Even though I listened to a great deal of music all my life – I tend to believe that it was something more than the average – I still discover some excellent pieces of musical art in music from all over the world. This is probably why this blog contains posts about Hawaian music, African Jazz, Cuba’s most treasured band (twice), Gypsy Music and more.  

Considering this, is easy to imagine the excitement I found when discovering this guide to world music published by The Independent. It features an excellent selection of some of the most beautiful pieces of world music which will help anyone discover something new to enjoy.

In briefing, the featured albums are:

Americas
- ’40 Temas Originales’ by Carlos Gardel – Argentina
- ‘Beleza Tropical’, compiled by David Byrne in 1987 – Brazil
- ‘The Buena Vista Social Club’ – Cuba
- ‘The Mighty Sparrow and Lord Kitchener’ – Carribean
- ‘Grandes Exitos by Juan Luis Guerra’ – Dominican Republic

African Music
- ‘The History of Township Music’ – South Africa
- ‘Golden Afrique, Volume II’ – Congo
- ‘Golden Afrique, Volume I’ – West Africa
- ‘Immigrés’, by Youssou N’Dour – Senegal
- ‘Moffou’, by Salif Keita

Europe
- ‘Rumba Argelina’ by Radio Tarifa – Spain
- ‘Clandestino’, by Manu Chao
- ‘Musique des Tziganes de Roumanie’, by Taraf de Haïdouks – Romanian. The description of the album is impressive: “This record shook us all. These Gypsy guys from the Balkans are a group with a fiddle, a cimbalom, and lots of other stuff – they play at an unbelievable speed, and change gear at the same time. Exhilarating.”
- ‘Napoli Mediterranea’, by Pietra Montecorvino – Italy
- ‘The Art of Amalia’, Amalia Rodrigues – Portugal

Asia and Pacific
- ‘Musst Musst’, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Pakistan
- ‘Lata Mangeshkar: The Legend’
- ‘The Very Best of the Far East’ – China
- ‘The Gabby Pahinui Hawaiian Band’ – Hawaii
- ‘The Rough Guide to the Music of Thailand’ – Thailand

Middle East
- ‘Khaled, Khaled’ – Algeria
- ‘Fairuz: The Lady and the Legend’ – Liban
- ‘Ilham al Madfai’ – Iraq
- ‘Yemenite Songs’ – Israel
- ‘Tea in Marrakesh’ – North Africa

A nice sample of the music played by Taraful Haiducilor can be found in this live performance video.

It seems summer is the statistics season, as more and more charts are emerging. One I found particularly interesting – and seems to reflect a lot of truth – is the top Rock Guitarists chart made by Digital DreamDoor. The chart has over 200 names, and the artists are ranked based on their impact, influence, creativity, technical skills and popularity.

The top 10 on this list are:

1. Jimi Hendrix*
2. Eric Clapton
3. Jimmy Page
4. Jeff Beck
5. Eddie Van Halen n
6. Stevie Ray Vaughan
7. Joe Satriani
8. Ritchie Blackmore
9. Steve Vai
10. David Gilmour

It is quite interesting that Clapton, Page and Beck, ranked on 2, 3 and 4 have all been members of the English Yardbirds band, which is well known for producing a great deal of guitarists over the time.

Also, the ranking features the “best of the decade”, which are:

90s – John Petrucci
80s – Eddie Van Halen
70s – Jimmy Page
60s – Jimi Hendrix
50s – Chuck Berry

Overall, I think it’s an excellent chart and any changes to this would be mostly on subjective basis – for example, I would have put Frank Zappa higher than 39th position. For the entire chart, here is the link.

This year I decided I will take a vacation. A typical one, 2 weeks long, going someplace nice with some nice friends and such. Therefore, the planning started and there are various options to consider. From going to a distant island and doing nothing to travelling around the country or just hanging around the house and doing all those things you never find the time to do – all of them sound somehow interesting.

But one of them looks particularly interesting, too bad for the price tag which makes it quite unaffordable – a walk in the space.

