#George Burton Quartet

[jesuisgourde]

A list of all the books mentioned in Peter Doherty's journals (and in some interviews/lyrics, too)

Because I just made this list in answer to someone's question on a facebook group, I thought I may as well post it here.

-The Picture of Dorian Gray/The Ballad Of Reading Gaol/Salome/The Happy Prince/The Duchess of Padua, all by Oscar Wilde -The Thief's Journal/Our Lady Of The Flowers/Miracle Of The Rose, all by Jean Genet -A Diamond Guitar by Truman Capote -Mixed Essays by Matthew Arnold -Venus In Furs by Leopold Sacher-Masoch -The Ministry Of Fear by Graham Greene -Brighton Rock by Graham Green -A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud -The Street Of Crocodiles (aka Cinnamon Shops) by Bruno Schulz -Opium: The Diary Of His Cure by Jean Cocteau -The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson -Howl by Allen Ginsberg -Women In Love by DH Lawrence -The Tempest by William Shakespeare -Trilby by George du Maurier -The Vision Of Jean Genet by Richard Coe -"Literature And The Crisis" by Isaiah Berlin -Le Cid by Pierre Corneille -The Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon -Junky by William S Burroughs -Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes -Futz by Rochelle Owens -They Shoot Horses Don't They? by Horace McCoy -"An Inquiry On Love" by La revolution surrealiste magazine -Idea by Michael Drayton -"The Nymph's Reply to The Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh -Hamlet by William Shakespeare -The Silver Shilling/The Old Church Bell/The Snail And The Rose Tree all by Hans Christian Andersen -120 Days Of Sodom by Marquis de Sade -Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke -Poetics Of Space by Gaston Bachelard -In Favor Of The Sensitive Man and Other Essays by Anais Nin -La Batarde by Violette LeDuc -Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov -Intimate Journals by Charles Baudelaire -Juno And The Paycock by Sean O'Casey -England Is Mine by Michael Bracewell -"The Prelude" by William Wordsworth -Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Atalli -"Elm" by Sylvia Plath -"I am pleased with my sight..." by Rumi -She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith -Amphitryon by John Dryden -Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman -The Song Of The South by James Rennell Rodd -In Her Praise by Robert Graves -"For That He Looked Not Upon Her" by George Gascoigne -"Order And Disorder" by Lucy Hutchinson -Man Crazy by Joyce Carol Oates -A Pictorial History Of Sex In The Movies by Jeremy Pascall and Clyde Jeavons -Anarchy State & Utopia by Robert Nozick -"Limbo" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge -Men In Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century by George Haggerty

[arbitrary line break because tumble hates lists apparently]

-Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky -Innocent When You Dream: the Tom Waits Reader -"Identity Card" by Mahmoud Darwish -Ulysses by James Joyce -The Four Quartets poems by TS Eliot -Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare -A'Rebours/Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans -Prisoner Of Love by Jean Genet -Down And Out In Paris And London by George Orwell -The Man With The Golden Arm by Nelson Algren -Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates -"Epitaph To A Dog" by Lord Byron -Cocaine Nights by JG Ballard -"Not By Bread Alone" by James Terry White -Anecdotes Of The Late Samuel Johnson by Hester Thrale -"The Owl And The Pussycat" by Edward Lear -"Chevaux de bois" by Paul Verlaine -A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting by Richard Burton -Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes -The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri -The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling -The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling -Ask The Dust by John Frante -On The Trans-Siberian Railways by Blaise Cendrars -The 39 Steps by John Buchan -The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol -The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol -The Iliad by Homer -Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad -The Volunteer by Shane O'Doherty -Twenty Love Poems and A Song Of Despair by Pablo Neruda -"May Banners" by Arthur Rimbaud -Literary Outlaw: The life and times of William S Burroughs by Ted Morgan -The Penguin Dorothy Parker -Smoke by William Faulkner -Hero And Leander by Christopher Marlowe -My Lady Nicotine by JM Barrie -All I Ever Wrote by Ronnie Barker -The Libertine by Stephen Jeffreys -On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts by Thomas de Quincey -The Void Ratio by Shane Levene and Karolina Urbaniak -The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro -Dead Fingers Talk by William S Burroughs -The England's Dreaming Tapes by Jon Savage -London Underworld by Henry Mayhew

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Dezron Douglas - ATALAYA

I first heard Dezron Douglas on Force Majeure, his terrific album of duets with harpist Brandee Younger from a few years back. But it turns out he has a high-profile gig with some guy named Trey Anastasio. Heard of him? Anyway — ATALAYA! At times, this solo effort for International Anthem could pass for some mid-1960s Blue Note session or a Classic Quartet-era Coltrane LP. But the playing is so crisp and purposeful that it never once feels like an exercise in nostalgia. It just feels timeless. Douglas' bass playing (on both acoustic and electric) is extremely strong and sturdy as he leads a crackling group of musicians (George Burton on keys, Joe Dyson on drums, Emilio Modeste on sax) through a selection of brisk, up-tempo numbers and romantic ballads. There are a few surprises, too, like Melvis Santa's show-stopping vocal on "Weeping Birch" and Douglas' watery solo electric excursion on "Octopus." I'd take a whole album of this kind of thing ...

[burlveneer-music]

Dezron Douglas - ATALAYA - double bassist’s new quartet set, straight-ahead to spiritual (International Anthem)

ATALAYA is new work by bassist Dezron Douglas, and it is alive. That is, ‘alive’ in all the ways that jazz is at its best – as a pure and personal expression of Black Music channeled through time-honored traditions by a group of musicians who practice sonic coherence through musical unity. As Dezron puts it in the opening statement of his liner notes for the album: “Mysticism, Magic, Faith, Love, Power, Discernment! These are words that embody the creative process of Music.” With Emilio Modeste on saxes, George Burton on keys, and Joe Dyson Jr. on drums, Dezron’s crew summons the dynamism of Coltrane’s classic Quartet, or Dave Holland’s Quintet on Prime Directive, or Charles Mingus on Nostalgia In Times Square… swinging virtuosically and firing on all 4 cylinders. But there’s nothing remotely revisionist here – Dezron and his quartet embody poetry, presence, artistic and emotional clarity in every note they play. Free and dissonant, sweet and consonant, sweeping and pure… This is the band you hope is playing every time you walk into a club.  Dezron Douglas – basses George Burton – piano and rhodes Joe Dyson Jr. – drums Emilio Modeste – saxophones Melvis Santa – vocals and percussion on “Wheeping Birch” Artwork by Adama Coulibaly.

[sheetmusiclibrarypdf]

Keith Jarrett - The Art of Improvisation COMPLETE (full 2005 documentary, with extra interviews)

Keith Jarrett - The Art of Improvisation COMPLETE (full 2005 documentary, with the extra interviews) Video Link:Best Sheet Music download from our Library.Please, subscribe to our Library. Thank you!Directed and narrated by Mike Dibb. Program consultant; Ian Carr.All About Jazz reviewBrowse in the Library:Best Sheet Music download from our Library.

Keith Jarrett - The Art of Improvisation COMPLETE (full 2005 documentary, with the extra interviews) Video Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fB5YXgNX-w

"In this in-depth portrait of one of the world's superstars of Jazz, pianist Keith Jarrett talks about the range of his music, the importance of improvisation, the great artists he has worked with, and about the highs and lows of his life. Further insights are provided by fellow musicians, family members and other musical associates. Incorporating recordings and rare archive footage of concerts dating back to the 1960s and including such greats as Miles Davis and Charles Lloyd, this first-ever major documentary has been made with the full cooperation of Keith Jarrett himself." "With, in order of appearance, Keith Jarrett, Manfred Eicher, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Steve Cloud, Scott Jarrett, George Avakian, Gary Burton, Toshinari Koinuma, Chick Corea, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Rose Anne Jarrett and Palle Danielsson." Directed and narrated by Mike Dibb. Program consultant; Ian Carr. Keith Jarrett in extended interview about his work illustrated by numerous tv clips of the musician in performance over the years and with interviews by colleagues Ian Carr, Miles Davis, Manfred Eicher, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, George Avakian, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen. (Personnel on Camera)

All About Jazz review

While he can often engender all manner of contention and argument, it's unquestionable that Keith Jarrett is one of the most significant pianists to emerge in the second half of the 20th Century. An artist who has done it all — performed his own sometimes lyrical, sometimes free-spirited compositions with two groundbreaking quartets in the '70s, taken solo improvisation to a whole new level with a series of important recordings including the classics Facing You and The Köln Concert; contributed a fresh spontaneity to the Great American Songbook with his Standards Trio. Tackled the challenging classical repertoires of Bach, Mozart and Shostakovich and composed his own classical works; and played in landmark groups including Charles Lloyd in the '60s and Miles Davis in the '70s — Jarrett is also more than a little enigmatic. Fastidious, perfectionist and, some might argue, highly controlled in his life, Jarrett paradoxically defines the concept of pure abandon in his playing. With a life's work that, classical repertoire aside, has always been about spontaneous creation, Jarrett is in an especially capable position to shed light on the true meaning of improvisation. And so, British producer/director Mike Dibb, responsible for '02's The Miles Davis Story, has fashioned a new documentary which, while never explicitly defining what that elusive meaning is, nevertheless manages — after 85 minutes and a series of remarkably erudite interviews with Jarrett and those who have been close to him over the past 30 years — to create a vivid impression that is both inspirational to aspiring musicians and uniquely clarifying to others who want to understand the process of how musicians create something out of nothing. Rather than present a chronological examination of Jarrett's life thus far, Dibb chooses, much like Jarrett's own work, to use a seemingly non-linear approach that focuses on Jarrett's improvisational process although, in the final analysis — just like Jarrett's extemporization — there is an arc. Beginning with the Standards Trio, then jumping back to his early days and ultimately ending with his European Quartet including saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson and drummer Jon Christensen, what becomes evident is that Jarrett's goal has essentially been the same as when, precociously, he would add both his own original compositions and spontaneous creations to the classical repertoire of recitals dating back as early as when he was only eight years old. Amongst the many interviews with past and present collaborators including Garbarek, Danielsson, Christensen, Charlie Haden, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Gary Burton and Dewey Redman, perhaps the most significant footage is that with ECM label owner and producer Manfred Eicher, with whom Jarrett found the perfect creative partner early in his career. Jarrett goes as far as saying that his albums are the product of two people — himself and Eicher — which is a significant distinction. That Eicher has recorded far more Jarrett performances than have ever been or will ever be released in order to catch those moments of pure magic, those performances where Jarrett alone or with a group is truly at the moment, also demonstrates the high standard and level of discernment that both he and Jarrett apply to deciding what will ultimately be commercially distributed. That Jarrett has, for 20 years, chosen only to document live performances, rather than record in the studio, is another distinction, one that points to a belief that the audience is, indeed, an integral part of each and every performance. Jarrett comes across as deeply committed, albeit unquestionably idiosyncratic and unapologetically purist; while he admits to enjoying his time with Miles Davis — the only time in his career where he totally gave up acoustic piano for electric instruments — he also dismisses his electric work by calling such instruments "toys. Few, if any, pianists other than Jarrett insist that a choice of pianos be provided for each performance, so that he can choose the best one for the concert hall. And the sheer physicality of his playing, along with his total and absolute involvement with the music to the exclusion of anything else, paints a unique picture — as does his level of communication. Virtually all concert footage — including performances with Lloyd, Miles, the Standards Trio, and the American and European Quartets — demonstrates the incredible interaction that exists at every performance. Jarrett has, in recent years, come under criticism with regard to the Standards Trio which, at over 20 years, is the longest-lasting group of his career — and, with rare exception, is one of the longest collaborations in the jazz period. Some say that the group has lost its creative edge. But watching the footage of the trio, and listening to Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette discuss how little rehearsal takes place — in fact, rehearsals typically only occur in sound checks before concerts, and it's not uncommon for the trio to work on something at a sound check and never actually play it in concert — one is truly drawn into the sense of adventure applied to every performance. And the performance footage, in concert with the interview clips, manages to demonstrate the kinds of risks the trio take with each and every tune; how any one of the members can suggest a new direction with complete confidence that the others will follow. By the time Dibb's documentary reaches its end, one may not be able to explicitly define the art of improvisation, but there are profound conclusions implicitly reached. And the documentary compels one to either play some Jarrett recordings or, if Jarrett's music is new to the viewer, to go out and find some. The level of excitement and discovery is so vivid that even those who have become jaded with Jarrett in recent times may find themselves with renewed interest. While some bemoan Jarrett's abandonment of writing, what becomes clear — and Jarrett articulates this at one point — is that every performance involves the act of composition. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the true meaning of improvisation. Visit Keith Jarrett on the web. Interviews with: Keith Jarrett, Manfred Eicher, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Steve Cloud, Scott Jarrett, George Avakian, Gary Burton, Tashinari Koinuma, Chick Corea, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Rose Anne Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Jon Christensen, Palle Danielsson Chapter Listing: Essentially an Improviser; Three is Not a Crowd; Small Hands; A Potential Star; Moments to Echo; Solo; Invader in the Ranks; Sounds and Pulses; Musical Seduction; The European Group; Sacrifices; Epilogue Bonus Features: The Keith Jarrett Trio, Live in Concert perform "Butch and Butch ; Extra interviews with Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. Read the full article

