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music

Just To Be For Sure, For Sure

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In my excitement to share good music with friends and customers, at times I give a favorite CD or LP as a gift, just to find out they are out of print and impossible to get back in my collection. It has happened once too often.

A few months ago when I gave a copy of Kazue Sawai CD to a customer who had come to audition Musical Affairs speakers. The sound is so real. You hear Ms. Sawai play in your music room. You hear everything. So beautiful. I am willing to cough up a couple of hundred dollars to get back that CD.

Another CD I really like is by Tamia and Pierre Favre, called “de la nuit… le jour” on ECM New Series. Hard to find. I have seen their new CDs on Amazon go anywhere from thirty some dollars to around $130. Lucky me. Just found a good source for them and ordered 12 copies of them! Received today from Germany.

Holderlin was a great German poet. I have read a little of his works. Not much. I was introduced to his work through a Wim Wenders’ movie called Wings of Desire. In it, Bruno Ganz recites some Holderlin poem. Beautiful even to the ears of someone like me who does not speak German. Found out there is actually a recording of Holderlin poetry recited by Bruno Ganz. Lucky me. Took a few months until I could locate one. And a while longer to find the LP version. Now, a couple of more copies, just in case.

Arvo Part is a very good composer. His Miserere and Tabula Rasa are still two of my favorite works. Both out of print now. I got 12 copies of Miserere on LP and have a couple of copies on CD. I figure every now and then I can take them to friends as a gift instead of a bottle of wine. Well, a good bottle of wine while listening to great music is rather fun anyways. You can find a good interview with Arvo Part on YouTube, by none other Bjork.

Please help me find my Kazue Sawai CD.

Malcolm McLaren Passed Away

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Malcolm McLaren, great musician, manager of the Sex Pistols passed away yesterday at age 64. Nostalgic or still creative, his Madame Butterfly remains as one of my favorites. Dancing to it my early college years.

A good friend said it much better than I could: “Malcolm was a visionary and what he lacked in absolute musical ability he more than made up for in innovation and energy, the breadth of which is astonishing.  By mentoring, publicising and blending at one time or another so many wildly diverse music strands, many of which had previously achieved only marginal interest before him, he has in no small way become responsible for a lot of the music that the world hears and takes for granted today.  Not content with grabbing the zeitgeist of the times, he has in many cases actually created it.

Mocked, undervalued or totally ignored even in his home country, the world is a poorer place without him.  By those who know, he will be sorely missed.”

May he rest in peace.