Monday recording....

thought I would get more done today, but then the whole phone drama happened....

Thunderball - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: this one was in bad shape (no skips but so crackly Tom Jones sounded like he was in a tin can) I debated bothering to transfer it. then the thought struck me that maybe the Cakewalk clean-up works, but playback sounds funny because the CPU maxes out on playback. so I recorded the first track (Tom Jones singing the title tune) hit the clean-up button, saved it, closed everything and played it using a different program aaaaaand it worked! beautifully. anyhoo, the soundtrack doesn't cover much new ground, has the 007 and Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang tunes.

Normally, I'm not prone to hysterics....

but @#%($#^*#$Q# I'M EXPECTING A PHONE CALL!!!!

time-warner, you are dead to me. maybe. I make RTO handle all that crap.

so yeah, I have no phone or internet at home right now. I'm at Starbucks. I'm not particularly fond of them either, but they're the closest place with wi-fi.

not one of my better moments.

update: got home a few minutes ago and there were two messages, seems it was a neighborhood problem.

kitty!

lesson learned.....

chugging a quart of chocolate milk on your way to the theater for a performance? not a good idea.

I may write a letter to Quiktrip, seems they aren't selling the more manageable size o' moojuice anymore. (just filled out the comment form on their website.)

recording

The Best of Mancini and Bacharach - Longines Symphonette Society: interesting mix of artists, 1st side is Mancini tunes and Bacharach gets the second side. each side begins and ends with a track played or conducted by the composer. Interesting arrangements included Charade by Liberace (surprisingly enough, I am not very familiar with his style) and Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head with Pete Fountain on the clarinet.

Million Seller Hits of 1969 - 101 Strings: they get a bit wild on this one and throw in some electric guitar. also loved the mandolin on Good Morning Starshine.

Peg o' My Heart - Jerry Murad's Harmonicats: this is just the goofy kind of thing records are for. Three dudes playing pop and classical tunes on harmonicas. who knew there was such a thing as a Bass Harmonica? the arrangement of Malaguena is nice.

Arthur or the decline and fall of The British Empire - The Kinks: this one got it's own entry in Wikipedia. interesting.

The Incomparable Mantovani and his Orchestra: so cool he doesn't even need a real album title. the usual Mantovani fare, lots of strings. I may have got this from my grandparents. there's not a price tag on it. on the other hand, it has More on it, so there's always a chance i paid for it.

sunday evening records

John Gary sings Your All-Time Favorite Songs: sure he does. All the things You Are, Autumn Leaves, Night and Day. Anyway the most fun thing about it is he's not afraid to use his falsetto voice on every song. It made Autumn Leaves particularly entertaining because in the opening phrases he'd hop up there and make little runs down on the last word. and then most songs ended on a high floaty note. w007!

Autumn Leaves - Ferrante & Teicher with Orchestra and Strings: Usually I love these guys but something was just off about this one. then I noticed it was "previously released as Postcards from Paris" (and that explains why most of the songtitles have French translations) so it's a recording from fairly early in their career and the sound balance is just completely out of whack. the pianos sound muddy and don't cut through the orchestra. blech.

Award Winning Scores from The Silver Screen - 101 Strings: wouldn't be an album of award winning songs without Theme from Moulin Rouge. ha ha. other familiar tunes include Spellbound, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Three Coins in the Fountain and Tara's Theme. This one also had a lot of wordless women's chorus. ah.

Dear maggie,

Here is your horoscope
for Saturday, April 21:

Practice makes perfect, but there's absolutely no fun in perfection. Discovery, exploration and making mistakes -- that's where all the joy in life comes from. Give yourself room to trip, stumble and fall right now.

so this got me reminiscing. ages ago when i took a watercolor class we'd talk about "happy mistakes" things might not always look like what you intended, but sometimes you're happier with the outcome.

Take that CraigC!!!

this is typical of so many afternoons

I look around an realize I'm the only one that's awake.

Don't forget to check out the Carnival of the Cats this weekend.

vague post that could mean something..... or not.....

I haven't seen someone on line for a couple days now.

developing......

RAAAARRRRRR!!!!

I was late to work today because the power went out last night. several times. it somehow seemed to know just when I'd nodded off and then blinked out. I finally called TXU about 4 a.m. and told them the power kept going out and waking me up. somebody called me a little while later and asked what was going on and did I need it fixed immediately or could it wait til morning, because it would be easier to spot problems if it was light outside. okay, fine. so sometime after that call the power must have gone off again, but i didn't wake up and it wiped out the alarm clock. I was not a happy camper today. and I haven't seen any signs of TXU making a visit, but it also looks like the power stayed on today.

roses

tuesday record

bland record for a blah day.

Roger Williams plays Love Theme from "Romeo and Juliet" and Other Great Movie Themes: yep, he covers some of the biggies of the time. Days of Wine and Roses, More and Theme from "Exodus". He stretches out some of the tunes to the point that they're hard to follow, such as As Long as He Needs Me. I kept thinking I'd figured out the timing and then nope, it was even slower. honk-shooooo.

