But music is a lot of things; it's drama and dramatic portrayal, expression of various things - emotions, the 'spirit of machines,' in the case of the later Nineteenth century English industrial-age composers, the 'feel' of dark cities and factories, and the working-class perspective... And over the seas in New Orleans there was some kind of post-French Bohemian color and glitter mixed in with the Mississippi mud...
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| She's married to the guy whose musical performance we are about to hear/watch. She comes from near where I live and we've seen her once or twice at photo shoots at the beach here for Scoop Magazine, a local top quality mag part-owned by a young Ukrainian who is currently being held without charge pending likely extradition to NYC to face some kind of internet manipulation charges... |
Recently, I encountered a couple of examples of modern musical art, both of which were re-workings of very old themes and styles - but both possessed just the right amount of their own individuality and innovation to mark them out. I will post a specific reference to just one of them at the moment, but this stands as one of those rare cases, where the performing musician manages to deliver the meaning within the character of the song, of the music, itself - and then the whole thing becomes quite a visceral work of art.
To explain further, the only, and I do mean only time I have ever heard someone play Paganini's most famous '4th violin concerto' with the adagio ending by Albinoni where it actually made any kind of musical sense - and Malmsteen enables it to make perfect sense - was in an early heavily-amp'd rock version on his (Yngvie Malmsteen's) electric guitar. Virtually all other players - either who try it on violin, or on guitar - turn the thing into note salad leaving the decisive 4th downbeat whole entire point of the thing somewhere 'on the table' so to speak, when the cards have all been played and the lights go out.
So now today we go to this guy - a relatively new name on the global music scene - Gary Clark Jr - and his performance of what is effectively a modification of a Blues' standard about trains and train lines: this is the age of steam, of rail, of iron and steel, and not so much of the 'angels (or 'engines') of gold' that Howling Wolf sang about at the Royal Albert Hall in the UK.
The real music starts about 1:10 in
