Musical pleasings
What’s your favorite musical sound? See, I’m not a big guitar guy. Acoustic? Boring and lacking expression. Electric? Forget it. A guitar belongs in the rhythm section, where Count Basie put it. Freddie Green kept a four string beat for the Basie organization for decades, physically-wedged between the piano of the Count’s simplified plunking, an upright bass, and the driving drums. The horn players in the band were the melody makers.
For me, it’s hard to beat that sound of the big band. It’s like baseball—and democracy—when the group charges ahead together but every man gets his chance once in a while to take the lead. Here is the rare Basie tune featuring a Freddie Green solo (about 3 1/2 minutes in).
Another favorite musical gumbo is just that trio of the piano, the upright bass, and the drums. What an appealing sound. Tony Bennett has ridden it through a second career worthy of anybody else's first. Put a woodwind, a brass instrument, or an Italian singer in front, or keep it just to the three pieces.
Then you got your voice collaborations. At the top here is Gladys Knight and her Pips. So satisfying. This musical number should have been the main feature at my wedding last year, but I didn’t think of it until today. What are you gonna do? The sentiment is still true.
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Important Alert: Amazon is now advertising a DVD product called “WKRP in Cincinnati: The Complete Series.” It’s from Shout! Factory, which has been promoting the fact that it’s been trying to secure all of the music rights for the legendary series. (This has been a complicated matter for other companies.) Shout!, previous savior of both “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart,” deserves credit for resurrecting so many of the great series of MTM (Mary Tyler Moore), the finest production studio in the medium's history, but this release is coming down the pike awfully quickly, only weeks after promises were relayed during a WKRP cast reunion at the Paley Center in New York. Details are still sketchy and an official media release awaits. Let's put it this way: I would be willing to wait well beyond October 28th if it means getting it just right. Now I won't be able to sleep tonight.
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Pete Rose cannot be forgiven. A quarter century of banishment from Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame is not enough. In a sport in which violent racists and white supremacists, as well as cheaters, gamblers, spouse-beaters, brawlers, and general criminals are enshrined with highest honors, Rose cannot be forgiven. In a country that has a rap sheet that includes genocide and has the pictures of revered slaveholders on its currency, he must not be allowed to participate in All-Star Game festivities at the invitation of the event’s host city. He simply mustn't.
The utter arrogance of this opinion from an aged hack cannot be stressed more forcefully.
posted by CM @ 8:50 PM
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