“Space Adventures Ltd., a company based in Vienna, Va., that has sent three very wealthy men to orbit the earth on the International Space Station, is planning to announce today that future customers will be able to take an hour-and-a-half trip outside the station as well.

The price? Just $15 million, on top of the $20 million for the flight itself.

The spacewalks have been approved by the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation, which provides training and transportation to the station on Soyuz rockets, said Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures.”

So finally you can get to know how a spaceman feels like. For a preview of how it should feel like, Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman might provide some insight. Really nice track, with an excellent video.

UPDATE: And, if you are to go for it, here is what the wake-up tune in space is – ABBA – I had a dream :) Here is the story.

Speaking about influencial bands – The Who, one of the most influent rock bands in the 60s and 70 is comming back, 25 years after they stopped making any music. The Who performed a concert earlier this month in Hyde Park, London and they are to tour the US later this year. They already performed some concerts in Europe in July and June, and their are to start the US tour in September.  

Also, in October they are about to release a new album, called WHO2. This will be their first release after It’s Hard, in 1982. The first preview, entitled Wire & Glass, has been released as a maxi-single on 17th of July on iTunes.

More info about the comeback are to be found on www.thewhotour.com. Also, for you to remember, here is one of their old famous tracks – I Can See for Miles.

Quite newly launched, www.sideload.com offers free msuci to listen and download over the web. Looking at it, it offers quite some interesting music – I was able to easily find Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, Nirvana, U2 and a lot of other high-profile bands in there.

Also, the site integrates with mp3tunes.com, using a plugin called Oboe Locker which you can easily download for free.

So, I wonder how this can all be legal, with allowing you to freely download music. Well, it’s quite simple. Looking at their terms and conditions, it’s written: “Sideload.com does not store any music, but rather links to files publicly available other places on the net. Sideload.com respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our users to do the same.”

Might be an interesting model, I wonder how long this will last before somebody sues them, as it seems this is getting quite a popular practice in the industry.

The Observer published the top 50 albums that influenced music. It is a very nice review, describing each album and mentioning to each of them what whould have/have not happened wihout it.

I think the list is pretty well put up, even though, as music is highly subjective, a lot of comments can be added to. For example, Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All album is missing from the list, while it influenced a lot of future (speed) metal bands.

Likewise, Oasis is missing, while they influenced Brit music greatly. 2 PAC influenced hip hop a lot and is not there, Madonna or Elton John are not in the top 50 either and this could go on and on…. but it is a very nice effort and I think a lot of the albums deserve to be where they are – even though I would put Bob Dylan‘s higher in the list.

I know someone will feel very good finding Velvet Underground on the first place :)

Some while ago, there started this big buzz around the media with the music publishers going to sue the websites which publish music lyrics without any approval or – to be more exact – without paying any copyright fees.

Some actions were taken against software tools which search for lyrics – like pearLyrics - and it seems they had the effect the publishers aimed for, as now websites started buying licenses for publishing the songs lyrics.

Gracenote took one of the first steps in this directions and bought the right to publish the lyrics of around 1 million songs from Bertelsmann AG’s BMG Music Publishing, Vivendi’s Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and other publishers.

Now, this seems quite stupid to me to charge for publishing the lyrics of the song which is something everybody hears, they are meant to be this way. Plus, knowing the lyrics of a song is, in my opinion, quite likely to make you buy it and maybe the whole album. I myself found out a lot of nice artists and songs just by searching on Google for the lyrics of a song heard on the radio or in

Hopefully it won’t end up with the companies charging money from the user every time you read the lyrics or start humming them in the street.

And I wonder…how much money can you charge for the right to publish the lyrics of this song ? :)

Deb, one of my favourite designers – very professional and creative guy – just launched a new website dedicated to the recruiting of “flash geeks” for the company he is working for  – one I used to work for like 3 years or so. As the message is written from the heart – from one flash geek to the other – I recommand you taking a look if you are interesting in a flash-geek job or similar – www.flashgeek.ro.

