The Penultimate Word

Spring is coming …

Peter Neubäcker, who developed Melodyne, the premier pitch-correction program, has new software out which can take a music recording of, say, a piano or string quartet, separate out the individual notes in all the chords, and allow you to change them at will. Want to change a major chord to a minor? No problem. This is a video of him demoing the software at Musikmesse Frankfurt. This is incredible stuff.

(Via Alex Ross)

Steve Novick, a junior high dropout who enrolled in the Harvard Law School at age 18, is running for Senate in the state of Oregon. He has the most, umm, startling political ad I have ever seen. Take a look:

One of my favorite musicians, Jeff Healey, died yesterday of cancer. Healey, blind from the age on one, had a unique style of playing the guitar with the instrument flat on his lap. He spent his childhoood in Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada, and his adult life in Toronto. He was discovered by Stevie Ray Vaughan who gave him international exposure. His only real American hit was Angel Eyes, released in 1988 on the album “See The Light”, but he was always very popular in Canada.

He had a club in Toronto called Jeff Healey’s Roadhouse, which was a mandatory stop for me whenever I was in that city.

The guy could flat-out play. Here is a live version of the title track from “See The Light”. I have no idea where or when this vid was taped, but Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) (!) is playing the piano.

Update: I figured out where this vid is from. It is from a show called Sunday Night, later Night Music, hosted by David Sanborn and Jools Holland. This was an extremely eclectic show, featuring artists from all types of jazz, pop, rock, blues, etc. backgrounds. It was a great show and it is too bad it lasted only two seasons.

Sunday I drove out to Ohio to visit my friends Ken and Trudy, who live about 40 minutes outside Cleveland, and with them hear the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra in the visuallly stunning and acoustically perfect Severance Hall. The concert was conducted by the CSO’s Music Director, Franz Welser-Möst.

The first work on the program was by the Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud. Called Apeiron, it is scored for a massive orchestra of 101 musicians. In the program notes, Staud says “… what I attempted was to bring the ‘unlimited’ (an infinity comprised solely of the combinatorial possibilities afforded by a large orchestra) and the ‘determinate’ (derivation from a few basic building blocks, plus a clear formal construction based on the simplest of arithmetical relationships) into a harmonious relationship with each other.” I have no idea what the hell that means, and after listening to the 20-minute work, I still don’t.

The problem that my friends and I had was that we couldn’t discern any organizing principle around which to make sense of the sounds the orchestra was making. There was no underlying rythmic structure that I could make out. Much of it was atonal. There were stretches of tonalilty, but the tonal passages seemed unrelated to each other. The orchestra played it vigorously and apparently with a lot of enthusiasm, so maybe they had it figured out.

The next work was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Alfred Brendel, piano. Brendel, who is retiring from public performance this year, gave a very thoughtful and moving reading of the piece. He is not a showy player, but is economical in his gestures and concise in his playing. The orchestra and soloist complemented each other very well.

The final work was Brahm’s Fourth Symphony, again played really well by the CSO. The CSO is a terrific band, with a rich, highly polished sound, and a flawless sense of ensemble, so this type of repertoire suits them well.

Another one for Plenipotentiary to swipe.
From the Times of London.

If I had to choose my favorite female pop or jazz singer, it would be a toss-up between Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. Ella was the perfect interpreter - she knew exactly how to sing a song to bring out its emotional content. Sarah simply breaks my heart. Here she is singing The Nearness of You. The sound is pretty crappy, but Sarah’s vulnerability and underlying sadness shines right through.