Creation calls

Happy Valentine’s Day

VALENTINE’S Day yet again. A time for exchanging tacky chocolate hearts, trinkets, mushy cards and flowers and dinner where we all pretend to ignore the over-priced set menus.

You might not be able to put a price tag on love, but you sure can on all the accessories.

The subversive truth is that love can be everything it’s cracked up to be.

Where there is great love, there is always the possibility for great miracles to occur in our lives.

So let’s celebrate this one day but know there’s much more to love than Cupid, Eros, heart-shaped balloons and chocolate.

And a word of advice – turn off the Iphones and pay attention to your loved ones. That’s what they really want.

And just for fun here are 20 love songs in strange new styles

A Christmas gift

The Piano Guys, Peter Hollens, David Archuleta, and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir get together to sing “Angels We Have Heard On High”

A love song to the world

Musicians Nimo Patel and Daniel Nahmod brought together dozens of people from around the world to create this beautiful, heart-opening melody. Inspired by the 21-Day Gratitude Challenge, the song is a celebration of our spirit and all that is a blessing in life. For the 21 Days, over 11,000 participants from 118 countries learned that “gratefulness” is a habit cultivated consciously and a muscle built over time. As a famous Roman, Cicero, once said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” This soul-stirring music video, created within a week by a team of volunteers, shines the light on all the small things that make up the beautiful fabric of our lives.

Blessed harmonies

Watch this video and read the amazing story behind the song

“I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” is a Christian hymn originating from India.

The lyrics are based on the last words of a man in Assam, north-east India, who along with his family was converted to Christianity in the middle of the 19th century through the efforts of a Welsh missionary. Called to renounce his faith by the village chief, the convert declared, “I have decided to follow Jesus.” In response to threats to his family, he continued, “Though no one joins me, still I will follow.” His wife was killed, and he was executed while singing. This display of faith is reported to have led to the conversion of the chief and others in the village.

The formation of these words into a hymn is attributed to the Indian missionary Sadhu Sundar Singh. The melody is also Indian, and entitled “Assam” after the region where the text originated

Eminem’s Rap God sets new world record for most words in a song

EMINEM’S hit Rap God averages more than four words a second across its six-minute running time.

As Billboard reports, Eminem’s Rap God is the holder of thes world record, with Marshall Mathers working his way through 1,560 words in 6’04”, at an average of 4.28 words per second.

The song features a verse about the Columbine High School massacre that had been written for the song I’m Back from the first Marshall Mathers LP, but which was censored from the original release. One section of the song features 97 words in 15 seconds, for an average of 6.5 words per second.

Eminem is one of five new rock and pop record holders in the forthcoming new edition of Guinness Book of World Records. Elsewhere, Metallica become the only band to have performed on all seven of the world’s continents following their gig last year in Antarctica; One Direction become the first act to debut at No 1 in the US with their first three albums; Miley Cyrus becomes the most searched-for pop star on the internet; Shakira becomes the most “liked” person on Facebook; and Katy Perry is the musician with the most Twitter followers.

BEWARE: Here is Eminem’s lyrically explicit video

Two birthday versions of a great song

Otis Redding and Michael Buble share a birthday today. So, here is Buble singing an Otis hit…and the soulful Otis original.

Still groovin at Woodstock

FORTY-FIVE years ago- about a month after the U.S. sent a man to the moon, and as the Vietnam War was still raging – 500,000 people gathered For three days for the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair – billed as “three Days of Peace and Music”.

There were surprisingly few episodes of violence. A number of musicians performed songs expressing their opposition to the Vietnam War, a sentiment that was enthusiastically shared by the vast majority of the audience. Later, the term “Woodstock Nation” would be used as a general term to describe the youth counterculture of the 1960s.

Woodstock 1969 showcased such talent as the Grateful Dead, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Santana, Janis Joplin, The Who, Sha Na Na and Jimi Hendrix.

And a very young Joe Cocker.

Science Proves: Pop Music Has Actually Gotten Worse

WELL, not worse exactly. That’s subjective. But a wide-ranging study has found that pop songs these days are becoming more and more similar

The study also found that most modern pop songs use less chords and less adventurous melodies than those of the 1960s.

