Category Music

If I’m drawn to a piece of music, it usually begins to spin its magic on me in the first few notes. Doesn’t matter the genre or era, and doesn’t always require that I be listening closely at the time.

Maybe the radio or Spotify will be on low volume and I’ll barely hear a melodic snippet or phrase or emotional lilt and the next thing out of my mouth to whomever is close to the dial is, “Can you please turn that up?”

And so it was a few weeks ago when somewhere—so many inputs, such cluttered memory—the late trumpeter Donald Byrd’s name appeared on an exotically named tune called “Cristo Redentor.” Byrd’s was the first recording of the song in 1963, and it still reigns as the definitive version. It was written, however, by his pal and collaborator, the composer and pianist Duke Pearson. And as you’ll see and hear evidence of below, the song does right by a wide variety of practitioners.

…a song that tran...

Sometimes an artist comes along who just knocks the legs right out from under you, and after you’ve picked yourself up you’re left wondering how such seemingly natural, God-given talent could have developed to the degree it has. (Though one of the answers is surely “lots of hard work.”)

This sense of amazement is all the more the case when the artist is a mere 20 years old, with a monster hit already in her rear view mirror and three Grammys on her shelf, still shining brightly after a debut album of all original material when she was 18 shot her into the stratosphere, a veritable babe in the musical woods.

…the few bits of data on a card underlie every avenue of grief and anger she explores as adulthood’s losses and emotional scarring are revealed as the costs of being human, and vulnerable, and alive.

We can’t always tell what any given artist’s long-term trajectory might be...

I was never one of Jimmy Buffett’s devoted fan base of “Parrot Heads,” about whom you can watch a full-length feature documentary available on You Tube after you’re done here. But I am here to declare that I played the living hell out of his “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” album in 1977, just as I was entering graduate school in the essentially sober field of psychology.

My head filled with earnest Freudian-Jungian-Reichian-Rogerian-Maslowian speculations on human nature, the album’s title song, not even to mention the anthemic “Margaritaville,” served as a kind of ballast during that period of my life.

It reminded me every time I wore another of countless grooves into the vinyl that I better not try to understand human beings without paying homage to their desire to let their hair down and party now and again—loudly, emphatically, with a true sense of joy and abandon...

I’ve become ever more convinced with age that It’s not so much the plain fact of death that people fear as they face the downslope of their allotted years on earth. It’s not death but the nature of the dying that furrows their brows during conversations about the end of life.

At least that’s how it is for me and most every aged peer I talk to when conversations—not all of them, but many—at least touch on who’s in the hospital now, who’s going in soon, who’s getting out, and whether the getting out is to go home, go to the nursing home, or go to the morgue.

And the last of those is the least of most everyone’s worries.

The thought of death is dwarfed first by the fear of unrelieved physical pain, though modern methods and attitudes toward pain management have significantly reduced the incidence and concern that one’s end may be accompanied by acute bodily suffering.

It’s another fear that strikes the mo...

I learned the Australian folk ballad “Waltzing Matilda” so early in my elementary school years that I don’t remember very much of the life I led before it became one of those anthemic tunes that courses through my blood with ease and gladness whenever I find myself suddenly singing it in the shower or out on a bike ride in the sun-splotched innocence of a spring day.

So the genius of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” is that it uses the freewheeling joy of the original as the backdrop for a deep lamentation on the devastating losses of war. Bogle frames those losses not in the realm of great battles and territory surrendered or annexed, but in the individual persons (young men in this case) with families, friends and romances waiting for them at home, and a future that will never be realized.

The setting is World War I, perhaps the most nonsensical war of all the nonsense that lies deep ...