist were a bit more subdued. The drummer started out more sedate, but there were numbers where he was throwing his entire body into the drumming, which was interesting to see.

Is this the type of concert I would go to again. Not alone. However, just for the joy it brought my wife, I would.

Upcoming Theatre, Concerts, and Dance: As soon as the show ended, we got on Santa Monica Blvd and headed east to our next show, “Glory Days” at the Lillian Theatre at 8pm. That review in a bit. April 9 will bring the Renaissance Faire. April 16 sees us out in Thousand Oaks revisiting “The Producers” at Cabrillo Music Theatre, with “Lust N Rust: The Trailer Park Musical” at the Lyric Theatre on April 17. April 23rd, which is during Pesach, brings the last show of the current Colony season, “The All Night Strut” at the Colony Theatre. April 24 was to bring “God of Carnage” at the Ahmanson Theatre, but the Hottix sold out in ½ hour… so we may try to get rush tickets (for they are not selling rear balcony in advance). The last weekend of April brings another concert: (this is a concert heavy year, it seems): Brian Stokes Mitchell at the new Valley Performing Arts Center. May starts with our penultimate Pasadena Playhouse production, “George Gershwin Alone“, on May 7. The weekend of May 12-14 will bring the “Collabor8 Dance Festival” at Van Nuys High School, which is always excellent. The third weekend in May is currently open, but I expect that to change. The last weekend of May brings “Cabaret” at REP East on May 28 (note: “Dear World“, which was to have been at the Lyric Theatre, appears to have been cancelled). June begins with “Year Zero” at the Colony Theatre on June 5, with the rest of June being lost to Confirmation Services at Temple (now a maybe), and a college visit trip (but who knows — we might go see “Always Patsy Cline” at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville). Lastly, July should hopefully start with “Les Miserables” at the Ahmanson on July 2 (pending hottix), and continue with “Jerry Springer: The Opera“ (July 8, Chance Theatre, pending ticketing); “Twist: A New Musical” (July 16, Pasadena Playhouse, ticketed); “Jewtopia” (July 17, REP East, ticketed); Dolly Parton (July 22 or 23, Hollywood Bowl, pending ticketing); “Shrek” (July 23 or 24, Pantages Theatre, pending ticketing); and “The Sound of Music” (July 30, Cabrillo Music Theatre, ticketed).

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Friday News Chum: Digital Music, Crafting, Cookies, and Atlantis, Oh My!

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Friday lunch time. You know what that means. Time to clean out the news chum links:

  • Technology End of Life. An article on the death of the DVD, combined with another article I read somewhere but can’t find today on the death of the CD, prompted some musing on disappearing technology—and the longevity of technology. Look at vinyl records. I’m still able to listen successfully to records manufactured in the 1930s and 1940s. Cassettes are known to be poor, although I’ve had some hold up for over 25 years. CDs? For all their superior technology, the only ones that might last are the manufactured ones. The CD-Rs supposedly have a very short shelf life (although I haven’t had any die on me yet). Same is true for DVD-Rs. The upshot of all of this is that those Super-8 movies and VHS tapes of your wedding will last longer than that CD or DVD. Further, our music collections are increasingly all digital—meaning you better have backups and backups of backups, as well storing them in non-proprietary convertable formats… as well as praying that the next revolution doesn’t mean that your converted MP3 sounds like crap. Oh, and as for your music device, I fear the day the iPod Classic goes away, but we all know that day is coming. Ten years is a lifetime for any modern technology.
  • Knitting Your Brow. The LA Times has a nice piece on how yarn shops are trying to make a comback after the knitting craze crashed. Crafting comes in crazes. Back in my college years, I remember when needlepoint shops were everywhere (this was good, as I was into needlepoint at the time). They then got pushed out by the knitting shops. You could find skeins and skeins of knitting yarn, but canvases and DMC were harder to find. My sister-in-law, Sheri, is one of those folks that love knitting. The next craze to come in was quilting—in fact, my wife is at the Glendale Quilt Show today with a friend. We’ve run all around Southern California for the Quilters Run. What’s the next craze that will kill the Quilt shops? Who knows.
  • Losing Your Cookies. As noted above, fancies come in waves. The NY Post is reporting on the next food fancy: macaroons. Evidently, cupcakes are so yesterday, and the almond paste cookie is now in. This makes me happy, as macaroons are gluten-free. Just as long as they are better than the yucky Manaschevitz Pesach macaroons.
  • What’s Lost is Found. They may have found the lost city of Atlantis, in a marsh in Spain. Funny thing is, it is just where Plato thought he parked it. He had just misplaced the stub where he wrote the information.
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Contemporary Jewish Music

