Podcasts about Octet

Dr. Mia Chung joins us for Part 2 of the conversation about the power of classical music to help with human flourishing. Today we explore the decline of musical education and its repercussions on holistic child development. Our discussion emphasizes how early training in music can prime the brain for better cognitive and social skills, addressing issues like executive function and intuitive learning. Today we also talk about links musical experience to spiritual growth, highlighting the harmonic similarity between music and language, and the deep emotional resonance music can bring.Find out more about Dr. Mia Chung HEREDiscover more about the Octet Collaborative HEREFollow the Octet Collaborative and their podcast through their Instagram HEREContact Cyndi Parker through Narrative of Place.Join Cyndi Parker's  Patreon Team!

Dr. Mia Chung joins us to talk about how classical music is a foundational aspect of human flourishing. Dr. Chung is an internationally renowned pianist, concerto soloist, and chamber musician.  She was on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and she is now a professor at Harvard. Additionally she is the founder and executive director of the Octet Collaborative, which is a community of students, faculty, and staff at MIT who are dedicated to human flourishing. And if that is not enough, she writes and speaks on the transformative impact of music on cognition, learning, and health.Find out more about Dr. Mia Chung HEREDiscover more about the Octet Collaborative HEREFollow the Octet Collaborative and their podcast through their Instagram HEREContact Cyndi Parker through Narrative of Place.Join Cyndi Parker's  Patreon Team!

In this episode of the Sting Stories podcast, host Jazlyn Fuentes '25 converses with Dr. Alexandra Rodman, a distinguished alumna from Milton's class of '06 and a psychology professor at Northeastern University. Dr. Rodman shares insights about her transformative experiences at Milton, including her involvement in boarding life and the Octet music group, which paved her path toward acapella in college. Dr. Rodman discusses her academic journey from Tufts University to obtaining a PhD at Harvard, emphasizing the importance of balancing academics with extracurricular activities. She highlights her passion for clinical psychology and developmental cognitive neuroscience, exploring the intersection of social experiences and brain development during adolescence in her present research. Through anecdotal experiences and advice, Dr. Rodman reflects on key learnings throughout her career, providing valuable insights for aspiring students and professionals in psychology and neuroscience. The conversation also delves into developmental phases, the importance of resilience, and emerging research on adolescent smartphone use.

Okay, don't panic! No, you've probably never heard of this song "The Field" -- or maybe even this show --Octet -- but what if I told you it was Dave Malloy's follow up to The Great Comet? And then what if I told you it was a weird chamber musical about internet addiction? Well, maybe listen to the episode anyway, and join us as we discuss the nature of Art, whether the internet is bad, and the fundamental nature of reality. Y'know, the stuff of musicals. All clips are from the 2019 original cast recording of Octet and are protected by the Fair Use guidelines of Section 107 of the Copyright Act for criticism and commentary. All rights reserved to the copyright owners. Listen to the SMSTS playlist on Spotify! Follow SMSTS on Instagram: @somuchstufftosing Email the show: somuchstufftosing@gmail.com

Send us your thoughts! Jon Irabagon is a Filipino-American saxophonist, composer, and founder of Irabbagast Records.[1]Winner of the 2008 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition[1] and one of Time Out's "25 essential New York City jazz icons",[2] Irabagon is known for the breadth of his work on a jazz continuum ranging "from postbop to free improvisation, avant country to doom metal".[3] His "extraordinary eclecticism"[4] has led to performances with such diverse artists as Wynton Marsalis,[5] Lou Reed, Evan Parker, Billy Joel, the Maria Schneider Orchestra, Bertha Hope, Herbie Hancock, Conor Oberst,[6] Christian McBride,[7] Mike Pride,[8] Kenny Barron, Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, Bill Laswell, Peter Evans,[9] Tyshawn Sorey, Ingrid Laubrock,[10] Ava Mendoza,[11] Mick Barr, and Tom Rainey.Irabagon's many projects as bandleader include a quartet with Luis Perdomo, Yasushi Nakamura, and Rudy Royston,[12] as well as a trio with Mark Helias and Barry Altschul.[13] He is also a member of the Mary Halvorson Quintet, Septet,[14] and Octet;[15] the Dave Douglas Quintet;Support the show

"That's How Much I Love You" - Bing Crosby; "As Long As I'm Dreaming" - Bing Crosby; "Muskrat Ramble" - George Barnes Octet; "Goodbye Mr. Ball Goodbye!" - Bing Crosby, Groucho Mark, & Hank Greenberg; "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" - Bing Crosby

