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Category Archives: General

Only on stage at the AMA

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There are two primary occasions when I consciously pay attention to pop music. The first is on long road trips, when I get tired of whatever CDs I dragged along, and I flip to whatever radio station I can pick up and try to catch up on trends (this stuff comes up really often in conversation). The other time is during award shows, which I really like despite hardly ever agreeing with the outcomes. I’m far from an expert on popular trends, but I know what my temporal lobe likes, and it’s not usually what ends up winning.

Anyway, one positive thing I can say about award shows is that it provides some pretty unique musical opportunities. I happened to catch one brief part last night, the only thing I was really interested in hearing, and it was Alicia Keys (stunning as always), performing with Queen Latifah (who’s busy staging a silent comeback this year with a new album release), and soprano Kathleen Battle. They tore up the stage, and the range of talent was impressive. Whoever conceived of it is pretty brilliant in my book.

Catchy, random tune in my head

That Apple MacBook Air commercial. You know, the one with the envelope and the crippled piece of shiny aluminum. All judgments on the value of that machine aside, I do happen to find the song, New Soul by Yael Naïm, incredibly catchy. It surprises me, and I don’t even know what its genre “label” would be, but the marching melody is humoresque, and her voice is sweet. Plus there’s something fun about any song in which part of the lyrics go, “Lala La-La, Lalala La-La, Lala LaLa Lala LaLa LaLa La La Lah.”

Waltz For Debby

There’s a short list of jazz standards that I haven’t ever picked up. I’ve heard most of them, and they’re good, but none were so compelling to deter me from more important acquisitions such as nearly every Mingus and Monk released. Among those were Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, an excellent album that I picked up earlier this past summer when friends of mine who are newer to jazz discovered it in a record shop and ended up loving it. I’m fortunate enough to have seen Brubeck perform live, and while I know the album well, I’ve never owned it. Of course I’ve since remedied that situation.

More recently, I’ve finally decided to purchase a standard CD issue of the Bill Evans Trio’s Waltz For Debby. There are numerous versions of this album in an already extensive and excellent body of work from him, and though this is another album I know and enjoy, I’ve never bothered to own it for some strange reason. I encountered it on a friend’s recommendation while working in Georgia many years ago, and most recently I was reintroduced to it in the gold CD version while at a regional audio conference. And even though I pick it up every time I’m in a local shop (invariably there are used copies available), I always find other treasures that usurp its priority. But with a local coupon in hand and an unbeatable final price of around five bucks, how could I resist?

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