[nwdsc]

(▶︎ ATALAYA | Dezron Douglas | International Anthemから)

ATALAYA by Dezron Douglas

ATALAYA is new work by bassist Dezron Douglas, and it is alive. That is, ‘alive’ in all the ways that jazz is at its best – as a pure and personal expression of Black Music channeled through time-honored traditions by a group of musicians who practice sonic coherence through musical unity. As Dezron puts it in the opening statement of his liner notes for the album: “Mysticism, Magic, Faith, Love, Power, Discernment! These are words that embody the creative process of Music.” Followers of contemporary jazz might recognize Dezron for his bass work behind Pharoah Sanders, Louis Hayes, or Ravi Coltrane. Others might know him as the newest full-time member of the Trey Anastasio Band. Steady International Anthem listeners might remember him from the New York side of Makaya McCraven's Universal Beings. More recently we presented Force Majeure, Dezron’s sublime duo record with harpist Brandee Younger, which compiled the best of livestream performances from their Harlem apartment during the original covid lockdown. That album, which came out in December of 2020, reflected the speed and feeling of the moment while somehow simultaneously distracting from the harsh reality of it. It also captured a very vulnerable, intimate, and real impression of Dezron on double bass, sharing his power and truth without abandon. ATALAYA, similarly, wasn’t processed in the lab, but rather, captured in the room. The realness factor is once again forefront in the sound; but the difference is in the energy and ambition of the music, which reaches for the stratosphere. Again, let’s defer to Dezron here: “Welcome to the Black Lion rocket ship.” With Emilio Modeste on saxes, George Burton on keys, and Joe Dyson Jr. on drums, Dezron’s crew summons the dynamism of Coltrane’s classic Quartet, or Dave Holland’s Quintet on Prime Directive, or Charles Mingus on Nostalgia In Times Square… swinging virtuosically and firing on all 4 cylinders. But there’s nothing remotely revisionist here – Dezron and his quartet embody poetry, presence, artistic and emotional clarity in every note they play. Free and dissonant, sweet and consonant, sweeping and pure… This is the band you hope is playing every time you walk into a club. クレジット2022年11月18日リリース Dezron Douglas – basses George Burton – piano and rhodes Joe Dyson Jr. – drums Emilio Modeste – saxophones Melvis Santa – vocals and percussion on “Wheeping Birch” All compositions by Dezron Douglas (NORZED Music ASCAP); except “Wheeping Birch” co-written by Dezron Douglas and Melvis Santa (TENAJA Sounds ASCAP). Recorded by Dave Vettraino, with assistance from Greg Dicastro, at Firehouse 12, New Haven, Connecticut, on August 25th and 26th, 2021. “Octopus” and vocals on “Wheeping Birch” recorded by David Stoller at Samurai Hotel, Astoria, New York, on November 28th, 2021. Produced by Dezron Douglas. Mixed by Dave Vettraino. Mastered by David Allen. Artwork by Adama Coulibaly. Photography by Deneka Peniston. Liner Notes by Dezron Douglas. Design by Jeremiah Chiu.

[popentertainment-concertphotos]

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Maceo Parker, Cecile McLoren Salvant, Leslie Odom, Jr., Christian Sands Quartet & George Burton Quartet – Newport Jazz Festival (Day 1) – Fort Adams State Park – Newport, RI – August 4, 2017

Photos by Ross Edmond © 2017

[whileiamdying]

Upswing Is Seen for jazz As Newport Series Nears

by John S. Wilson [Jazz Critic, the New York Times] June 26, 1970

Jazz reached a nadir of popularity last year, according to George Wein, producer of the Newport Jazz Festival.

“But this year will be a jazz year,” he predicted as he prepared for the 17th year of the festival, “because there is now more concern among jazz fans. They realize how close their music has come to being extinct. The festival's advance sale is al ready 20 per cent ahead of 1968, which set a record.”

Last year was the year when Mr. Wein spiced up the Newport Jazz Festival with rock groups, offering pro grams that produced a strong divergence of opinion among jazz followers and attracted crowds, which, during one concert, battered down a seg ment of the wooden fence surrounding Festival Field. After the festival, Mr. Wein was required by the City of Newport to install a chain link fence and to make changes in the method of policing the area around the field.

Details of Cutback

Because of these expenses, which were shared by the Newport Folk Festival, and reaction to the turmoil at the Jazz Festival, the Folk Festival, held two weeks later, wound up with a financial loss.

As a consequence, there will be no Folk Festival this year, the Jazz Festival will be reduced to three nights (July 10 to 12) instead of the customary four, and no rock groups will perform — not even jazz‐influenced rock groups such as Blood, Sweat and Tears, which played last year.

“Even the jazz fans who complained about rock last year generally considered Blood, Sweat and Tears acceptable,” Mr. Wein ad mitted.

This year, during three evening concerts and two afternoons, Mr. Wein will place the musical focus directly on jazz, starting with an open ing night tribute on July 10 to Louis Armstrong, who will celebrate his 70th birthday on July 4. Mr. Armstrong will be present with a contingent of long‐time New Orleans musicians, including the Preservation Hall Band, the Eureka Jazz Band and the New Orleans Ragtime Band, as well as another New Orleans native, Mahalia Jackson, the gospel singer.

Afternoon workshops, a regular feature of the Folk Festivals, will be adapted to the Jazz Festival this year with drum, trumpet and vio lin sessions scattered around the field on Saturday after noon, July 11.

Cosby and His Band

On Sunday afternoon, Bill Cosby, the comedian who is a jazz fan and an enthusiastic drummer, will appear with his group, Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Bradford Marching and Funeral Band.

Among other musicians scheduled to play are the Gary Burton Quartet, the Chico Hamilton Quintet, the Tony Williams Lifetime and the Elvin Jones Trio on Saturday afternoon; the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, Don Byas, Nina Simone, Ike and Tina Turner, Kenny Burrell, Herbie Mann and a quartet of violinists — Stephane Grappelli, Jean‐Luc Ponty, Ray Nance and Joe Venuti—on Saturday night.

[lonelyasawhisper]

Brian May

John Tobler, Stuart Grundy, The Guitar Greats (BBC Books), 1983

AT THE START of the 1980s, the rock band which was generally accepted, if not as the most popular group in the world, then as one of the top half dozen, was Queen.

The conventional record markets were comprehensively conquered at the end of the previous decade, while the group had effectively opened the door for rock music in South America – at one point, Queen were not only top of the charts in Argentina, but allegedly occupied the top ten positions in the hit parade. To single out one member of the quartet as particularly responsible for this remarkable popularity would be invidious – vocalist Freddie Mercury is the obvious focal point, but the musical heart of the band is undoubtedly Brian May, certainly one of the most innovative British guitar players of the rock era, and equally important in view of the stance of many of his peers, a modest, unassuming and immensely likable person, from whom many could learn...

Brian was born in Twickenham, Middlesex, on 19 July 1947. His father was an electronics engineer working on secret military projects for the Ministry of Defence, and this interest communicated itself to Brian, who nevertheless claims to lack his father's instinctive abilities relating to electronics, although he will admit to being well versed in the theory of the subject. More to the point, Brian's father was and is interested in music, and "a pretty good pianist. He taught me to play ukelele-banjo in the style of George Formby – it's a pretty good instrument that's tuned the same way as a ukelele, but has the same sort of sound vellum as a banjo, and from the chords I learnt on that, I taught myself the guitar."

Brian acquired his first guitar at around the age of seven. "It was a very cheap acoustic Spanish type guitar with steel strings, and was much too big for me when I got it. I can remember being dwarfed by this thing, getting it in bed on my birthday morning, and I thought it was very shiny and new and exciting. The strings were a long way off the fingerboard, and I thought for a long time about whether I should try to modify it, to make it easier to play, because I thought I might ruin it, but eventually I did carve down the bridge, and later, I put a pick-up on it, which my father and I made out of some button magnets with a coil wound round – it worked as well! We plugged it into a radio, into the auxiliary input, and it sounded pretty good, with a very sharp, penetrating clear sound, which I can't really get now.

"I found it quite easy to pick up playing the guitar – I was taking piano lessons at the time, which I never really enjoyed, because it was a chore to do the requisite half hour piano practice, and I always ended up banging the piano and swearing and walking away in disgust, whereas I always went to the guitar for pleasure, which is why, I suppose, my guitar playing progressed faster." And his early influences? "Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele, and the guy who played on the Rick Nelson records, James Burton. Soon after that, the Shadows came along, and they were a big influence, although I was always a bit snobby, like all the people at my school – we thought that somehow the Shadows were beneath us, because we could play better or faster or something, which was definitely a mistaken opinion. I was very keen on the Ventures, probably partly because of the American mystique – the Ventures were cool, but the Shadows weren't – but now I think Hank Marvin had the edge, although some of those Ventures things were very good, and very hard to play."

