But ya know why there hasn’t been a ‘Great American Novel’, one with the sweep of Tolstoy’s Russia or Shakespeare’s England, or Dante’s Florence? Because it’s really hard to start with a metaphor and then find a story to build around it. And that delusion seems to me now to be (irony of ironies) quintessentially American… If you build it he will come. If we start with a cool idea, all we need to do is throw enough man-hours at it and POW! To the moon, Alice!

I have never seen a successful integration of rock n’ roll and classical music. The closest to the mark, in my opinion, was ELP’s ‘Pirates’. That’s ten minutes–about proper length for ‘prog’. It seems the longer one goes, the less successful the results.

I keep getting asked how the opera is going. Actually, I’m getting asked less and less because interested parties are sick of waiting. But Detroit proceeds apace. What strains credibility is the lack of audio samples. And that, Dear Reader, is the point of this post.

JUST ME AND THIS LI’L OL’ GUITAR

There is this myth and legend—which used to be true—that songwriters sat down in a room with their geetar and the producer and performer say, “Now that’s a song! Sign that boy up!” But that ended decades ago.

But I, in all my naivete, still feeling twenty years old, that we were back in the age of Hindemith and some old Germanic types with white flowing beards and a monocle, perhaps. I present Herr Professor with a large sheaf of score papers and he hears the score in his head, humming softly at certain particularly cantabile passages. Boy, what a moronic idea.

Today’s music societies are largely technically uneducated. I don’t mean that the way it sounded. Back in the day […]

Wow.Two posts about famous musicians in one month.

Beyond the sadness that accompanies any loss of life, I am neither surprised nor especially disturbed by her death. I have no idea what loss it is to the world (what she might have done and all that crap.) But in truth, when I think of contemporary artists who have died young (Hendrix, Parker) I’m not certain they would’ve done all that much beyond what they did. It’s always a shame when life ends so young, but it’s not necessarily a disaster for art.

But I am sad simply because, with that one record, Back To Black, Amy Winehouse was the finest female singer of the past two decades. Straight up.

RHYTHM IS WHAT MAKES GREAT SINGERS

What made her extraordinary was her sense of rhythm. All the greats have it. Note that great singers don’t always have the best voice. (If that were the case, all those American Idol winners nobody remembers would be fuckin’ geniuses.) The classic example comparison of great voice against great […]

Louis C.K. has done a bit for a number of years called ‘Hilarious’. Basically he talks about how hyperbolic everything speaks these days. Every joke is ‘hilarious’. Any event even mildly interesting is ‘amazing’. And then, of course, he spends five minutes giving an ever escalating series of penalties and tortures for offenders. Prog rockers? Epic, of course! But my pet peeve is ‘awesome’; which Webster’s describes as ‘inspiring awe.’

As Louis so rightly points out, if you start with everything on the top shelf, there’s no place left to go.

The thing that wears one down after a while, in any kind of modern music is the constant pounding. The lack of contrast.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

One reason I always jumped at the chance to play Cuban music was the huge contrasts. There’s no drum set, so the bottom is held down by a guy playing a double bass (typically this old thing called an Ampeg Baby Bass, which is made out of aircraft plastic.) And unlike pop music, the bass […]