music
- Pete Seeger on the 4th of July: The Truest American Hero- My wife and I saw "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song" last night. Part of PBS's superb American Masters series, "The Power of Song" may well win an Emmy this year, and it would be eminently deserved. One of the best portraits of a singer - someone far more than a singer - I've ever seen.
- "CSNY: Deja Vu"- A film by Neil Young
Due in theaters July 25
The Trailer
The war in Iraq is the backdrop as the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young "Freedom of Speech Tour" crisscrosses North America. Echoes of Vietnam-era anti-war sentiment abound as the band connects with today's audiences.
I caught a fresh Reuters Article, with interview, about the film just a short while ago, read through it and it peaked my interest, as a fan of CSNY and Neil Young, in finding some more.
- Best Music of the Year-
Introduction
These songs will be hosted until Thursday on Pruning Shears so you can try before you buy.
This is a CD's worth of the best new music I heard this year. God bless the Internet - I doubt I'd have heard any of them without it. I deliberately forced myself to stay under 80 minutes so they all could fit on a single CD. In a way it's an arbitrary limit but if you're going to share a "best of" list you shouldn't overwhelm your listeners. I know from experience that restraint in these matters is greatly appreciated. There are some songs I loved that didn't make it as a result; I've listed some of them in the comments. If you like my picks I recommend tracking them down as well.
- Bruce Springsteen - Father Figure- Springsteen is coming out with a new album, made with the E Street Band, called Magic. An inspired review can be found here: http://matt.orel.ws/blog/2007/09/bruce-springsteen-and-little-magic.html Magic was apparently made WITH the E Street band, but, to hear Jon Landau talk, it sounds like it's mostly Bruce in the studio and the band getting plugged in from time to time:
- Everybody Knows-
- Delovely - movie review- I watched THAT movie again last night. How revolting! There are so many reasons for me not to like Delovely. For one thing, I'm not particularly a Cole Porter fan. For another, I think the basic metaphor of the film (life as theater) has been done to death, and was done as well as it is ever likely to be done in All That Jazz. And then there is Kevin Kline.
- About Louis Armstrong- In her biography of Scott Joplin, Dancing to a Black Man's Tune, Susan Curtis says:
power in society is maintained not only ... through sheer force, but also through the construction of widely shared beliefs, codes and ideals that inscribe desired behavior that benefits those in power. ... Thus, the arena of culture is anything but nuetral and, in fact, represents one of the key locations for contest and debate that result in historical shifts.
- Music: The Sound of Torture & War-
Disco Inferno And he was left in a room soldiers blithely called The Disco, a place where Western music rang out so loud that his interrogators were, in Qutaji's words, forced to "talk to me via a loudspeaker that was placed next to my ears."