One of the legendary items for which Brian is famed is that during his teenage years, and with the help of his father, he built his own guitar. "We didn't really have the money to buy a proper guitar, and my school friends had things like Hofner Futuramas or Coloramas, and later a couple had Gibsons, which we couldn't afford, so we decided to make one. I'd played other people's, so I knew roughly what I wanted, and I had some theories about what sort of properties it should have – I wanted a cambered fingerboard which was very close and fast, and I wanted three pick-ups, and to be able to vary the combinations of the pick-ups, which I felt was very limited on the guitars that I'd tried, where you either had them all on or all off, and that was about it. I think I'd just seen Jeff Beck at the time I was building it, so I wanted to be able to make it feed back like he did, because I was amazed at all this violin sound stuff, which I thought was obviously going to be the direction in which guitar playing was going – I thought if you could get a really good sustain which was foolproof, didn't just come out now and again, and was actually controllable, you'd almost have a new instrument, something really like a violin, where you can put some expression into the notes. So I had this idea of putting acoustic pockets into the guitar, because I realised it had to feed back through the body of the guitar and the strings, rather than through the pick-ups, which gives a microphone whistle effect – most of the guitars I'd played would just whistle if you held them near the amplifiers. I also wanted a good tremolo, which returned to its zero position, and didn't go flat once you'd pushed it down a couple of times, so we had to find a tremolo design which didn't have much friction in it – my dad and I did lots of tests with a sort of mock up, a piece of wood with some strings stretched over it, to see what sort of strains were involved. We were very scientific about it, and measured the stresses of the strings – and we designed one tremolo, a sort of cylinder device, which didn't work very well, because here was too much friction, so we ditched that, and went with the knife edge design, which I don't think had been done at that time, although there are some designs like that now. So we had an actual knife edge, which was a mild steel plate with a little "V" groove in it, and into the groove fits a plate which has a point, and the plate which holds the strings can rock backwards and forwards. We did the thing properly and case-hardened the ridge so that it would almost never wear out, which it actually never has, although I've used it constantly for the last ten years.

"It's very hard for most people to play, but as I grew up with it, I find it easy, and in fact, it's the only thing I can play properly, and I'm still using it. The neck was actually part of a fireplace which was just lying around in a friend's house, and the friend was a woodworking man – it was a lovely piece of mahogany with dead straight grain, which had probably been lying in his house for fifty years, and he said he got it from his father."

Brian's early life was spent in the suburb of Feltham, not far from London Airport, and whether coincidentally or otherwise, the schools he attended had also educated several other notable musicians – Jimmy Page, Brian learnt, had attended the same infant's school in Feltham, while two of the Yardbirds, Jim McCarty and Paul Samwell-Smith, went to Brian's secondary school, Hampton Grammar School, which as a result became a fairly well-known nursery for rock musicians including Brian's own first group. Additionally, although neither of them knew it at the time, Freddie Mercury lived only a few hundred yards away..."I didn't know – obviously, we went to different schools, and I didn't know who he was until we were at college and he was friendly with Tim Staffell, who went to the same art college as Freddie, in Ealing." Staffell, in fact, was also a member of Brian's first group, 1984.

"1984 was purely an amateur band, formed at school, although perhaps at the end we once got fifteen quid or something. We never really played anything significant in the way of original material – it was a strange mixture of cover versions, some pop, Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly & the Crickets, some James Brown, 'Knock On Wood' by Eddie Floyd, all the things which people wanted to hear at the time. This was about the time that the Stones were emerging, and later on we did Stones and Yardbirds things...I was in the band for a couple of years, although it wasn't very serious – we did a few dances and things, but I was never happy about it. I left because I wanted to do something where we wrote our own material. I just thought that was necessary to progress, and that was the time I met Roger (Taylor, drummer with Queen). I advertised on a notice board at college for a drummer, because by this time, Cream and Jimi Hendrix were around, and I wanted a drummer who could handle that sort of stuff, and Roger was easily capable of it. Tim Staffell, who had been in 1984, was our singer, and we formed this group called Smile, which was semi-pro – we travelled around the country a fair bit, as far as Cornwall, and Liverpool, and although we did well in some places, we never felt we were getting anywhere, because if you don't have a record out, people tend to forget who you are very quickly, even if they like you on the night. We tried for a long time, and wrote a lot of material, a little of which was carried over into Queen, and we also did a lot of improvising. We did get a record contract – we got very big time, thinking that was it, and we signed with Mercury Records of England, who were just setting up, headed by Lou Reisner, as an English branch of American Mercury, and we recorded about half-a-dozen tracks for them, but they didn't release any of them in Britain. They did put out a single in America, but it didn't do anything. It was a very bad experience, and we also had a bad management experience as well at that time, and it was all very disillusioning."

It was also at this time that Brian first came across Freddie Mercury. "He was a friend of Tim's and came along to a lot of our gigs, and offered suggestions in a way that couldn't be refused! Like 'Why are you wasting your time doing this and that? You should do more original material, and be more demonstrative in the way you put your music across. It takes more than that, and you should put it across with more force – if I was your singer, that's what I'd be doing.' At that time, he hadn't really done any singing, and we didn't know he could – we thought he was just a theoretical rock musician. He was a big Hendrix fan, and he played me all these little bits of Hendrix that weren't obviously audible – he was really a fanatic."

At Imperial College in London Brian studied for an Honours Degree. "It was about 50 per cent mathematics, with a little bit of electronics and a lot of pure physics. I intended to be an astronomer, and I attended the infra-red astronomy department of Imperial, although I didn't actually do infra-red astronomy – what I did was optical interferometry, looking at dust in the solar system. I did that for four years with the idea of getting a Ph.D., but I never finished writing it up – I was about two pages away from finishing, but I never got the final conclusions done, although we did publish two papers with the results and a brief interpretation of them, but there was going to be a third paper which unfortunately never got done. It all got beyond me, and I ran out of money in the fourth year, because the grant only lasted for three years, so I decided to teach in the daytime to make the money to support myself and be able to keep on processing the results. I did that for a while, and worked at night doing the calculations for the results, but that got way too much – anyone who's taught knows that teaching's a full time job. I taught at a comprehensive in Stockwell, and I found that I had to prepare for an hour or more each night to keep on top, and I just became tired, so something had to go, and also at that time was the beginnings of Queen. We were rehearsing, considering whether we'd go into it full time, and around the time we were offered the chance to sign a contract, I decided to forget the academic side at least for a while to see if Queen could become a proper group."

After the inevitable finish of Smile, whose sole single coupled 'Earth' with 'Step On Me', came the eventual transition from that group into Queen. "Smile completely broke up, and we gave up, and I think we all thought that we wouldn't try again after that, but Tim was the first to get back into music, and went off with a group run by a folk singer named Jonathan Kelly, who was trying to get into more rock-oriented material."

With the departure of Staffell, Queen began to take shape, its initial members apart from Brian being drummer Roger Taylor and Freddie Mercury. "Freddie was the driving force for getting us back together – he told us we could do it, and said he didn't want to play useless gigs where no one listened, and that we would have to rehearse and get a stage act together – he was very keen for it to be an actual act – and we started again, taking a couple of songs from Smile and a couple of songs from groups he'd been in, like a band called Wreckage from which we stole bits that went into 'Liar' and a couple of other songs, and we set about it in a serious manner. We'd rehearse three or four nights a week in places like lecture theatres, and we managed to scrape together some equipment."

Despite a level of musical expertise and originality which, in retrospect, was plainly evident, Queen did not enjoy the smoothest of rides in Britain at the genesis of their career, largely due to their choice of name – at a time when glitter rock was in vogue, the name "Queen" seemed rather too obviously an attempt to cash in on someone else's fame...

"I think the name mainly came from Freddie, and I don't think I was too keen on it at the beginning – you toss around hundreds of names, and of all of them, that was the one that stuck, and in a way, the one which got the most argument. I'm not sure that Roger was that keen to begin with, either, but we felt it seemed to stick in the mind, and had a certain mystique and grandeur about it which we thought might catch people's imagination, so that was the one we kept."

It will not have escaped the attention of those familiar with Queen's work that thus far, only three names have been mentioned as members of Queen. "We did have a bass player, and we went through a few of them, but either the personality or the musical ability didn't fit, and it was a while before we found John, through some friends." The first Queen LP refers to John Deacon as "Deacon John" – what's that about? "We used to call him that, and it appeared like that on the album, but after that, he objected to it, and said he wanted to be called John Deacon. I don't really know why we called him Deacon John in the first place – just one of those silly things."

A discussion of Brian's guitar influences at the time of Queen's formation revealed some familiar names – Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix. "When Hendrix came along, it just seemed to be such a great opening of the doors – he seemed to push it along so fast in such a short time. When I first heard 'Stone Free', which was the B-side of 'Hey Joe', there was this solo I couldn't believe, and as a guitarist, I've a reluctance to admit another guitarist's as good as he is but there's still nobody who can approach him for inventiveness, technique, pure sound and style and everything.

One unique feature of Brian May's technique is the fact that he plays not with any kind of conventional plectrum but with a coin, in fact a pre-decimalisation sixpence, of which he has a large supply. "It's not crucial, because I can play with a new penny, or an American dime. I use coins because they're not flexible – I think you get more control if all the flexing is due to the movement in your fingers. You get better contact with the strings, and depending on how tightly you hold it, you have total control over how hard it's being played, and because of its round surface and the serration, by turning it different ways you can get different sounds, like a fairly soft sound, or a slightly grating sound on the beginning of the note which actually lends a bit of distinction to the notes, especially when you're using the guitar at high volume, as I generally do. Otherwise, the sounds tends to be very level and smoothed out."

Queen's early days were, perhaps predictably, nondescript in terms of progress until they were invited to "test" a new studio which had just been completed. "I did have one real contact, a guy called Terry who was working at the time for Pye Studios, but was moving to the new DeLane Lea studios, and he said they needed people in there to make some noise, because they were testing the separation between the three studios, and the reverberation times, and they wanted a group to do it and Roy Thomas Baker came to DeLane Lea, completely by accident, as far as I know, and said that he liked what we were doing very much, and I think it was through him recommending us to Trident that they finally gave us a contract."

The first Queen LP was made over a lengthy period at times when the recording studios owned by Trident were not booked by paying customers, which is not an ideal way for any band to make their first album – Brian confirmed that the group were less than happy about this arrangement, but added that since it was in the past, he felt it inappropriate to elaborate further on the subject.

At least a part of Queen had appeared on record shortly before any Queen product was released, in the shape of a single, 'I Can Hear Music'/'Goin' Back', credited to one Larry Lurex. "As I said, the album took ages and ages – two years in total, in the preparation, making and then trying to get the thing released – and meanwhile, Robin Cable, who we also knew in Trident Studios, was doing this thing which was a re-creation of the Phil Spector sound, and he was very keen for Freddie to be the vocalist. Once Freddie was in there, he suggested that it should have some of my guitar work in this instrumental space they'd left blank, after they'd tried to do it with synthesisers, but it didn't seem to be working out too well, so I did a solo, although I didn't play the acoustic guitars which are crashing through it, and they also used Roger to do some percussion overdubs, like the maraccas and tambourines, which is a part of the Phil Spector sound. I like that quite a lot, and I thought it was a good piece of work, and it was done before we'd finished our own LP, so it was put out under the name of Larry Lurex, which was a joke, but which unfortunately backfired, because a lot of people took exception to the fact that we seemed to be taking the mickey out of Gary Glitter, so a lot of people refused to play it because of that."

