BONUS: Joe Cocker at Woodstock - the real lyrics

For those of us old enough to remember Woodstock - and Joe Cocker - here's a clip that made me laugh more than anything I've seen in the last few months:

Retro Cocktail Hour

A weekly treat from my former home state of Kansas is the (inaccurately-named) Retro Cocktail Hour http://www.kpr.ku.edu/retro/. This weekly two-hour radio show of "Space-age pop, bachelor pad music, exotica, lounge music, and cocktail jazz" is loads of fun. Dig that cocktail shaker out of the closet and make this the backdrop to your next tiki-themed party. The shows are usually available for streaming for about 6 weeks after their Saturday night broadcasts.

Montana Radio Cafe

In 2004, Scott Johnston went on the air from his 90-year old farmhouse near Creston, Montana. His 100-watt signal barely reaches his nearest neighbor, but his eclectic 21,000+ song library has attracted fans from around the web. I'd characterize his playlist as largely "American Roots" – Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Tish Hinojosa, John Mayall, BB King, the BoDeans, and Little Feat show up regularly, but many of the tracks will be ones you've never heard on the radio. The site streams 24/7, and is free, but has commercials for local home-town businesses. http://www.kxzi.com/. 

SoundCloud

An interesting website I've recently started visiting is SoundCloud http://soundcloud.com/. The site, which originated in Sweden in 2007, allows visitors to upload their own music, poetry readings, interviews, ambient recordings – really anything. Anyone can listen to and comment on the tracks at any point (there's a cute waveform display for each track), and a whole social network has emerged from this. I enjoy sticking a random word into their search engine – say, broccoli – and see what pops up.

Found via BoingBoing

The Retro Cocktail Hour

A weekly treat from my former home state of Kansas is the (inaccurately-named) Retro Cocktail Hour http://www.kpr.ku.edu/retro/. This weekly two-hour radio show of "Space-age pop, bachelor pad music, exotica, lounge music, and cocktail jazz" is loads of fun. Dig that cocktail shaker out of the closet and make this the backdrop to your next tiki-themed party. The shows are usually available for streaming for about 6 weeks after their Saturday night broadcasts.

Montana Radio Cafe

In 2004, Scott Johnston went on the air from his 90-year old farmhouse near Creston, Montana. His 100-watt signal barely reaches his nearest neighbor, but his eclectic 21,000+ song library has attracted fans from around the web. I'd characterize his playlist as largely "American Roots" – Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Tish Hinojosa, John Mayall, BB King, the BoDeans, and Little Feat show up regularly, but many of the tracks will be ones you've never heard on the radio. The site streams 24/7, and is free, but has commercials for local home-town businesses. http://www.kxzi.com/. 

Shared by June.

Clownbarf!

My color sense is practically non-existent. If I try to combine colors into a pleasant palette, it invariably ends up a disaster. I am forever grateful that the women in my life have exquisite taste in color.

Perhaps because of this, I've had a lifelong love for the variety of celluloid guitar pick called variously Confetti, Mix-up, or my favorite name for it -- Clownbarf. (Sometimes I've seen it called "clown vomit" but I find that a bit uglier.)

Here is an example of a vintage 1930s D'Andrea clownbarf pick I saw recently on eBay:


This aesthetic carries over into other areas -- I'm always looking for this kind of color mixing in other places:

Funkytown (detail), by Polly Apfelbaum

There is a type of gemstone called fordite that I like very much. To call it a gemstone is a bit of a stretch, though. What it is, is the built-up layers of paint from old-style (pre-robots) auto factory paint booths, hardened over the years by baking and age, then sliced to reveal the layers:

From the Fordite.com website

And just today, I discovered -- via a fine jeweler named Scott Schreiber -- that there is a clownbarf opal! OK, it's officially called Koroit Boulder Opal, but it sure looks like clownbarf to me!

Scott's chunk of Clownbarf Koroit Boulder Opal

My Life as a Fakebook

That's the working title of a project I've been working on for a couple of years. I'd been wanting to publish a fakebook of some of my tunes for quite a long time, and I seriously got underway in 2007 when I had to do leadsheets for the other musicians who played on the CD Sometimes Things Work Out. At the same time, I wanted to share some stories from my career as a musician. I was looking at Charles Mingus's book More Than a Fakebook, and I liked how his leadsheets were interspersed with stories, anecdotes, and performance notes.

Good enough for Mingus, good enough for me.

So far, I've completed about 30 leadsheets, and maybe a dozen stories. I'm far short of where I need to be before I print up some copies (in C, Bb, Eb, and Bass transpositions, of course) and start dragging them out to jam sessions. I'd like to have about a hundred tunes and possibly a couple of dozen stories before I stop writing and start polishing it up.

I also learned a good lesson from the Sometimes Things Work Out CD project; my first print run will be in single-digit quantities. (CDs are still in stock -- get them while they last!)

Artie Colatrella

From my dear friend Lisa Nemzo has come word of the serious challenges one of our friends is facing. Artie Colatrella is a wonderfully talented poet and lyricist. He is also very sick right now. As you can imagine, the positions of "poet" and "lyricist" don't usually come with health insurance.

Anyone who is on the fence about the need to reform the US health care system need only to read Artie's story. Please look it over and help if you can:

http://artiecolatrellafund.com/


UPDATE: Hear Artie and Lisa interviewed on the London Garcia Show. It's the March 7th, 2010 show on this web page:

http://www.latalkradio.com/London.php

UPDATE: Artie passed away at 12:57 am, September 2, 2011. His final collaboration with Lisa Nemzo was the song Arlington, which has been made into a wonderful video.

Blue Fiddles

You should check out a new web series called Blue Fiddles. It's set in Portland, Oregon, and also filmed there. The writer/director/star is the multi-talented Nena Botto, and here's how Nena describes the story line:

"It's the story of three women searching for meaning amongst the day to day grind living in Portland, Oregon. The theme is a mix of comedy and drama that has aims to be glamorous through honesty -women who have scars from life experiences not from numerous Botox sessions. The characters are complex in their demeanor and wonderfully flawed in their intentions."

Please give this excellent web series a look. The first three episodes (Season One) are up now.


Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention, they used a snippet of one of the tracks from the "Sometimes Things Work Out" CD -- Longing -- as soundtrack music in Episode 3. It's in the next to last scene.