In the early 1980s, when saxophonist Eric Person was coming up, one big question that was being addressed was how to combine the free-swinging improv of the Loft scene with the beauty and power of a large ensemble.  Many fascinating strategies would arrive (Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, we're looking at you!).  One of the first and most thrilling came from saxophonist David Murray.  Murray was the emerging heavyweight champ of the tenor sax and he packed his Octet with Big Thinkers, Heavy Honkers, and Late-Night Prowlers.  "Men," in the words of Stanley Crouch, "of great magnitude."   And the David Murray Octet always played standing up.     This Monday (1/6) on Deep Focus, Mitch Goldman invites Eric Person into the WKCR archives for an exploration of this explosive and still underappreciated ensemble, from 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org.     Or join us next week when it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/.  Subscribe right now to get notifications when new episodes are posted.  It's ad-free, all free, totally non-commercial.  We won't even ask for your contact info.   Find out more about Deep Focus at https://mitchgoldman.com/about-deep-focus/ or join us on Instagram @deep_focus_podcast.     Photo credit: no publishing information available.   #WKCR #DeepFocus #/EricPerson #DavidMurray #DavidMurrayOctet #JazzRadio #JazzPodcast #JazzInterview #MitchGoldman  

Ben returns to join Joris and Scott to talk about an incredible eight red cards across the latest matchday in the Belgian Pro League. They talk transfers for each club and a few managers under pressure. They then quickly dive into the second tier where Zulte Waregem look set for a return to the top flight.

In the early 1980s, when saxophonist Eric Person was coming up, one big question that was being addressed was how to combine the free-swinging improv of the Loft scene with the beauty and power of a large ensemble.  Many fascinating strategies would arrive (Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, we're looking at you!).  One of the first and most thrilling came from saxophonist David Murray.  Murray was the emerging heavyweight champ of the tenor sax and he packed his Octet with Big Thinkers, Heavy Honkers, and Late-Night Prowlers.  "Men," in the words of Stanley Crouch, "of great magnitude."   And the David Murray Octet always played standing up.     This Monday (1/6) on Deep Focus, Mitch Goldman invites Eric Person into the WKCR archives for an exploration of this explosive and still underappreciated ensemble, from 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org.     Or join us next week when it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/.  Subscribe right now to get notifications when new episodes are posted.  It's ad-free, all free, totally non-commercial.  We won't even ask for your contact info.   Find out more about Deep Focus at https://mitchgoldman.com/about-deep-focus/ or join us on Instagram @deep_focus_podcast.     Photo credit: no publishing information available.   #WKCR #DeepFocus #/EricPerson #DavidMurray #DavidMurrayOctet #JazzRadio #JazzPodcast #JazzInterview #MitchGoldman  

In the early 1980s, when saxophonist Eric Person was coming up, one big question that was being addressed was how to combine the free-swinging improv of the Loft scene with the beauty and power of a large ensemble.  Many fascinating strategies would arrive (Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, we're looking at you!).  One of the first and most thrilling came from saxophonist David Murray.  Murray was the emerging heavyweight champ of the tenor sax and he packed his Octet with Big Thinkers, Heavy Honkers, and Late-Night Prowlers.  "Men," in the words of Stanley Crouch, "of great magnitude."   And the David Murray Octet always played standing up.     This Monday (1/6) on Deep Focus, Mitch Goldman invites Eric Person into the WKCR archives for an exploration of this explosive and still underappreciated ensemble, from 6p to 9p NYC time on WKCR 89.9FM, WKCR-HD or wkcr.org.     Or join us next week when it goes up on the Deep Focus podcast on your favorite podcasting app or at https://mitchgoldman.podbean.com/.  Subscribe right now to get notifications when new episodes are posted.  It's ad-free, all free, totally non-commercial.  We won't even ask for your contact info.   Find out more about Deep Focus at https://mitchgoldman.com/about-deep-focus/ or join us on Instagram @deep_focus_podcast.     Photo credit: no publishing information available.   #WKCR #DeepFocus #/EricPerson #DavidMurray #DavidMurrayOctet #JazzRadio #JazzPodcast #JazzInterview #MitchGoldman

Second of three pre-Christmas Week 2024 episodes of the program all about TV. Our guests: Bree and Chuck West, co-founders of Octet Productions, the venture producing ALLBLK scripted series Hush and made-for-TV movie A Wesley South African Christmas, now playing on BET+, and Ornella Ohayon, 2024 winner of the Sir Peter Ustinov International Emmy Award for her TV pilot script Each Other's Keeper.