Even when the first Queen LP was finally completed, it was not immediately released. "After that, Trident had to go around all the record companies again to see what offers they could get for us, but unfortunately, they were selling us as part of a package of their production, which also included Eugene Wallace and Mark Ashton, and they wanted the package accepted as a whole. But suddenly, there was a move from EMI – Roy Featherstone sent us a telegram which asked us not to sign with anyone else until we'd talked to him, and he was very keen and he got us, and I think, in the end, he did sign the whole package of Mark Ashton and everything. But it had taken an awfully long time, partially because Trident had to do all the negotiations, as our hands were tied, and we actually put on the sleeve of the album that this was the result of three years work, because we were upset and felt that the record was old-fashioned by the time it came out. Lots of stuff had happened in the meantime particularly David Bowie and Roxy Music, who were our sort of generation, but who had already made it, and we felt that it would look like we were jumping on their bandwagon, whereas we'd actually had all that stuff in the can from a very long time before, and it was extremely frustrating."

In America, the story was a little different, as neither Bowie nor Roxy Music were as immediately successful as they had been in Britain. "We got a lot of FM radio play, and a lot of backing for that first album from people who played four or five tracks of it to death, and that gave us a really good grounding in America. We didn't tour in America, which was a shame, but we were just too busy doing other things at the time, and it's very much to the credit of Jack Nelson, who was brought in from America to manage us on Trident's behalf, and knew the American scene, that we toured America immediately after making our second album, supporting Mott the Hoople, and that was really one of the best things we ever did, and that was due to Jack."

Another item of interest on Queen's debut LP was a note on the sleeve proclaiming "No synthesizers", which was echoed on each new Queen album for several years. "The guitars were making some sounds which people might have thought were synthesizers – I was using pedals and the long sustain stuff; and harmony guitars in the background – and we did some John Peel sessions for the BBC, and a lot of people thought we used synthesisers, so we wanted to make sure people knew it was all guitars and voices, and that stuck with us for a long time. I think that for the first nine albums we made, there was never a synthesiser and never an orchestra, never any other player except us on the records."

While 'Keep Yourself Alive' was the outstanding track for most on the first Queen LP, 'My Fairy King' seems to have been a foretaste of what would become one of the group's best known hits, 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. "Yes, I think that was the first step in that direction, the first time we'd really seen Freddie working at his full capacity. He's virtually a self-taught pianist, and he was making vast strides at the time, although we didn't have a piano on stage at that point, because it would have been impossible to fix up, and we didn't want an organ sound. So in the studio was the first chance Freddie had to do his piano things, and we actually got that sound of the piano and guitar working for the first time, which was very exciting, and 'My Fairy King' was the first of those sort of epics where there were lots of voice overdubs and harmonies, and a quite complicated structure, which Freddie got into, and that led to 'The March Of The Black Queen' on the second album which is very much in that idiom, and then 'Bohemian Rhapsody' later on."

1974 saw the second Queen LP, Queen II, released, which saw the first British breakthrough for the group. The track from that album which seems to most bear Brian May's mark is 'Father To Son', which seems in retrospect to betray elements of both the Who and Led Zeppelin. "They're probably in there somewhere, because they were among our favourite groups, but what we were trying to do differently from either of those groups was this sort of layered sound. The Who had the open chord guitar sound, and there's a bit of that in 'Father To Son' but our sound is more based around the overdriven guitar sound, which is used for the main bulk of the song, but I also wanted to do this business of building up textures behind the main melody lines. To me, Queen II was the sort of emotional music we'd always wanted to be able to play, although we couldn't play most of it onstage because it was too complicated, and so it was our first expedition into pure studio music. We were trying to push studio techniques to a new limit for rock groups, and we wore the tape literally to the point where you could see through it because we were doing so many overdubs. We were building up fifty piece choir type effects and loads of guitars to get this thick orchestra sound, and in a way, it was going over the top – it was fulfilling all our dreams, because we didn't have much opportunity for that on the first album, being stuck in at odd hours, and virtually reproducing what we could do on stage at that time, so the second album was an adventure into the world of what can be done and hasn't been done before, and in that sense it was over the top. We thought of it as almost baroque in some of the things we were doing, and in fact it went through our minds to call the album Over The Top."

While he is best known as a guitarist, Brian is also a notable songwriter, and it seemed appropriate to enquire about the lyrical inspiration of 'Father To Son'... "That was sort of a vision of things growing with the passage of time, not by overthrowing what's gone before, but by building on it – evolution as opposed to revolution, which is something I still believe in. So that was my little statement, although I don't know how much people actually get into lyrics."

The track from Queen II which first attracted attention in Britain was 'Seven Seas Of Rhye', which had also been included, in a very short version, on the first album. Roy Thomas Baker, who produced both the first two Queen albums, had suggested that 'Seven Seas...' was no better than 'Keep Yourself Alive', but had become a hit because it was featured on Top Of The Pops, whereas the earlier single had been less fortunate.

"The first version was just a little trailer, because the song wasn't actually finished then – the shape of things which might come, although it was very plain on the first album, with no vocals or orchestration. As to the Top Of The Pops thing, there's probably a lot of truth in that. And on 'Seven Seas Of Rhye' – the whole world happens in the first twenty seconds, and you've almost heard the whole song in that time. Great big swooping things, then the vocal launches straight in...maybe that had something to do with it, and it was a good, catchy record, but we were hot at the time, and that obviously helped."

Shortly after embarking on the American tour on which Queen supported Mott the Hoople, Brian was struck down with a serious case of hepatitis. "I really felt bad at having let the group down at such an important place, but there was nothing I could do about it. It was hepatitis, which I think you get sometimes when you're emotionally run down. And almost immediately after that, we were due to start recording the next album, Sheer Heart Attack, and I couldn't do much at the start. I seemed to recover, but then got ill again, and eventually, I couldn't eat anything and I was being sick all the time, which was sheer misery. They discovered that I'd had this ulcer business for fifteen years on and off, which had been aggravated by the hepatitis. So then I was stuck in hospital for a few weeks, and they did some stuff to me which was like a miracle, and it was like new life afterwards, because I thought I was dead. Being ill like that may even have been a good thing at the time, although it was pretty hellish going through it –I felt glad to be alive, and I became able to hold things in perspective more and not get so wound up and worried about them to make myself ill.

"With Sheer Heart Attack, it was very weird, because I was able to see the group from the outside, and was pretty excited by what I saw. We'd done a few things before I was ill, but when I came back, they'd done a load more, including a couple of backing tracks of songs by Freddie which I hadn't heard, like 'Flick Of The Wrist', which excited me and gave me a lot of inspiration to get back in there and do what I wanted to do. I also managed to do some writing – 'Now I'm Here' was done in that period, and came out quite easily, whereas I'd been wrestling with it before without getting anywhere. That song's sort of about experiences on the American tour, which really blew me away in more senses than one! I was bowled over, partly by the success we were having and partly by the amazing aura which surrounds rock music in America, which is hard to describe."

Another notable song from Sheer Heart Attack written by Brian is 'Brighton Rock'. "I like to think that showed how my style was evolving, particularly with the solo bit in the middle, which I'd been doing on the Mott the Hoople tour and has gradually expanded ever since, although I keep trying to throw it out, but it keeps creeping back in. That involved using the repeat device in time with an original guitar phrase, which I don't think had been done before that time. It's a very nice device to work with, because you can build up harmonies or cross rhythms, but it's not a multiple repeat like Hendrix or even the Shadows used, which is fairly indiscriminate, although it makes a nice noise, but just a single repeat which comes back, or sometimes a second repeat as well, so you can plan or experiment to produce a fugue type effect."

Roy Thomas Baker, who produced Sheer Heart Attack, has said that the album was designed to be more easily assimilable than its predecessor. "Yes, that's probably true, although we weren't going for hits, because we always thought of ourselves as an album group, but we did think that perhaps we'd dished up a bit too much for people to swallow on Queen II."

After the album was released, Queen embarked on their first trip to Japan which was a major occurrence. "Oh yes, that was a big thing for us. Suddenly we were stars – we'd had some success in England and America, but we hadn't had adulation and been adored, and suddenly, in Japan, we were pop stars in the same way as the Beatles or the Bay City Rollers, with people screaming at us, which was a big novelty, and we loved it and had a great time. The only drawback was that we were a sort of teenybop attraction, but it was some years ago, and when we go back to Japan now, we're lucky enough to have made a smooth transition to having a pretty normal rock audience in Japan of older people of both sexes, rather than just the little girls screaming. But it was an inspirational experience, and I think it brought out the acting ability in us, and made us a bit more extrovert on stage."

In the same period May received an offer from another group, Sparks, who were interested in his leaving Queen and joining them. "They thought that because I was ill, Queen was breaking up, which wasn't really happening, although things were obviously a bit shaky at the time. I got on very well with Ron and Russell Mael, and I still see them occasionally, but despite the fact that I quite like their music, I didn't feel it would be quite right. I also felt a loyalty to Queen and thought that we'd get our strength back in the end."

How does Brian feel his playing has developed during his years with the band? "I don't think I've progressed that much technically in terms of pure playing, and I could play almost everything I can play now when I was about sixteen. I sometimes think that's a bad thing, but I see it in lots of other people as well, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. You fairly quickly reach a stage when you're practising very intensely and where you can express most of what you want to play, and after that, I think, you become better as an all-round musician and your taste improves, but I don't think your technical ability gets that much better and you reach a plateau."

It must be, and has been, difficult for Queen to tour due to the enormous amount of amplification and lighting equipment they use on stage. "Yes, even in the beginning when we couldn't afford a light show, we used projector lamps for lights, and we just got through somehow, getting someone to drive us, or borrowing a bigger van – it was scraping through all the way. It's still a big problem organising everything, but we're very lucky in having some great people working for us, notably Gerry Stickells, who was Hendrix's road manager throughout his career, and is an amazing person who I'd say was the best tour manager in the world, without any doubt. He's able to get it together in any circumstances and organise everything, even in South America, where you have no help because people don't understand what you're trying to do. We can go anywhere and know that when we walk on stage for the sound check, it'll all be working, which is a wonderful feeling of security. We also have other people working for us in different capacities, because we now manage ourselves and in the end everybody leaves the decision to us, but we have Jim Beach, who negotiates with record companies, agents, and merchandising people, and Paul Prenter, who runs our day to day operation. It's not a big operation – people tend to think of the vast Queen machine swinging into action, but we only have four or five people actually working for us, and we pick up the rest when we go on tour, although there are certain people who we rely on getting, like Trip Khalaf, who's our permanent sound mixer, and James Devenney, our permanent monitor mixer – that's so crucial, and I think one of the most difficult jobs in the world, because it's equally important to have a good sound on stage as to get it good out front, and if either one's lacking, you do a bad show."

Between Sheer Heart Attack and their next LP, A Night At The Opera, a basic change occurred in Queen's operations when they left Trident and started the organisation described above.

It was perhaps no coincidence that Queen's producer, Roy Thomas Baker, also left Trident during this period, and ironically followed Queen to their next manager, John Reid, who also manages Elton John. "We went round and talked in person to a few managers, and it was quite an exciting time really, although depressing in some ways, because we felt very locked in. We thought if we could find someone who it was our idea to approach, then at least they'd be able to help us get out of our other situation, and we saw a lot of managers, all of whom had something useful to say, but John Reid seemed to be the only one we could all agree about – we liked his approach and the style of his operation, so we gave it to him, and told him to do the negotiating and get us out, and we'd go away to make the album. He did take the burden off our shoulders at that time, which was crucial, and allowed us to make that all important album.

