There are a few groups that I grew up listening to but never had the chance to see live; with reunion tours and better medicine, I’ve been able to catch Yes, Genesis, Rush, and others live. But I have always longed to hear Renaissance, with Annie Haslam, in a small venue, with high-end sound.
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Archive of posts filed under the Music category.
Renaissance On Tour (Again)
Summer 09 CD Frenzy
Every summer, I try to make a pilgrammage to the Princeton Record Exchange. My affiliation with Barry and his floor-to-ceiling crates of vinyl goes back to the spring of 1980, when I was a wide-eyed high school senior who happened into this used record store that just opened on Nassau Street. [...]
Neal Peart’s “Traveling Music”
Back from a true week of vacation: thanks to the hotel’s internet service provider’s inability to maintain IP addresses consistently during a 24-hour period, I had almost no IMAP service and therefore no email. A week of bakery-fueled breakfasts, days of reading by the pool, and some random boogie boarding were a huge [...]
Plumbing the Depths
It was one of those weekends when I did many things, but didn’t see a common theme emerge until I spent Sunday afternoon with my hands submerged in a failed attempt to blend art and plumbing and realized I’d had a trio of plumbing references as the meta data for my weekend. But I’m cutting [...]
Ghost Rider
Just finished Neal Peart’s Ghost Rider, the story of his “healing road” of motorcycle travels after the tragic deaths of his daughter and wife within 10 months of each other. Normally I find travel literature really boring; I’d rather go and explore and get a sense of places first-hand than have context prescribed [...]
Musical Taxonomies and Global Economies
On our walk between the hotel and biergarten for dinner last night, a few of us stopped into a local music store on the Ku’dam in Berlin. This is one of my favorite ways to get a sense of local culture: stop into a local retail store. This music shop was 80% equivalent [...]
Feeling Old On A Friday Night
Bily Crystal wrote in 700 Sundays that he felt old when Mickey Mantle died, his first childhood hero’s death forcing him to deal with mortality. I felt the same way when Willie Stargell died in 2001, on the very day that the more-than-lifesize statue of him was to be unveiled at the [...]
Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Wind Ensemble
Today was one of those “If you can read this, thank a teacher” kind of days. After blogging about the harmonic convergence of a high school band performance and my trip to Korea, I decided to track down Mr. Santoro (my high school band director); turns out he teaches at a school not far from [...]
Funky Winkerbean Moment in Korea
As a high school student, the original Funky Winkerbean comic strip captured my life pretty well, especially Harry Dinkle, the world’s greatest band director. Mr. Dinkle was fond of proclaiming that “Football fields are for band practice,” while Mr. Santoro, my own marching band director, insisted that “Band prepares you for life.” [...]
Art Rocking The House
Chalk up another transitive closure to amazon.com’s suggestion engine. While hunting for Yes “Live at Montreaux” on CD, I was presented with the concert mash-up of the last Genesis jaunt across Europe, appropriately titled “Live Over Europe 2007.” I ended up throwing a nice Rick Wakeman compliation (”Sixty Minutes With…”) [...]