Tasmin Little selects her favourite version of Franz Schubert's Octet in F Major D.803.

fWotD Episode 2703: Igor Stravinsky Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.The featured article for Saturday, 28 September 2024 is Igor Stravinsky.Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June [O. S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.Born to a famous bass in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Stravinsky grew up taking piano and music theory lessons. While studying law at the University of Saint Petersburg, he met Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and studied music under him until the latter's death in 1908. Stravinsky met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev soon after, who commissioned the composer to write three ballets for the Ballets Russes's Paris seasons: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913), the last of which caused a near-riot at the premiere due to its avant-garde nature and later changed the way composers understood rhythmic structure.Stravinsky's compositional career is often divided into three main periods: his Russian period (1913–1920), his neoclassical period (1920–1951), and his serial period (1954–1968). During his Russian period, Stravinsky was heavily influenced by Russian styles and folklore. Works such as Renard (1916) and Les noces (1923) drew upon Russian folk poetry, while compositions like L'Histoire du soldat (1918) integrated these folk elements with popular musical forms, including the tango, waltz, ragtime, and chorale. His neoclassical period exhibited themes and techniques from the classical period, like the use of the sonata form in his Octet (1923) and use of Greek mythological themes in works including Apollon musagète (1927), Oedipus rex (1927), and Persephone (1935). In his serial period, Stravinsky turned towards compositional techniques from the Second Viennese School like Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954) was the first of his compositions to be fully based on the technique, and Canticum Sacrum (1956) was his first to be based on a tone row. Stravinsky's last major work was the Requiem Canticles (1966), which was performed at his funeral.While many supporters were confused by Stravinsky's constant stylistic changes, later writers recognized his versatile language as important in the development of modernist music. Stravinsky's revolutionary ideas influenced composers as diverse as Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Béla Bartók, and Pierre Boulez, who were all challenged to innovate music in areas beyond tonality, especially rhythm and form. In 1998, Time magazine listed Stravinsky as one of the 100 most influential people of the century. Stravinsky died of pulmonary edema on 6 April 1971 in New York City, having left six memoirs written with his friend and assistant Robert Craft, as well as an earlier autobiography and a series of lectures.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:51 UTC on Saturday, 28 September 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Igor Stravinsky on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm neural Amy.

This episode was originally released Feb 28, 2023 as episode 34. To listen to Lili's episode from Dec 2023 on The Theatre Podcast, click here. --- ORIGINAL NOTES --- Do you remember when our collective hearts broke watching “Connor's mom” breakdown in Dear Evan Hansen? Yeah, that was traumatic! And Lili Thomas does it every single night on stage as she performs the beautiful and devastating role of Cynthia Murphy for the North American touring company of Dear Evan Hansen. The child of two world-renowned classical musicians, Lili made her own path in the arts. She became a triple threat by training extensively in acting, singing, and dancing in addition to, of course, learning several instruments. She plays professionally on 6 different instruments. Lili recently completed the pre-Broadway run of Octet and is an acclaimed vocal coach, choreographer, director, and the hardest job of all, parent of two kids. She's kind, funny and crazy talented! Follow Lili and learn more on Instagram, grab tickets to see Dear Evan Hansen here, and make sure to stick around to the end of the episode for a fun, dirty joke form Lili! Make sure to follow this podcast everywhere you find podcasts, leave a rating and a review, and slip into our Instagram DMs at @wasitchance. More about Heather via @heather_ vickeryandco on Instagram and Threads, @Braveheather on TikTok, and listen to The Brave Files More about Alan via @theatre_podcast on Instagram and listen to The Theatre Podcast with Alan Seales EPISODE TAKEAWAYS Being exposed to professional musicians helped Lili embrace chance as an entertainer. She randomly started singing with a live band at the age of 5 and people loved it. The thrill was real! Both of Lili's parents are world-renowned musicians but they didn't pressure her into playing music, which Lili considers a gift. Lili's performing love is musical theater - that's her creative home. She loves playing complex characters and embracing them fully which she does beautifully. It's really hard to balance being a parent and needing daycare with auditioning (as a job) because it's not a paying job but must be treated as a job. When she went back to theater it felt like breathing again. This is truly where she's meant to be. She has such a loving and supportive family who love seeing her pursue her dreams. Positivity and energy are the core of who Lili is and that's counter-intuitive to the role she plays in Dear Evan Hansen. When Lili needs to decompress and get into creative a space she needs total quiet and solitude (just like our co-host, Heather!). The most creative minds are also the most curious ones. Self-taping has become really dangerous for people - it drives perfectionist behaviors and that's just not possible. It sets unrealistic standards and puts undue pressure on actors (and kids!). Returning to the theater has been part of Lili's journey toward loving herself and it's magical. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Jazz Session No.381 from RaidersBroadcast.com as aired in September 2024, featuring a very cool 2023 album “Polar Waters”, from the Joshua Jaswon Octet – with shades of Return to Forever and Flora Purim. TRACK LISTING:Feel No Fret - Average White Band; The Hustler - The Crusaders; Sweet and Hot - Fletcher Henderson; Climax Rag - George Lewis and his New Orleans Stompers; Deception Island - Joshua Jaswon Octet; Seasick Part 1: Gannets - Joshua Jaswon Octet; The Things Are Here - Dizzy Gillespie; New Rhumba - Miles Davis & Gil Evans; Unknown Soldier - Weather Report; Miles Beyond - Mahavishnu Orchestra; You Don't Know What Love Is - John Coltrane; How About You - Stan Getz; Gimme Dat Harp Boy - Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band; Invocation & Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin - Frank Zappa & The Mothers; Karner Blue - Joshua Jaswon Octet; Swimming in Winter - Joshua Jaswon Octet; Floater - Carla Bley; Laugh Lines  - The Impossible Gentlemen; Newk's Fadeaway - Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet; Flying Colours - Mike Manieri.

