As an avid musician and listener to many kinds of music–in particular jazz–I’ve followed Marcus Roberts for a long time, back to my early teens in the 80’s. Along with an 8 piece band, Marcus Roberts absolutely shot the moon this past weekend, revisiting Deep in the Shed, an album he released in 1990, at….
Michiko Kakutani reviews Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia in today’s NYTimes. I’ve read so many great reviews on this book and it’s such a deep interest for me that it’s on my holiday wish list both to buy and to read!
“Music has a deep connection to the workings of the brain. In his new book Musicophilia, literary neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about how rhythm and melody can trigger symptoms of neurological disease in some patients and help ease the conditions of others.” So begins a post at the WSJ’s health blog for an interview with….
I came across the following link to a rare 1954 performance of the virtuoso cellist Pablo Casals playing Bach’s Cello Suite #1. Absolutely beautiful…and some nice links to other performances by other virtuosi too.
This past weekend I read an article by Haruki Murakami in the NYT about how he became a novelist, and he drew a series of beautiful parallels to music. I won’t attempt to reproduce his elegance, only point you in the direction of the article here. But, in that article was a quote from Theloneus….
Tom Hespos sent me the following link to a performance then 14-year old Jennifer Lin made at the TED conference in 2004. I dug around and found this link from Yamaha (Jennifer is a Yamaha music student) which provides a bit more detail about the performance and Jennifer’s approach to music. She performed during the….
This great article from the NYTimes.com discusses the pros/cons of various forms of bitrate encoding. As digital storage gets cheaper by the day, music companies are starting to increase the bitrate sampling of songs they make available online (currently for a premium). Some are even taking Super Audio CD tracks and sampling them at ridiculous….
A new take on Take 5. Thanks to Hespos for pointing this out.
As some of my friends know, I’ve played piano for a long time. But in all of my studies, never have I seen a cat who plays the piano with two paws. See for yourself. And the sequel.
Joyce Hatto’s husband has come clean to say that all of her late “recordings” were in fact frauds of his own doing. Read about it here in this article from the Washington Post.