A place for things I found…
these things sound nice!
Enjoy!
One of the most famous, if not one of the best rock bands from the 1960’s was Iron Butterfly, and their biggest hit was “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida“, a 17+ minute jam session. The performance included vocals and keyboard by Doug Ingle, Ron Bushy on drums, Lee Dorman on bass and vocals, and Erik Braunn on guitar and vocals. Â The song was noted for being so long that it took the entire side of an LP album, and for being a transition from “psychedelic rock” to “heavy metal”. Â It was also the first to have a drum solo as part of the flow of music from the vocals and keyboard at the beginning and end, through the guitar- and bass-centric pieces between. Â A little-known bit of trivia, back in the days before automated radio stations there were people called “disk jockeys” who selected the songs to be played and “cued up” songs on turntables that they switched between to transition songs. Â “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was a well-known “bathroom break” song, because a DJ that needed a break could cue up this song to play, and know that they had at least 15 minutes before they needed to be back at the control to kick off the next song. Â This song, along with the live recording of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, and the live album version of Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” were often-requested songs, but seldom played, and if you heard one of them, you could bet that the DJ needed to be away from the console for a little bit.
This performance was recorded in May 2012, just a few months before bassist Lee Dorman passed away. Â He was found in December of 2012 in his car, he died of natural causes likely on his way to a doctor’s appointment. Â He was 70 years old. Â I personally love the fact that even after all the years between the original recording and this performance, the men could still bring their best to this piece, to an appreciative audience.
Enjoy these men in their final performance together, as the effortlessly lay down “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” one last time.
Strolling through the Youtube archives is one of my favorite pastimes, since you never know what you’ll come across. I knew James Cagney could dance, even though he also played gangsters and other tough guys in the old movies, but I never knew that Bob Hope could hold his own in tap-dancing. If I had ever seen the movie “The Seven Little Foys” I would have learned better. This is a great scene with Hope playing Eddie Foy and Cagney playing George M. Cohan, doing a tap-dance “face-off”, and it is a joy to behold. Today’s pop-and-lock dancers do similar competitions with each other, but these guys were hitting it 60 years ago! If you watch closely there’s a part where Hope almost does a “moonwalk” while tap-dancing.
Enjoy!
Back in the early 2000’s, I was just getting into anime watching heavily, and one of my favorite shows from that time was “Noir”, a mystery about two young women who work as assassins for hire. Their assignments mostly involved killing people who deserved to die, at least as determined by the ones hiring them, but there was also they recurring mystery of how they became killers, and what secrets of their relationship to each other and to their employers would be revealed. One of the girls was amnesiac, who woke up in a room in Japan with no memory, but with a school uniform and ID, and an innate knowledge of how to field-strip, clean and reassemble almost any gun. The other young woman initially worked alone using the code name “Noir”, but she encountered the other girl when both of them tried to kill the same set of gangsters. The younger girl ended up working with the older, and they ended up on various assignments throughout Europe and the Middle East, all the while learning more and more about who hired them and why, and what tied them together from many years earlier.
What most added to the show for me was the atmospheric music of Kajiura Yuki, who wrote music that spanned several genres, but mostly faux-Medieval European music, such as the song in this video clip, “Salva Nos”. Also, there was a recurring theme, where the amnesiac girl had a musical watch which played a theme song that the other girl remembered from childhood. Ms. Kajiura played many variations on that theme throughout the show’s episodes, and it added a haunting current to the scenes of both violence and stillness.
This was one of the first anime in the “girls with guns” genre, which led to two follow-on anime by the same production company, Bee Train, called “Madlax” and “El Cazador de la Bruja”, but with different characters and no relation plot-wise. Other anime in this genre include “Gunslinger Girls” and even parodies such as the currently running “Sabagebu”.
This video clip is a music video of “Salva Nos”, with many action scenes from various episodes of “Noir.” Enjoy!
Leave it to Japan to combine a catchy Gene Kelly tap-dance number from “Singing in the Rain” with a cute anime ghost girl, to create one of the sweetest, cutest anime shorts I’ve seen to date. A lot of the world seems to agree, since the YouTube video is now over 300,000 views, and the comments section is filled with all kinds of languages from fans.
The anime short starts off with a lonely, sad ghost girl, who happens to hear two haunted tap shoes singing and dancing to “Moses Supposes” from “Singing in the Rain.”
This is one to really enjoy!
(Update: I didn’t know this before but the other singer and dancer you hear is Donald O’Conner!)
Just ran across this video, it’s kind of dance music, but the theme and the video is very “spaghetti Western” like, which I for some reason kind of like! =^_^=
The artist is David Guetta, and I’m going to be looking for more of his work.
Enjoy!
Once again, the Dutch pop-and-lock dancers Nick and Jeppe have another catchy robot-themed dance video, where they’re joined by “Poppin John”, another dancer in a routine set to the music composed by Nick and Jeppe. If you’re into this kind of music and dance, this will be the kind of performance you’ll like. If you’ve never heard or seen it before, give it a shot.
Enjoy!
and the closing theme is “Half Pain”, both songs by “Bana”:
Very moody and evocative, much like the anime.
Here is an excellent review of the anime, or you can always hit Wikipedia.
