Scott Robinson, “8 min. 46 sec.”
For saxophone.
Current events
All I can say, with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, is “Clickety clack, clickety clack, / Somebody’s mind done got off the goddam track.”
Rounder
“Sharing cultures, sharing musics, makes the world rounder”: Flaco Jiménez, musician.
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in the news
It’s a wonderful song, especially when performed by Ray Charles and Betty Carter, but yes, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is problematic indeed.
Five questions
The Washington Post asks “the five hardest questions in pop music.”
A song for these times
In The New York Times , Bruce Handy writes about “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
“Sunday”
Listening to Frank Sinatra’s 1954 recording of “Sunday,” I was slightly startled to realize that the song depicts American life before the institution of the weekend.
A deportee memorial
Sixty-five years later, there is a memorial for those who died in the 1948 plane crash that inspired Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” and whose names are now, all, known.
Goodbye, Muzak
“Listening to Muzak, late on, say, a Thursday night, straightening up a badly-lit, customer-free aisle of ironing boards and clothespins and clothespin bags: no wonder I fancied myself an existentialist.”
Woody Guthrie centennial
His songs were made for you and me.
VDP on “Wall Street” and Wall Street
Van Dyke Parks: “The Creed Is Greed, in a nation dominated by stone-age fundamentalism.”
Music for hard times
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
Ben Folds on the tyranny of cool
“Everyone can’t be cool.”
Van Dyke Parks, “the epic opportunity”
“I have lived through McCarthyism, through riots with race at the core. I have seen dark times, but nothing to match the complacency, materialism, triviality, and Stone Age beliefs that dominate our current state of affairs. So I turn to the epic opportunity — the song form. Songs interest me that much.”
Pete Seeger sings of the BP oil spill
A new song
American ones
One-hundred voices for the Fourth of July
"Let the Earth Bear Witness"
Words by William Butler Yeats, music by Mike Scott of The Waterboys
On "American music"
Van Dyke Parks quoting Aaron Copland
Three inaugural moments
Sources for Barack Obama's speech and Joseph Lowery's benediction
Classic Arts Showcase background music
Who wrote those pieces? Bartok and Rossini
Classic Arts Showcase
Great free cable service
High Water Everywhere
Oh Lordy, women and grown men drown Oh, women and children sinkin' down [spoken: Lord have mercy] I couldn't see nobody's home and wasn't no...