Vocalist extraordinaire Samara Joy is coming to the Ordway on Saturday September 14. During a break in her schedule Samara Joy connected with Sean McPherson to discuss her technique for picking songs, her quick rise to become one of the biggest names in the world of jazz and her love of ensemble singing.

Vocalist extraordinaire Samara Joy is coming to the Ordway on Saturday September 14. During a break in her schedule Samara Joy connected with Sean McPherson to discuss her technique for picking songs, her quick rise to become one of the biggest names in the world of jazz and her love of ensemble singing.

Welcome back to a new season(??) of Upstage Left! After a long hiatus we're back with actor Kim Blanck who plays Ruza Wenclawska in Broadway's Suffs. We're so excited to be talking our dear friend who's been singing and acting on New York stages for more than a decade. You may have seen her in MCC's Alice by Heart or Dave Malloy's Octet at the Signature Theater.In this episode we discuss:Kim's unconventional journey as a musical theater phenomNavigating the industry as a HAPA actorHow she ended up in the Broadway production of Suffs after she thought her journey with the show was overThis episode was a joy to record, and even more a joy to listen back to. We hope you enjoy, and stay tuned for more episodes this season!---Music by David HilowitzLearn more about Kim HERE!Support the Show.

Underappreciated alto sax player Ernie Henry's last recordings before his premature death in 1957. . .featuring his Octet (with Lee Morgan, Melba Liston, Benny Golson and Cecil Payne), quintet (with Kenny Dorham) and quartet - also the Kenny Dorham Quartet . . groups including Wynton Kelly, Kenny Drew, Wilbur Ware, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones and Art Taylor --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

All music used with permission by the Stephen Phillip Harvey Octet.   Stephen Phillip Harvey's works sit squarely at the intersection of popular culture and jazz. In his latest Octet project, Stephen explores the elements on a composition he calls Elemental.   The Stephen Phillip Harvey Octet performs this suite of six original compositions to bring his original interpretation of these elements and the balance they create. Fusing modern harmonies, driving vamps, and a myriad of textures, Harvey brings these forces of nature to aural landscape.    From a June 16th, 2023 performance it's the Stephen Phillip Harvey Octet  - Live at the Bop Stop.   Live at the Bop Stop is made possible by The Music Settlement – serving Northeast Ohio by offering music instruction, music therapy, and early childhood education since 1912. The Music Settlement's mission is to welcome all to our music and arts community to learn, create, inspire, and heal.   This program is recorded at the Robert Conrad Studios at the Bop Stop in Cleveland, Ohio, and the studios of WBWC FM on the campus of Baldwin-Wallace University in Berea, Ohio. Additional production at the Bop Stop is provided by Graham Rosen. Technical editing for the program is provided by Dr. Pete Naegele, Shawn Gilbert, and Darren Thompson through Gilazar Media.   The executive producer and writer is Daniel Peck, with additional consulting production on behalf of The Music Settlement by Bryan Kennard.   For extended versions of all of our shows, our Live at the Bop Stop podcast can be found on your favorite podcast app or visit our website at www.themusicsettlement.org and click the Bop Stop link.   To reach out directly, email liveatthebopstop@gmail.com. I'm Daniel Peck. Join me again next time... Live at the Bop Stop. Want to Support The Bop Stop?  Donate here!   Contact us here

All music used with permission by Clint Bleil with the Bryan Kennard Octet.   Ten time award winning composer, arranger and saxophonist Clint Bleil sits in for a night of large group arrangements with the Bryan Kennard Octet. Clint has performed along side luminaries such as Randy Brecker and Dave Holland, and has worked with acts as diverse as The Shirelles and the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra.   Heard here with the Bryan Kennard Octet in this June 4th, 2023 performance, it's Clint Bleil – Live at the Bop Stop.  Live at the Bop Stop is made possible by The Music Settlement – serving Northeast Ohio by offering music instruction, music therapy, and early childhood education since 1912. The Music Settlement's mission is to welcome all to our music and arts community to learn, create, inspire, and heal.   This program is recorded at the Robert Conrad Studios at the Bop Stop in Cleveland, Ohio, and the studios of WBWC FM on the campus of Baldwin-Wallace University in Berea, Ohio. Additional production at the Bop Stop is provided by Graham Rosen. Technical editing for the program is provided by Dr. Pete Naegele, Shawn Gilbert, and Darren Thompson through Gilazar Media.   The executive producer and writer is Daniel Peck, with additional consulting production on behalf of The Music Settlement by Bryan Kennard.   For extended versions of all of our shows, our Live at the Bop Stop podcast can be found on your favorite podcast app or visit our website at www.themusicsettlement.org and click the Bop Stop link.   To reach out directly, email liveatthebopstop@gmail.com. I'm Daniel Peck. Join me again next time... Live at the Bop Stop. Want to Support The Bop Stop?  Donate here!   Contact us here