The group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to look for widespread changes in music’s character over the years.

The study also found that pitch content has decreased – which means that the number of chords and different melodies has gone down. “Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries,” Scientific American explains.

Joan Serrà, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, and his colleagues examined three aspects of those songs: timbre (which “accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality,” ; pitch (which “roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements”); and loudness.

After peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day, the researchers found. That implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shriveled somewhat. The basic pitch vocabulary has remained unchanged—the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today—but the syntax has become more restricted. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries.

And music, generally, has become a lot louder in the past half-century. Serrà and his colleagues found that the loudness of recorded music is increasing by about one decibel every eight years.

For years audiophiles have decried the “loudness wars”—the gradual upping of recorded music’s loudness over time, in an apparent effort to grab listeners’ attention. Loudness comes at the expense of dynamic range—in very broad terms, when the whole song is loud, nothing within it stands out as being exclamatory or punchy.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop-music-has-actually-gotten-worse-8173368/?no-ist

Remembering the One and Only Satchmo

IT’S the birthday of that pioneering jazz musician Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo or Pops. The man who Bing Crosby called “the beginning and the end of music in America.”

It is sometimes claimed that Satchmo, the grandson of former slaves, invented scat singing. As the story goes, he dropped his lyric sheet while recording the hit song “Heebie Jeebies.” Without dropping a beat, he just kept going with what must have seemed as random gibberish. This introduced his musical “language” to millions, inspiring future scatters like Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby McFerrin

Armstrong’s biggest hit What A Wonderful World, was released in 1967, when America’s southern states were fighting desegregation, as the Vietnam War was raging and the Cold War was well underway in Eastern Europe.

And of course the Israelis were at war with their Arab neighbours. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. would both be assassinated the following year.

Hardly a wonderful world! Yet Armstrong explained how he could sing this song – “It seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad, but what we’re doing to it. All I’m saying is: See what a wonderful world it would be, if only we’d give it a chance.”

Comfortably numb

NINE years ago today, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright reunited as Pink Floyd in London’s Hyde Park for the incredible Live 8 concert. As a reminder of how special that day was, here’s the performance of Comfortably Numb:

Happy birthday Glenn Shorrock

Glenn Shorrock, the fine vocalist with Little River Band (and other great bands) celebrates his 70th birthday today.
Here he is live crooning Cool Change.

AND with his former LRB mates in a medley of hits

YouTube To Remove Some Really Great Music In ‘A Matter Of Days’

YouTube just hit the big red button in its fight with musicians over streaming music.

Any artist who doesn’t want to join YouTube’s new ad-free music service will be scrubbed from the site entirely, the company said. The service, which will show you ad-free songs for a small fee, has been in the works for a while, but some artists are not happy with the financial arrangements YouTube is proposing.

YouTube’s head of content and business operations told the Financial Times that artists who aren’t happy with the new rules, including Adele, the Arctic Monkeys and Jack White, will be blacklisted from YouTube in “a matter of days.”

The Arctic Monkeys were one of the first bands to gain fame through the Internet.
Google plans to begin testing ad-free YouTube among Google employees in the coming weeks.

The new streaming music service will help musicians make even more money off of YouTube, the company told The Huffington Post in a statement. However, YouTube hasn’t publicly disclosed the terms of the deals surrounding the new service. The website is already the world’s largest online streamer of music.

Of all the music labels that have previously signed deals with YouTube to share ad revenue, only 5 percent of them have not yet signed up for the new service, a YouTube spokesperson told the Huffington Post.

Making matters even more confusing, different artists sign to different labels in different countries. And that means that a musician’s work might soon be available in one country but not another, a YouTube spokesperson told HuffPost.

Careful who you serve

PHILOSOPHER Russell Hittinger remarking on the cult of the individual in the US said: “We now live in a nation populated by 260 million supreme beings.’’

Former Australian PM Gough Whitlam said: “The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race’’.

Friedrich Nietzsche said: “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way and the only way, it doesnt exist.’’

