Terry Riley – St George’s, Bristol. 13th April 2019

I was quite surprised when I saw this concert in the listings for St George’s in Bristol. What, the Terry Riley? At the lovely little 500 seater venue in Bristol?Yes, that Terry Riley – he of “In C”, “A Rainbow in Curved Air”, half of the inspiration for Baba O’Riley by The Who, and one of the pioneers of minimalist music. So we booked.As an aside, it was really unfortunate timing, as we then found Continue Reading

The Modern Jazz Quartet – LPJT56

I found this in my dad’s collection a couple of weeks ago, and I’d bought one of their LPs earlier in the year – fortunately not the same one. This is rather pleasant listenable jazz, recorded in the mid 1950s. The main difference is that while it has your regular piano, upright bass and drums, they also have a virtuoso vibraphobe player. Vibes have a unique sound – warmer and fuller than a glockenspiel or Continue Reading

Reading List

As this blog is supposed to about more than just records and gigs, I thought I would start its new iteration with a reading list – some of the music books that I’ve read and some I plan to read. Joe Boyd “White Bicycles” – I read this on the back of his work with Fairport Convention – someone who seemed to be there at every key event in the 60s Glyn Johns “Sound Man” Continue Reading

An update…

So here we are with this new blog, which replaces the “My Dad’s Vinyl” Tumblr account. I’ve copied all of the Tumblr posts over to here, and have supplemented it with some Twitter posts from the last couple of years, which might hopefully give a feel for the sort of thing I want to do on here.

Charity Shop Pickings

Aretha Franklin: I picked this up at a charity shop today and it’s just as good as you’d hope – the disc is in tip-top condition too, not a pop or click on it. A definite keeper. I also took a punt on this – I’m not a huge fan of big band/swing stuff but I’d heard of Gene Krupa and an album by two drummers sounded interesting. And it’s great, unchallenging listening, drums to Continue Reading

An Evening’s Listening

And we’re back – I’ve been digging through my dad’s vinyl today and cataloguing, so we’re listening to some of it to see if we want to keep it. First up this evening, Peter Paul and Mary. Yeah, not great. Anything with a song called “I dig rock and roll music” is trying too hard to be down with the trendy hepcats. We’re hanging on for Puff the Magic Dragon… Not a keeper. Average of Continue Reading

Focus

A charity shop purchase from today. Hocus Pocus is just genius! We recognised House of the King and found it was the theme to a 70s children’s TV programme “Don’t Ask Me”. I don’t remember the programme but I remember the theme.

Berlioz – Symphonie Fantastique, Sir Thomas Beecham & French National Radio Orchestra (1961, HMV SXLP 30295)

This one surprised us a bit – we thought Berlioz was experimental, but this sounded pretty normal to us, nothing too untoward and pleasantly listenable in an occasionally forthright way with some quite loud horns. It seemed to flow, nothing atonal about it – which is perhaps what we expected, a bit of honking and clanging. So forgive the ignorance, what’s controversial/innovative/unique about it (I’m reading from the sleeve notes here)? We enjoyed it and Continue Reading

Schubert – Symphonies 5 & 8, Karl Bohm/Berlin Philharmonic (1966, Deutsche Grammophon)

This one hasn’t really done it for us, and we didn’t make it to the end of the 5th Symphony, let alone the 8th – I suppose it would have been more apt not to finish the 8th, given that it’s the “Unfinished Symphony”. It wasn’t helped by the record sounding quite scratchy, but SWMBO also described it as “cut-price Elgar”. I’m not sure what it was about it – most things have been “yes, that’s nice” Continue Reading