Send us a Text Message.There was GLEE In the grid, literally, in this Tuesday crossword by Gary Larson and Amy Ensz. A few recent answers made reappearances - we just saw 68A, Ensemble of eight, OCTET, and it's been less than a month since 9D, Unit of butter, PAT, melted into view. One answer that hasn't been clued as such in aeons also arose, that being 14A, Thrice repeated words in one of Gertrude Stein's truisms, AROSE (as in AROSE is AROSE is AROSE).In other news, Mike cleared the very low bar of not making a total fool of himself in today's Triplet Tuesday -- deets inside, so check it out!Show note imagery: The KARASEA, just north of SiberiaContact Info:We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com.Also, we're on FaceBook, so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!

Send us a Text Message.Today's crossword pegged the meter as far as difficulty was concerned, each clue only wanting to begrudgingly give up its secrets, and some not at all! We have the whole blow-by-blow (by-blow-by-blow-by ...), so download today's podcast to hear about our epic struggle. While you're listening, feel free to applaud the deserving winner of this week's JAMCOTWA (Jean And Mike Crossword Of The Week Award™).Show note imagery: An OCTET of Wonder Bread hot dog bunsContact Info:We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com.Also, we're on FaceBook, so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!

This episode we are joined by Lucille Lortel Award winning director, Annie Tippe!  Annie is known for her directing work with Dave Malloy's Octet, Ghost Quartet, Cowboy Bob, and most recently Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares and Dave Malloy's Three Houses (currently playing at Signature Theatre until June 16th!).  Annie has also directed short films such as Help Me Mary and Egg Timer.  We talk with Annie about how she got her start, her directing style, what it's like working on new works and much more!

During his lifetime, Charles Martin Loeffler was one of the most performed American composers.   His octet was completed in 1896, played twice the following year and then forgotten. Clarnetist Graeme Steele Johnson rediscovered the manuscript in the Library of Congress, took a year to create a performing edition from the score, and recorded the work for Delos, DE3603.  In this podcast, he talks about that journey.

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In this interview the people behind this rare Bassoon Octet concert shares insights on the proper way to play the Bassoon, how this event came to be, and the need to know details of the concert happening on March 26th.

Donald Macleod explores Mendelssohn's experience in the British IslesMendelssohn's relationship with Britain began when he was 20 years old, when London became the first stop of his Grand Tour. This week Donald Macleod explores the composer's experiences in Britain, considering the mark he left on musical life in these islands, the works he wrote here, and what he got up to in the course of the ten visits he made across his lifetime. Mendelssohn took inspiration from the scenery, but he also got his first professional engagements in Britain, and in return, by the end of his life, Britain lionized him.Music Featured:Songs Without Words Op 19b No 1 Symphony No 1 in C minor (1st mvt) 12 Lieder Pp 9: III – Wartend Octet in E flat major (3rd mvt) Concerto in E major for Two pianos (2nd & 3rd mvts) Fantasie in F# minor (Mvt 1) Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' (1st mvt) 3 Fantasies (or Caprices) Op 16 String Quartet in E flat Major (1st mvt) Organ Sonata No 3 (1st mvt) Symphony No 3 in A minor 'Scottish' (4th mvt) Songs without Words Op 19b No 3 Hebrides Overture Piano Concerto No 1 in G minor (2nd & 3rd mvts)) Songs Without Words Op 19b (Nos 2, 5, 6) Symphony No 4 in A major 'Italian' (3rd & 4th mvts) Songs Without Words Op 102 No 1 Piano Concerto No 2 in D minor (2nd & 3rd mvts) Piano Trio No 1 (1st mvt) A Midsummer Night's Dream (Nos 5 & 7) Violin Concerto in E minor (1st mvt) 6 Songs Op 99 No 5 Elijah Part 1 (excerpt) Octet in E flat major (1st mvt) String Quartet No 6 in F minor (3rd mvt) Elijah Part 2 (excerpt)Presented by Donald Macleod Produced by Megan Jones for BBC Audio Wales and WestFor full track listings, including artist and recording details, and to listen to the pieces featured in full (for 30 days after broadcast) head to the series page for Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001v4jhAnd you can delve into the A-Z of all the composers we've featured on Composer of the Week here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3cjHdZlXwL7W41XGB77X3S0/composers-a-to-z

