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Music for today A field recording of a prison work song recorded by Alan Lomax in 1947/48 during a tour of prison work camps in Louisiana and Alabama: Early In The Morning .It's collected on the album "Negro Prison Blues And Songs". The lead singer's prison name is '22' and the other members of the crew go by the nicknames Hard Hair, Little Red, and Tangle Eye. This is seriously spooky music. You can hear the voices echoing off the trees. The rhythm of the tune is kept by the axes the singers swing. Their voices overlap but go slient together so they can swing every other ax stroke with great power. The timbre of the shouting voices, especially '22', the leader's, is wild and desparate. At the end of each verse they sing "Well.." altogether to launch into the next verse. I don't understand every word but I get shivers when I hear them accuse their baby "you told a dirty lie". I hear drum rhythms in the way the singing is accented but the only steady rhythm is the chopping of the axes on the offbeats of the song. Sound sample from Amazon Amazon link to album
Scripting News on the web for 10 years! Dave Winer, the proto-blogger and software tools genius, started his Scripting News weblog on April 1st, 1997. I've read Scripting News nearly every day for the entire decade. The spadework that Dave did for his site made it possible for me to launch SongTrellis by myself in 1999, after I learned how the code for his Manila blogging system and Frontier scripting system worked. The SongTrellis server site is still a modified Manila site that runs on Frontier. It lets me do things that amaze me. Thanks, Dave! Rhapsody - a great way to preview new music I've been a Rhapsody subscriber for several weeks now and have been using it to explore its enormous music catalog (several million titles). There have been thousands of albums that I've been aware of over the last 35 years that I've wanted to check out but could never afford to buy. A $10 per month Rhapsody subscription gives me access to probably 90 percent of that music. If they would get rights to present music from the Xanadu, Steeplechase, Inner City, Roulette, and Black Saint recording catalogs and they filled out their world music offerings, I'd probably be 99% satisfied. I search for things using the Rhapsody web browser and add albums to my private album list that my home Sonos music system is pointing at. When I decide after listening that a piece of music is a keeper and that I want to hear it in fullest glory, I order a copy from Amazon, which I rip to my media server. That media server collection is also playable by the house Sonos system. Why don't I buy from Apple's iTunes store? The DRM locks(digital rights manangement) that Apple has shipped with its vended music prevented me from playing iTunes purchases on Sonos. Now that Apple has dropped DRM from the EMI catalog as of yesterday (which includes Bluenote Records, my favorite label), I'll be able to upgrade the sound quality of my auditioned music at whim. My Rhapsody subscription lets me buy the stuff I want to hear best with complete confidence. The preview clips on Amazon and the iTunes store never let you hear the truly amazing part of a performance. Wherever that was, it was certain that you couldn't hear that in their preview. I can hear it all now. The free version - Rhapsody 25 Rhapsody has a deal in place that allows anyone on the web to listen to 25 tracks per month from their library for free. The user has to download a small player plugin for their web browser to listen to the music. It seems that Rhapsody keeps track of your 25 free plays by keeping track of the IP address that you are browsing from since they don't require that you be registered to the server to get your free auditions. If your Internet provider assigns your house a new IP address before the end of the month, you can get another increment of 25 playbacks for free. Rhapsody is a Real Networks product. The Rhapsody Music Player for the web must suck, right? On the contrary, it seems to be a solid piece of work on both PCs and Macs. The Real Networks RealPlayer seemed to desire to insinuate itself so deeply into a user's system that you could never remove it. What's worse, for a long time it interfered with the operation of other media software you might want to run. I don't know if that's still the case. I'll remove this online aspersion if someone can show me that the RealPlayer has a better policy now. I am happy to report, though, that the Rhapsody Player is a much better citizen on your computer's desktop. I've not experienced any of the operational interference I've come to expect from Real software and its user interface is good. The experiment that Rhapsody enables With SongTrellis, I've always wanted to point directly to great pieces of music that are not universally known, so that folks can check them out for themselves. Internet music policies of the large recording companies made that impossible until recently. I've been willing to help their cause for ages, but they could never organize their web offerings to allow this to happen. If it were possible to point to a great work, I wanted to.be able to point inside at the parts where the magic happens. The Rhapsody 25 plan grants me most of my wish. I can't craft a URL which plays excerpts from Rhapsody tracks, but I can tell folks to scroll to a particular point in a piece using the Rhpasody player, which is not a terrible amount of trouble. I'm going to try to point to new music on Rhapsody daily so that you can find new good stuff to listen to. I know thousands of great performances you might enjoy. Of course, the mass of recorded music is so enormous that know one can know even a fraction of it. I'm a jazz expert more than anything. If there were 50 or 100 other folks who could point at the greatest classical, blues, rock, bluegrass, Brazilian, Carribean, African, qawalli, Indian, Indonesian music that they know about, I would be consulting with you and constantly pointing at you. If you would want to make these kinds of posts at SongTrellis, my site is your site. See the Song Discussions. If you want to blog this kind of thing on your own site, I'll subscribe and point to your work blog comments powered by Disqus
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Last update: Thursday, April 5, 2007 at 1:40 AM. |
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