I’m just back from a week in Paris where I visited the fantastic Cité de la Musique, home to the Musée de la Musique with its extensive collection of instruments from centuries ago up to the modern era. The focus of the museum is classical music, with only slight nods to folk/world/rock and other...
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There’s another story from me, now ready at Great Hites. This one is musical in nature, after a fashion, and puts a bit of a spin on the question “What kind of band would you hire if money was no object?” I’ve been doing quite a lot of behind-the-scenes work on “Some Other Scotland”...
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Jimmy Carl Black RIP 1-2-1938 to 1-11-2008 Another rock legend has left the stage… JCB was the drummer with the Mothers in their earlier days and stamped his unique sound onto some of the finest albums in the Zappa collection. What he may have lacked in the technical skill of later Zappa drummers, he...
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One of Zappa’s favourite tricks around the “Joe’s Garage” era and beyond was the practice he called “xenochrony” or “strange synchronisation”. This involved him taking a piece of music (often a studio backing track) and overdubbing it with a totally unrelated (usually a live guitar solo) track from a completely different song. After some...
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I’ve had more than my fair share of hillbilly / redneck experiences in this last week – must be something in the air. Jerry Springer – The Opera At the start of the week we treated ourselves to a night at the opera; ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’, to be precise. It’s had quite...
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Track of the Week My Wee Green Buddy Week 13 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza. If you liked the ‘Yet Another Granfalloon’ pieces, then this short instrumental ditty should be of interest. It’s an earlier attempt at a similar style, in this case purely electronic, owing much to Zappa’s ‘Jazz From Hell’ album....
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Track of the Week Yet Another Granfalloon (2nd movement) Week 5 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza. No, I hadn’t forgotten about this week’s tune, but some positive comments about part 1 of Granfalloon have inspired me to re-think my choice and use part two instead. Part 2 of this piece was composed in...
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