Fans of David Bowie will know of his deep love of jazz. Though he never ventured into the genre in a literal sense, the inspiration is clear when you listen to his impressive body of work. The Metropolitan Jazz Octet, in partnership with Paul Marinaro, is reimagining some of Bowie's classics with a new show titled “The Bowie Project.” Paul and MJO Co-founder Jim Gailloreto join Reset to discuss their love of the psychedelic space explorer, adapting Bowie's work in a new medium, and how the MJO came to be.

Small groups that played regularly at Cafe Society and other New York establishments for about four years, led by the great pianist Teddy Wilson. Columbia and transcription recordings featuring Bill Coleman, Emmett Berry, Benny Morton, Jimmy Hamilton, Edmond Hall, George James, Al Hall, Specs Powell, Sid Catlett, Slam Stewart and others . .also Helen Ward and Lena Horne on vocals! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

From dancing to “Chicago” songs to finally playing the role of Mama Morton in the long-running musical, Lili Thomas's acting career has definitely come full circle. Celebrating her first anniversary on the show, Lili shares the unique experience of being part of a production with constantly changing casts, and the show's dynamics, including the encouragement for actors to bring their individuality to their characters. She also talks about her Broadway debut and the excitement of performing on opening night, the complexity of her character, and the challenges of adapting to a fast-paced environment. As a mother and Broadway performer, Lili sheds light on the balancing act required to manage her career and responsibilities at home. She reflects on her unique journey as a single mom in the industry and offers advice to aspiring performers, highlighting the importance of being true to oneself. Lili Thomas is an actress who just recently ended her leg of the “Dear Evan Hansen” First National Tour playing the role of Cynthia Murphy. Before that, she appeared in Dave Malloy's pre-Broadway run of “Octet” and has other off-Broadway credits including “We're Gonna Die”, “The Hello Girls”, and “Only Human”. She is now making history in her Broadway debut as the first Asian American to play the role of Mama Morton in “Chicago”. Connect with Lili: Website: www.lili-thomas.com Instagram: @thelilithomas Connect with The Theatre Podcast: Support us on Patreon: Patreon.com/TheTheatrePodcast YouTube: YouTube.com/TheTheatrePodcast Threads, Twitter & Instagram: @theatre_podcast TikTok: @thetheatrepodcast Facebook.com/OfficialTheatrePodcast TheTheatrePodcast.com Alan's personal Instagram: @alanseales Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marcel Schwittlick is a Berlin-based artist best known for his work with drawing machines. We have been fans of Marcel's work since we first discovered his Upward Spiral series and have been following from platform to platform since then. In this interview we discuss: Marcel's background in art and coding & how he discovered NFTs The "generative-ness" of his work with drawing machines & building entropy with cursor lines Honoring pens and ink with his The Long Run series How the Octet performance came about & using A.I. to network 8 different plotting machines The influence of the Concrete art movement on Marcel's work with Luminograms & his upcoming exhibition of Composition 92 at Paris Photo (and here is a link to the Verse page for his works & others) Marcel's thoughts on Tezos and Ethereum, and whether he would replace a lost or destroyed physical piece for a collector Thanks to Marcel for taking the time to speak with us for the show. You can learn more about him and his work on his website, schwittlick.net and you can follow him on Twitter @schwittlick_ You can follow us on Twitter @waitingtosign and on Instagram @waitingtobesigned If you like the show you can support us by subscribing to our Patreon or donating directly to wtbs.tez or wtbs.eth Episode Art: Composition #92 (Luminogram) #3 by Marcel Schwittlick Intro & Outro music by Pixelwank

Jess Gillam meets with the conductor Nicholas Collon to share some of the music they love. Today their musical journey takes in the harmonic genius of Jacob Collier, glorious choral music by Poulenc, a youthful Octet by Mendelssohn, a dreamy song from Sibelius, Britten's iconic Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, some grooves from Pino Palladino and Taylor Swift visits The Lakes. Playlist: Felix Mendelssohn – Octet in E flat major, IV. Presto [Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble] Pino Palladino & Blake Mills – Ekute Francis Poulenc – Figure humaine, VIII. Liberte [Tenebrae, Nigel Short] Benjamin Britten - The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra [London Symphony Orchestra, Benjamin Britten] Taylor Swift – The Lakes Sibelius - Lieder No. 4 Op 37 - Was it a Dream [Kari Lövaas, Berliner Symphoniker, Eduardo Marturet] Jacob Collier / Henry Mancini – Moon River Carl Nielsen - Symphony No. 4, Op. 29 (FS76) 'The Inextinguishable'; 1. Allegro [Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Fabio Luisi]

durée : 00:59:27 - Zoot Octet - par : Alex Dutilh - Pour son 4ème album, le Zoot Octet témoigne d'une histoire qui l'a inspiré, et qu'il rêvait de raconter en musique et par la voix de Natalie Dessay. “Pannonica” paraît chez Zoot Records/Socadisc.

