Benj’s blog!

As promised here are two more great videos from YouTube.Well, actually, two videos, but one track (I’m not getting lazy, it’s split over two videos, so that counts!) Featured are: Ray Brown, Ulf Wakenius, Michael Brecker and others. The track is Secret Love, a jazz standard that I enjoy playing on the guitar. Enjoy
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As promised here are two more great videos from YouTube.

First up, Eric Clapton with Old Love. This is a video from “24 Nights” recording, which for those unfamilar, is a live recording of Clapton’s 24-night stint at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1990 (and again in 1991!). Enjoy (especially Ray Cooper on percussion ).
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Last week, I committed to a weekly post highlighting the wonders of YouTube, by way of sharing performances by my favourite artists.

First up this week is Bireli Lagrene, a French guitar virtuoso, comfortable playing Django-style gypsy jazz to up-beat bebop! This is a video of him playing Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t she Lovely, enjoy. (If you like this, he has a great acoustic version Sylvain Luc, who is a great guy.)

Second, Carlos Santana, Europa. Santana was one of the first groups I listened to solely for the guitar. The sound and groove they got was great. And whilst to a large extent my tastes have narrowed in on Jazz, I still enjoy Carlos’s playing, and that is almost certainly down to his feel.

Music is an important part of my life, initially just listening and for the past six years or so, playing. Sometimes I find myself just whiling away the hours on YouTube finding inspiring performances by some of my favourite artists.This is the first in what I hope will be a weekly post and features John McLaughlin and George Benson.
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Leaving Beirut lyrics. More info’, including versions of the song in QT, Real and WindowsMedia.

Another Saturday, another trip to Virgin. This time I found a DVD entitled “Paco de Lucía & Group”, published by TDK mediactive. It’s a recording of a show in Germering from 1996. The quality and the production are fantastic! As for the playing — is there any question? — the octet (yes, there are 8 artists) are in amazing form! Highly recommended!

Why have I posted this to my blog? Well, I’ve been a fan of Paco for quite some time and this was the first time I’ve come across a DVD featuring Paco and his group. The only DVDs featuring Paco I know about are:

• Light and Shade — An Interview with the great man
• Meeting of the Spirits — Paco with John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell
• Flamenco — Film by Carlos Saura

I also picked up some more Charlie Haden, and a Telarc release from Monty Alexander featuring Ernest Ranglin.

Should be an interesting evening!

Recently I was in Nottingham doing a spot of shopping and called in (as usual) to Virgin to spend some time perusing the Jazz CDs. The CD playing was really ’swinging’ and I decided to find out who it was: Tomasz Stanko. He’s a polish trumpeter and releases on ECM.

The CD playing in the shop was Suspended Night — which spent some time recently around the top of the charts on Amazon UK — and features Stanko with a youngish trio: Slawomirem Kurkiewiczem (bass), Michal Miskiewicz (drums) and Marcinem Wasilewski (piano).

As far as I can tell the quartet got together on the Soul of Things (2001) and Suspended Night was their second recording. The musicians work really well together. It’s hard to believe they swing so hard, given that they’ve been playing together for only 3 years!

Check the CDs out!

I saw this CD whilst in Borders in the US, but for some reason I didn’t buy it. It’s a wonderful CD, it reminds me a little of what Al Di Meola has been doing on his last couple of World Sinfonia albums; orchestra coupled with guitar, sounds great! Go buy it!

John McLaughlin — Thieves and Poets (Verve)

Burt Bacharach is an amazing composer and manages to impress me even when re-arranging his own songs! I noticed on the Burt Bacharach Forum that he was to team up with Ron Isley to record some new arrangements of his songs. The website for the CD appeared back in September and I feel it deserves a mention here! Ron (of the Isley Brothers) has an incredible voice and gives the lyrics the careful attention they deserve. What’s more, the whole CD was recorded in 2 live sessions — orchestra and all — I can’t wait!

Check it out, no excuses :). Two videos and full audio for four tracks (in WMA or Real format ) can be found on the media page. “Isley meets Bacharach — Here I am” is released in the US on 11th November, not sure of the UK date but Amazon UK will import it.

This evening, on the way back from playing at a wedding in Freiston, John and I decided to call in at Newark for pizza at Pizza Express and to enjoy some of the music at the “Newark on Water” festival.

The pizza was great, Pizza Express really do know how to make pizzas (no sh*t!). The restaurant setting is nice too, a converted building right along side the River Trent. It beats the Dominos pizza I had a few weeks ago by a factor of 100!

Anyway, we walked over to the festival venue and arrived at about 7pm. Café Aman were doing their sound check. Around 7:15 they started playing. We were stood right next to the P.A. system at the stage. IT WAS LOUD! ;). It was great though, the whole set moved along nicely, grooving well.

After the first track I decided to look around to see what the rest of the few thousand people thought. Barely any reaction at all. How can they NOT be enjoying the music? Sure the soloists were using a lot of modal stuff in their improvisations (it was a Greek influenced band after all…) but was the music so radically different that people didn’t like it?

My opinion (shared by John) was that people just don’t know good music when they hear it. Unless they’ve been told it’s good on the radio (be it implicitly, as a result of playtime or explicitly as a result of “DJs” saying ‘this is good’). Anyway … rant over for now.

A great interview with Al Di Meola (and many others) @ Innerviews.

