Jazzanova – I Can See (feat. Ben Westbeech)

Website: Jazzanova.de. Amazon: Jazzanova – Of All The Things

Top-40, Steve Reich Piano Phase:

“(…) But on the October 2006, Peter Aidu performed this composition with an absolutely unique technique. While playing on two pianos, with a left hand on one instrument and the right hand playing separately on the second piano, he was recreating the sounding of two performers! (…)”

(via)

Franz Schubert – Symfonie no. 8 ‘Unvollendete’ – Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest o.l.v. Nikolaus Hamoncourt (opname uit 1997).

Gratis downloads van 10 symfonieën uitgevoerd door het KCO.:

• Franz Schubert – Symfonie no. 8 ‘Unvollendete’
• Ludwig van Beethoven – Symfonie no. 2
• Felix Mendelssohn – Symfonie no. 4 ‘Italiaanse’
• César Franck – Symfonie in d
• Gustav Mahler – Symfonie no. 1
• Antonin Dvorák – Symfonie no. 8
• Camille Saint-Saëns – Symfonie no. 3 ‘Orgelsymfonie’
• Jean Sibelius – Symfonie no. 2
• Anton Bruckner – Symfonie no. 8
• Johannes Brahms – Symfonie no. 2

‘There was an assignment in my class in which we were to give a short presentation on pretty much any subject. I decided to make a music video. (…) I got an A++ on it, a 26/25′ (YouTube)

“What happens if you put three professional musicians in a recording studio and … have them watch porn movies?

While you probably begin imagining strange situations, these guys made it a creative venture. They created a new soundtrack to the 70ties adult movies they were watching – turning off the sound and just letting their instincts come up with vivid musical imaginations. And it worked.

This music sounds like a combination of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and the Emanuelle sequels of adult movies. Feisty and furious with a sugarcoat of sensuality.

This is the first volume of their ventures, played on real instruments and treated to have the authentic sleazy sound of the 70′s.”

“”You’d have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women,” one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey’s brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they’d flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey’s to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.

When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. “He did not know about the soft,” a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. “She ready?” he’d ask. “I ain’t got no time now. Make sure she ready.” He’d hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. “Why’s a white man eat a woman?” he once asked a white friend. “What’s he get outta that?” Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. “You sittin’ down, Mr. Johnson?” he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. “Black man don’t know nothing. Black man don’t know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind.” Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. (“You had to go there with him,” he says, “because you didn’t know anything Mr. Brown didn’t know.”)”

Roisin Murphy in The Culture Show‘s versie van ‘The reasonably priced car’: ‘The busking challenge’. (YouTube)

Muxtape / zidouta

In de media. (Kát’a Kabanová eerder.)

“Na dik 100.000 stemmen, uitgebracht door bijna 20.000 stemmers uit 17 landen, is de eindstand bekend van Eclectro Electo 2007. De uitslag leert door zijn eerlijke stemmethode, hoge aantal stemmen en internationale achtergrond veel over de voorkeuren van de wereldwijde dancescene. En de winnaar is…”

Steve Reich “Piano Phase” Pt.1/2. Choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Michele Anne De Mey. (YouTube)

Rosas, Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, (2002). (Deel 2 na de klik.)

Steve Reich “Piano Phase” Pt.2/2. Choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Michele Anne De Mey. (YouTube)

Klaus Nomi – The Cold Song (Henry Purcell, King Arthur)

“Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song “Radio Head” from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience.”

Leoš Janáček: Kát’a Kabanová. Opera in three acts. (Composed 1919-21. Premiered: Brno, 23/11/1921.) De Nederlandse Opera, première 3 maart 2008.

Wikipedia:

“Káťa Kabanová is an opera in three acts, with music by Leoš Janáček to a libretto by Vincenc Cervinka, based on The Storm, a play by Alexander Ostrovsky. The opera was also largely inspired by Janáček’s love for Kamila Stösslová. This is often considered his first “mature” opera, despite the fact that he was 67 when it was premiered. Káťa Kabanová is a clear response to Janáček’s feelings for Kamila, and the work is dedicated to her. The first performance was in Brno on 23 November 1921.”

leosjanacek.com:

“Although Kát’a Kabanová marks the beginning of Janáček’s final decade of mature operatic compositions, it equally shows a return to a more traditional ‘operatic’ territory and that of his predecessors (particularly Tchaikovsky). Its downtrodden heroine, the storm and confession scenes (as with Jenůfa) all take us away from the experimental style found in Osud and Brouček. Unlike Jenůfa and his predecessors’ work, Kát’a Kabanová has a more brutally direct style, which is more emotionally pungent and realistic. The opera marks the first opera written after the greatest affection of Janáček’s own life, Kamila Stösslová.”

Max Brod:

“The libretto is based on Ostrovsky’s drama The Thunderstorm – a Russian Madame Bovary. As in Flaubert’s masterpiece, the entire plot hinges on the adultery of a romantically inclined woman no longer able to bear the pressures of a repugnant and constricting environment.

Several characteristic differences emerge between the French and the Russian versions of this theme, tempting us to trace them back to differences in national character, or between East and West. Madame Bovary’s vein of romanticism is primarily poetic and hedonistic, Kát’a Kabanová’s more religious and introspective – which is not to deny Emma Bovary’s very real religious traits. The winning quality of both figures is an artless nobility. By their very existence they protest against the narrowness of their surroundings, against provincialism and small-mindedness. In Madame Bovary’s case these surroundings are marked by boredom, philistinism and imposture. Kát’a bears the greater burden, for she is enslaved – what is worse, enslaved to her own family. Her husband is a weak man, whose mother, the sinister Kabanicha, is the true driving force behind the drama. She rules with the conventions of so-called ‘good breeding’ – in reality nothing more than traditional mores. Her absolute tyranny within her family mirrors in miniature the ruthless power wielded by the tsars to keep the whole of Russia in bondage. From above came oppression by government, officialdom, a superstitious clergy; at home an entire household stood in thrall to the eldest family member. The aged Kabanicha is more than that time-honoured harridan, the ‘wicked mother-in-law’; she stands symbolically for tsarist Russia, with its morality of blind obedience to arbitrary command.”

Opnames van Janáček Káta: Amazon (Sir Charles Mackerras, 1998) en iTunes Store (Sir Charles Mackerras, 1977).

LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends” (YouTube)

Pitchfork: Top 100 Tracks of 2007.

Pitchfork: Top 50 Albums of 2007.