In addition to being From The Top's broadcast home, NPR has been kind enough to include me (this for the first of many times) on their Music website, NPR Music.
So now, with the help of Reid Mangan at the FTT office, we're shooting and uploading videos of my breakpieces.
This one, Reid Anderson (of The Bad Plus)'s 'Lost of Love' was taped back in May at Jordan Hall in Boston.
Here's the link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94061655
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We're presently confirming license agreements with the publishers for Radiohead, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake for permission to offer my single song arrangements as one-time secure PDF downloads on this site. While I loved putting the Radiohead book together with Steve Byram, and another such project would be something to consider seriously down the line, there have been so many requests for single songs that I wanted to see if that could happen. All the publishers were exceedingly responsive and courteous, and so it'll likely be on June 1st that the first batch should go up on the site. They'll most likely have their own page (drag your cursor over my picture and you'll see all the various page links appear) to accomodate all the various titles. Each song arrngement will sell for $5.
The Nick Drake titles to become available:
Fly
From the Morning
Hanging on a Star
Harvest Breed
Hazey Jane
Introduction to Bryter Layter
Joey
Northern Sky
One of These Things First
Place To Be
Rider on the Wheel
River Man
Three Hours
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Our latest 13-part series will go up for PBS on May 11. Check your local listings for time and day, as each market tends to play them when convenient. On the heels of the Emmy nominations for Season One, there should be a fair amount of interest in how this season stacks up. I can say with confidence that the new season looks and feels a whole lot more like the free-wheeling fun that the radio show continues to be, and this can be credited to the dedication of the whole crew, but most passionately by director Gary Halvorsen and Producer Tim Banker. They never slept, and never stopped coming up with new ideas and tweaks on the available material that made everything really pop. I'd always thought the half-hour format was a bit unwieldy, and Season One felt simultaneously too short to be anything but superficial and too long in its lack of focus. This year, the episodes have no dead weight on them, and much more of the action takes place off-stage. There's much more layering of the visual texture, much more spontaneity, and the performances were stellar throughout. Check it out.
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the band has their most ecstatic album in recent memory out this month, along with a tour embracing SxSW and a performance at the royal albert hall (and points beyond and in between).
the bonus cd that accompanies this month's cover-story on r.e.m. has fifteen tracks the band members have chosen, with attendant program notes.
they really are the friendliest band in the world, as well as the best american band, ever.
http://promo.emapnetwork.com/q4music/rem/remjukebox.shtml
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With apologies to those of you unable to order anything at all from my website's STORE page, latest information, now that I'm in direct contact with Kagi (the purchase site provider), seems to show that inability to make purchases is linked to use of Internet Explorer as one's browser. If you have access to Firefox, that seems to be showing no error messages, and explains why I have been still receiving a fair number of orders through the site. Kagi is looking into it, and I let them know that, whatever one's personal browser preferences IE is still used by an awful lot of us, and we'd appreciate being able to access the ordering mechanism.
I'll hope things are up and running again soon.
update: Kagi stepped up and rectified a recalcitrant Internet Explorer code incongruency. We are up are running. Just make sure you click the CONTINUE button now visible and viable at the bottom of each purchase page.
Thanks, Kagi.
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Looking forward to playing a Radiohead/Elliott Smith/Nick Drake show at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland on June 16.
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this from the pittsburgh post-gazette this morning...
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I'm very happy to announce the release on 10 April of my Nick Drake piano arrangements CD on World Village/Harmonia Mundi. Here's the announcement over on Stereogum
Tracklisting:
Rider on the Wheel
Pink Moon
Fly
Parasite
River Man
One of These Things First
Joey
Introduction-Bryter Layter
Northern Sky
Hanging on a Star
Harvest Breed
Place to Be
Three Hours
From the Morning
Many of these tracks had their maiden voyage in live performance on From The Top, and are available there and at the NPR site. The whole set, plus Radiohead: Videotape and another Nick Drake arrangement, Hazey Jane, were premiered at Royce Hall as part of UCLA/Live!. Here's the LA Times review and another.
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thanks to friend, bertis, for sending this along.
it's a film less than 10 minutes long, a princeton study of the facile corruptability of the diebold automated voting machine, a machine manufactured by a corporation whose head, with close ties to the republican party, vowed the delivery of ohio's votes for george w. bush. the use of the diebold machine is also widespread in georgia, which, after implementation, returned a victory for a republican governor for the first time since reconstruction.
regardless of whether you feel like rolling your eyes over conspiracy theory, of whether you think that my calling attention to this issue is some act of disloyalty to the sitting president (it's hardly conspiracy-level carping; it was just front-page news in Rolling Stone)the ease with which this automated system is prone to tampering, is truly alarming, and, i believe, worthy of you attention.
please, take the time to watch the film:
http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/09/14/late-nite-fdl-die-diebold-die/#more-4497
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saw the al gore film, 'an inconvenient truth' last night.
it's something absolutely everyone on the planet ought to see.
not just a spot-on projection of global catastrophe, if offers real hope that, with the human spirit striving to make changes for its survival abetted by the positive aspects of modern technology, there is a way to save ourselves and our future generations.
one can be proactive and aware, and this is the best place to start.
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