Category: music
Gimme crowdsourced shelter
The Playing For Change Foundation has done it again:
[Direct video link here.]
Shoe Shop lament
(L to R) Damian Moynihan (drums), Larry Björnson (bass), Scott Macmillan (guitar), and Damian Moynihan (drums), and Rob Crowell (saxophone) played the Economy Shoe Shops’s Monday Night Jazz session to a an appreciative but subdued crowd. The bar’s co-founder, David Henry, a Halifax fixture, died of cancer Saturday after a brief illness.
Politicians and concerts
Contrarian reader Ritchie Simpson asks:
What is it with civic politicians in the Maritimes? They’ve jumped on the concert bandwagon with abandon and are flinging money around the way Keith Moon used to fling furniture. The long serving and long suffering mayor of Summerside is a tad closer to the chopping block than HRM’s potentate but it’s troubling the ease with which processes are ignored and checks are written. The Roman circuses were used to keep the civic populace quiet, peaceful, and accommodating. Maybe it’s time we threw a few politicians to the lions.
James Make-and-Break Taylor
Costas Halavrezos adds a Rube Goldberg twist to our antique engine percussion series (previous instalments here, here, and here.) with this unique James Taylor concert rendition of Slap Leather:
As Costas points out, the song is 20 years old, but its bittersweet lyrics could have been written yesterday.
The sound of old machines
Contrarian friend Cliff White muses on tractor percussion (previously here and here):
Not only is this just a wonderful piece, it’s a nostalgic reminder of just how much rhythm and music there was in early machinery. Aside from the occasional pile driver, I can’t think of anything today that carries on that tradition. Even the once ubiquitous make-and-break engine seems to have unfortunately gone completely from our shores.
God love the Internet
And God love Contrarian readers. When Steve Hart sent me this video of a pretty good guitar trio using a slow-idling tractor for percussion on Sweet Georgia Brown and Bye Bye Blues, I wondered it it was a known Internet chestnut that had somehow escaped me. But the earliest copy of “the Saskatchewan Philharmonic” was posted last April and had only 8,000 hits.
Turns out the video is neither philharmonic nor Saskatchewanian. It’s Sweden’s Olle Hemmingson Trio, featuring the eponymous Olle playing a Gibson Les Paul Signature guitar, with an antique Volvo tractor for percussion. Thanks to Brian Bonnar for setting me straight.
Here’s Olle aboard a 1951 Deutz playing Lover Come Back to Me:
(Those with Flash-impaired Apple devices, click here.)
Here’s Ollie, sans trio, back on the Volvo:
(Direct link here.)
Is traktor percussion a peculiarly Swedish musical genre?
(Direct link here.)
For those who want to delve further, Bottleneck John’s excellent Youtube channel features oddball antique guitars accompanied by a tractor, a hydraulic ram water pump, and a steamboat engine.
Slow idle
It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it:
Between the musicians and the marine make-n-breaks in this province, surely we could produce a Maritime rejoinder.
Update: It ain’t from Saskatchewan. Amplification and correction here.
H/T: Steve Hart.
Plaskett: Somewhere with us.
Joel Plaskett performing in advance of a planned FlashMob on Halifax’s Celebration Square:
Mr. Plaskett was joined briefly on one chorus by Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter.
It occurs to me Mr. Plaskett’s songs cry out for bluegrass covers. They are made for that high lonesome sound.
Jim Nunn is in the Smoke Room
In 1995, when Jim Nunn left the host chair at what was then called First Edition and moved to Toronto to take over co-hosting duties on the CBC Show Marketplace, some of his chums produced a tribute music video called, “Jim Nunn is in the Smoke Room.” There are a few CBC in-jokes, but the piece, starring Jonathan Torrens, Mike Clattenburg, Keith Bradley, and Brian Heighton, never fails to crack me up.
Other credits: Producer/Director: Cynthia Kent; Editor: Keith Bradley; Shooters: Steve Lawrence & Doug Carmichael. H/T: Sharlene Woods.
It’ll be a Dobro, Dobro Christmas without you
With a little help from a Dobro, Graham Breeze and Toby Wilson bring a Christmas classic closer to its roots in the version first recorded by Ernest Tubb in 1948:
