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RE: Riverside - Towards the Blue Horizon - Music
Well, this is a niche you fit well: the music critic, curator. Yes, they are indeed pretty good. Genuine musicians.
Well, this is a niche you fit well: the music critic, curator. Yes, they are indeed pretty good. Genuine musicians.
LOL - Marek said that to me last night.
I actually have written music reviews in the past, both for www.examiner.com and on my own blogs, usually album or concert reviews. It is definitely something I am truly passionate about, and just in my own music library, I could introduce an album a day for two years straight without a repeat; even longer if I include Marek's collection.
I just can't believe it took me three months on Steemit before I posted any music. Evidently I'm slipping in my dotage. ;-)
I often quip to myself: I'm usually the last one to find out what I should do. I wonder where these connections, like yours to music, come from. Lifetimes of music, perhaps a professor of music, or a composer. One day we shall know. Two years of music. Oh, my! Blessings.
Two years might actually be a conservative estimate. In addition to the music I've collected in my life, I also inherited a large amount from both parents, and a smaller amount from my older sister.
And, had my former spouse not been such a *&%^& about it, I would still have my father's collection of jazz 78s from the 30s and 40s. My father had belonged to a record club at the time, and had literally over 4,000 first press jazz recordings, which he kept in their original boxes, many of which may no longer have existed outside of his copies.
I can only imagine what that collection might have been worth to a jazz historian.
As for lifetimes of music, that was both of my parents in a nutshell, especially my dad. According to the family story, the family was on their way home from church one day, with his grandmother waxing poetic over the music they had heard in church that day.
My dad, at all of three years old, sat up and said, "I can play those songs!" At which point, his grandmother said, "Oh you can, can you?" And he was adamant - yes, he could play those songs. No one in the family ever remembered him sitting at the piano before that day, much less playing it.
So they humored him, took him home and sat him down at the piano, and he proceeded to play every single song he had heard. They were stunned.
He could literally play any song he heard, and once he played it, it became part of his permanent repertoire. Reading notation was a major chore for him, even though he ultimately earned a double degree in music and music education, but if he heard a song, he could play it, and even arrange and transpose it in his head, with no hesitation.
My mom was the opposite. She could pick out a tune she heard on the piano, but it was a much more laborious task, but reading music was second nature to her, and she could play pretty much anything on piano in a cold reading, and play it beautifully.
I was more like my dad in that respect, in that I could play by ear, though not with the ease of his amazing gift, and reading music for me was an onerous task. But I turned out to be the composer in the family, not that I shared many of my songs with them over the years. And, not wanting to compete with my dad's ego surrounding the piano, I took up the guitar and recorder instead. Funny, I would play the guitar for other people, but I wouldn't sing in front of anyone.
Marek is the one who finally got me out my shell in singing, and actually managed to get me on stage, and all the music he introduced me to got me back into writing songs again, after a twenty year plus lapse.
Thanks for the personal story. I value it. Who are we here if we are not human with each other? Your fathers jazz collection. Oh my! Blessings.
Thanks, and I agree - it is our humanity that connects us all.
I'm grateful that I still have many of my dad's LPs, and of course, memories of many an afternoon sitting in his apartment, drinking green tea, and sharing whatever music was on the menu that day.
And it went both ways. Both of my parents were very open musically. I remember when I brought Emerson Lake and Palmer's album "Tarkus" to play for my dad, I was maybe eleven, and they had completely blown apart my notions of musical limits; as if there are any.
My dad listened to the whole thing, and when it was over, he commented that while it wasn't his music, he understood why I liked it, because they displayed exceptional musicianship. That always stuck with me, because it was the first time I had heard him use the word in reference to a rock album. This is the guy, after all, who hated the Beatles. ;-)