Category Archives: Music

Painters Of The 1920’s & 1930’s: “Moonlight Ballad – The Art Of Martin Lewis”

 

Born in Victoria, Australia, Martin Lewis was a printmaker who is known for his scenes of urban life in New York during the 1920s and 1930s. As a youth Lewis held a variety of jobs that ranged from working on cattle ranches in the Australian Outback, in logging and mining camps, to being a sailor. In 1898, he moved to Sydney for two years where he received his only formal art training. During this period he may have been introduced to printmaking; a local radical paper, The Bulletin, published two of his drawings.

Lewis left Australia in 1900 and first settled in San Francisco. He eventually worked his way eastward to New York. Little is known about his life during the following decade except that he made a living as a commercial artist and produced his first etching in 1915. Lewis’ skill as an etcher was noticed by Edward Hopper, who became a lifelong friend. In 1920, dissatisfied with his job, Lewis used his entire savings to study art and to sketch in Japan. He returned to New York after a two-year stay and resumed his commercial art career, but also pursued his own work as a painter and printmaker.

During the Depression, Lewis moved to Newtown, Connecticut, but later returned to Manhattan, where he helped establish a school for printmakers. From 1944-1952 Lewis taught a graphics course at the Art Students League in New York.

During his thirty-year career, Lewis made about 145 drypoints and etchings. His prints, like Shadow Dance and Stoops in Snow, were much admired during the 1930s for their realistic portrayal of daily life and sensitive rendering of texture. The artist’s skill in composition and his talent in the drypoint and etching media have received renewed attention in recent years. Lewis is one of the few printmakers of this era who specialized in nocturnal scenes. Some scholars consider his print Glow of the City his most significant work because of the subtlety of handling. A minute network of dots, lines, and flecks scratched onto the plate creates the illusion of transparent garments hanging in the foreground, while the Chanin Building, an art deco skyscraper, towers over the nearby tenements.

nga.gov/collection/artist-info.4704.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Lewis_(artist)

Tributes: 81-Year Old Country Singer Kenny Rogers Dies (1938 – 2020)

Kenny Rogers Facebook March 21 2020March 21, 2020 – The Rogers family is sad to announce that Kenny Rogers passed away last night at 10:25PM at the age of 81.  Rogers passed away peacefully at home from natural causes under the care of hospice and surrounded by his family.
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In a career that spanned more than six decades, Kenny Rogers left an indelible mark on the history of American music. His songs have endeared music lovers and touched the lives of millions around the world. Chart-topping hits like “The Gambler,” “Lady,” “Islands In The Stream,” “Lucille,” “She Believes In Me,” and “Through the Years” are just a handful of Kenny Rogers’ songs that have inspired generations of artists and fans alike.
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Rogers, with twenty-four number-one hits, was a Country Music Hall of Fame member, six-time CMA Awards winner, three-time GRAMMY® Award winner, recipient of the CMA Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, CMT Artist of a Lifetime Award honoree in 2015 and has been voted the “Favorite Singer of All Time” in a joint poll by readers of both USA Today and People.
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The family is planning a small private service at this time out of concern for the national COVID-19 emergency.  They look forward to celebrating Kenny’s life publicly with his friends and fans at a later date.
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Top Travel & Music Videos: “Hamish Napier – The Woods” In Scotland

To celebrate the launch of “The Woods”, the third album from acclaimed musician Hamish Napier Music, we’ve teamed up to bring you an audio-visual treat.

The Woods was commissioned by #CairngormsConnect to celebrate the ancient forests that make the project area so special.

Hamish has used the Scottish Gaelic alphabet, which is centred around Scotland’s native trees, to explore the folklore, natural and social heritage of Strathspey.

hamishnapier.bandcamp.com/music

Music Profiles: 76-Year Old Musician Robbie Robertson Talks About “Building The Band” (PBS)

The documentary “Once Were Brothers” chronicles the highs and lows of a famous rock group. Lead guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson began touring as a teenager and played for Bob Dylan before joining forces with four other musicians to become The Band. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Profiles: 73-Year Old British Novelist And Poet Ruth Padel On Her Book “Beethoven Variations”

Ruth Padel Beethoven Variations Poems on a Life bookLike Beethoven, the poet Ruth Padel first came to love and understand music through playing the viola. Her great grandfather, a concert pianist, studied music in Leipzig with Beethoven’s friend and contemporary. Her latest collection Beethoven Variations (Chatto) is simultaneously a biography in verse of the great composer and a passionate and highly personal account of how one creative genius can feed, and feed on, another.

