Music
Music Monday - Francesco Bonifazi
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 07:52Today is the final day that performers can submit their electronic press kits (EPKs) to me on Sonicbids for this set of reviews. Performers are asked to fill out a pretty standard questionnaire, that includes, “Are you a current reader of the Orient Lodge Music Review” and “Briefly describe why we should write about you”.
People who are regular readers will know that I like to highlight unknown and out of the ordinary performers. Francesco Bonifazi said that he is not a regular reader, yet in telling me why he thinks I should write about him, he hits the note that resonates here.
He starts off:
I suspect that my music is not exactly like anything you've heard before....so please keep an open mind. When I tell reviewers, radio hosts etc. that I'm a world-champion whistler they wince and think it's going to be a cute novelty act
He’s right. His music is not exactly like anything I’ve heard before. That is part of the reason I like it. It is not some cute novelty act and, yes, he is a world-champion whistler. I followed up on this claim. He won first place in the Popular Music category at the 2003 International Whistlers Convention. This year’s convention will be in Louisburg, North Carolina, April 6-10, 2011.
His whistling covers a broad spectrum of genres with a jazz being an important focus and I listened to quite a few tracks. “Angels” is one of my favorites:
Sometimes it feels like an angel brushes my skin.
They're all around us and from within.
Soft and smooth like a feather on a warm summer wind.
And there's kindness in the music of their gentle wings.
There is some impressive whistling on this track.
He sent me a link to one video. It is about twelve minutes long and not greatly edited. However, if you skip the first the first seven and a half minutes, there is a really fun section where he does Take The A Train, with some nice whistling and a kid in a Santa hat coming up to dance.
However, if you want to watch a video that really captures his whistling process watch this one:
Francesco Bonifazi is currently putting together a tour of the north east in the Spring and working on a second album focused on Acoustic/Americana/Audult Comtemporary music.
Melancholy Music Monday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/20/2010 - 08:21
Last night, I scanned through the Sonic bids submissions to the music review section of this blog. This time around, I’ve gotten much less submissions. During my first period, I had 71 submissions. In the end, I reviewed 16. With one week left in this submission period, I’ve only received sixteen listings to review. I’ve now reviewed 7 of them.
There are a few interesting groups that I am considering reviewing. A couple have interesting videos or interesting backgrounds, but none of them really fit my feeling for this week.
You see, Saturday afternoon, my aunt died. I wrote a bit about it then, and I’m still feeling a bit blue. None of the listings jumped out at me on this. However, several tunes that often rattle around in my head have been with me for the past couple of days.
I like to write about songs that most people have not heard, yet there is one well known song that captures my mood fairly nicely. River by Joni Mitchell.
Two other songs are about bigger struggles that people go through. The first is Chris O’Brien’s “Blood Like Yours”. I first heard Chris at Falcon Ridge this year. His song about struggling with his father’s alcoholism is powerful and comes back to me from time to time.
In the same way, David Silva’s song “It will all be perfect” often comes back to me. David submitted a listing to Sonicbids earlier this year and I featured him in a review. This is a song about domestic violence. It comes from the abused’s perspective with the haunting line, “It will all be perfect baby, please don’t hit me anymore”; the hope that things will be okay when deep down, you know they aren’t, and won’t be without some sort of major changes. I suspect that the broader sense may be something many of us can relate to, even if we have no immediate experiences with domestic violence.
With that, I come to Harpeth rising’s “Can’t find the revolution”. They also came to me via a SonicBids submission. I reviewed Harpeth rising back in June. They will be playing in Middletown, CT in January and I’m working out details for them to appear on Fiona’s Radio Show this weekend to talk about their music and their upcoming show.
Back in June, I mentioned “Can’t find the revolution” as one of the songs that I really like, and it has been coming back to my mind a lot during these past few days. It talks about a woman who used to be a rambler and now she’s trapped inside a swivel chair and that she can’t find the revolution, but she’s looking every day.