"We later bought ourselves out of John Reid as well, but it was more out of a feeling that nothing was happening any more – it wasn't so much a conflict as a feeling that we weren't getting any further in the relationship, and the creative management thing wasn't there as much as it had been at the start. We obviously owe some of our success to both Trident and to John – Trident got us making records and hits, for instance – but the whole John Reid time was a period when we made very big strides."

A Night At The Opera was an extremely successful LP, perhaps largely due to the inclusion of the track which has become Queen's "signature tune", the epic 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. "That was really Freddie's baby from the beginning – he came in and knew exactly what he wanted. The backing track was done with just piano, bass and drums, with a few spaces for other things to go in, like the tic-tic-tic on the hi-hat to keep the time, and Freddie sang a guide vocal at the time, but he had all his harmonies written out, and it was really just a question of doing it. He even knew pretty much what he wanted in the way of guitar, although there's always a bit of freedom to do what I want on the guitar side, and I could do the solo as I wanted really, but it was very much Freddie's thing which was mapped out. It took a week just to do the vocals, and that was efficient working as well – we already had our methods well worked out, where the three of us would sing a line, then double or maybe treble track it. There were nine parts to some of those vocal pieces."

Brian was responsible for writing no less than three standout tracks on the album, 'The Prophet's Song', 'Good Company' and '39'. "'The Prophet's Song' had been around for quite a long time, and I finished the lyrics off when we were making this album. I don't know exactly what inspired the words, because I don't pretend to have any supernatural vision of any kind – it was really just my feelings, and I had a dream about some of it, which I put into the song, but that's not my usual inspiration for songwriting. I'm not a very prolific writer, and I can never just sit down and write a song – there has to be something there, and usually, I get a couple of lines of lyrics and melody together, and then the rest of it's really working very hard, searching the soul, to see what should be in there, but then some of the stuff I've done without taking it too seriously, I've been more pleased with it in the end.

"With 'Good Company', I indulged a little fetish of mine – all the things that sound like other instruments, like trumpets and clarinets, were done with guitar. To get the effect of the instruments, I was doing one note at a time with the pedal and building them up, so you can imagine how long it took. We experimented with mikes and various tiny amplifiers to get just the right sound, and I made a study of the kind of things those instruments could play to try to get that authentic flavour. It was a bit of fun, but a semi-serious piece of work because so much time went into it. '39' was different again, kind of a folky thing, close to skiffle, which probably comes from my Lonnie Donegan days. There was such a wide variety on those albums – Fred doing a really quite slushy ballad, then a heavy rock thing, then something else – and we were willing to try everything because we always wanted to expand our range.

"Recently, we've become more selective, I think, and we try to make albums which don't go in so many directions at once – for example, The Game album was really pruned, and the others refused to include a couple of things I wanted on, because they said they were too far outside the theme of the album, and that we should be trying to make a slightly more coherent album. '39' is a science fiction story I made up, it's a story about someone who goes away and leaves his family, and because of the time-dilation effect, where the people on earth have aged a lot more than he has when he returns, he's aged a year and they've aged a hundred years, so instead of coming back to his wife, he comes back to his daughter, in whom he can see his wife. I think I also had in mind a story by Herman Hesse, which is called "The River", I think, where a man leaves his hometown and travels a lot, then comes back and observes it from the other side of a river, and sees it in a completely different light because of his experiences. I felt a little like that about my home at the time, having been away and seen this vastly different world of rock music, which was totally different from the way I was brought up. People may not generally admit it, but I think when most people write songs, there's more than one level to them – they'll be about one thing on the surface, but underneath, they're probably trying, maybe even unconsciously, to say something about their own life, their own experience – and in nearly all my stuff, there's a personal feeling."

The 1976 Queen album, A Day At The Races, continued the Marx Brothers title fetish, but in the opinions of many, was somewhat less impressive than A Night At The Opera. "I wish in some ways that we had put the two albums out together, because the material for both of them was more or less written at the same time, and it corresponds to an almost exactly similar period in our development, so I regard the two albums as completely parallel, and the fact that one came out after the other is a shame, because it was looked on as a follow-up, whereas really it was sort of an extension of the first one."

The period after the release of A Day At The Races saw Queen retreating into a kind of cloistered privacy from which they rarely departed, especially to speak to the media. "This was imposed on us in a way – we had never really got on with the press and had a lot of enemies there, but by that time, just about everyone in the press was against us, and quite blatantly so. So our silence wasn't through choice, it was really having no one to talk to who was going to write anything which would be of any use to us, so we thought it best not to bother, although reluctantly, particularly in my case, because I like talking to people and I think there's always something to gain from it. I know it happens to everybody else as well, and it's a normal consequence of success in England – a lot of people resent your success, and a lot of people also resented Fred's demeanour on stage, interpreting it as a sort of arrogance in his private life, which he doesn't have. He's a performer first, and off stage, he's pretty shy on the whole."

The mention of Mercury was appropriate at this point, as the 1977 Queen LP, News Of The World, saw Freddie less well-represented than usual as far as songwriting went, which led to some of the same press people to whom the group weren't talking to assume that a split of some kind in the group might be imminent. "There was nothing like that really, except that possibly Fred was then getting interested in other things, and a bit bored with being in the studio, because we did studios to death with the previous two albums, when we'd be in there for months on end, just working away, although we weren't particularly inefficient, it was just that there was a lot to be done. We all felt we'd done enough of that for the time being, and wanted to get back to basics and do something simpler, but Fred got to the point where he could hardly stand being in a studio, and he'd want to do his bit and get out."

Of the tracks on the record written by Brian, perhaps the most interesting is 'Sleeping On The Sidewalk', which evokes memories of the British R&B boom of the 1960s. "That was the quickest song I've ever written – I just wrote it down, and I'm quite pleased with it as well, because it's not highly subtle, but it leaves me with a good feeling. It was the sort of thing any guitarist who had played a bit of blues would do, and I could very well have had Eric Clapton in the back of my mind...It was a one take thing as well, although I messed about with the take a lot, chopped it around and rearranged it, but we basically used that first take, so it has a kind of sloppy feel, but that works with the song.

'It's Late', on the same LP, comes across as a typical Queen song. "There's not much I can say to that – I suppose that's as close to typical Queen as you can get, and there's a kind of style in there, which I've often thought about, which is somewhere between my kind of thing on 'It's Late', and one of Freddie's, something like 'We Are The Champions'. It's so easy for us to do, and we can slip into it almost without thinking, on stage and on record. Once Freddie starts playing E flat and A flat on the piano, which he very often does, it has a particular sound, and those are very strange keys for a guitarist to play in, so the songs being in those keys actually produces something different out of me, but as soon as that's happening, that formula's there, and we can do that sort of Queen sound all night and all day."

The release of News Of The World more or less coincided with the rise of punk rock in general, and the Sex Pistols in particular, leading to Queen's fall from popularity being freely predicted in the media.

"We didn't really feel threatened, because we saw that it was still the same people attracting large crowds, like Genesis, Zeppelin and the Who, and even us, and we knew that the man in the street was still aware that music could have different forms, and that it didn't have to be one thing at a time, which is what I don't like about England, if you like. Going back to punk, that era took a lot of backward steps, like the idea that it was bad to put on a show because that wasn't musically valid, but the end result was good, as a sort of clearing out system, and it was a good time for people to reassess themselves, but I do wish it hadn't eventually destroyed the Sex Pistols – I would have loved to be able to talk to them, although I'm sure they wouldn't have listened at the time, because we were something which punk was reacting against."

1978 saw the release of Jazz, perhaps Queen's most controversial LP, and one whose title was inspired by a spray painting on a wall seen by Roger Taylor. It marked a reunion with producer Roy Thomas Baker, with whom the group hadn't worked since A Night At The Opera, having produced the two intervening albums by themselves. What did Queen hope to gain from the reunion? "An easy life? No, I'm kidding – we thought it would be nice to try again with a producer on whom we could put some of the responsibility. We'd found a few of our own methods, and so had he, and on top of what we'd collectively learned before, we thought that coming back together would mean that there would be some new stuff going on, and it worked pretty well."

The controversial aspect of the album concerned two tracks, 'Fat Bottomed Girls' and 'Bicycle Race' – it was decided to combine the ramifications of these titles to produce a live action video, which showed three hundred naked young ladies riding bicycles around Wimbledon Stadium, something which many might consider beneath Queen's dignity... "It was just a bit of fun really – we thought the two songs went together, and the album was sort of European flavoured. We'd never recorded in Europe, and we absorbed some of the feeling, and talked about how to sell the album, eventually opting for something which was really crass and blatantly commercial. That's what we did, and I can't make any apology for it, but it was fun at the time. Now I'm pretty indifferent to it – I don't think it made much difference either way, to be honest. It alienated a few people, won over a few others, but on the whole, it was a pretty small thing."

The 1979 Queen LP was a double live album, Queen Live Killers. "Live albums are inescapable, really – everyone tells you you have to do them, and when you do, you find that they're very often not of mass appeal, and in the absence of a fluke condition, you sell your live album to the converted, the people who already know your stuff and come to the concerts. So if you add up the number of people who've seen you over the last few years, that's very roughly the number who'll buy your live album, unless you have a hit single on it, which we didn't – maybe we chose the wrong one, which was 'Love Of My Life' in England and America."

One interesting track which highlighted Brian's guitar was 'Get Down, Make Love', on which there appear some peculiar effects. "That's a harmoniser thing which I've used really as a noise more than a musical thing. It's controllable because I had a special little pedal made for it, which means I can change the interval at which the harmoniser comes back, and it's fed back on itself so it makes all these swooping noises, and it's just an exercise in using that, together with noises from Freddie – a sort of erotic interlude."

1979 also saw Queen active, appropriately enough, in live situations, which were however abnormal, first when they played smaller venues, and at the end of the year, when they assisted a number of other star names in a week of concerts whose proceeds were designed to provide relief to the people of Kampuchea.

1980 saw a departure as far as Queen's records are concerned in the shape of The Game. "We approached that from a different angle, with the idea of ruthlessly pruning it down to a coherent album rather than letting our flights of fancy lead us off into different ideas. The impetus came very largely from Freddie, who said that he thought we'd been diversifying so much that people didn't know what we were about any more, so if there's a theme to the album, it's rhythm and sparseness – never two notes played if one would do, which is a hard discipline for us, because we tend to be quite over the top in the way we work. So the whole thing has a very economical feel to it, particularly 'Another One Bites The Dust', 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love', 'Dragon Attack', 'Suicide' – a very sparse feel to all of them, and for us, a very modern sounding album."

One new element in the recipe was an engineer/co-producer simply known as Mack. "He had a great deal to do with the way the album sounds. His name's Reinholdt Mack, and he's the greatest of the unknown engineers, although he's now becoming known and quite rightly so. He's done a lot of work for ELO, and worked with all sorts of people like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, but he's been stuck there in Munich, and nobody seems to have given him a thought that much – the typeface used for his name was always rather small – so we thought that having found him, we should make a big thing of him because he's really quite a phenomenon.