But Bob Dylan said although we were all created as individuals we “all gotta serve somebody’’. “It might be the devil, or it might be the Lord but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.’’

Dylan’s right because there is no neutral territory when it comes to acknowledging God. You either do or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re serving someone else.

And here’s a good version of that song.

Religion ‘makes people more generous’, concludes study

RELIGIOUS people are more generous than non-believers when it comes to giving to charity, British research claims

Research commissioned by the BBC found that British people who profess a religious belief are significantly more likely to give to charity than non-believers.

Sikhs and Jews emerged as the most likely to share their worldly goods with a good cause, just ahead of Christians, Hindus and Muslims.

The study, carried out for the BBC’s network of local radio stations, included polling by ComRes of a sample of more than 3,000 people of all faiths and none.

It found that levels of generosity across the British public are strikingly high, but highest among those with a religious faith.
Overall as many as seven in 10 people in England said they had given money to a charity in the past month. But while just over two thirds of those who professed no religious faith claimed to have done so, among believers the figure rose to almost eight out of 10.

Among those polled, all of the Sikhs and 82 per cent of practising Jews had given money in the past month. Among practising Christians the figure was 78 per cent.

The Revd Dr Martyn Atkins, general Secretary of the Methodist Church, said: “Religious faith should motivate people to acts of generosity and it’s good to see this reflected in these figures.

“Of course, financial giving is only part of the picture.

“For some people a simple act of kindness, or the very fact that someone has made time for them, can mean more than any financial gift.

“But every act of generosity, however small, bears witness to a generous and loving God and helps to change the world for good.”

This song strikes a deadly chord

MANY KARAOKE bars in the Philippines removed the song My Way from their song lists after a series of killings over the past decade.

At least half a dozen people have allegedly been murdered after the singing of the Frank Sinatra tune at karaoke clubs.

One local claimed the My Way killings, as they are now known, occur because everyone knows the song and everyone has a strong opinion on how it should be sung. Those murdering the song can themselves be murdered. Killings have occurred after out-of-tune renditions were laughed at or jeered by drunken listeners.

And tuneful singers of My Way have been killed by jealous rivals.

Maybe part of the problem is the song itself. The brash egotism of lines such as “To say the things he truly feels/and not the words of one who kneels’’ and “the record shows, Itook the blows and did it my way’’ can sound arrogant when sung by anyone other than Sinatra. People who love the song can take it too seriously

Those who hate the song My Way have described it as narcissistic, bombastic, boastful and triumphalist

Sid Vicious did a fascinatingly awful putdown version of My Way. Sinatra fans detested the version. Vicious reportedly often bought a gun with him on stage when singing it live.

In a parody of the killings, the Japanese band Kishidan released as their 10th Anniversary single, an uptempo rock cover of “My Way”. The promotional music video consisted of the lead singer Ayonocozy Show (DJ Ozma) being shot numerous times while singing.

The song is basically a lie. It suggests that its best to be fatalistic and selfish about life because this is all there is. “For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught.’’ So the strong ones “chew it up and spit it out’’. Being an individual is what it’s all about.

That’’s ridiculous. It reminds me of that great Monty Python moment in Life of Brian where the multitude yells in unison “We are all individuals’’. And then one bloke at the back yells out “I’m not.’’

Videoke rage” is not just limited to My Way in the Philippines. “There have been several reported cases of singers being assaulted, shot or stabbed mid-performance, usually over how songs are sung,” according to a 2008 report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

In Malaysia in 2008, a man at a coffee shop hogged the karaoke microphone so long he was stabbed to death by other patrons In Thailand, a man was arrested on charges that he shot to death eight neighbors, one of whom was his brother-in-law, in a dispute stemming from several karaoke offerings, including repeated renditions of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads.

In China, a fight occurred over the microphone in a karaoke parlor, and a man hacked two others to death with a meat cleaver.

One of the best timelapse videos you’ll ever see

A cameraman took a trip to El Teide, one of Spain’s highest mountains, to watch the stars and film the Milky Way galaxy. What he was able to capture over eight days is absolutely breathtaking.