I promise there will be more than one today...

so I didn't get any more records done last night. i conked out. i think my allergies are beating me down the last few days. yeah, that's it. anyhoo here goes.

An Evening at the Cafe Feenjon - The Feenjon Group: I'll just quote from the record jacket:

The Feenjon Group can be heard nightly at the Cafe Feenjon, located on Macdougal Street in New York's Greenwich Village. From the very beginning, the Feenjon has been a mecca for lovers of Israeli, Greek, Arabic, Turkis and Armenian song and dance.

doing some poking around online I found out that the cafe eventually became a comedy club. and you can hear some clips of this album here.

A Night with Jerome Kern - Earl Wrightson, Lois Hunt with Percy Faith and his orchestra: just an album of nice "legit" musical theater. ;D apparently Wrightson and Hunt performed together for years doing similar programs of musical theater. I found this nice article about Ms. Hunt. I suspected she had a classical background and I was right, she performed with the Met for several years. anyway, I'm always a bit amused by a white guy singing Ol' Man River.


Let It Be - The Beatles: The anthology version of I dig a Pony comes up on the shuffle all the time. I never knew that's what they were saying till now. huh.

Backbeat Symphony - 101 Strings: ah, the more things change....

This is the majesty of the symphony - with a beat. The melodies are among the greatest ever written. the tempos, the beat - pure rock and roll in a setting of the most beautiful tunes ever written and played by one of the world's leading orchestras - "101 Strings."

Perhaps this program will raise eyebrows and be declared as the wrong treatment ot these immortal classics. However, for the older listener who does not approve and considers this a desecration of classical works, we offer the following reasoning that lead to the production of this album:

As a group, the teen-ager has the highest musical appetite in the world today. And too often this appetite for music (predominated by rhythmic, danceable tunes) must be satisfied with badly written songs with borderline obscene lyrics. For teen-age audiences the beat is here. The longhair and parent alike should accept this fact. It is not wrong. It is wrong only when satisfied by material of inferior content. If the teen-ager is to develop musical tastes along with other maturities it can be readily appreciated that an exposure to good music in some form is a prerequisite to this development. It is the opinion of musically honest people that anything done well for what it is, is good providing it fills the need of natural expression. An after all, the majority of our greatest composers were considered very "far out" in their day, when they conceived the lovely melodies in this album.

yes, nothing like Caro Nome given a triplet beat and retitled as Rigoletto Rock. oh, I have to give you the rest of the titles, they're just too precious: Swingin at Igors, Choppin' Chopin, Rigoletto Rock, Swingin' Little Martha, Twangy Serenade, Back Beat Symphony, New World Rock, Rome and Juliet, Sherabop and Strings at the Hop.

Diamonds are Forever - Soundtrack: um, is it just me or did they just recycle a lot of stuff from other movies for this one? they gave them different titles, but I recognized them. and the "James Bond Theme" isn't on here. leave it to reveiwers on Amazon to explain a few things... the fact that the cd has twice as many tracks as the LP kinda explains it.

Bing Crosby - A Legendary Performer: kinda interesting the first side kicks off with a jaunty rendition of Ol' Man River from 1928 and has some other recordings through 1931 and then the second side recordings are from 1957 so we hear a much richer sounding Bing. so can anyone explain to me the, um, attraction of Just a Gigolo? I don't get that song.

ha ha!

today's records....

The World's Great Arias - featuring Enzo Stuarti & other artistes: I hunted around for a while to try to find out who the other artistes were but I haven't come up with anything. Did find some interesting bits about "Enzo Stuarti" though. First a really old article from Time and then his obituary. Anyhoo, lots of familiar things on here, La Donna E Mobile, Habanera, Vesti La Guibba... only thing I didn't recognize was In Fernen Land. I don't know for certain, but to my ear it sounded like a couple of the arias were transposed down, Che Gelida Manina in particular. and then whoever sang Ah! Forse Lui opted not to take the high E-flat at the end, which is as it's written*, but I don't hear it done much nowadays.

*found this nice commentary at nfcs about it

If you sing the E-flat in performance, be prepared for one critic to say, "Instead of respecting Verdi's score, Miss C______ screeched out an unwritten high note in a blatant attempt to win cheap applause."

If you don't sing the E-flat, someone will write, "Miss C_____ avoided the climactic note of the aria, so the entire scene fell flat. A soprano who cannot sing all the notes has no business singing Violetta."

good news, bad news...

I have the evening free. but rehearsal was cancelled due to weather. There's currently a tornado warning issued for Dallas county. storm tracker on tv is predicting the storm will get here in a bout an hour. wish me luck.

update: well, it looks like the worst of it went south of here. kind of a dud. I've seen worse storms where they didn't sound the emergency sirens. oh well.

hello, I know you're reading the paper but....

isn't there something else you should be doing?

i've been seeing this ad a lot lately...