One important aspect of The Game to longtime Queen aficionados was that finally the group used synthesisers. "Actually, they overflow from the Flash Gordon album, because we were working on that at the same time. Roger's really the guy who introduced us to synths, because he had this OBX which he was playing around with, which obviously produced some good sounds, and synths had advanced an awful long way since those early days. You can now get polyphonic synths with a device for bending the notes which is much closer to the feel of a guitar than ever before, so now we use the synth, but sparingly, I think, particularly on The Game – there's very little there, and what there is merely complements what we'd used already, so there's no danger of the synth taking over, which I would never allow to happen, although I'm much happier using them than I used to be. I get a good feeling from playing the guitar which you don't get with anything else – a feeling of power, and a type of expression."

The Game was a remarkably successful LP, spawning no less than four top 20 singles in Britain, two of which Brian talked about in greater depth. "'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' was very untypical playing for me, and Mack actually persuaded me to use a Telecaster, which I'd never used on record before, and a Boogie amplifier, which I'd never have considered using. It's a very sparse record, and it was done with Elvis Presley in mind, obviously – I thought that Freddie sounded a bit like Elvis, but somebody's done a cover of it who sounds absolutely like Elvis, and the whole record sounds like a Jordanaires/Elvis recreation...A lot of people have used 'Another One Bites The Dust' as a theme song – the Detroit Lions used it for their games, and they soon began to lose, so they bit the dust soon afterwards, but it was a help to the record – and there's been a few cover versions of various kinds, notably 'Another One Rides The Bus', which is an extremely funny record by a bloke called Mad Al or something, in the States, and you should hear it, because it's hilarious. We like people covering our songs in any way, no matter what spirit it's done in, because it's great to have anyone use your music as a base, a big compliment."

Flash Gordon has already been mentioned, and was in fact an album of soundtrack music to the 1980 science fiction film of that name, with the music performed and written by Queen. "It was in our minds that we would be up for writing a soundtrack if the right one came along. We'd been offered a few, but most of them were where the film is written around music, and that's been done to death – it's the cliché of "movie star appears in movie about movie stars" – but this one was different, in that it was a proper film and had a real story which wasn't based around music, and we would be writing a film score in the way anyone else writes a film score, which is basically background music, but can obviously help the film if it's strong enough. That was the attraction, because we thought that a rock group hadn't done that kind of thing before, and it was an opportunity to write real film music. So we were writing to a discipline for the first time ever, and the only criterion for success was whether or not it worked with and helped the film, and we weren't our own bosses for a change, which was quite interesting."

The album contained a track which became a hit single, 'Flash', but rather more intriguing was 'The Wedding March', which seemed to be in the vein of Jimi Hendrix playing 'Star Spangled Banner' at Woodstock. "Things like that go back a long way with us – we did 'God Save The Queen', the beginning part of 'Tie Your Mother Down', and there's 'Procession' on the first album – those little guitar pieces. I'd heard Hendrix's thing, but his approach was very different, because he put down a line and then improvised another one around it, and the whole thing works on the basis of things going in and out of harmony more or less by accident – it's very much a free form multi-tracking thing, whereas my stuff is totally arranged and planned, and I treat it like you'd give a score to an orchestra. It lacks the improvisation part, but it's a complete orchestration, so it's a different kind of approach."

The major new Queen-related item in 1981, a year which also saw a Greatest Hits LP, a Queen video and a book of photographs about the group, was a single titled 'Under Pressure', a collaboration between Queen and David Bowie, which not surprisingly, topped the UK singles chart. "He lives near the studio we bought, in a little town close to Montreux, and when we were there, he'd often come over to see us, to chat and have a drink. Someone suggested that we should all go into the studio and play around one night, to see what came out, which we did, playing each other's old songs and just fiddling around. The next night, we listened to the tapes, because we'd left the tape recorder running, and picked out a couple of pieces which seemed to be promising, and then we just worked on one particular idea, which became 'Under Pressure', for a whole night...an extremely long night."

Otherwise, the album which eventually contained 'Under Pressure' – Hot Space – reflected a different method of creating songs from that which Queen had previously used, although there were some similarities in the evolution of The Game. "We were thinking about rhythm before anything else, so in some cases, like 'Dancer', the backing track was there a long time before the actual song was properly pieced together. We would experiment with the rhythm and the bass and drum track and get that sounding right, and then very cautiously piece the rest around it, which was an experimental way for us to do it. In one track called 'Backchat', there wasn't going to be a guitar solo, because John Deacon, who wrote the song, has gone perhaps more violently black than the rest of us. We had lots of arguments about it, and what he was heading for in his tracks was a totally non-compromise situation, doing black stuff as R&B artists would do it with no concessions to our methods at all, and I was trying to edge him back towards the central path and get a bit of heaviness into it, and a bit of the anger of rock music. So one night I said I wanted to see what I could add to it, because I was inspired by the backing track, which is very rhythmic and aggressive, but I felt that the song as it stood wasn't aggressive enough – it's 'Backchat', and it's supposed to be about people arguing and it should have some kind of guts to it. He agreed, and I went in and tried a few things."

Hot Space saw a further increase in the use of synthesisers. "There's two there, really, an OBX, which fell into disuse a bit on this album, and a Jupiter 8, which we thought was more versatile in certain ways, and provided a lot of new stuff. But it's just a tool with which we're experimenting, and it hasn't really replaced anything except on a temporary basis."

Brian May is one of the most genuinely rewarding people one could ever hope to meet. His contributions to the work of Queen may not have been more crucial than those of the other members of the group, but there can be little doubt that his temperament has been a vital factor in the quite remarkable consistency of both quality and success which has elevated Queen to the top of their industry and kept them there for longer than most, with little sign of deterioration. What does he consider the secret of Queen's success?

"I think change is part of it, but constancy of members is the biggest thing – it helps because we know how to work with each other, and also people identify with the four of us as a group, and know what we look like and who we are. It's also important not to have constancy of material – there should be some style to it, and maybe there should be some trademarks which crop up, but you should keep exploring new avenues, or else you die of boredom." And how long can Queen continue?

"I don't know... it doesn't seem to be getting any harder, although it's always hard." And can we expect a Brian May solo album? "I don't really have the time, and I don't think the time's really right for me yet. I have a lot of ideas stored away in boxes, but I don't really want to do it at the moment, because there's enough to do with Queen and my private life." So be it...

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☐  AKILAN – Vengayin maindan ☐  ALENCAR, José de – Iracema ☐  ALENCAR, José de – O Guarani ☐  ALLENDE, Isabel – La Isla Bajo el Mar ☐  ANDRIĆ, Ivo – The Bridge on the Drina ☐  ATWOOD, Margaret – Alias Grace ☐  ATWOOD, Margaret – The Blind Assassin ☐  BARICCO, Alessandro – Seta ☐  BOYDEN, Joseph – Three Day Road ☐  BOYDEN, Joseph – The Orenda ☐  BUCK, Pearl S. – East Wind: West Wind ☐  BUCK, Pearl S. – The House of Earth Trilogy ☐  BUCK, Pearl S. – China Trilogy ☐  BUCK, Pearl S. – Dragon Seed & The Promise ☐  BUCK, Pearl S. – Pavilion of Women ☐  BUCK, Pearl S. – Peony ☐  BULGAKOV, Mikhail – The White Guard ☐  BURTON, Jessie – The Minaturist ☐  BUTT, Razia – Bano ☐  CAREY, Peter – Jack Maggs ☐  CAREY, Peter – Oscar and Lucinda ☐  CAREY, Peter – True History of the Kelly Gang ☐  CARPENTIER, Alejo – El reino de este mundo ☐  CATHER, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop ☐  CATTON, Eleanor – The Luminaries ☐  CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, Miguel de – El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha ☐  CHATTOPADHYAY, Bankim Chandra – Durgeshnandini ☐  CHATTOPADHYAY, Bankim Chandra – Anandamath ☐  CHEVALIER, Tracy – Girl with a Pearl Earring ☐  CHOY, Wayson – The Jade Peony ☐  CHOY, Wayson – All That Matters ☐  CLAUS, Hugo – Het verdriet van België ☐  CLAVELL, James – The Asian Saga ☐  COETZEE, J. M. – Waiting for the Barbarians ☐  CONIGLIO, Angelo F. – La Ruotaia ☐  CONRAD, Joseph – The Rover ☐  COOPER, James Fenimore – Leatherstocking Tales Pentology ☐  COSTER, Charles De – La Légende...d'Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak... ☐  CRANE, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage ☐  DAVIS, Lindsey – Falco series ☐  DeLILLO, Don – Libra ☐  de MADARIAGA, Salvador – El corazón de piedra verde ☐  DICKENS, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities ☐  DOCTOROW, E. L. – Ragtime ☐  DONALD, Angus – Outlaw Chronicles ☐  DRUON, Maurice – Les Rois maudits ☐  DUMAS, Alexandre (père) – The DÁrtagnan Romances ☐  DUMAS, Alexandre (père) – Le Comte de Monte-Cristo ☐  DUMAS, Alexandre (père) – La Tulipe Noire ☐  ECO, Umberto – Il nome della rosa ☐  ECO, Umberto – I'isola del giorno prima ☐  ECO, Umberto – Baudolino ☐  ECO, Umberto – La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana ☐  ECO, Umberto – Il cimitero di Praga ☐  ELIOT, George – Romola ☐  ELIOT, George – Middlemarch ☐  ENDŌ, Shūsaku – Chinmoku ☐  FARRELL, J. G. – The Siege of Krishnapur ☐  FARRELL, J. G. – Troubles ☐  FAST, Howard – Spartacus ☐  FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant's Woman ☐  FRASER, George MacDonald – Flashman ☐  GEDGE, Pauline – Scroll of Saqqara ☐  GHOSH, Amitav – Ibis Trilogy ☐  GOLON, Anne – Angélique series ☐  GRAVES, Robert – I, Claudius ☐  GRENVILLE, Kate – The Secret River ☐  HAGGARD, Sir H. Rider – King Solomon's Mines ☐  HARRIS, Robert – An Officer and a Spy ☐  HELLER, Joseph – Catch-22 ☐  HIJĀZĪ, Nasīm – Khaak aur Khoon ☐  HILL, Lawrence – The Book of Negroes ☐  HOLLAND, Cecelia – City of God ☐  HOLLAND, Cecelia – The Lords of Vaumartin ☐  HUGO, Victor – Quatrevingt-treize ☐  HUGO, Victor – Les Misérables ☐  HYDER, Qurratulain – Aag Ka Darya ☐  IBÁÑEZ, Vicente Blasco – Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis ☐  IRVING, Washington – Tales of the Alhambra ☐  JENNINGS, Gary – Aztec ☐  JENNINGS, Gary – Aztec Autumn ☐  JENNINGS, Gary – Raptor ☐  JIN YONG – all works ☐  JOAQUIN, Nick – The Woman Who Had Two Navels ☐  JOHNSTON, Wayne – The Colony of Unrequited Dreams ☐  JOSÉ, Francisco Sionil – Po-on ☐  JUAN MANUEL, Don – Libro do los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio ☐  KADARE, Ismail – Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur ☐  KANEKAR, Amita – A Spoke in the Wheel ☐  KAYE, M. M. – The Far Pavilions ☐  KENEALLY, Thomas – Bring Larks and Heroes ☐  KENNEDY, William – Albany Cycle ☐  KIDD, Sue Monk – The Secret Life of Bees ☐  KINGSLEY, Charles – Westward Ho! ☐  KRISHNAMURTHY, Kalki – Parthiban Kanavu ☐  KRISHNAMURTHY, Kalki – Sivagamiyin Sabatham ☐  KRISHNAMURTHY, Kalki – Ponniyin Selvan ☐  LEONARDOS, George – Palaiologan Dynasty series ☐  LITTELL, Jonathan – Les Bienveillantes ☐  LISS, David – The Coffee Trader ☐  LOWRY, Lois – Number the Stars ☐  MALRAUX, Georges André – Les Conquérants ☐  MALRAUX, Georges André – La Voie Royale ☐  MALRAUX, Georges André – La condition humaine ☐  MANTEL, Hilary – A Place of Greater Safety ☐  MANZONI, Alessandro – I promessi sposi ☐  MARTINEZ, Tomás Eloy – Santa Evita ☐  MASTOOR, Khadija – Aangan ☐  McCORMMACH, RUSSELL – Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist ☐  McCARTHY, Cormac – Blood Meridian ☐  MEHTA, Nandshankar – Karan Ghelo ☐  MICHENER, James A. – all works ☐  MIKSZÁTH, Kálmán – A fekete város ☐  MIN, Anchee – Wild Ginger ☐  MITCHELL, David – The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet ☐  MITCHELL, Margaret – Gone with the Wind ☐  MORANTE, Elsa – La Storia ☐  MORRISON, Toni – Beloved ☐  MORRISON, Toni – Jazz ☐  MULTATULI – Max Havelaar ☐  NEWTON, Nerida – The Lambing Flat ☐  NINH, Bảo – Nỗi buồn chiến tranh ☐  OKSANEN, Sofi – Puhdistus ☐  ONDAATJE, Michael – In the Skin of a Lion ☐  PATTERSON, James & GROSS, Andrew – The Jester ☐  PENNER, Sarah – The Lost Apothecary ☐  PÉREZ-REVERTE, Arturo – Captain Alatriste novels ☐  PÉREZ-REVERTE, Arturo – Falcó novels ☐  PÉREZ-REVERTE, Arturo – El maestro de esgrima ☐  PÉREZ-REVERTE, Arturo – La Reina del Sur ☐  PÉREZ-REVERTE, Arturo – El pintor de batallas ☐  PHILLIPS, Arthur – Prague ☐  PHILLIPS, Arthur – The King at the Edge of the World ☐  PILLAI, C. V. Raman – novel trilogy ☐  POPE, Barbara Corrado – Cézanne's Quarry ☐  POPE, Barbara Corrado – The Blood of Lorraine ☐  POPE, Barbara Corrado – The Missing Italian Girl ☐  PRAMOEDYA, Ananta Toer – Buru Quartet ☐  PRESSFIELD, Steven – Gates of Fire ☐  PRESSFIELD, Steven – Tides of War ☐  PRESSFIELD, Steven – The Afghan Campaign ☐  PRUS, Bolesław – Faraon ☐  PUZO, Mario – The Godfather universe ☐  PUZO, Mario – The Family ☐  PYNCHON, Thomas – Gravity's Rainbow ☐  PYNCHON, Thomas – Mason & Dixon ☐  READE, Charles – The Cloister and the Hearth ☐  RENAULT, Mary – The Last of the Wine ☐  RENAULT, Mary – The Mask of Apollo ☐  RENAULT, Mary – The King Must Die ☐  RICHARDS, D. Manning – Destiny in Sydney ☐  RIZAL, José – Noli Me Tángere ☐  RIZAL, José – El filibusterismo ☐  RUSHDIE, Salman – Midnight's Children ☐  RUTHERFURD, Edward – Russka ☐  SABATO, Ernesto – Sobre héroes y tumbas ☐  SANGHI, Ashwin – Chanakya's Chant ☐  SANKRITYAYAN, Rahul – Volga Se Ganga ☐  SARAMAGO, José – Memorial do Convento ☐  SATYANARAYANA, Viswanatha – Veyi Padagalu ☐  SCOTT, Sir Walter – Quentin Durward ☐  SCOTT, Sir Walter – Tales of the Crusaders ☐  SCOTT, Sir Walter – Ivanhoe ☐  SHAN, Sa – Porte de la paix céleste ☐  SHAN, Sa – La Joueuse de go ☐  SHAN, Sa – La cithare nue ☐  SIENKIEWICZ, Henryk – The Trilogy ☐  SMILEY, Jane – The Greenlanders ☐  SOMOZA, José Carlos – La caverna de las ideas ☐  STEPHENSON, Neal – Cryptonomicon ☐  STIFTER, Adalbert – Witiko ☐  STYRON, William – Sophie's Choice ☐  TOLSTOY, Leo – War and Peace ☐  TOMASI, Giuseppe (di Lampedusa) – Il Gattopardo ☐  TREMAYNE, Peter – Sister Fidelma mysteries ☐  UNDSET, Sigrid – Kristin Lavransdatter ☐  UNDSET, Sigrid – Olav Audunssøn novels ☐  VARGAS LLOSA, Mario – La guerra del fin del mundo ☐  VARGAS LLOSA, Mario – La Fiesta del Chivo ☐  VIDAL, Gore – Narratives of Empire ☐  WALLACE, Lew – Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ ☐  WALTARI, Mika – Sinuhe egyptiläinen ☐  WALTARI, Mika – Mikael Karvajalka ☐  WILDER, Thornton – The Bridge of San Luis Rey ☐  WOOLF, Virginia – Orlando: A Biography ☐  YERBY, Frank – Goat Song ☐  YOURCENAR, Marguerite – L'Œuvre au noir ☐  ŻEROMSKI, Stefan – Wierna rzeka ☐  ZIMLER, Richard – The Warsaw Anagrams ☐  ZIMLER, Richard – The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon ☐  ZUSAK, Markus – The Book Thief

[tinyshe]

WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - “I started this list as the 100 Best Pieces of Sacred Music, but I decided instead to recommend specific recordings. Why? No matter how fine the music, say Bach's Mass in B minor, a poor performance will leave the listener wondering where the "greatness" went.  So the recommendations below represent a merging of both: All of the compositions are among the very best sacred music ever written, but the recorded performances succeed in communicating their extraordinary beauty.  

“I also dithered over whether or not to make a list of "liturgical" music, or "mass settings," or "requiems." Each of these would make interesting lists, but I chose the broader "sacred music" with the hope that this list might be of interest to a wider spectrum of people. Composers are not limited to any denomination -- some are known to have been non-believers -- although the music belongs to the Christian tradition.  

“I've also decided to limit my choices to recordings that are presently available on CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, or digital downloads.  I don't expect those who are curious about a particular title to start hunting down LPs, especially since these vinyl recordings are suddenly in great demand and prices are rising.  

“This list is alphabetized, rather than listed in chronological order. This was necessary, since recordings will often include several pieces composed years apart, perhaps much more. Thus, to reiterate, there has been no attempt to arrange them in order of preference -- all 100 are among "the best" recordings of sacred music currently available. The recording label is indicated in parentheses.

What I would call 'Indispensable Sacred Music Recordings' are marked with an ***.