When confronted with death, we may stop and wonder how our lives are going. Are we doing something we want to be doing, something meaningful? Have we found the revolution, or are we trapped inside a swivel chair. My new job is still new, and I’m just starting to find the frustrations that I suspect I’ll have to fight, but at least right now, it feels like I’ve found the revolution. But that’s a different blog post waiting to be written.
Ending things off is Calaveras’ “Ready to Fly”. I heard Calaveras at Falcon Ridge in 2009. Their song “Ready to Fly” grew out of some time that they spent with elderly people in nursing homes. “I am not dying, I’m getting ready to fly.” It is an incredibly hopeful look at the final days of loved ones.
So, as I mourn the passing of my aunt, I am spending time with some of my close friends. Just like my human friends, these musical friends might not be the most popular, but they carry incredibly deep meaning, and I hope that everyone spends time seeking similar friendships.
Music Monday - The Rogues
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/13/2010 - 07:24The Rogues are not the type of band that I normally review here. I like to talk about the 22 year old hitching down Route 101 with a guitar on his back, looking for another open mic and at unknown coffee shop. That’s not The Rogues.
There website proclaims:
VOTED #1 OUT OF BANDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD THE ROGUES HAVE PERFORMED GLOBALLY FOR OVER 1 MILLION PEOPLE. 9 ALBUMS; 7 COMBINED WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS; 2 ASCAP AWARDS; APPEARANCES IN LAS VEGAS, CHICAGO, MIAMI, A HOLLYWOOD FILM, AND WITH THE U.S. AIR FORCE ORCHESTRA... THE NUMBERS SHOW THE ROGUES ARE READY TO TAKE ON THE WORLDS OF CELTIC, ROCK, FOLK, AND CLASSICAL MUSIC.
Okay, then. My little review won’t have the same sort of impact as it would for the kid on the highway. But they submitted their electronic press kit (EPK) on Orient Lodge Music Review’s Sonicbids page, and I just couldn’t skip them because they’re already pretty big. After all, there is a reason they are so successful, even though I suspect that a lot of my readers probably haven’t listened to them before.
The first song in their EPK is “The Gael”. Here is the second reason I normally wouldn’t review them. I’m focused on words. This piece is an instrumental. I can’t quote a line of lyrics that I found inspirational and pontificate on it. Yet the whole piece is inspirational. As I prepared to write this review on Sunday afternoon, I listened to “The Gael” as I looked out of my office window. It was a cold rainy blustery day. A gale was blowing outside and I could imagine the gael standing in the breeze, cold, soaking wet and reeking of the tune coming out of my speakers. The one thing that was missing was a really good sound system. Sure, they sounded good coming from the small Sony PC speakers that I have next to my computer, but I would really like to hear them cranked all the way up on a good sound system, or even better catch them live.
Looking at there schedule I noted one interesting gig they have. U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay Cuba, March 19. 2011. I don’t think I’ll make it to that show. They also have a show towards the end of next year, Deakstock - Wounded Vets Fundraiser at the American Legion Hall in Crownsville, MD. $10 to get in. Well worth it. They do a lot of fundraising for vets and you’ve got to love them for it.
Their other big circuit is the Renfaire’s and Scottish Festivals. Oklahoma, West Virginia, and yes, Connecticut. They will be playing four weekends at the Robin Hood Springtime Festival in Guilford, CT. So, check out their webpage and get one of their CDs. Find a show where they are playing and check them out.
As I like to do with my Music Monday posts, let me leave you with a video:
Where were you when you heard the news of John Lennon's murder?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/11/2010 - 14:14It has been a long week, the first full week of my new job. To make things worse, I’ve been fighting a cold that I believe Fiona brought to the house. I’ve been tired and when I’ve gotten home, often gone straight to bed. My personal writing and my visit to friends blogs have suffered considerably. John from Ask The Blogster left a nice comment yesterday mentioning that I was missed from the Adgitize community.
