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How Three Italian Crossover Singers Launched Their Careers in 2011 with "Il Volo … First Flight"

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Thursday, May 18), my husband Charles and I watched an engaging classical-pops crossover concert video by an Italian singing trio called Il Volo (“The Flight”). The video was called Il Volo … Takes Flight (though there’s some uncertainty about the ellipsis in the title and whether it belongs there) and was an early live album from Detroit with the Detroit Symphony in 2011. Il Volo organized when its three members, tenors Ignazio Boschetto and Gianloca Ginoble and light baritone Piero Barone, met in 2009 when they separately entered a televised singing contest in Italy called Ti Lascio una Canzone (“I Bring You a Song”). Roberto Cenci, the show’s producer, had the idea of teaming them as a sort of younger version of the “Three Tenors” (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras), who had created a sensation when they performed together for the 1990 opening ceremonies of the ...
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Stash Records' 1976 "Women in Jazz: All Women Groups" LP and Sexism in Jazz

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This morning I listened to the Stash Records LP from 1976, Women in Jazz: All Women Groups , one of a series of three Stash LP’s from 1976 to showcase jazz musicians of the female gender. Of course the liner-note writer, Art Napoleon (any relation to Bonaparte or Phil?), emphasized the institutionalized sexism of the jazz world that kept most women from achieving stardom unless they sang: “With a few notable exceptions – most of them pianists of determined and forceful ways – even the best female musicians have found that most of the time just being good wasn’t good enough. A woman remained an outsider, even an intruder, sometimes a threat.” I read a biography of Woody Herman that mentioned Billie Young, a woman trumpeter he hired in 1940, and the problems that caused both of them, particularly the knotty question of how she would dress. Eventually she wore a black skirt and a white top to match th...
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Pristine Classical's "1925: Landmarks from the Dawn of Electrical Recording": An Electrifying Compilation

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I’ve just downloaded a fascinating compilation of 1925 electrical recordings from Pristine: a two-CD set (for which I also received a download link, so I’m listening to it now) of the very first electrical recordings ever released publicly. These are recorded documents that until now had only been the stuff of legend for me, names mentioned in Roland Gelatt’s book The Fabulous Phonograph but which I’d never thought I’d actually get to hear. A brief précis is necessary here: until 1925 virtually all officially released sound recordings were made by an acoustic process. The sound waves being recorded were collected by a giant metal horn, which transmitted the sound to a cutting stylus that inscribed a groove on a master disc or cylinder. In the early 1920’s Western Electric, the research arm of the giant American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) monopoly, started a project to see if they could in...
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"An Evening with Elton John and Brandi Carlile" Showcases Two Openly Queer Artists from Different Generations

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter on Sunday, April 6 I switched channels for a 90-minute TV concert special featuring Elton John and Brandi Carlile in joint performance at the London Palladium. This was a venue young Reginald Kenneth Dwight (Elton John’s original name – I often joke that he’s the rock star with five first names) frequently attended because it showcased the top American rock acts as well as British stars like The Beatles, but he’d never actually performed there himself before this show. Their collaboration came about when Carlile wrote John a letter offering to record a song with him, and it snowballed from there into an entire album, recorded over a three-week period at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. With American producer Andrew Watt, they crafted an album with Elton John writing the music and Carlile and John’s longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin doing the ...
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Eight-Person "Vox Humana" a cappella Group Performs Extraordinary Concert at St. Paul's April 5

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, April 5) I attended a quite remarkable concert by an eight-person youth vocal group called Vox Humana at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral. The personnel are Lauren Carter and Stephanie Smith, sopranos; Chloe O’Mara and Antonia Fuenzalida, altos; John Yokoyama and Kit Jack Chan, tenors; and Allen Pace and Uriah Brown, basses. They performed a wide variety of material within the eight songs they sang (seven in the printed program and an unannounced encore, Billy Joel’s breakup ballad “And So It Goes,” from his 1989 album Storm Front , though he actually wrote it six years earlier). They opened with an original setting of the traditional religious verse “O Nata Lux” by John Yokoyama, who said he’d been inspired to compose it by singing the earlier setting of the same Latin text by Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) in a church group. The members of Vox Humana met each other, not surprisi...
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Benise's "25 Years of Passion!" TV Special as Overwhelming – In All the Wrong Reasons – As Its Title

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved By the time I got home from the stunning Vox Humana concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on April 5, 2025, it was already 8:35 p.m., too late to watch the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter , and for some reason Turner Classic Movies isn’t doing the dedicated “ Noir Alley” and “Silent Sunday Showcase” time slots usually hosted by Eddie Muller and Jacqueline Stewart, respectively, this month. So I looked online for something else to watch and found it in a PBS special called Benise: 25 Years of Passion! This is apparently the eighth PBS special for Benise, though I’d never heard of him before and judging from the widely disparate settings for the various songs (including Cuban music performed on a giant set representing “Club Havana” and Asian music from an equally monstrous set in China), this appeared to be a Greatest Hits compilation from all Benise’s seven previous PBS shows. So who ...
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67th Annual Grammy Awards: Chappell Roan and Raye Stand Out in Nearly Four-Hour Awards Show/Telethon

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Sunday, February 2) the 67th annual Grammy Awards took place in Hollywood at an arena named after a cryptocurrency (barf!). It was hosted by Trevor Noah, who began the event by saying that in light of the recent big fires in Los Angeles it had been touch and go for a few days whether the Grammy Awards would even happen at all. In the event, the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), hosts of the Grammy Awards, decided to turn it into a combination awards show and telethon, with one of those disgusting QR codes at the bottom of the screen (those horrible things that look like very bad miniature black-and-white reproductions of paintings by Mondrian) which you could photograph with your smartphone to open a Web site through which you could make a donation. Noah also tried to guilt-trip members of today’s super-rich (you know, the ones who brought you Donald Trump 2.0...
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