music
Poor boy long ways from home
Has a song title ever said so much in so few words? This one has the reputation of being one of the oldest blues songs. That’s a claim that’s hard to substantiate, but this song certainly has a long history, and it’s still alive and well today. ‘Poor boy long ways from home’, often shortened […]
Billie Holiday’s last day
Billie Holiday died aged 44 in a New York hospital at 3:10am on Friday 17 July 1959. Some failed to notice. The New York Times published a short obit, but only on page 15. But for those who cared about her and her music, the news was a bitter shock. One of them was Frank […]
Circles of light
A virus, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is ‘an infectious, often pathogenic agent or biological entity … able to function only within the living cells of a host animal, plant, or microorganism’. It’s a dark and invisible thing, that threatens suffering and destruction. William Blake knew about the terrors it would bring: O Rose […]
Jazz recordings: gwallter’s top ten
A while ago I suggested ten favourite blues recordings you might try. All of them were tracks I’d treasured, most for over forty years. So here are ten more, this time old jazz favourites, in chronological order. Actually, these are numbers three to twelve in my list, because my top choices, Billie Holiday and Lester […]
Morfydd Llwyn Owen a Ruth Herbert Lewis
Faint o bobl sy’n ymwybodol bod un o’r mynwentydd gorau yng Nghymru i’w gweld oddi ar Newton Road, Ystumllwynarth? Ac o’r rheiny, faint sy’n gyfarwydd â’r gofeb urddasol sy’n llechu mewn cornel anghysbell o’r fynwent, fel na fyddai ymwelydd sy’n troedio’r llwybrau yn sylwi arno? Cyfeirio ydw i at fedd y gyfansoddwraig ifanc Morfydd Llwyn […]
Walking to meet heroes
In October 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach set out on foot on a journey of 260 miles. He was twenty years old. He’d recently been in a brawl with a musician he’d insulted in the market place of his home town of Arnstadt in Thuringia, central Germany. The church authorities who employed him as organist in […]
Nicholas Roerich: archaeology and ‘The Rite of Spring’
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s concert on Friday in the Brangwyn Hall had a well-matched programme: Stravinsky’s The rite of spring, preceded by Prokofiev’s Scythian suite and Ravel’s piano concerto in G major. All are brilliant works, written within twenty years of one another, and all feature the strongest of rhythms and cross-rhythms. Prokofiev […]
Domenico Scarlatti and Basil Bunting
Under his full wig he looks like a successful but no-nonsense, even grumpy eighteenth century aristocrat or businessman. It would be hard to guess, if you didn’t know, that this is Domenico Scarlatti, the composer of the most inventive, quirky and joyful Baroque music ever written. Born in Naples in the same year as Bach […]
Me, myself and I
Billie Holiday and Lester Young had as close and creative a musical friendship as any two people could. All agree: the pair themselves, their friends and musical colleagues, their biographers, and anyone else with a view. How can you get a proper sense of that friendship, 70 and 80 years after the event? The scattered […]
Blues recordings: gwallter’s top 10
Richard ‘Rabbit’ Brown, James Alley blues, 1927 James Alley is in New Orleans. Like Louis Armstrong Brown was a native of the Storyville district of that city. He only recorded six songs, but this one, recorded in his home town, is a peach. Brown was already in his late forties when he sang it, […]