And as any passion needs a song, the one which should go for a flash geek I guess is a very technologic song. It sounds like being made by a bunch of IT-oriented guys, and as a result it has been used in commercials for iPod or Motorola phones for example. The song is by Daft Punk and the name says it all – Technologic. You can listen to it here.

Write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
Load it, check it, quick- rewrite it,
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
Drag it, drop it, zip- unzip it.

[download]: Daft Punk – Technologic

 

Muse, the UK band which not long time ago was mostly reffered to as the new Radiohead, just released their fourth album – Black Holes and Revelations.

Having the opportunity to listen to it, it provides a great feeling starting with the first track – Take a Bow – a powerful song with a space-like feeling made with a complex orchestration in the beginning which leaves space to a more powerful drums sound to the end of the track.

This feeling carries on to the next tracks, all having a complex sound with powerful orchestrations until the 5th track – Soldier’s Poem, where the listener can take a brake and enjoy mostly the lyrics of the short, 2:01 minutes, ballad.

The seventh song, Assassin, starts with high pressure and follows up the same, being one of the best pieces of rock on this album. Still, I think the lyrics could be more outspoken in this track to deliver more power.

One of the last songs, Hoodoo, gives a strange feeling of both a poem with some instruments in the background until it strikes with some powerful drums riffs towards the end of it.

Overall, I found it a consistent album, it is clear that the guys from Muse worked a lot for it to bring it to this shape. If you are a fan of the genre, it is very likely you will find it a great piece of work.

Only for sample purposes – not to be distributed – you can listen to the first track here: Muse - Take A Bow.

 

Who would have thought that the first Romanian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” would be staged by a group of students from professor Florin Zamfirescu’s class at the National University of Drama and Cinematography “I. L. Caragiale” (UNATC) in Bucharest, lead by professor Adrian Pintea? Well, it’s true ;)

I guess most of you have already seen one of the movies with the same title from 1973 or 2000, or have at least listened to a recording of it. This modern opera is a masterpiece – the more you listen to it, the more you begin to understand and love it. But anyway, this is not my main point here ;).

The first time I went to see the show at the Arcub Theater (because I have to admit I already went three times and, who knows, maybe I’ll go again ;) ) I was completely blown away. I imagined the show would be ok – but nothing more. Yes, I had the preconception that it can’t be exceptional, because I knew the actors were only students, still preparing for their big acting careers. But I was so wrong: nothing can beat a year of hard work, the professionalism of all the people involved, these students’ optimism and great attitude, their talent and – most of all – their unspoiled enthusiasm. Combine all of that with a modern opera as brilliant and as powerful as Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” and I guess it’s obvious that they can’t go wrong.

Most of all, I would have never guessed that young people preparing at UNATC can have such great voices – I would have thought that their acting skills are their biggest asset, but it’s obvious that they have a lot more to show. From this point of view I would totally mention the two leading actors who play the roles of Jesus (Daniel Dobre) and Judas (Dan Rădulescu) – some of their songs gave me serious goose bumps ;). Mihai Niţă (in the roles of Peter and Herod), Darius Daradici (Caiaphas) and Marius Miron (Pilate) are also very good.

However, I think that the greatest merit of the show lies most of all in the excellent interaction between the actors – you will most likely find several of them very gifted but you will probably be the most impressed by the way their group songs turn out, so uplifting and powerful.

Oh, and they dance really cool, the orchestra (Conservatory students) sounds very professional and the costumes and scenery are also very appropriate. Need I say more? ;)

Big “congrats” to them all – for their hard work and accomplishment of a difficult project – but most of all for the great feeling that they manage to translate to the audience.

 

If you haven’t seen it yet, there are four more shows left, on the 13^th, 15^th, 17^th and 19^th of july, at 19.00. The address of the Arcub Theater is Batistei str., nr. 14.

Enjoy ;) I know I definitely have.

You can find some of mtx’s pics of the show on his blog, on my blog or on the official website of the project.