So today I spent time listening to two artists whose albums are currently on the Folk DJ Chart for January. The first was Wyatt Easterling whose album Goodbye –Hello is #33 and the second Steep Ravine and their album Trampin’ On which sits a little higher on the chart at #20. Neither of the artists names were familiar to me.
This morning the name that caught my attention on the list of birthdays at All About Jazz was Paolo Fresu,a trumpet player. Paolo is in fact not only a trumpet and flugelhorn player, but he is also an arranger and composer. And an award-winning one at that!! Paolo was born in Berchidda, Sardina on February 10, 1961 and he his musical career has spanned the last 30 years in which he has performed on over 300 albums.many as a sideman and lots as a leader of his quintet.But wait there’s more…(if you call now – just joking) He is also according to Wikipedia:
Chris Beall.’s 2013 release is titled Gin Mill Hymns. Now if I see an album with a title like that, and read that the musician resides in Austin. Texas, I’m gonna give it a listen!! Visions of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Slaid Cleaves and a dozen others dance in my head. The only other thing that would make it a certainty that I would listen is if I saw that the album was produced by Lloyd Maines. What I got was an album that’s full of great songs some really personal like :”Dug Down Deep” about his father, a Texas motorcycle racer’s crash in Missouri and his miraculous recovery. coupled with blues classics like Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues” Chris says his influences include David Grissom, Tom Petty, Will Hoge, Neil Young, John Mellencamp. But when I listen to the first and second tracks on the album “Half a World Away” and the aforementioned “Dug Down Deep” I hear a little Greg Trooper in his music. And I even think he stole his hat!
One of the reasons that I explore the daily birthdays at All About Jazz is that it gives me names of musicians that I don’t know, like yesterday, when I discovered Pawel Kaczmarczyk the great young Polish jazz pianist. The odds of coming across his name elsewhere are pretty low. Anyway, the first name on the birthday list is actually someone I already knew, but only because when I was checking the birthdays at All About Jazz, I saw his latest album on the same page! That artist is Behn Gillece and the album is Top Shelf.
from Truthdig,com and Informed Comment
A new paper by Israeli archeologists Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, [pdf] posted at the University of Tel Aviv web site, is bad news for biblical literalists and far right wing Israeli nationalists who use the Bible for support.
The Hebrew Bible’s oldest chapters– Genesis, Exodus, and even Judges purport to discuss events thousands of years ago. The custom in Western biblical scholarship is to date Abraham to e.g. 2000 B.C. This dating is based on nothing more than counting generations (“begats”) backward and assigning an arbitrary number of years to each generation. In fact, Genesis is replete with myths and assertions of people living hundreds of years, and was only historicized in this way by 19th century positivists.
But here is proof that the Bible was written late and projects later developments into the distant past: it alleges that people had domesticated camels four millennia ago in what is now Israel. And that assertion, folks, is simply not true. That is the finding of Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef.
E.g. Genesis 24: 64 says, “Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she dismounted from the camel.” If this encounter happened circa 2026 BC, it was happening a thousand years before anyone was riding camels
Continue Reading at Truthdig.com or at Juan’s website Informed Comment
from Truthdig,com and Informed Comment
A new paper by Israeli archeologists Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, [pdf] posted at the University of Tel Aviv web site, is bad news for biblical literalists and far right wing Israeli nationalists who use the Bible for support.
I’ve written it before and I am sure I will write it again during the years from 1980 to 1995 there was so much going on in my life that there was little time for musical explorations. During that period our family grew to include four children Nick (1979), Andrew (1982), Peter (1986) and Elizabeth (1990). Along the way our family lost my wife’s mother to breast cancer (1982 at the age of 48), my wife’s grandmother, and father, my father (1984) the way our sons Nick and Andrew both had medical problems, and mu wife had to miscarriages!! Anyway you get the picture, musical explorations were way down the list! I write all of this to give myself an excuse for not knowing about many of the artists that i have recently been discovering. One of those artists is trumpeter Terrence Blanchard! Today I have listened to his latest release Magnetic and throughly enjoying it!!
The other day I was surfing MOG looking artists who are like ones that I like and I came across Anthriel and their 2010 release The Pathway. I gave it a 30 second test and I liked what I heard so it went on the iPhone. This morning it was part of the soundtrack playing while I did some work around the house. What a fine progressive metal album this is, with a little bit of everything – there’s some hard-driving guitar work from Timo Niemsto, drumming from Jari Kuokkanen. which often flows into some melodic keyboard work from Antti Hakulinen.These guys are the trio that founded the band in 2004. In 2008 lead singer Simo Silvan joined the band and last but not least there’s the bass player Klaus Wirzenius