London Review Bookshop Podcast logoShe was joined in an evening of readings and conversation about Beethoven, poetry and music by poets Raymond Antrobus and Anthony Anaxagorou, both of whom are currently engaged in creative projects working on and from the life and work of Beethoven.

Ruth Padel Slient Letters of the Alphabet bookRuth Sophia Padel (born 8 May 1946) is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, in whose work “the journey is the stepping stone to lyrical reflections on the human condition”. She is known for her explorations through poetry of migration and refugees,science, and homelessness; for her involvement in wildlife conservation,  Greece, and music; and for her belief that poetry “connects with every area of life” and “has a responsibility to look at the world”. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the Board of the Zoological Society of London, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and 4 on poetry, wildlife and music. In 2013 she joined King’s College London, where she is Professor of Poetry. 

Website

Bio from Wikipedia

 

Movie Soundtracks: “James Bond Theme” For “Dr. No” By Monty Norman, Now 91 (1928, London)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UssXdE4MFI

Monty Norman
Monty Norman

Soundtrack/theme music from the 1962 Terence Young film “Dr. No,” with Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord, John Kitzmiller, Lois Maxwell & Bernard Lee.

Monty Norman (born 4 April 1928) is a singer and film composer best known for composing the “James Bond Theme”.

Norman is famous for writing the music to the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, including the “James Bond Theme”, the signature theme of the James Bond franchise. Norman has received royalties since 1962 for the theme. However, as the producers were dissatisfied with Norman’s arrangement, John Barry re-arranged the theme. Barry later claimed that it was actually he who wrote the theme, but Norman won two libel actions against publishers for claiming that Barry was the composer, most recently against The Sunday Times in 2001. In the made-for-DVD documentary Inside Dr. No, Norman performs a music piece which he wrote for the stage several years earlier entitled “Bad Sign, Good Sign”, that resembles the melody of the “James Bond Theme” in several places.

Norman collected around £600,000 in royalties between the years 1976 and 1999 for the use of the theme since Dr. No.

From Wikipedia

Interviews: 71-Year Old Singer James Taylor On His Audiobook “Break Shot”

NPR Weekend Edition Sunday logoJames Taylor has been a household name for a long time now. Taylor was just 20-years-old when he released his self-titled debut in 1968; in the half century since then, he has sold over 100 million albums and cemented his status as one of the most successful American singer-songwriters.

But in Break Shot: My First 21 Years, his audio memoir on Audible, Taylor narrates his life before fame — including details of his struggle with drugs, alcohol addiction and time in psychiatric institutions. Taylor is also looking back with American Standard, a new album that revives the American Songbook tunes of his childhood.

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro spoke with Taylor about revisiting his fraught early memories, dealing with fame at an early age and his connection to The Beatles. Listen to their conversation in the player above and read on for highlights from the interview — including a few audio excerpts from Break Shot.

Retro Tech: “Gearbox Automatic Turntable MkII”

GEARBOX AUTOMATIC TURNTABLE MKIIThe Gearbox Automatic has created quite a buzz in the audio world, a plug & play turntable that plugs a gap in the portable turntable sector. It features high-quality components, meaning the sound is astonishing for its price class. This you would expect from Gearbox of course, but it also does things no other turntable has ever done before.

What also sets this turntable apart is the high-fidelity built-in valve phono stage, (the first in the world to have one), which has been designed and tuned for moving magnet cartridges such as the pre-fitted Ortofon OM10. This means that you can plug the turntable straight into any line input and enjoy the warm and open acoustics, right from the box.

Website

Profiles: 76-Year Old Country Singer Terry Allen Releases New Album “Just Like Moby Dick”

The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything)Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.

Iconic and iconoclastic Texan songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka AllenRichard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin

Album Website

Terry Allen (born May 7, 1943 in Wichita, Kansas) is an American Texas country and outlaw country singer-songwriter, painter and conceptual artist from Lubbock, Texas. He currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has recorded twelve albums of original songs, including the landmark releases Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979). His song “Amarillo Highway” has been covered by Bobby Bare, Sturgill Simpson and Robert Earl Keen. Other artists who have recorded Allen’s songs include Guy Clark, Little Feat, David Byrne, Doug Sahm, Ricky Nelson, and Lucinda Williams. Rolling Stone magazine describes his catalog, reaching back to Juarez as “..uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.”

From Wikipedia