I describe it as a community, instead of an advertising network or some sort of blogging network, because that is what it is. It relates back to any sort of good social media activity. It is about the community.
Dick, another active member of the Adgitize community, over at Dickster’s Random Thoughts asked in a recent blog post, "Where were you when you heard the news of John Lennon's murder?”. He talks about getting dressed in black and heading off to open up the store he worked at.
I’m a few years older than Dick. I was living in an old spice factory that had been converted into artists’ loft spaces in Brooklyn, NY. One of my loftmates was a photographer supporting himself working for CBS news doing food service. I remember that he told me that Lennon had been shot. The details are now a little bit blurry in my mind. My recollection was that at some point, he had gotten a call from work. He was told that Lennon had been shot and that it was going to be a busy long cold night at CBS news, and he had better get in to make sure there would be enough coffee and hot chocolate for people working long hours.
I had moved to New York to be a writer. I was supporting myself by writing computer programs for New York Life Insurance company. In the morning, I got on the subway into Manhattan. I don’t know if there really was a strange hush over the crowd in the subways, or it was just my reaction to all the people. I remember seeing a poster for some movie titled something like “The Starmaker” and I thought about how we deal with stars, making stars, killing stars. I stopped and wrote a poem about it in a park on the way to work. I suspect the poem was lost a long time ago, and it was probably a proto-emo type poem that is just as well lost.
Now, thirty years later, I’m still writing. I’m writing my blog posts. I’m working on using social media to improve communities’ health, and I’m tired. I’ll post this as is, rest, visit a few other blogs and head off to some social engagements for the day.
Music Monday - Joe Rollin Porter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 07:17As I started checking over my list of possible musicians to review for this week’s Music Monday, I looked again at Joe Rollin Porter. I had to check over my blog posts, because it really felt like I had reviewed him before. There is something very familiar about him and his music.
On his SonicBids press kit it says
Joe’s fingerstyle acoustic guitar playing and vocals transcend genre and style, viscerally connecting with music lovers of widely diverging tastes. His live performance can bring a room full of loud distracted drinkers to a hushed silence, hanging on every note...
Joe does not attempt to “authentically” replicate old-time music. Nor does he try to modernize the old songs to make them appeal to contemporary commercial tastes. Rather, after years of absorbing and internalizing traditional folk music, the songs flow out as natural self-expression.
Okay. Maybe that is why he sounds so familiar. So many of the press kits say the same sort of stuff. I clicked on play for the first song in his press kit. It was Black Jack Davy. Black Jack Davy is an alternative title to The Gypsy Laddie. It is in number 200 in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads as collected by Francis James Child.
Last may, I reviewed The Sweet Colleens. The first song in their Electronic Press Kit was “Wraggle Taggle”, which is another name of the same ballad. It is two very different interpretations of the same ballad and both stand very well on their own.
The second song that he has is the traditional American folk song, The Cuckoo Bird. Both songs illustrate nicely his “very advanced and unique fingerstyle guitar technique”. I like to listen to folk musicians with great finger style pickin, and Joe Rollin Porter fits nicely in this category.
What makes it all the more enjoyable is that he has a voice that matches his guitar picking. It has often seemed like many of the better pickers rarely sing.
I like to end off my reviews with YouTube videos of the performers, when I can find them, and MyUncleJoe666 has a good video of this song being performed. It is in black and white in what looks like an empty apartment. It switches back and forth between different views of Joe, sometimes cutting off the top of his head. Yeah, traditional American folk singing, performed in a unique way, shot as a YouTube video which is fairly traditional in certain aspect and unique in others.
I still haven’t figured out why the music and the musician seem so familiar. If I did review him already and you find the review, let me know. Maybe it is just because I’ve checked out his music a few times, or maybe it is just some timeless quality to the performances. Whatever it is, you might want to get more familiar with Joe’s music as well.
Here’s the video:
