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Posted by Li Robbins on Jul-13-09 at 10:22 AM
Is it my imagination, or are more women taking up the bass? Brandi Disterheft, for example, or the bassist featured on tonight's Canada Live broadcast, Esperanza Spalding. Esperanza means hope, and she had to have a lot, growing up on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks in Portland, in what people euphemistically describe as "economically deprived circumstances." She was poor. But not in determination.
From there to now...at 24 she's already played with people like Stevie Wonder -- and for Barack Obama at the White House. She's noted both for her bass playing, singing, and as a teacher (at Berklee, no less). As All About Jazz puts it, Spalding "might just be the kind of artist who will help bring jazz back to younger, more mainstream audiences thanks not only to her enormous talent, but also her charm and showmanship."
The performance you'll hear tonight was recorded at the Ottawa Jazz festival, and according to the Ottawa Sun:
"It was clearly a showcase for a new star-in-the-making. Throughout her 75-minute set, Spalding radiated sunny pleasure when performing, while her funky, bass-heavy improvisations kept the band, and the audience, on their toes."
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-28-09 at 08:10 AM
On Monday you'll begin hearing some changes to the Radio 2 schedule, and also to the Radio 2 website. On air you'll hear a new show hosted by Mr. Tom Allen each weekday at 2 p.m., called Shift. And there are a number of tweaks to when shows start and end (as you'll see if you click through that last link).
But the website is also having a little "refresh" (which makes me picture a computer surrounded by spa technicians -- massaging, maybe applying a little nail polish). The refreshed site will be "live" at some point Monday. But sometimes changes behind the scenes on websites aren't instantaneous, (all that buffing and polishing), so if there is any bumpiness as the transition happens, your patience is appreciated!
Continue reading "Coming Soon To A Computer Near You" »
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-27-09 at 01:00 PM
Still the best selling jazz album of all time, and still shiver-inducing -- that's Kind Of Blue, recorded in 1959 by an incredible group of musicians assembled by Miles Davis. Its sound, based on modes rather than loads of chord changes, and the mood that created, (moody! and exquisite) connected in a way that few single recordings do.
It has stood the test of time too -- August 2009 marks its 50th year. Noting that anniversary, Saturday on Inside The Music -- a documentary about the making of Kind Of Blue. Interviews include Herbie Hancock, David Amram, and the only extant member of the original group, drummer Jimmy Cobb. (Who also recently reminisced about the experience before a date at the Calgary Jazz fest).
Cobb is eighty now, and leading a band named after one of the Kind Of Blue tunes, the So What Band, which brings me to the concert: Canada Live is recording the So What Band performing the music of Kind Of Blue, and broadcasts the concert on July 13th.
Continue reading "Kind Of Blue -- Documentary, Concert" »
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-27-09 at 12:00 PM
SATO presents Alban Berg’s decadent swan song, today: Lulu, which was nearing completion at the time of his death in 1935.
The story was adapted by Berg himself from Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904), and tells of Lulu's steady decline from unfaithful wife to mistress to murderess to fugitive and prostitute. Yet she exudes a particular kind of attraction - Sir Andrew Davis, music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, was so smitten by the character and the score that he named his dog Lulu!
Paolo Pietropaolo is guest host for today's performance, which is a production from the Lyric Opera of Chicago and WFMT in Chicago.
For more, much more, about the opera and today's production, please continue reading:
Continue reading "The Ultimate Femme Fatale - Lulu" »
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-26-09 at 10:55 AM
Last night traveling through my city there was a low level buzz: "Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson." Everyone was talking about the news. Michael Jackson dying at 50 has an impact like...well, that's still to be revealed. But today the shock waves and analysis sure seem in the Elvis/Lennon category of response.
For better or for worse, news about his death has bumped stories like Iran off the front page of publications like the Huffington Post -- Jackson was a strange and fascinating and without question significant figure in popular culture, music, and dance. (Maybe especially dance...)
How do you feel about the current wave of intensity about Jackson's premature passing? And of course, about his music...