Ain’t Misbehavin’

THE great Fats Waller (real name Thomas Wright Qaller) was born on this day in 1904. Here he is live with Lena Horne, dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, drummer Zutty Singleton, bassist Slam Stewart and Trumpeter Benny Carter…

The guitarist they called ‘God’

WHEN Eric Clapton, who celebrates his birthday today, was playing blistering guitar lines with the legendary John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in the heady 1960s, someone spray painted the slogan “Clapton is God” on the wall of a London train station.
The graffiti began to appear in other areas in the city and the phrase became a catchcry at Clapton’s concerts. The guitarist accepted it as a compliment, even though privately he was descending into a personal hell.
Clapton, despite a remarkable talent for squeezing wonderful tones from his Gibson guitar, was anything but godly. He was a drug addict, womaniser, drunk and a racist and made some pretty bad career choices.
But the time-ravaged guitar deity has grown up. At 68, Eric Clapton proclaims that he is mortal after all and revealed a spiritual side to his life and art in his excruciatingly honest memoir Clapton: The Autobiography. He revealed that he has found God
Clapton admits that he was drawn to the grittiness of the blues because of insecurity and feelings of isolation that haunted him as a child and teenager. As a member of the rock nobility, he was seduced by the booze, the drugs – cocaine and heroin mainly and by the groups of willing women who threw themselves at him.
In 1987, he hit rock bottom and went to rehab. The first attempt failed. While on an Australian tour the same year, he came to a realization. “There had been such an erosion of my capabilities that I couldn’t stop shaking. Cooped up in my hotel room, a long way from home, with nothing to think about but my own pain and misery, I suddenly knew that I had to go back into treatment. I thought to myself, “This has got to stop.”
Back in rehab, he fell to his knees and “surrendered to God.
“I was in complete despair,” Clapton writes in his autobiography. “The noise in my head was deafening, and drinking was in my thoughts all the time. It shocked me to realize that here I was in a treatment centre, a supposedly safe environment, and I was in serious danger. I was absolutely terrified, in complete despair.
“Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do my pride just wouldn’t allow it but I knew that on my own I wasnt going to make it, so I asked for help.
“At that moment, almost of their own accord, my legs gave way and I fell to my knees. In the privacy of my room, I begged for help. I had no idea who I thought I was talking to,I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether, I had nothing left to fight with.’’
Clapton says within a few days, he realized that something remarkable had taken place. “An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude, and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that. I had found a place to turn to, a place I’d always known was there but never really wanted, or needed, to believe in.’’
Four years after his surrender to God, Clapton’s four-year-old son Connor died in a fall from the window of a 53rd floor of a Park Avenue apartment. It could have destroyed his faith. He remembers that period in his life as if he was in a fog. He withdrew from his family and friends and admits his faith was seriously challenged. In the end, he survived both emotionally and spiritually.
Clapton has 20 years of sobriety behind him, a happy marriage and three young daughters. He is as great a player as ever.
But he has discovered that the blues is a dialogue of both pain and redemption, of suffering and joy.

Here is Clapton in a blistering recent performance

Happy birthday to the most lucrative song of all time

NINETY years ago this month, the song millions of people sing around a candlelit cake was published in a songbook.

Even though nobody knows who actually wrote Happy Birthday’s lyrics, Warner Music contentiously owns the copyright to the song in its entirety. The media giant has therefore been earning millions from people celebrating their birthdays for a quarter of a century.

Walt Disney had to pay $5000 to use it in a parade and the royalties charge on a scene of Martin Luther King celebrating his birthday in civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize was so high that it never made it to DVD. More recently, the makers of the 2008 documentary No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos, about the Hungarian cinematographers, paid $5000 to use the music in their film.

To sing Happy Birthday in a restaurant, at a concert or public place, royalties have to be paid. The most recent exception to the rule, it would seem, is if you sing it on Mars – as Curiosity Rover did to the surface of the planet last August, a year after it landed.

According to the 1998 Guinness Book of World Records, “Happy Birthday to You” is the most recognized song in the English language.

The familiar six-note tune and original similar, but importantly not birthday-related, lyrics were the work of two sisters, Mildred and Patty Hill, who composed Good Morning To All in 1893 to sing to their pupils every day.