The stories, legends, and myths about the trials and travails of composers lives are legion, like Beethoven's battles against fate, Mozart and Schubert's struggles with finances, Brahms' failures with women, Mahler's troubles with just about everyone, and Shostakovich's near fatal interactions with the government.  These stories tend to add to the general understanding of these composers, and in fact they tend to enhance their reputations.  We see their struggles in their music, and it makes us admire them more for overcoming them.   With Mendelssohn, and to some extent Haydn as well, we have the opposite case.  Mendelssohn grew up in a happy, wealthy German family, and it was only late in his life when he underwent any major struggles at all.  Whether this happy upbringing contributed to the character of his music is anyone's guess, but Mendelssohn seems to always get the short end of the stick when it comes to reputation, and I think that his generally cheerful music has a lot to do with this fact.  But Mendelssohn is no second-rate composer.  As I mentioned in April with my show about Mendelssohn's Octet, he was certainly THE greatest composer under 18 that we know of(and yes I'm including Mozart in that), and his best music ranks up there with the best composers in history.  And today, our focus on both the overture to Midsummer Night's Dream, and the incidental music that Mendelssohn wrote 17 years later, allows us to enjoy the full breadth of Mendelssohn's staggering talent.  This is not only clever and cheerful music. It is also fantastically orchestrated, perfectly structured, and in the case of the overture, it is full of invention and character that is simply mind-blowing from a composer who was just 17 years old at the time.  So today we'll talk all about this, from the beauty and perfection of the overture to the incidental music that followed, meant to be performed alongside Shakespeare's play. We'll also talk about the role Shakespeare played in Germany at the time, and how Mendelssohn's upbringing did indeed have a lot to do with the music he chose to write. Join us!

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

Whooms't? Willow De Beers, back and ready to get her family togetherness on. Whats't? the second dry novel in the De Beeries. Wherems't? Joya Del Mar, obvi. Whens't? A time of FAX LINES and one mention of the internet. Whyms't? Great question Dear Listener. Because sometimes there are 87 plot lines and we're goings't full speed toward Margaret Selby's sex advice!

Dr. Onas Bolton — Founder and CEO of Octet Scientific, a specialty Cleveland-based chemical manufacturer unlocking the full power of safe, economical, and sustainable energy storage by providing better electrolyte chemistry for zinc and other aqueous batteries — on the potential for zinc-based batteries, the history of energy production, storage, and use, and how the work Octet Scientific is doing will facilitate our transition to carbon-neutral sustainable power!Dr. Bolton is a 14-year veteran of the specialty chemicals industry with a PhD in materials science and specific expertise in organic electrochemistry. He is an experienced organic and materials chemist whose work has been published in prestigious scientific journals like the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and highlighted on the cover of Nature Chemistry and in the Economist. Prior to founding Octet, Dr. Bolton created new organic additives for Atotech, the world's largest producer of chemicals to the electroplating industry.At Octet, he and his team are working closely with a wide variety of zinc battery chemistries and manufacturers worldwide to continue to perfect zinc battery chemistry through novel additive development. Dr. Bolton began Octet by winning two highly competitive funding awards from the US National Science Foundation, based on the idea that establishing safe and sustainable zinc-based energy storage will require optimized additive chemistry and more recently, has close over an additional $1 million in traditional venture funding led by Jumpstart here in Cleveland. Please enjoy!-----This episode is brought to you by Impact Architects and Ninety. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations throughout NEO, Impact Architects helps those leaders — many of whom we've heard from as guests on Lay of The Land — realize their visions and build great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much, that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love! As a listener, you can sit down for a free consultation with Impact Architects or leverage a free trial through Ninety, the software platform that helps teams build great companies, by visiting ia.layoftheland.fm!-----Learn more about Octet Scientific — https://www.octetsci.com/about-octet/Connect with Dr. Onas Bolton on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/onas-bolton-693ba319/-----For more episodes of Lay of The Land, visit https://www.layoftheland.fm/Past guests include Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, Steve Potash (OverDrive), Ed Largest (Westfield), Ray Leach (JumpStart), Lila Mills (Signal Cleveland), Pat Conway (Great Lakes Brewing), Lindsay Watson (Augment Therapy), and many more.Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up for Lay of The Land's weekly newsletter — sign up here.Connect with Jeffrey Stern on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreypstern/Follow Jeffrey Stern on Twitter @sternJefe — https://twitter.com/sternjefeFollow Lay of The Land on Twitter @podlayofthelandhttps://www.jeffreys.page/

