I recently acquired a lot of new music, on vinyl and CD. My mother moved out of the house we’d lived
in since 1958, and gave me a lifetime’s collection. The vinyl included some iconic recordings from my
childhood. There are albums from Jonathan Winters, Frank Sinatra, and the Baja Marimba Band, not to
mention Beethoven and Bach.
By Jay Kerner It has always been mankind’s plight to contemplate his own existence. The great philosophers of the ages have all aimed their collective
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When I heard that my friend Rod Powell passed away, I couldn’t help thinking of when we met.
I was still in high school, driving a ‘58 Chevy pickup with a busted gas gauge. Ran out on 28th Street, a couple blocks from Mitchell. Didn’t know what was going on up ahead, but I could hear it!
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Oh, the best laid plans. I had three stops to make on a recent Saturday night. Unfortunately for all involved, Mother Nature reared her ugly head and blasted us with artic temperatures and everybody’s favorite, freezing rain. I actually fired up the old “Bone-mobile” and scraped the windshield clean to make an attempt, but before I went even a dozen blocks, the clear spot had reduced to a football size hole and I gave up the ghost and turned around.
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Music, probably more so than any other art form, is driven by technology. Early 20th century composers like Ferruccio Busoni envisioned a time when music would be able to “follow the line of the rainbow” by not being tied to any rules or the specific instruments of his time. With the invention in 1906 of the triode aubion tube, music slowly, but very surely, began losing the “weights” and laws previously applied to it. But it wasn’t until the invention of magnetic tape recording that the dream of a truly “free” music began being met…
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