I keep vacillating between laughter and horror. I can't remember what he's singing, Traviata?

update: checked with someone who would know. it is indeed from Traviata.

note to self....

don't feed the puppy outside anymore. it attracts undesirables....
slugs.
possums.
birds.
big fat slimy slugs! GAH!!!! I HATE THEM!!!!!!!

who says opera is serious?

friend of mine tonight was wearing a t-shirt she made herself. it said, "it ain't over til I sing" and had a little stick figure woman in breastplate and horned helmet. very cute.

Tuesday record

Skins! a bongo party with Les Baxter: not as exciting as it sounds. even with each instrument "played by a foreign-born musician".

Monday records...

A New World Record - ELO: I think this is the first ELO record I had, and I couldn't tell you why I even picked it up, but it's among one of my favorite albums of all. It's got Telephone Line, Rockaria! and Do Ya though my favorite is probably Shangri-La. I just love the harmonies and the orchestration and Jeff Lynne's voice. this is one I would crank up whenever i was home alone.


Bernard Herrmann conducts.... : lots of his stuff from movies. I particularly liked the North by Northwest track. and of course the second side is mostly Psycho adapted as a "Narrative for Orchestra". it was fun to watch Roxie's ears perk up at the stabby violin part.

who knew...

kitten calendar photography could be so cruel?

oh, language warning.

Sunday records

World's Greatest Piano Music: for some reason I have one record from this RD collection, guess mom will have to send me the rest. ;D anyhoo, this is pretty heavy on the Chopin with two tracks on each side two Debussy and then some Schubert, Schumann, Liszt and Gershwin. okay, who doesn't fit in this list? actually, Gershwin's Three Preludes don't stick out too much.

A Time for Love - Bobby Hackett with strings: mmmmm, cheesy cornet. this is one of those that goes on and on about the recording technique used in the liner notes. "Now-for the first time-you can really hear Bobby Hackett on a recording." well, since I don't think I have any earlier recordings of him to compare it to, I'll have to take their word for it. some nice arrangements of some of my faves, particularly On the Street Where You Live, they keep it moving with pizzicato strings while Hackett noodles around the tune.

Shadow of Your Smile and other Great Themes - Andre Kostelanetz: tried to dig up some info on "Kosty" (as spaceagepop nicknames him) I was curious about whether or not he was using a theremin on a few of the songs here, but I couldn't find anything. it very well could be a person singing, I have a hard time distinguishing sometimes. imdb says he commissioned Copland's Lincoln Portrait. and he was married to Lily Pons for a while.

sneaky records....

so in about the time it takes me to read the day's paper, I can get one record transfered. this week I've been working my way through the boxed set Mood Music from the Movies. yes it's Reader's Digest Pleasure Programmed (that sound a bit, um, icky) anyhoo, six whole records of music from movies, mostly not from the soundtracks, but rearranged and also from lots of movies I've never heard of. I mean, Airport? apparently it had a great soundtrack since it got two tracks. for the most part these would be great for innocuous background noise. not too distracting. there were a few things that struck me as entertaining as i was listening to them, but I've slept since then and can't remember what they were. something about mandolins. aw yeah! ooooh, it looks like I paid all of 99 cents for this set. quite the deal there. there will be more RD boxed sets to come later. I think I'll probably ramble about each album individually because obviously I've forgotten things over the last few days. too many movies, it's rotting my brain.

Magical Mystery Tour - The Beatles: I debated recording this one since I could probably find a remastered cd for cheap. and I can't really add anything to whatever has been said about it. I was wondering if it was a compilation because it doesn't seem to gel as well as some of their other albums, but apparently it's not and i'm not the only one to have that impression of it. (at least that's what i gather from skimming a few amazon reviews) but, would the cd include the trippy photos and cartoons? I don't know. this also had a poster from the white album stashed in it. oops. (I'll put it back where it belongs) and 8x10's of Paul, Ringo, and George.... John is missing, couldn't tell you if I lost it or dad did something with it. ;D


speaking of the white album, I won't be transfering it cause i already have it on cd. also skipping Sgt. Pepper's and Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed. though may I just say it's a bit annoying/amusing how the cd splits the tracks on that one, I need to figure out how to tell itunes to keep them all together.

Saturday weather update

yes, it is cold. and yes, I have seen a few snowflakes. or else someone with a bad case of dandruff is on the roof of my house. take your pick.

friday catblogging

maggie and carlos bagged out on the couch.

Roxie let me know....

these are my dog walking shoes. I didn't know this until mid-February when I put them on to go trim the rose bushes. Roxie got really excited and ran back and forth between me and the front door. so now I know. I don't even remember making it a point to wear these shoes to walk the dog, so I'll never know how many times it took her to make the connection, but it's definitely made now.

and speaking of roses....

I took this a little while ago. word on the street is it will get close to freezing tonight (just checked weather.com, there's a chance of snow tomorrow!) so, these probably won't last long.

you go!

you sign. please. or not, just don't tell me. ;D