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

This morning I was futzing around on Amazon and iTunes, and got to thinking about contemporary Jewish music. I grew up on Debbie Friedman’s music, and (unfortunately) there aren’t going to be new albums. So I started looking at some of my other collections (the five Ruach albums, a Sounds Write sampler, and an Artists Booking International sampler) to see if I might identify some new artists to explore. Some of the artists I found are more familiar to me than others. So, I figured I’d post a little poll, even though I’m sure most folks aren’t familiar with all these artists…

ETA: Facebook friends, please remember: You can vote in this poll. You just need to comment first, logging in with your Facebook ID to Livejournal, which creates you a quasi-LJ account. You could also create your own LJ account (free) by visiting the account creation page.

ETAA: If you want to investigate any of these artists, SoundWrite/Transcontinental Music is a good place to start. Just search on the artist’s name. Here are some direct links: Visions, Dan Nichols and E18ghteen, Julie Silver, Beth Schafer, Jeff Klepper, Sababa, Josh Nelson Project, Rick Recht, Doug Cotler, Peri Smilow.

ETA3: Yes, I’m familiar with Craig Taubman (and Cindy Paley as well), and I even have some of their albums. However, I find their music aimed a little too much at the family audience. Of course, feel free to suggest specific albums to prove me wrong.

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Sad News – Debbie Friedman

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

According to the Jewish Journal, singer and composer Debbie Friedman, who was hospitalized and in critical condition due to a respiratory problem, passed away this morning (ETA: updated story).

Debbie Friedman’s music was a staple of my Jewish musical catalog going back to my camp days in the 1970s. My condolences to her family, and they can take comfort in the fact that she has made a contribution that will live on.

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Used Bookstores and Used Music Stores

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

If there’s one thing I love, it’s a good used bookstore. Happily, one of my favorites made Bookstore of the Week at the LA Times today: Brand Bookstore. Brand Bookstore is just a few doors down from our optometrist, and has a wonderful selection of books, and a reasonably good selection of used LPs (include a pretty good selection of used cast albums — that’s where I picked up the album listed in my music, for example, as well as musicals like “Blitz!” and “A Dolls Life”, the music from the TV series Fame, the final Weavers album, and a obscure Big Daddy album.

I have another favorite used bookstore: Cliff’s Books in Pasadena. Cliff’s is around the corner from the Pasadena Playhouse, and practically across the street from Vromans (one of the largest independent bookstores in Los Angeles). Cliff’s has a very eclectic and large collection… and is open to midnight! We would often wander their aisles before the Playhouse. [I’ll note that while researching this post, I uncovered a new used bookstore: The Battery Used Books in South Pasadena.

It is important to support these establishments: the used bookstores, the independents. This is especially true these days, where we’re losing the big chains left and right (Barnes and Nobel has closed in Encino, and Borders is closing in Westwood Village). If the independents and used stores aren’t supported, they close (or at least close their storefronts), leaving us at the mercy of the chains. Let me give an example. Jerry Blaz was a long-time contributor to mail.liberal-judaism, the mailing list I used to run. He had a used book store (“The Bookie Joint”) on Reseda that closed. He’s survived by moving to the Internet.

As a last item on bookstores, let me mention another favorite independent. When we hit the Steve Allen Theatre, we love to have dinner at Fred 62 on Vermont, and hit the wonderful independent bookstore Skylight Books just a few doors down. I’ll also mention Books 5150 in Chatsworth, not that far from our house. This is a used bookstore tucked in the back of a shopping center.

Of course, when I go to a used bookstore, I don’t just get books. I often look for used LPs and CDs. I thought I’d mention a few of my favorite stores for used music shopping. The 800lb gorilla (well known to the Berkeley and San Francisco folks) is Amoeba Records. However, their Hollywood location is a pain to get to. If I’m on the westside, I like to go to Record Surplus on Pico—I’ve been getting used records their for years: $50 can get me 8-10 albums, many of them the obscure folk, rock, and cast albums I enjoy. Out here in the valley there is CD Trader down on Ventura in Tarzana and Second Spin, also on Ventura but in Sherman Oaks. Near home there is Orphaned CDs, but I find them to rarely have anything interesting in their stock. One place I’ve always wanted to explore, but never have, is Canterbury Records in Pasadena, near the Pasadena Playhouse.

