Category Music

I don’t remember the exact moment I discovered Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” but I do remember just wearing that record out after landing upon it in my early 20s. I then kept the album it was on close by my turntable through that tumultuous decade of struggles and thrashings for identity, vocation, love, the meaning of life and my place in the world.

Kristofferson died this week at a much older age (88) than he had anticipated reaching in his younger years. He was a gifted man in multiple ways—artistic, intellectual, physical—but none of those gifts allowed for escape from the struggle to discover and give form to his life’s work.

In his case, that struggle included climbing out from under a domineering father who leaned on him to pursue a military career and later on, at least an equally domineering drinking habit that nearly derailed his very life through the 1960s-’70s.

Kristoff...

I’d been watching and listening for a good mesmerizing minute to the second selection in this “Brilliant Cover Songs” series when I tapped the pause button and went back to the beginning to confirm what had suddenly dawned on me just the moment before: Were these guys really creating this seeming symphony of sound without employing any instrument other than their gloriously blended human voices?

Sure enough—the four members of the Dallas-based “Kings Return” only sound like they have the backing of multiple instruments and/or a robust choir as they create a lush musical soundscape powered only by voices that traverse multiple musical genres and what musical cognoscenti call “sonic timbre,” and I call just plain dazzling.

Kings Return is comprised of classically trained musicians whose beginnings trace back to 2016...

You know what makes me happy? That “Happy,” the 48th “Brilliant Song” in this series, has garnered 239,107 comments since it landed on You Tube a decade ago. Along with: 1.3 billion (that’s “billion”-with-a-“b”) views and 8.7 million thumbs-up. (Though for context: the all-time leading You Tube video through early August is “Baby Shark,” a children’s song-and-dance from South Korea at 14.9 billion views since 2016.)

But “billion” is a most hefty number indeed, reflected in a recent comment on top of the “Happy” pile, which exclaims, “WE STEALING THE MOON WITH THIS ONE.”

And so we are with that felicitous phrase that nonetheless implies larceny of something—human happiness— that should perhaps be regarded as a birthright to at least some degree, yes?

Like Bobby McFerrin long before him, Pharrell Williams does something both remarkably simple and ultimately profound: He writes and sings in praise of pure...

Borrowed a friend’s car last week and the Sirius radio channel was on a classic rock station. I liked classic rock plenty back when it wasn’t classic yet, and can still feel that warm pulsing of nostalgia when a Millennial or Gen X wedding DJ finally sees fit to placate the Grayhairs in attendance by playing something dance-able from that era. (I make a habit of imploring them to play Motown; they always nod agreeably but then don’t…)

So I listened along a while as the heavily algorithmed playlist churned out standard ’60s-’70s fare from the likes of the Bee Gees, Buffalo Springfield, Simon & Garfunkel, et al.

And after a few more, I came to a sudden, definitive realization that shocked me at the time, but which I could then and there boil down to one dismaying word: Boring.

Not all of it, by any means, and not because it was bad music...

There’s a scene some 40 minutes into Netflix’s stirring documentary on musician/composer Jon Batiste when his adult self is back on the piano bench with his long ago teacher from Juilliard School of Music, working on Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata. Batiste starts in and his teacher brings him up short within seconds, even grabbing his hand off the piano as he sternly implores, “You have to breathe; you are not breathing!”

The teacher demonstrates, Batiste tries again, the teacher stops him again and says, “If you don’t breathe, it’s like a computer, it doesn’t express anything. You want life. Breathe!”

In some ways, the whole plot of “American Symphony” can be seen as Batiste working very, very hard, both out of virtuous striving for excellence and an absolute, desperate quest for emotional survival, to learn how to breathe. (The “wanting life” part has always seemed well in hand.)

Batiste is plainly on...