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Good, and it's funny to hear Geordie's halfway impersonation - although rather than sounding like Don's uncle's "fine big Beef Heart," it sounds more like a Bee Fart.

Also, Morgan is incapable of...

Interesting. It's going to take some listening.

And, an odd question about your band: What is Jonathan Smith's main instrument?
I gather that, like Blake, he learned guitar to play with you,...

And they aren't even getting out to the Northwest this time.

A new album announced - Hellfire, due July 15th - and a new video:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efmq_uXt1Rk

It might be a matter of becoming more selective about tours - not going out unless they have a couple of festival gigs to anchor the tour, or not going such long distances, or only going out if they...

Maybe that's why he talked about the past - you were genuinely interested in the present, so he didn't think that you'd slight everything he's done for the last 35 years in favor of stuff he did back...

Good guy, good songwriter and musician. Never met him, although we live(d) in the same corner of the country. I always regretted that, and now I'll regret it more.

They also sound a bit like The Mercury Tree, only without the disconcerting alternate tuning systems.

Excellent. I need to get something by them.

"Watcher of the Skies" has SF-influenced lyrics. Although there's some disagreement about exactly what story it depicts, Childhood's End fits.

"Inca Roads" refers to Chariots of the Gods.

It sounds like the part was too high for him to sing comfortably, but he could almost hit the notes by belting.

As the heading says. This was done for Roadie Relief, and features:

Part 1:

drums: Greg Gilmore (Mother Love Bone)
bass: Jeff Pilson (Dokken/Dio/Foreigner)
guitar: Kurt Bloch...

A few funny things about that:


Guys who actually create hip-hop are total musical pack-rats - they'll listen to anything in search of a few killer seconds that they can loop to be yammered...

Not prog in any way, but music, and relevant:

A Ukrainian punk band called Beton (Ukrainian for Concrete) has recorded and posted their version of a rock 'n roll classic,
with rewritten lyrics,...

Good songwriter, decent piano player, and the man could sing.

Dexter Ford: Interesting person, highly eccentric, great musician. Doesn't get up until about 1 in the afternoon, is obsessed with video-game music, also plays bass very well. Not sure what he's...

Interesting that she farmed the job out, because she definitely knows how to write for orchestra.

So that's what she did during Covid - wrote out all those pages and pages of score it takes for that to happen.

And, she's touring the States in March.

It really is. Prog is a very broad, "none of the above" category. Ten albums nothing, it contains more than ten commonly-recognized subgenres, and ten albums couldn't even start to encompass it.

Exactly.

Sad to hear - he was a helluva songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

Not terrible.

But two by Rush? Two by Floyd? None by Genesis? No Italian prog, or Zappa, or Henry Cow?

This guy needs to listen to more music.

Interesting concept. The album cover, though, is terrible - busy, cluttered, and visually incoherent. Couldn't Dave find somebody with decent graphic design skills?

It might have been a matter of what their fans liked and responded to - to say nothing of their record company. It's also easier to write music if you're following a template, rather than...

Are they Nobody? Nobody can shoot faster than that.

I wonder why. Do they maybe consider those lyrics to belong so much to him that no one else should sing them? I've also heard of bands who wrote everything collectively, and would throw out all their...

It helps that it has a very recognizable progression, at least to anybody who plays jazz (yourself) or has attempted to play it (me).
Mingus once did a rewritten version with the wonderfully...

There are only six people in it, but you have to carefully to catch on.

His press release, and that track in the video suggest that he sees prog as the music of his own personal childhood. That, of course, would include Rush. Moreover, it suggests that he sees it as a...

Unfortunately, they seem to have canceled their US tour, or at least some dates. Their singer-lyricist just quit, so that might have something to do with it, as opposed to COVID.

The lineup is interesting on that - he hired nearly a dozen other musicians to collaborate with him, but no bass player beyond his own left hand on piano or synth. I suppose I can hear why - it's a...

He's playing compositions by other people, by prog bands, but they're not standards - which are generally considered to be the Great American Songbook of Broadway tunes, plus a number of jazz...

