Category Archives: Arts: Music

To The Young Dude In His Dancing Duds – May 16, 2023

Cue The Byrds:

(And the rest of you,
open your Bibles to Ecclesiastes 3):

To everything,
(Turn, turn, turn),

There is a season,
(Turn, turn, turn),

And
a time for every purpose
under heaven.

A time to build up, a time to break downA time to dance, a time to mourn . . .
YES–tonight is the big 8th grade dance at grandson’s school, and he, usually a stay-at-home, wants to go. So here he is, spiffed up in his new 2023-style dancing duds, and ready to hit the floor. I’ll explain all the sentimental chitter-chatter around this photo to him later. Including what a boutonnière is. (Or was.)

To everything
(Turn, turn, turn),
There is a season
(Turn, turn, turn),

A time to buid up, a time to break downA time to cast away stonesA time to gather stones together
To everything
(Turn, turn, turn),
There is a season
(Turn, turn, turn),
And a time to every purpose
under Heaven . . .
A time of love, a time of hateA time of war, a time of peaceA time you may embraceA time to refrain from embracing
To everything
(Turn, turn, turn),

There is a season turn
(Turn, turn, turn),
And a time to every purpose
under Heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose

In The Yard: this pair of roses looked like just the thing for an artisanal boutonnière . . . .But when I was ready to bring it in and pin it on, he was already on his way. Whatever.

A time to sow, a time to reap,A time for love, a time for hateA time for peace, I swear it’s not too late . . .

 

BREAKING: David Crosby — And Another (Great) One Bites The Dust

AP News: David Crosby, rock star and CSNY co-founder, dies

BY ROBERT JABLON — January 19, 2023

David Crosby, the brash rock musician who evolved from a baby-faced harmony singer with the Byrds to a mustachioed hippie superstar and an ongoing troubadour in Crosby, Stills, Nash & (sometimes) Young, has died at 81, several media outlets reported Thursday. Continue reading BREAKING: David Crosby — And Another (Great) One Bites The Dust

Oh, No! Ian Tyson, Canadian folk legend, is gone (“So Much For Dreaming”)

AP News: Ian Tyson, half of Ian & Sylvia folk duo, dies at age 89

December 29, 2022
TORONTO (AP) — Ian Tyson, the Canadian folk singer who wrote the modern standard “Four Strong Winds” as one half of Ian & Sylvia and helped influence such future superstars as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, died Thursday at age 89.

The native of Victoria, British Columbia, died at his ranch in southern Alberta following a series of health complications, his manager, Paul Mascioli, said. Continue reading Oh, No! Ian Tyson, Canadian folk legend, is gone (“So Much For Dreaming”)

Star of the Week: Gladys Knight And her Storied Career

[NOTE: i saw Gladys Knight perform with The Pips in the early ‘70s. It was in a seedy, low-light club in Boston. I wasn’t a clubber; the tickets came from a stash of freebies collected by a local music editor I wrote some reviews for. The passes were also the paper’s substitute for decent paychecks for our efforts. But I was too young to care: what was catching up on the rent compared to catching up with Gladys? (I began to figure that out later.) And they did put on a heckuva show: Gladys belted them out of the park, and the Pips were not only fine backup, they could, as Gladys explains below, dance their precisely choreographed behinds off. A fine moment in a long-lost youth, and it’s great to see she’s getting some overdue mainstream propers.]

Washington Post, December 4, 2022

Gladys Knight has always been ‘a singer’s singer
‘

Gladys Knight, today

It’s something that came to me that wasn’t forced,’ says the ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ singer, who won her first vocal competition as a child

By Helena Andrews-Dyer
— November 30, 2022

ASHEVILLE, N.C.
 – It is much too easy to take Gladys Knight for granted.

Her sound is so pure, her steps so graceful, her smile so disarming that the vocal powerhouse’s sheer presence seems at once natural and divine. Wrapped in a magenta turtleneck, she tells the handsome waiter pouring her iced tea that he “should be in the movies” before launching into a humble story about how she discovered Michael Jackson. As the Atlanta native peppers her sentences with y’all and fussin’, she makes it easy to forget that she is the prototype. Continue reading Star of the Week: Gladys Knight And her Storied Career

Noted Quaker Atheist Dies in New York; Also Kept Diary, & Was A Composer

Ned Rorem, Pulitzer-winning composer and noted diarist, dies at 99

Washington Post — (AP)
By Tim Page
 — November 18, 2022

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his orchestral suite ‘Air Music.’ His diaries offered a ‘worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet’ entree into elite gay and artistic circles.


Composer and author Ned Rorem won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for “Air Music,” an orchestral suite.

Ned Rorem, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and the author of more than a dozen published diaries that were remarkable for their candid entree into elite gay and artistic circles from the 1960s onward, died Nov. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. Continue reading Noted Quaker Atheist Dies in New York; Also Kept Diary, & Was A Composer