Yesterday, a friend of mine mentioned being interested in Pat Metheny’s music.  It occured to me that for someone who’s just starting out, tackling any large catalog of music can be overwhelming.  Where do you start?  I’ve sometimes started with the newest or oldest recordings of an artist, or starting somewhere in the middle with one of that artist’s most popular recordings.  With Pat Metheny’s music, you have to acknowledge his multiple musical paths, and choose those that may sound the most interesting to you.  This post is a primer of Metheny’s wide body of recordings, and  I will keep it simple for the sake of this discussion.

Continue reading A Beginner’s Guide to Pat Metheny →

Just when I thought I’d seen everything, here’s a video of an orchestral work set to the piano performance of…a cat??  Yes! CATcerto is the creation of  Lithuanian conductor and composer Mindaugas Piečaitis, and was performed by Klaipėda Chamber Orchestra in Klaipėda (Lithuania) on June 5th, 2009.  Nora The Piano Cat™, the featured soloist, was brought in by video.  Check out the official CATcerto site for the video (hosted on YouTube), and interviews with the composer/conductor, and Nora!

Continue reading CATcerto! →

It’s a crazy life, a hazy life, a mixed-up, jumbled phasey life…a crazy life for people who want to smile…

Many readers know that I tend to favor albums from a decade or two ago, over newer ones.  I do occasionally find gems among newer releases, but it’s even more of a surprise to find a new favorite album among a collection that I’ve overlooked in the past.  Gino Vannelli was listed for a local gig, but that turned out to be a false alarm.  Nonetheless, I figured I would listen to more of his catalog, as I’d picked up just about everything at used record shops.  Starting at the beginning, I decided to give Crazy Life a try…

Continue reading Gino Vannelli’s “Crazy Life” (A Retro Review) →

I’m wondering if any of Rudy’s Corner’s audience has heard, or heard of, Gino Vannelli’s new album, A Good Thing.

I’m a bit perplexed:  it seems like it was released briefly in Europe this past February, but it’s now out of print. Gino’s site still shows that the CD is a “new release”, but you can’t yet buy it (unless you find one from Amazon). I can’t find anything online regarding the reason for its delay, or it being pulled from the market, but I’ll post an update here when I find out a worldwide release date.

Anyhow, I got ahold of a copy back at the end of May, and it’s pretty good so far.  Many of the songs (including the first single, “Measure Of A Man”) bring to mind his pop music successes of the 70s and 80s, but filtered through the acoustic jazz stylings of Yonder Tree and Slow Love (both on Verve, from the mid 90s).  Gino’s pop sensibilities are still intact, but the synthesizers from the 70s and 80s are gone for the most part. (They’re used more for sweetening.) His voice is still as good as it’s always been–in fact, it is richer and more expressive than on his earlier recordings.

For now I’ll leave you, dear readers, with this little teaser, and will return with a formal review of the rest of the album’s songs once it gets worldwide release.  This is a very solid album so far, and I must say that the acoustic angle is very refreshing.  And it’s nice to know that Gino still “has it”.  With a forthcoming U.S. tour, this is shaping up to be a good year for Gino Vannelli fans!  Be sure to visit Gino’s official site for news about the tour and (hopefully) updated information on the release of this new album.

I’m not sure if I hit a button or selected too many things while working on my Zune 120, but I watched the player “sync” by deleting album…after album…after album.  I finally managed to get it to stop deleting the albums, but only after going in the complete opposite direction and trying to upload everything to the player in order to restore what was deleted.  And then the software balked again: since I was overfilling the player, it prevented me from uploading!  As it stands, I now have it on manual sync for the Zune 120.

Continue reading Zune Software Panic →