required listening

Required Listening: Rit

03.21.2012 Listening

Today’s Required Listening contribution comes from my friend, Steve Kramer. Steve is himself a musician and deeply knowledgable about music. He has a great choice for this week. Randy ___________ “Rit” – Lee Ritenour (1979) Oh c’mon… it was the eighties. Music was going through a change. The love affair with 60’s leftover bands (e.g., [...]

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Required Listening: Hot Fives and Sevens

02.22.2012 Listening

I have never understood how people who claim to love rock or pop can also claim to hate jazz. Jazz and blues are the source of virtually all American popular music. And the source of all that is mostly contained in a little set of records called Hot Fives and Sevens. Louis Armstrong did not [...]

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Required Listening: And Now For Something Entirely Different: Animusic

02.01.2012 Listening

This Required Listening contribution is from Penny Mattern. In today’s recommendation she make case for an original musical and visual work in what may become a significant future musical genre. ——————————— A friend of mine some years ago, a software engineer, told me about a video he had seen and had been mightily impressed by, [...]

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Required Listening: Songs In The Key Of Life

01.25.2012 Listening

Today we’re used to buying and listening to tracks, single songs. I’m old enough to remember the time of buying 45s, singles, too. But there were always albums, complete works by musicians. Sometimes, most of the time, they were just collections of songs, especially by pop music artists. But not always. For me, the first [...]

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Required Listening: Strength in Numbers, The Telluride Sessions

01.18.2012 Listening

This Required Listening post is by Penny Mattern ——————————— Strength in Numbers made only one recording, in 1998. They are (in alphabetical order) Sam Bush (mandolin), Jerry Douglas (dobro), Bela Fleck (banjo), Edgar Meyer (bass), and Mark O’Connor (violin), each of whom is recognized as a virtuoso player at the top of his field. And [...]

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