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 […]

I just happened to look in the paper last Wednesday and look who’s in town? Milton Nascimento! So off I go to Jazz Alley to see some live music. Which happens for me now… oh, the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’ comes to mind.  So why drop everything for this particular guy? Well, that’s the whole point of this little essay, now isn’t it?

Well, first off,  the word ‘legend’ is now something of a joke due to overuse, but Nascimento is truly that. I think it’s fair to say that he is to Brazilian popular music what Miles Davis was to jazz: a guy who maintained the highest level of musical integrity, reached a vast audience far beyond his home genre and who was able to really incorporate a number of other genre’s holistically into his work as he went. And to me—it’s that last part that makes Milton totally ‘prog’.

I first encountered Milton in 1980 […]

I remember reading a while back about studies in human compatibility based on ‘smell’. Apparently, members of the opposite sex are attracted by smell. It’s a dirty little secret (no pun intended) that this overrides the higher faculties. People will be attracted to potential partners based on their smell because (apparently) the smell communicates a lot of potential info on your IQ, strength, health, etc; in other words, stuff that really contributes to compatibility.

And though Coco Chanel rises from the grave to object, from an evolutionary perspective, the key benefit of slathering on eau de whatever is that the smell will mask your natural odor and thus make you acceptable to a wider array of partners. Of course now that we have on-line dating, we can mask who we really are without everyone else having to endure Axe Body Spray. But I digress.

TEMPO COMPATIBILITY

It’s taken me a long time to realise that there must be something like this in musical courtships—as well as ongoing relationships. And I’ve decided that […]

I understand that the biggest objection people come up against re. Detroit is the ‘opera’ voice. We’ve all done it in the shower.

Figaro! Figaro!

…and so on. I mocked that whole deal in my song ‘Time’ from

Just listening to Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto. Coincidentally, there’s this pretentious guy from the New York Times on the radio who has the snotty ones to rank The Ten Greatest Composers Of All Time!. What a prat. (And note my envy. He’s getting paid to do something I do all the time. But I’d never have the snotty ones to rank them. At least not in public. Unless I was getting paid, of course.)

But then it got me thinking about losing a few pounds. Because the next thing on the radio is a story about how America has the fattest people on the planet. (Curse you BBC! Thou enabler of all things ADD!)

So we’re all fat, right? OK… everyone but you.

And the reason we’re fat is because our bodies were not genetically designed for all the abundance we have at hand. By now we all get that, even as we reach for that next Ho Ho. We’re wired to look for that sugary goodness. And it’s so easy to […]