From 1825-1827, Mendelssohn wrote 3 of his most beloved and most played works: his Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, his String Quartet, Op. 13, and the piece were going to talk about today, his Octet. What is truly astonishing about these three pieces is that they were all written before Mendelssohn turned 18 years old. Mendelssohn was the greatest prodigy in the history of Western Classical Music, writing music so spectacular at such a young age that it almost overshadows his later, more mature, works. In my opinion, the greatest of these three towering early pieces from Mendelssohn is his octet. It is a piece of structural perfection, ingenuity, innovation, and most of all, it is a piece of such youthful enthusiasm that it is impossible to not put a smile on your face. We'll talk all about this piece today, from its soaring first movement, to its contemplative second movement, the brilliant third movement, and the bubbling last movement. Let's discuss this miracle of a piece together - join us!

Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn.

An ENDEARING Saturday crossword, with nary a GIMMICK to be seen (except, of course, for the answer GIMMICK), and at least an OCTET of great clues, including, 1D, Four+Four, OCTET

Do you remember when our collective hearts broke watching “Connors's mom” breakdown in Dear Evan Hansen? Yeah, that was traumatic! And Lili Thomas does it every single night on stage as she performs the beautiful and devastating role of Cynthia Murphy for the North American touring company of DEH. The child of two world-renowned classical musicians, Lili made her own path in the arts. She became a triple threat by training extensively in acting, singing, and dancing in addition to, of course, learning several instruments. She plays professionally on 6 different instruments. Lili recently completed the pre-Broadway run of Octet and is an acclaimed vocal coach, choreographer, director, and the hardest job of all, parent of two kids. She's kind, funny and crazy talented! Follow Lili and learn more on Instagram, grab tickets to see Dear Evan Hansen here, and make sure to stick around to the end of the episode for a fun, dirty joke form Lili! Make sure to follow this podcast everywhere you find podcasts, leave a rating and a review, and slip into our Instagram DMs at @wasitchance. More about Heather via @vickeryandco on Instagram, @Braveheather on TikTok, and listen to The Brave Files More about Alan via @theatre_podcast on Instagram and listen to The Theatre Podcast with Alan Seales EPISODE TAKEAWAYS Being exposed to professional musicians helped Lili embrace chance as an entertainer. She randomly started singing with a live band at the age of 5 and people loved it. The thrill was real! Both of Lili's parents are world-renowned musicians but they didn't pressure her into playing music, which Lili considers a gift. Lili's performing love is musical theater - that's her creative home. She loves playing complex characters and embracing them fully which she does beautifully. It's really hard to balance being a parent and needing daycare with auditioning (as a job) because it's not a paying job but must be treated as a job. When she went back to theater it felt like breathing again. This is truly where she's meant to be. She has such a loving and supportive family who love seeing her pursue her dreams. Positivity and energy are core of who Lili is and that's counter-intuitive to the role she plays in Dear Evan Hansen. When Lili needs to decompress and get into creative a space she needs total quiet and solitude (just like our co-host, Heather!). The most creative minds are also the most curious ones. Self-taping has become really dangerous for people - it drives perfectionist behaviors and that's just not possible. It sets unrealistic standards and puts undo pressure on actors (and kids!). Returning to the theater has been part of Lili's journey towards loving herself and it's magical. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Niels Gade - String Octet: Finale Ensemble MidtVest Danish String Quartet More info about today's track: CPO 555077-2 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

durée : 00:28:12 - Actualités de l'orchestre - par : Christian Merlin - Le Sirba Octet, le hautboïste Alexey Godik et le chef Lahav Shani seront au cœur de l'actualité du jour, avec vos questions d'auditeurs. - réalisé par : Taïssia Froidure

Franz Schubert - Octet: Menuetto Linos Ensemble More info about today's track: Capriccio C10840 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

Ludwig van Beethoven - Octet for Winds: 1st movement Consortium Classicum More info about today's track: CPO 999438-2 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

Carl Reinecke - Wind Octet: Finale Boston Symphony Orchestra Members More info about today's track: Naxos 8.570777 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

Felix Mendelssohn - Octet: Scherzo Kodaly Quartet Auer String Quartet More info about today's track: Naxos 8.557270 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

An educational Tuesday crossword, at least for certainly one of our dynamic duo, with the other playing the role of educator on such diverse topics as the difference between octet and OCTAD, the ABC Islands, and a CHOWCHOW. And that's just a handful of the many fun factoids that we acquired as we spelunked through today's grid, so for all the deets, download, listen up, and don't forget to take notes