Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night my husband Charles and I watched two Christmas specials on KPBS, of which the first was a quite engaging 60th anniversary tribute to the Ella Fitzgerald Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album from 1960. It wasn’t billed as a 60th anniversary tribute, but since it was made in 2020 it obviously functioned as one. I first encountered Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas as a cassette I bought from the old Sam Goody’s location on the third floor of Horton Plaza before they moved to a bigger location on the first floor and then lamentably went out of business altogether in 2013. I burned a CD copy from my tape just as it was about to self-destruct and then got a CD version at Auntie Helen’s thrift store in North Park, though according to Wikipedia a later CD edition contained six bonus tracks, three of which were alternate takes. The original Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas album,...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved After Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christma s PBS showed a quite different holiday-themed special, The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King. Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker has become a staple of the holiday season – just about every ballet company in the world mounts a production of it during the Christmas season and makes so much money off it it provides half their income for the year – but John Mauceri, American-born conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, decided to do a new version that would bring the story closer to its original source, the 1816 novel by German writer. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Most classical music fans know of Hoffmann, if at all, as the central figure of Jacques Offenbach’s last opera, The Tales of Hoffmann , which not only draws on three of his stories but presents Hoffmann as an on-stage character, a man routinely victimized by love and relationships that turn out to b...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved At 11 p.m. on Friday, December 23 I caught a Live at the Belly Up show on KPBS which I quite liked, featuring a 30-year-old blues-rock musician named Samantha Fish. In her interstitial interviews she said she grew up in Kansas City and started at age 13 as a drummer before switching to guitar and vocals at 15. So far she’s made 11 albums, some leading the Samantha Fish Blues Band and some on her own, and the copyright date on this show was 2020 (which would mean they got in just before the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of all live venues for almost two years). Most of the songs she played came from her 2019 album Kill or Be Kind – a song she wrote about the dynamics of a dysfunctional relationship – including the spectacular opening song, “Bulletproof,” which she played on a guitar with a long neck and a rectangular body that reminded me of a cigar box (the body even had filigreed ornamentat...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 9 CBS-TV ran the awkwardly titled program Homeward Bound: A Grammy Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon . I had just started watching it when my husband Charles came home from work during the second song, the Jonas Brothers’ version of “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” The songs of Paul Simon are among the greatest parts of our cultural heritage from the second half of the 20th century – he’s at the same level as John Lennon and Paul McCartney (jointly and severally), Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and Stevie Wonder – but they’re also tough nuts for cover artists to crack because most of them admit to only one sort of interpretation. These lumbering tribute shows to various artists generally produce a few horribly awful or misguided performances as well as great ones; in last night’s Simon tribute there were no outright dogs but also very few performances that illuminate anything new to the son...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved One of this year’s biggest Christmas-themed TV specials was Merry Christmas to All by singer Mariah Carey, filmed “live” in concert at Madison Square Garden in New York December 16, 2022 and aired on CBS four nights later. Though my husband Charles was working the night it was aired, we’d seen Mariah Carey on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show a few nights before and she’d visibly and audibly bristled at being referred to as “the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas.” Mariah Carey said that, whoever proclaimed her the “Queen of Christmas,” it wasn’t she – though her mega-hit song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” seems to have taken over from Bing Crosby’s (and Irving Berlin’s) “White Christmas” as the Christmas-themed pop song. In his introduction, Colbert also stated that at 200 million records sold, Mariah Carey is the best-selling solo artist in recording history, taking the title from Garth Bro...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved This morning, I played through Michel Legrand’s album Legrand Jazz , made in 1958 in three recording sessions in New York City, one of which featured Miles Davis and two of his then-sidemen, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and John Coltrane (and it’s fascinating to hear Trane in a context where he had to keep his solos short and simple at a time when Miles was frequently upbraiding him for the sheer length of his improvisations; after one particularly extended solo Miles asked him, “Why did you play that long?” and Coltrane answered, “It took that long to get it all in”). The Legrand Jazz album (the title a pun on Michel Legrand’s last name, which means “The Great” in French) is a jazz-history retrospective featuring Thomas “:Fats” Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” Count Basie’s “Blue and Sentimental” (with Ben Webster paying a heartfel...