Perhaps I have such a love of music and music stores because I haunted record stores in my youth. Growing up in West LA, with my parent’s office at Wilshire and Barrington, I was in walking distance from two great stores: Music Odyssey, which had new records downstairs and used records and pinball upstairs, and Licorice Pizza, which always had the newer stuff. My college days were when Westwood Village was a busy place, with multiple record stores including Tower Records, Warehouse, and Penny Lane records. [and let’s not forget Westwood’s bookstores, Pickwick (later B. Dalton), University Books, and A Change of Hobbit, in addition to the UCLA Bookstore, which is the only survivor, combined with the B&N at Westside Pavillion, which didn’t exist in my UCLA days]

So what are your favorites (in LA, if you live here, or whereever you live)? What is your favorite independent bookstore? Where do you go these days to find used books or used music?

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Has The iPod Ruined Music?

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece this morning on whether the iPod has ruined music. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to put it—for those are those that believe that compression (as in MP3s or AACs) ruins music. What the article posits is that the iPod has ruined the listening experience.

The basic premise of the article is this: In the “old days”, you couldn’t carry your music with you (or if you could, you could only carry a limited amount with you). Thus you would coordinate special times to just sit and listen to your albums. You would listen to them, you would read the album artwork, and you would savor the music. He talks about how listening to music used to be a concerted sonic and emotional event, and that rather than being a problem, the inconvenience was part of the whole point. You had to create special time to listen to your records, you had an involved process to listen to the songs, including thumbing through your collection, putting the record on the turntable and then setting the needle down with the utmost care. But as for today, he believes that the ease with which we can hear any song at any moment we want no matter where we are (and often for free) has diluted the very act of listening, rendering it just another channel on our ever-expanding dial of distractions.

I’m going to disagree.

First, he’s blaming the wrong culprit. It wasn’t the iPod or iTunes that did this. The whole move away from the listening experience started with the cassette, which gave your music (as opposed to a DJ’s selection) the portability it never had. LPs don’t work in cars or while jogging. The cassette gave birth to the Sony Walkman, which started the devaluation. We then went to the CD, which improved the quality of the sound, but made things even more portable. It was easy to take your CD collection to work; you couldn’t do that with an LP. We had CD readers on computers (rarely did those computers that had cassette storage use the cassette to play music). So the iPod/iTunes are only the next generation of music portability.

So let’s phrase the question a different way: Did music portability destroy the listening experience? Perhaps for some, but I think the 1950s and 1960s “Hi Fidelity” techno-experience was a Playboy advertiser’s fantasy. People like music while they do things; the rhythms help settle the mind. We’ve had this ever since the days of Top 40 radio.

In fact, the iPod has made me appreciate my music collection more. As my collection grew, I found that I was listening only to perhaps 10% of the over 1500 albums I had. I was forgetting all the great music, and the undiscovered music, elsewhere in my collection. But thanks to being able to put my entire collection on my iPod (currently nearing 20,000 tracks), I’m able to listen on shuffle, and regularly rediscover music. I can now claim to listen to my entire collection, and I know (thanks to the iPod) that I’ve listened to every track in my collection at least once in the last year. Yes, it is on in the background when I work, but I also listen as I exercise and I drive the van. I regularly rediscover and enjoy my music.

So, what about you? Did the iPod “ruin” your listening experience? What are you listening to now?

P.S.: Now Facebook, that has ruined the experience. With LiveJournal, I can share with you the music I listen to as I write these posts. Facebook doesn’t seem to want to encourage sharing the knowledge of what you listen to.

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Mobile Music

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Driving home tonight from working out with my iPod playing, I got to think about the music in my life…

I started getting into music when my brother died, and I got a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. I started then recording records and making custom reels. I soon got a cassette player (and old Craig), and quickly switched to cassettes. The cassettes continued for many years. I remember a Zenith player I adapted to work in my first car. I remember taking cassettes to camp in a briefcase. The collection grew until it filled a wall. I got portable cassette recorders and used them for years, even after I had switched to CDs for the house.

Then I discovered how to record CDs. Soon, I was converting my vinyl to CDs (and converted most of my collection, recording everything again). Portable CD players became what I listened to. I got a car with a CD player, and then a 6-CD changer.

Then I got the iPod. Suddenly, it was rip time again. This time, in addition to all my CDs, I was getting new (old) records and ripping them straight to the iPod. It is amazing to think that a cassette collection that took a whole wall morphed to a CD collection filling a wall… and now fits on a device that fits in my shirt pocket.

Technology is amazing…

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