Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the premiere episode of American Song Contest on NBC. I hadn’t expected that Charles would be watching it with me, but he did and he was less impressed than I was, especially with the quality of the songs. He argued that the songs were pretty derivative and fit neatly into established genres . There were a few exceptions – notably “New Boot Goofin’” by Ryan Charles of Wyoming, which was not country but rap (and not a country-rap fusion like last year’s “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus, either: “New Boot Goofin’” was straight-up rap on a country subject, though at least you could understand the words: a lot of my frustration with rap comes from its virtual incomprehensibility, and I figure if you’re going to reduce music to just lyrics and rhythm, at least you ought to make it possible for us to decipher what you’re saying) – but ...

br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night I wanted to watch the NBC-TV special An Audience with Adele, thinking a) it would be on at 8 p.m. and b) it would be a simple Adele concert special with her singing 20 songs over the telecast time slot. In fact it was on at 9 p.m. (I filled in the hour between by watching a Meloni-era Law and Order: Special Victims Unit rerun on the USA Channel) and it was “an audience with Adele” in both senses of the term. The crowd was filled with other celebrities, including Samuel L. Jackson, Idris Elba and Emma Thompsun, and Adele called on them to ask her questions which she answered in crushingly banal terms. What’s more, NBC decided to use this show as a mega-promo for tonight’s premiere of the American Song Contest , a new show of their own patterned on the Eurovision Song Contest with up-and-comers from each state competing with people on the way down, including Michael Bolton from Con...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s event at the Balboa Park Organ Pavilion was billed as “A Musical Tribute to Peace, Dignity and Democracy,” but it was really a concert celebrating and commemorating the brave resistance of ordinary Ukrainians who are standing up to the Russian invaders that are shelling civilian targets throughout the country. I’m a bit suspicious about the way the American media have covered this war as a morality play with the Ukrainians as the good guys and the Russians as the bad guys, and I’ve been inclined to believe there may be justice on both sides. Certainly my long-time friend Cat said she thinks Ukraine at least partially provoked this by asking (and putting it into their constitution) to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which would put NATO right on Russia’s border. At the same time I find myself asking why the hell it’s Russia’s business that Ukraine joins NATO; I’m old ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Over the past two days I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos of gospel music, including a quite remarkable TV show from 1962: TV Gospel Time ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYzolJ6rR6k ), which featured the Soul Stirrers, the Caravans and a quite good church choir from the Shady Grove Church in Memphis, Tennessee (one wonders if this was one of the Black churches Elvis Presley used to sneak into when he was growing up) that were as inspired as the other two more famous ensembles on the program. It was amusing that three of the four sponsors of the show – Sulfur-8 hair tonic, Artra Beauty Bar and Artra Skin Tone Cream – were products deliberately aimed at helping Black people look white, or at least look white r . (The fourth sponsor was Feenamint chewing-gum laxative, which had also been the sponsor of George Gershwin’s radio program nearly 30 years earlier.) The market for these products...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday I played through three compilations of jazz versions of George Gershwin songs, including Blue Gershwin – a Blue Note anthology of jazz versions of Gershwin that I bought on cassette and later dubbed to CD along with a scan of the original j-card I used as a cover, along with Rhapsody in Blue and a separate CD of great jazz singers doing Gershwin, which I think was part of the same series as the CD I got of the great jazz singers doing Hoagy Carmichael. The Rhapsody in Blue CD duplicated two of the same tracks as Blue Gershwin, one great – Thelonious Monk’s marvelous 1947 trio recording of “Nice Work If You Can Get It” – and one terrible, “I Got Rhythm” as rearranged into somnolent boredom by pianists Bill Evans and Bob Brookmeyer. Brookmeyer was usually a valve trombonist, and he and Evans playing a piano duet systematically drained this song of everything that makes it great: rhythmic...