The Hill sisters, possibly forseeing of the copyright battles to come, instructed the trainee teachers they shared the song with never to write it down. However, in around 1911 the word ‘birthday’ started to sneak its way into versions of the tune and it was first published next to the melody in March, 1924.

In 1988, after a series of acquisitions, Warner Music became owners of the song and benefited from its reported $2 million of royalties per year. The Hill Foundation, set up in the sisters’ honour, has collected half of all royalties since 1893, with some going to their nephew Archibald, after Patty’s death in 1946.

Many have argued that Happy Birthday belongs in the public domain.

A collection of slightly bizarre versions of the song.

Happy birthday David Gilmour: Video

THE Pink Floyd guitarist and singer is celebrating today. Here is a performance of the magnificent Echoes.

Where have all the flowers gone?

LEGENDARY folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger has passed away at the age of 94, but his songs and words will live on.

Best known for eco-folk ballads such as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)”, Seeger became somewhat of a spiritual icon throughout his career, often noted by the pacifist and contemplative themes of his songs.

“My job,” he said in 2009, “is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.”

He once said: “a good song reminds us what we’re fighting for”.

So here’s good song with a message.

Time to hit the oasis

IT’S been hot, hot hot on this side of the world. But the cool change is about to come.
Sometimes we all need a break from the madness. This is one of those times.
Breathe
And let this music restore you

A song for today

That beauty called music

ALDOUS HUXLEY said after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Scientists say birds, like humans, can learn music while they are still in the egg stage. And termites will apparently eat wood two times faster when listening to heavy metal.
Ulysses. Grant, the Civil War general and President of the US, said he only knew two tunes.
“One of them is Yankee Doodle, and the other isn’t,’’ he said.
That’s sad. Music is as necessary for humankind as it is for birds. It affirms life. It reveals to us beauties we find nowhere else.
Clearly, some forms of music are universally better for us than others.
In controlled laboratory conditions, heavy metal sounds have stunted or killed plants whereas other music has enhanced plant growth. Plants exposed to jazz or classical music, particularly Bach and Beethoven, have been observed to lean toward the speakers.
Music directly elicits a range of emotions. Music with a quick tempo in a major key, tend to bring about all the physical changes associated with happiness in listeners. In contrast, music with a slow tempo and minor key can inspire sadness.
Patricia Gray, head of the Biomusic program at the National Academy of the Sciences proposes that music came into this world long before the human race ever did.
“If music making is as ancient as some believe, this could explain why we find so much meaning and emotion in music, even though we cannot say why it makes us feel the way it does,” she said.
“This seems to signal that the roots of music lie closer to our ancient lizard brain than to our more recent reasoning cortex, and that music has a more ancient origin than language.”
But for what purpose?
Beethoven, perhaps the greatest composer of them all, said: Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. Although the spirit be not master of that which it creates through music, yet it is blessed in this creation, which, like every creation of art, is mightier than the artist.”
He said good music was a higher revelation than all wisdom or philosophy.
“The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man’s soul,” he said.”God whispers into the ears of some men, but he shouts into mine!”

The evolution of music (in just a couple of minutes)

A musical history lesson from the fabulous Pentatonix

The words I would say

These lyrics were written after the songwriter received a call to tell him his grandfather was dying. He wrote the words in the form of a letter…and was able to read them to his grandad before he passed away.

Concert etiquette

REMEMBER those great stadium concerts when the band would finish off with one of those power anthems and fans would light cigarette lighters and raise them above their heads in unison?
A mate was at a big gig the other night and was surprised to see that the practice of holding up cigarette lighters had been replaced by smart phone applications that provided an image of a flickering flame rather than the real thing. It is obviously less hazardous to wave a phone than a naked flame but it’s sad to see the old rituals disappear.
Reality, like nostalgia, isn’t what it used to be.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Music to reflect on six million slain Jews and another 11 million slain Poles, Slavs, Soviets, Romanies, Non-Aryans, the Deaf, the Mentally handicapped, Homosexuals. Transexuals, Freemasons, Religious and Political Dissidents. Lest we forget these souls.