Category: videos

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Eliška Lenhartová

I presented Eliška Lenhartová before in this post as part of the Duo Françaix – now here she is alone, some three years after that previous video:

Wonderful, isn’t she? And looking at her fingers move along that guitar I wonder if some people were just born for certain instruments…

Thanks as always for reading, and for watching. Hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I did (and for me it’s always a pleasure to see and hear good musicians)…

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Just voices

The human voice is the ultimate instrument. Not only do you have it with you wherever you go, but its expressive capabilities seem to be just endless.

This was recorded some time ago, but listen to the young women and men of this choir:

The Parting Glass

I like this one even more. Gets me each time:

Black is the Colour of my True Love’s Hair

“And I love the ground whereon she stands”

Wow.

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R.I.P. Lyle Mays (1953-2020)

Read it from some of my friends and fellow musicians at Wikiloops first, then in other media: Lyle Mays, genius keyboarder and musician as well as a genius in maths and other sciences died two days ago. See the German and English Wikipedia pages about him, and the sad news also from Pat Metheny’s site.

It’s quasi impossible to give you a short overview over his works, but this for example is from him:

Lyle Mays & Bonnie Herman – Moses The Lawgiver

Awesome, isn’t it? And what’s less well known is that he and Pat also wrote a hit like this one:

David Bowie & Pat Metheny Group – This Is Not America (official video reworked)

So rest in peace, Lyle, and thanks for everything.

As always, thanks to you for reading, watching, and listening.

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Speaking about awards…

… which I actually don’t like that much, really – because how could you award arts? But in my last post I congratulated Esperanza Spalding, and at the moment it’s the time of the 2020 BAFTA Awards, and that in turn reminded me of a series which I’m currently watching (we’ll have season/episode 2.4 later today), namely “Keeping Faith”, starring Eve Myles (also known from Torchwood and other series).

That series won 3 BAFTA Awards, for best story, best actress, and best music, and each of these is well deserved in my opinion. Listen to Amy Wadge and to Laurence Love Greed in these ones for instance:

The series is fully packed with music of that caliber from start to finish – quite the hit factory. So here’s the honour they received for it in 2018:

I’m glad that I can watch that. Thanks to everyone.

And as always, thanks to you for reading, watching, and listening.

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Congratulations, Ms. Spalding!

Found this article today about Esperanza Spalding winning her 4th grammy, this time in the vocal category, for this album release of last October:

And I’ll have to say that this one was well deserved. If you make it through the list of her 19 videos I’m sure you will agree – pieces of art, all of them.

So this one’s for the singers. Needless to say that Ms Spalding is also a killer bass player both on upright as well as on electric bass. In fact she’s teaching both vocals and bass at Berklee…

As always, thanks for reading, and for listening. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

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Three random takes on ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’

The conductor of the orchestra in which I’m helping out sent me another piece via email – and this time it’s a real fun one as it seems. And with about 100 years of age I guess you might call it ‘oldie but goldie’. If you look up the title on Youtube and select three, it can be as interesting as this:

  1. Jazz Manouche example:

2. Older, more to the original ‘Foxtrot’ or ‘Charleston’ style:

3. Much slower, but swinging real hard on this Jazz Standard:

As you see, the possibilities on songs like this one are endless – although with my electric bass I can’t of course get anywhere near to what Ray Brown did here…

Really lookin’ forward to playin’ on that one 😀 What a nice idea! 😀

See also: English or German Wikipedia pages about this song.