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-26-09 at 03:00 AM
When people talk about "the great American songbook" you probably think of someone crooning something like It Had To Be You. Well, call me irresponsible, but I think that jazz pianist John Stetch has stretched the boundaries of what's considered part of that canon. His latest recording is called TV Trio, and on it he does things with The Waltons theme you'd never dreamed possible.
Not just the Waltons theme, of course, but a whole bunch of TV themes mostly from the 70s and 80s -- Six Million Dollar Man, Love Boat, The Price is Right, Rocky and Bullwinkle, All My Children, Dallas, and more.
It's jazz, it's fun, and you can hear a live performance featuring this music tonight on Canada Live.
Continue reading "Jazzing The TV Theme" »
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-25-09 at 03:37 PM
Probably most of us have woken from a dream wishing we could somehow capture the sensation in waking life. The startling and incongruous things that happen: a friend from childhood shows up with a goldfish that turns into your boss. Stuff like that.
R. Murray Schafer decided not just to lie in bed thinking about it, but to do it. In 26 days he wrote a composition that reveals how dreams shift and mutate in such odd and unexpected ways.
Schafer says the piece, called Dream-E-Scape, makes us "witness one image, now another -- shocking, alluring, repellent, voluptuous, risible -- totally without consistency or order."
The premiere of Dream-E-Scape is broadcast tonight on The Signal. It was commissioned in honour of Schafer's 75th birthday, and was part of a four day Schafer-fest put on by the National Arts Centre.
Continue reading "Shocking, Alluring...Risible" »
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-25-09 at 03:00 AM
When the True North label signed Catherine MacLellan you couldn't be surprised. True North (the "Bruce Cockburn label") is very discriminating, and MacLellan is a singer-songwriter who is standout. And yes, her father was the great songwriter Gene MacLellan, of Snowbird and Put Your Hand In The Hand fame, who left this earth too soon. But his daughter is adding to his legacy.
"Roots music authority" No Depression posted a comparison of her True North recording, Water In The Ground, with Bob Dylan's latest. A really interesting review, (originally from Restless And Real) concluding by saying: "Catherine Maclellan may just have the key for what ails us. Highly recommended for the young at heart and pure of spirit."
Tonight Canada Live broadcasts a concert MacLellan did at The Harbourfront Theatre in her hometown, Summerside PEI.
Continue reading "One Of Those Voices You Never Tire Of" »
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-24-09 at 03:33 PM
Is a composition only a composition if it's written down? Is it a composition if an improvisation creates certain musical elements revisited in subsequent performances? These are some of the questions the Instant Composers' Pool Orchestra inevitably provoke. They're based around pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink, and tonight you can hear them on The Signal, recorded at the Guelph Jazz Festival.
In a way it's a question jazz has asked since it began. Think of Ellington, he wrote arrangements borrowing from his musicians favourite improvised licks. He also wrote "charts," as those jazz cats say, that were designed to feature the improvising strengths of his soloists.
Continue reading "Instant Composition" »
Posted by Li Robbins on Jun-24-09 at 03:00 AM
Once upon a time the day was celebrated with a bonfire and cannon shots, but on Radio 2 Fête Nationale Du Quebéc celebrations are strictly musical. (Wise, cannon shots tend to distort.) And this year Canada Live's Fête Nationale broadcast is proof of how multicultural music making in Quebec can be.
Three concerts, and dozens of cultural influences -- but all of it rooted in Quebec musical culture: First, the Brazilian-born Bia, now a resident of Montreal. (After living in Chile, Peru, Portugal and France.) You've probably heard her on Radio 2 Morning or Tonic -- her music seems to mix effortlessly with jazz, singer songwriter, pop. And her singing is pretty irresistible, whatever language she chooses.
Then it's Djoumbush and Warhol Dervish.
Continue reading "Happy Fête Nationale Du Quebéc" »
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Is it my imagination, or are more women taking up the bass? Brandi Disterheft, for example, or the bassist featured on tonight's Canada Live broadcast, Esperanza Spalding. Esperanza means hope, and she had to have a lot, growing up on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks in Portland, in what people euphemistically describe as "economically deprived circumstances." She was poor. But not in determination. 