Yes, indeed. It'll be called Jacob’s Ladder. Apparently, it contains both originals and a number of Golden Age prog tunes, interpreted and often reworked by Mehldau and other, mostly NYC-based jazz...

Really interesting and ingenious. By the way, the whole work is a genuine, fairly large physical object - it's just that particular presentation, assembled on a computer from some 400 photos, that...

That's not unknown in the classical world.

William Schuman asked that his first two symphonies not be played. He described himself as having written "eight symphonies, numbered 3 to 10". I've...

In Portland, OR.

Maybe Seattle, too. Maybe not. I think she's making up some Covid cancellations from a couple years ago.

He could have joined The Rutles, because he definitely had the right kind of......

......trousers. Their manager would have loved him.

They're real movies, they just aren't real films. You know, real films, as in The Bicycle Thief, or Le Jour se Leve; or maybe even Citizen Kane. The James Bond movies and the Star Wars series are...

That's one of the problems I have. More and more, their songs sound assembled rather than written. Like four people brought in one-or-two bar musical fragments - and then, rather than sitting down,...

She deserves to be much more successful - rather than her+band driving themselves around in a rental van, moving their own gear and selling their own merch, sleeping on loyal fans' floors, and doing...

Their records have gotten more and more heavily PRODUCED by Vince. And in that process everything - vocals, instrumental parts, the entire structure of the songs - has become no more than grist for...

I guess Wilcox's question is why you would call her "post-prog".

What she's doing has some parallels to prog, but it's more straightforwardly describable as the work of a trained classical...

Tredeci Bacci have been around since 2013, but I just found out about them, and no one else here seems to have mentioned them. They are not, in fact, an Italian band - although much of their...

Has this been posted here yet?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F9NwouJNhc

It's one of the better Cardiacs covers I've heard, with quite a bit bigger sound than the original. These guys are...

To say nothing of Ed having formerly been the clonemeister (assistant musical director), maybe not at all appreciating his demotion in responsibility and pay, and particularly resenting that Frank...

When he got to Hoping Against Hope, the difference was that Mike didn't have a keyboardist as a regular member of the band. So, for the most part, he composed the music for an ensemble of voice,...

Bought Henki myself. Good album, and sounds exactly like what it is - a Scandinavian band playing psych, with a British folkie singing.

Seconded.

And here's a sort of brother band to Jambinai: Ak Dan Gwang Chil (ADG7)

Less prog-metal, closer to New Wave rock, and heavier on the Korean instruments - the only Western gear is a few parts of...

In emotional feel, yes.

But so much of the music is missing, due to Burton's decision to have only the principals sing. Sondheim wrote quite a lot for the chorus, some of the best songs, and it's...

Long time fan here, too. Not much I can say that you haven't; Assassins and Company are particular favorites.

There are cases like that, they're just rare. It's so hard to make a living as a full-time professional musician that the first and only consideration many of them have becomes "How hip is the...

That's something I've always wondered. I mean, I know that she went to music school with several members of the original band - she was in the songwriting program, while they were in the jazz...

It's highly recognizable, though, as your work and no one else's. There's a really characteristic melodic and harmonic vocabulary and quality to it; if I'd heard it without knowing who did it and...

There's one way they don't follow modern pop practice: The live versions of songs have no backing tracks* (none that I know of, at least), and they often follow the psych/prog/jam-band/Seventies...

To today's average casual listener, Autotune is the sound of studio professionalism. And Bent Knee have gradually been creeping away from songwriting and into production as the organizing principle...

.
Monika's other band - TMT Xplosif, a jazz/rock organ trio, in which she stretches out more as a player - also put in an appearance on the same TV/radio show:

...

The best credits sequence ever:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBxjwurp_04

This whole theme consists of only eight bars repeated over and over again, and orchestrated so cleverly you...

I'd have to concur with Steve and Arturs: Disappointing music from a man and a band who could do so much more, and had done so much more. Although Roxy and Elsewhere and One Size Fits All were...

I'm definitely tempted. Haven't decided yet.

They're really good - a sort of Gallic take on FZ crossed with Willem Breuker. Olivier Foy sings in English, at least part of the time, and employs many silly voices. But, as with FZ and WB, the...