This is a more rational attempt on my thoughts about iTunes. I wrote it for the TopTechTips site that a friend is trying to get up and running.
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I went over to Sheffield last night, to see a guy called Buddy Miller. Dave has a knack of finding out good gigs, wherever they may be in the country! We set off about 1800hrs to be there in-time for the start at 2000hrs — rush-hour traffic in Nottingham is quite bad and it’s about a 40 mile drive.

After a slight detour via Sutton-in-Ashfield we were on the Motorway, listening to Alison Krauss and Union Station (great CD, more on that another time … ). Sheffield is a very well laid out city, you can drive straight off the Motorway at junction 33, right into the heart of town. Found a car-park opposite the “theatre square” and crossed over to the Library Theatre. In the same square is the Crucible, where the world championships are being held!

The venue was small and about half-full for the opening act,
Bill Mallonee who I remember seeing before in Nottingham with Vigilantes of Love. Bill did a great opening act (1h) and Buddy and the band joined him for a few numbers towards the end. After a short interval — to allow the very drunk local guy to stock up on even more Carling(?) — Buddy and band came to the stage. He looked a lot like he does here, Dave commented he had looked like that for as long as he could remember.

I always enjoy live music, the thrill of seeing talented musicians enjoying themselves and the inspiration I get, especially if they are naturally gifted guitarists, is something you don’t get with a CD! Anyway, Buddy did a great set, managing to shake off the comments from the by now very drunk local guy and I’m looking forward to listening to some more Miller soon!

Erik was expecting some big announcement today regarding AppleMusic, I was hoping for the same. After all, Apple have a history of innovation and to some extent they’ve innovated today. Unfortunately there was absolutely nothing unexpected about the announcement and I am somewhat disappointed.

• If this system has really been in development for 1.5 years as Mr Jobs claimed, one would have thought it would have had sufficient testing so that it wouldn’t fall over in the first few minutes of opening!
• Putting that aside, it would be nice if the majority of the world’s population were able to use the system (which currently is available to US credit card holders only).
• Next, they could have improved the HTTP handling in iTunes 4.0, which is currently awful, the application spends most of its time spinning (consuming CPU) waiting for responses to the HTTP requests (that never arrive).
• When they do arrive, the XML documents get parsed and rendered by something which once again is far from efficient (XML -> HTML to be rendered by KHTML?). The KHTML engine in Safari does a similar job consuming far less CPU!

If they get the performance issues resolved and enable the store in the rest of the world (with reasonable pricing), I look forward to using it. At the moment I am not impressed and a new iPod won’t be my next toy ™!

PS Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I think this will be a failure, I’m pretty sure it will be an amazing success. I’m simply saying they could do better, much, much better!

Update: The service seems to have stabilised now, I am very impressed with it. The catalogue is good! The speed is great. iTunes 4 still sucks in terms of performance though, even error messages cause “spins”.

I really hope it is available in the UK soon, I’ve seen 3 albums I would buy straight away. Having thought about it for a while, it seems licensing will be the biggest issue. Different record companies license the rights to the songs and albums out differently around the globe, I imagine it’s a legal nightmare!

I thought I would quickly mention how good this CD is!

Ludovico is an Italian born composer and pianist. I first heard him on ClassicFM in 2000 when I was driving home from work but forget to write it down (since then I always carry a pen in the car!). Luckily, a few days later the same track was played again and I was at home and able to take down the details.

The track was from Le Onde (the wave?) and it was some of the most “relaxing” music I had heard, I picked up the CD in Virgin Records and it probably stayed in my CD player for a few weeks! Since then, whenever I called into Virgin I would check the classical section but there was never anything new. Until last Saturday …

I’m not sure what it is about his compositions (or maybe it’s his playing?) but you immediately feel something! It’s very difficult to evoke emotion with a single instrument and no lyrics, but he does it and so eloquently. He says this CD is inspired by a visit to Africa, I’m not sure I can detect that, you’ll have to order the CD to see

I popped into Virgin today to look around the Classical/Jazz section and ended up buying 4 CDs:

Kenny Garrett - Standard of Living
This CD has been “on” constantly since driving home, it is really that good, constantly moving! I notice Marcus Miller was co-producer along side K.G. himself which probably explains how “tight” everything this. For a brief few seconds in Kurita Sensei I thought I was listening to Wayne Shorter playing Footprints
Diana Krall - When I look in your eyes
I have all of the “official” Diana Krall CDs now she is a great performer and pianist, but Russell Malone (who played with her on the earlier recordings) is something else. His latest CD with Benny Green is definitely worth checking out and I am looking forward to either of their next releases.

Ludovico Einaudi - I Gionri
I bought the CD by Ludovico Einaudi because I really enjoyed his last CD - Le Onde. I’m hoping this one will be as good.

Wayne Shorter - Alegria
Listening to Wayne Shorter is a bit of chore at times but I hope it’s like drinking wine and that the more I listen the easier and more enjoyable it becomes ;).

Oh - btw CD is great - what an excellent player. JC informs me that the Jiménez family have produced many great players. He said that ge will find me some LPs to listen too - cool :).

Oh - just a quick after update. I ordered a Ramón Jiménez CD from Flamenco World earlier in the week, received shipping notification yesterday and it’s in my CD player now. Madrid -> Nottingham in less than 24 hours …. not bad !
The CD is great … well … Track 1 is at least