Watch and listen:
Wow. Miles would be glad to hear this I suppose…
Pink Martini & Saori Yuki – Yoake no Scat
This is beautiful:
Pink Martini has two female lead singers – but when Saori had a hit with this one in 1969, they weren’t even born yet.
Thanks for listening.
Remembering the Wikiloops members meeting 2018
Here’s a nice video made by Navota:
So nice. Missing all of you…
Want to hear that last song again? Here you go:
List of musicians on that one is:
Thanks Navota, and thanks for watching.
Cody’s Tune – a remix on a remix
Got another remix on a remix on a song I remixed a while ago 😉 that’s how it works at the ‘loops, folks. Have a listen to Rob’s upload:
List of musicians on this one is:
As always, thanks for listening.
The way home
A fun jam with Martin and Shi:
List of musicians, so far:
As always, thanks for listening.
And as always, if you’re a musician yourself, consider joining and playing with us – it’s fun! 🙂
For Muriel (feat. Offfocus)
Here’s a fun track from fanne, Shi, Offfocus, and me:
Hope you like it as much as I do. And as always, thanks for listening.
If you’re a musician yourself: please join us and have fun at Wikiloops!
P.S.: a bit of background to this song:
For fanne, Muriel was his crush in high school, with unbelievably clear green eyes as he wrote in his template track. For others, it was the most beautiful girl in their grade school class (read all of this on fanne’s template track). Then Shi came and took it to the next level with her awesome story-telling lyrics. For me? Yes, there were Muriels in each school grade, in my class in primary school I had even two of them in the same class, one blonde, one with dark hair. I never took notice of them until my parents and teachers found out that I’m short-sighted. So I got a prescription and my first glasses – and fell in love with both girls.
Maybe it’s these stories which make the track so lovely… and of course Shi, and fanne’s wonderful composition, with Pat (Offfocus) on top 🙂
Thanks for reading.
Installing and testing Joe’s Wikiloops plugin
Today I was reading the Wikiloops Howto and Forum sections again to see how one can contribute back, and promote Wikiloops a bit.
And sometimes it’s interesting to do just that and to see what others have done already. I found for instance Joe’s (jmrukkers) WordPress plugin that way – so I downloaded and installed it right away.
Joe describes two ways it should work, like with a single line, or the id in brackets.
So let’s test that with his latest two tracks here. For “Fun Time Funk”, I’ll try his method 1:
Hey, that looks cool – I now see the Wikiloops player embedded in the new “Gutenberg” editor. Wow.
Ok, his second method, with the track number in a bracketed ID now:
Hmmm ok – that doesn’t update itself in the editor, but then it wasn’t tested in WP 5.x and its “Gutenberg” editor – the plugin page says:
Tested up to: 4.9.10
(and I’m on WordPress 5.1.1)
So I’ll see after saving the thing as draft, or after refreshing the page… and yes, that worked as well, tho the first method is maybe both easier to remember and more direct in its result – showing you the track right away.
Anyway, great work from my friend and fellow musician Joe; thanks a lot for that, man!
In case you want to see us playing together, we did that already, in one of last year’s video collaborations – see here:
So that’s Joe and me together with a few more friends, some of which – including Joe – I have met shortly after this at last year’s members’ meeting.
Again, thanks Joe, and thanks to you for reading, viewing, and listening.
Listen to the bass…
Stumbled upon some videos with killer bass lines again lately – and here are two three of them. First, a cute one (and females seem to like it because of the man depicted there) of singer/bassist/professor Esperanza Spalding, with herself as main actress:
Then, a duo. One of the greatest guitar players of all time, Joe Pass, but listen to Red Mitchell on bass on this one (which is again one of my most favourite songs ever):
Oh, and you probably knew already that Michael League from Snarky Puppy is a killer bass player also, didn’t you? Here’s some ‘making of’ of one of the songs from their latest album “Immigrance” which should be out right now:
Love that African polyrhythmic vibe of this one – the drums, the handclaps, everything. Oh, and the cats of course!
That’s all for now folks – and it’s all on my wishlist at the big dealer’s place…
As always, thanks for reading / watching / listening.
Mari Boine
A thread over at talkbass.com asked about favourite vocalists. I gave three answers (#27, #59, and #229) so far, naming a few which came to my mind.
As you can probably guess in case you know me or read these pages since a while, my answers were almost all more or less not very mainstream. And one of my most favourite still living artists besides my friends from Wikiloops is Marie Boine. I first heard her on Jan Garbarek‘s album “Visible World” with a song they called “Evening Land” (Jan Garbarek, Mari Boine) – but she had that before, and named it “Goaskinviellja / Eagle Brother”. Here she performed it some 10 years ago in Oslo:
So totally not from this world, hm? And at the same time this Sami singing somehow reminds me of American Indians, so maybe we could call those Sami the European Indians?
Anyway – when Youn Sun Nah was once asked about influences, she not only named Tom Waits but also Mari Boine. Who is awesome.
As always, thanks for reading / viewing / listening.
A song, older than me. And a new one.
I recently discovered “Cry me a river”, a song composed and first published in 1953 by Arthur Hamilton (see the song’s Wikipedia and JazzStandards pages).
And since Mr. Hamilton originally wrote this for Ella (yes, *the* Ella Fitzgerald!), here is her version of it:
In 1955, it was recorded by Julie London – and even if you’re younger, you might know her version from a movie (“V for Vendetta”):
Some friends of mine from Wikiloops, French guitarist OliVBee and also French singer marmotte also recorded a very beautiful version of it and uploaded it to Youtube:
Chord progressions cannot be copyrighted (for a bit of background in formation (in German) on copyright, cover versions, and so on, see an article in Sound & Recording for instance), so a bit later OliVBee uploaded a slightly changed version of it as “Tears Made Of Silver” onto the loops for people to get creative with these chords.
And then came Shi (from England), and she developed a story not about herself being sad like in the original, but about a missing girl called “Emily”. And then Wade (from New Zealand) played a beautiful sax onto it, finally making it irresistible for me (to not jump in).
I’ve shown it before on these pages, but here it’s again for comparison: “Looking for Emily”:
This track is embedded with the friendly permission by the creatives on wikiloops.com.
And the list of musicians on this is:
As always, thanks for reading, viewing, and listening.