1.Allegri, Miserere, cond., Peter Phillips (Gimell).*** 2.Bach Mass in B Minor, cond., Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1968 recording;Teldec).*** 3.Bach, St. Matthew Passion, cond., Philippe Herreweghe (Harmonia Mundi).*** 4.Bach, Cantatas, cond., Geraint Jones and Wolfgang Gonnenwein (EMI Classics). 5.Barber, Agnus Dei, The Esoterics (Naxos). 6.Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, cond., Otto Klemperer (EMI/Angel). 7.Bernstein, Mass, cond., Leonard Bernstein (Columbia). 8.Berlioz, Requiem, cond. Colin Davis (Phillips). 9.Brahms,  Requiem, cond., Otto Klemperer (EMI/Angel).*** 10.Briggs, Mass for Notre Dame, cond., Stephen Layton (Hyperion). 11.Britten, War Requiem, cond., Benjamin Britten (Decca). 12.Brubeck, To Hope! A Celebration, cond. Russell Gloyd (Telarc). 13.Bruckner, Motets, Choir of St. Mary's Cathedral (Delphian).*** 14.Byrd, Three Masses, cond., Peter Phillips (Gimell). 15.Burgon, Nunc Dimittis, cond., Richard Hickox (EMI Classics). 16.Celtic Christmas from Brittany, Ensemble Choral Du Bout Du Monde (Green Linnet) 17.Chant, Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos (Milan/Jade). 18.Charpentier, Te Deum in D, cond., Philip Ledger (EMI Classics). 19.Christmas, The Holly and the Ivy, cond., John Rutter (Decca). 20.Christmas, Christmas with Robert Shaw, cond., Robert Shaw (Vox). 21.Christmas, Cantate Domino, cond., Torsten Nilsson (Proprius).*** 22.Christmas, Follow That Star, The Gents (Channel Classics). 23.Christmas, The Glorious Sound of Christmas, cond., Eugene Ormandy (Sony). 24.Christmas: Moravian Christmas, Czech Philharmonic Choir (ArcoDiva) 25.Desprez, Ave Maris Stella Mass, cond., Andrew Parrott (EMI Reflexe). 26.Dufay, Missa L'homme arme, cond., Paul Hillier (EMI Reflexe). 27.Duruflle, Requiem & Motets, cond. Matthew Best (Hyperion) 28.Dvorak, Requiem, cond. Istvan Kertesz (Decca). 29.Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, cond. John Barbirolli (EMI Classics).*** 30.Elgar, The Apostles, cond. Adrian Boult (EMI Classics). 31.Elgar, The Kingdom, cond., Mark Elder (Halle). 32.Eton Choirbook, The Flower of All Virginity, cond., Harry Christophers (Coro). 33.Faure, Requiem, cond., Robert Shaw (Telarc). 34.Finnish Sacred Songs, Soile Isokoski (Ondine). 35.Finzi, In Terra Pax, cond. Vernon Handley (Lyrita). 36.Gabrieli, The Glory of Gabrieli, E. Power Biggs, organ (Sony). 37.Gesualdo, Sacred Music for Easter, cond., Bo Holten (BBC). 38.Gonoud, St. Cecilia Mass, cond. George Pretre (EMI Classics). 39.Gorecki, Beatus Vir & Totus Tuus, cond. John Nelson (Polygram). 40.Gospel Quartet, Hovie Lister and the Statesman (Chordant) 41.Guerrero, Missa Sancta et immaculata, cond., James O'Donnell (Hyperion) 42.Handel, Messiah, cond., by Nicholas McGegan (Harmonia Mundi)*** 43.Haydn, Creation, cond., Neville Marriner (Phillips). 44.Haydn, Mass in Time of War, cond., Neville Marriner (EMI Classics). 45.Hildegard of Bingen, Feather on the Breath of God, Gothic Voices (Hyperion). 46.Howells, Hymnus Paradisi, cond., David Willocks (EMI Classics).*** 47.Hymns, Amazing Grace: American Hymns and Spirituals, cond. Robert Shaw (Telarc).*** 48.Lauridsen, Lux Aeterna & O Magnum Mysterium, cond. Stephen Layton (Hyperion).*** 49.Lassus, Penitential Psalms, cond. Josef Veselka (Supraphon). 50.Leighton, Sacred Choral Music, cond., Christopher Robinson (Naxos). 51.Liszt, Christus, cond., Helmut Rilling (Hannsler). 52.Liszt, The Legend of St. Elisabeth, cond., Arpad Joo (Hungaroton). 53.Lobo, Requiem for Six Voices, cond., Peter Phillips (Gimell). 54.Martin, Requiem, cond. James O'Donnell (Hyperion). 55.Machaut, La Messe de Nostre Dame, cond., Jeremy Summerly (Naxos). 56.Mahler, 8th Symphony, cond., George Solti (Decca). 57.Mendelssohn, Elijah, cond. Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (EMI 58.Monteverdi, 1610 Vespers, cond., Paul McCreesh (Archiv). 59.Morales, Magnificat, cond., Stephen Rice (Hyperion). 60.Mozart, Requiem, cond. Christopher Hogwood (L'Oiseau-Lyre). 61.Mozart, Mass in C Minor, cond. John Eliot Gardiner (Phillips). 62.Nystedt, Sacred Choral Music, cond., Kari Hankin (ASV). 63.Organum, Music of the Gothic Era, cond., David Munrow (Polygram). 64.Palestrina, Canticum Canticorum, Les Voix Baroques (ATMA). 65.Palestrina, Missa Papae Marcelli, cond. Peter Phillips (Gimell). 66.Part, Passio (St. John Passion), cond., Paul Hillier (ECM New Series). 67.Parsons, Ave Maria and other Sacred Music, cond., Andrew Carwood (Hyperion). 68.Pizzetti, Requiem, cond., James O'Donnell (Hyperion). 69.Poulenc, Gloria & Stabat Mater, cond., George Pretre (EMI Classics). 70.Poulenc. Mass in G Major; Motets, cond., Robert Shaw (Telarc). 71.Puccini, Messa di Gloria, cond., Antonio Pappano (EMI Classics). 72.Purcell, Complete Anthems and Services, fond., Robert King (Hyperion). 73.Rachmaninov, Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, cond., Charles Bruffy (Nimbus). 74.Rachmaninov, Vespers, cond., Robert Shaw (Telarc). 75.Respighi, Lauda Per La Nativita Del Signore, cond., Anders Eby Proprius). 76.Rheinberger, Sacred Choral Music, cond., Charles Bruffy (Chandos). 77.Rossini, Stabat Mater, cond., Antonio Pappano (EMI). 78.Rubbra, The Sacred Muse, Gloriae Dei Cantores (Gloriae Dei Cantores). 79.Rutter, Be Thou My Vision: Sacred Music, cond., John Rutter (Collegium).*** 80.Russian Divine Liturgy, Novospassky Monastery Choir (Naxos). 81.Rutti, Requiem, cond., David Hill (Naxos). 82.Saint Saens, Oratorio de Noel, cond., Anders Eby (Proprius). 83.Schubert, 3 Masses, cond., Wolfgang Sawallisch (EMI Classics). 84.Schutz, Musicalische Exequien, cond., Lionel Meunier (Ricercar). 85.Spirituals, Marian Anderson (RCA).*** 86.Spirituals, Jesse Norman (Phillips) 87.Telemann, Der Tag des Gerichts, cond., Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Teldec). 88.Thompson, Mass of the Holy Spirit, cond., James Burton (Hyperion). 89.Shapenote Carols, Tudor Choir (Loft Recordings) 90.Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms, cond., Robert Shaw (Telarc). 91.Tallis, Spem in alium & Lamentations of Jeremiah, cond., David Hill (Hyperion).*** 92.Tschiakovsky, Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, cond, Valery Polansky (Moscow Studio). 93.Taneyev, At the Reading of a Psalm, cond., Mikhail Pletnev (Pentatone). 94.Vaughn Williams, Five Mystical Songs, cond., David Willcocks (EMI Classics).*** 95.Vaughn Williams, Mass in G, cond. David Willcocks (EMI Classics). 96.Vaughn Williams, Pilgrims Progress, cond., Adrian Boult (EMI Classics).*** 97.Verdi, Requiem, cond., Carlo Maria Guilini (EMI Classics).*** 98.Victoria, O Magnum Mysterium & Mass, cond., David Hill (Hyperion).*** 99.Victoria, Tenebrae Responsories, cond., David Hill (Hyperion). 100.Vivaldi, Sacred Music, cond., Robert King (Hyperion).   “ -----

Deal W. Hudson is president of the Pennsylvania Catholics Network and former publisher/editor of Crisis Magazine. Dr. Hudson also a partner in the film/TV production company, Good Country Pictures.

[aliveandfullofjoy]

2019 Tony Awards Trivia

This is the stat that I’ve seen get the most attention, and it’s a really cool one: Jeremy Pope, who’s nominated in Leading Actor in a Play for Choir Boy and Featured Actor in a Musical for Ain’t Too Proud, is the sixth actor in Tonys history to be nominated in two different categories in the same year. Pope is only the second to be nominated for both a play and a musical in the same year, the first actor of color to achieve this distinction, as well as the first member of the LGBTQ+ community. The others are: Amanda Plummer (Leading Actress in a Play nominee for A Taste of Honey and Featured Actress in a Play winner for Agnes of God in 1982), Dana Ivey (Featured Actress in a Musical nominee for Sunday in the Park with George and Featured Actress in a Play nominee for Heartbreak House in 1984), Kate Burton (Leading Actress in a Play nominee for Hedda Gabler and Featured Actress in a Play nominee for The Elephant Man in 2002), Jan Maxwell (Leading Actress in a Play nominee for The Royal Family and Featured Actress in a Play nominee for Lend Me a Tenor in 2010), and Mark Rylance (Leading Actor in a Play nominee for Richard III and Featured Actor in a Play winner for Twelfth Night in 2014).

A few notable firsts: Ali Stroker (Oklahoma!) is the first actor who uses a wheelchair to be nominated for a Tony. Paddy Considine (The Ferryman) is the first actor with autism to be nominated for a Tony. 

Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me) is the third person in Tonys history to be nominated for Best Play and Best Actress for the same show in the same year. She joins Anna Deavere Smith (Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992) and Claudia Shear (Dirty Blonde). 

Oklahoma! is one of the landmark American musicals and, as of yesterday’s nominations, has received a total of seventeen competitive nominations and a special award in 1993. The only competitive award the show has ever won is for Featured Actor in a Musical in 2002 for Shuler Hensley. 

Director Rachel Chavkin only has two Broadway credits to her name, but both shows led the nomination count in their respective Tonys ceremonies: Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 received twelve (eventually winning two), while Hadestown scored fourteen nominations. 

Anaïs Mitchell (Hadestown) is the 41st woman nominated in the Best Score category. If she won, she would be the seventh woman to win (joining Betty Comden, Lynn Ahrens, Lisa Lambert, Cyndi Lauper, Jeanine Tesori, and Lisa Kron), and she would be only the second woman to win the award as a solo composer, following Lauper in 2013.

Dominique Morisseau (Ain’t Too Proud) is the first black woman nominated for Best Book since Lita Gaithers in 1999, who was nominated for It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues. 

If either Kiss Me, Kate or All My Sons wins their respective Best Revival category, they would join The King and I, La Cage aux Folles, Death of a Salesman, and A View from the Bridge as the only shows to win Best Revival twice. 

Some of the roles nominated this year have previously been nominated for or won Oscars. These roles include Scout Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird), Michael Dorsey (Tootsie), and Sandy Lester (Tootsie), while the roles Howard Beale (Network), Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird), and Julie Nichols (Tootsie) have all won Oscars. 

A few actors are back with a returning Tony nomination after a lengthy gap: Annette Bening (All My Sons) received her second nomination, her first coming in 1987 for Coastal Disturbances; Fionnula Flanagan (The Ferryman) also received her second nomination, with her first coming from further back in 1974 for Ulysses in Nighttown. Mary Testa and André De Shields both received their third nominations (she for Oklahoma!, he for Hadestown), the first for each of them since their last nomination in 2001 (she for 42nd Street, he for The Full Monty). 

Some roles that received nominations this year that have previously been nominated or won: Chris Keller in All My Sons (Benjamin Walker in 2019, Jamey Sheridan in 1987), Larry in Burn This (Brandon Uranowitz in 2019, Lou Liberatore in 1988), Lilli Vanessi in Kiss Me, Kate (Kelli O’Hara in 2019, Marin Mazzie in 2000), Curly in Oklahoma! (Damon Daunno in 2019, Patrick Wilson in 2002), and Aunt Eller in Oklahoma! (Andrea Martin in 2002, Mary Testa in 2019).

Ain’t Too Proud is the first jukebox bio-musical nominated for Best Musical since Beautiful in 2014, and the sixth ever nominated, joining The Boy from Oz (2004), Jersey Boys (2006), Fela! (2010), Million Dollar Quartet (2010), and Beautiful (2014).

With his double nominations for Tootsie and Beetlejuice, William Ivey Long remains the most nominated costume designer in Tonys history, with 17 total. This is also his second year with two nominations, having also been nominated for both La Cage aux Folles and A Streetcar Named Desire in 2005. 

This is the first time ever that there are six nominees in the Best Score category. To Kill a Mockingbird is the eighth non-musical play to be nominated in this category, joining Much Ado About Nothing (1973), The Song of Jacob Zulu (1993), Twelfth Night (1999), ENRON (2010), Fences (2010), Peter and the Starcatcher (2012), One Man, Two Guvnors (2012), and Angels in America (2018). This is the first time a non-musical play has been nominated in this category in consecutive years.

Kelli O’Hara received her seventh Tony nomination for Kiss Me, Kate, her sixth in the Leading Actress in a Musical category, tying her with Sutton Foster and Bernadette Peters. Chita Rivera still reigns supreme in that category, with eight nominations.

The Prom is the 14th musical to get multiple Leading Actress nominations. The others: New Girl in Town (1958), Company (1971), Follies (1972), Chicago (1976), Annie (1977), Dreamgirls (1982), The Rink (1984), Black and Blue (1989), Guys and Dolls (1992), Side Show (1998), Urinetown (2002), Wicked (2004), and War Paint (2017). 

If Tootsie wins Best Musical, David Yazbek will be the fourth person to work as composer on back-to-back Best Musical winners, joining Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees) and Cy Coleman (City of Angels and The Will Rogers Follies). 

With both Ain’t Too Proud and Hadestown, This is the fifth time that two shows received at least two nominations in Featured Actor in a Musical. The others are Fiorello! and The Sound of Music (1960), The Producers and The Full Monty (2001), Hairspray and Movin’ Out (2003), and Something Rotten! and An American in Paris (2015).

Scott Ellis (Tootsie) has broken his tie with James Lapine to become the director with most nominations for Direction of a Musical without a win.

With his nomination for Kiss Me, Kate, orchestrator Larry Hochman is a nine-time Tony nominee and is now second behind Jonathan Tunick as the most nominated orchestrator of all-time.

Peter Nigrini is the first person in Tonys history nominated for both Scenic Design of a Musical and Lighting Design of a Musical in the same year. He’s nominated for Ain’t Too Proud’s set with Robert Brill and for Beetlejuice’s lights with Kenneth Posner.

Some stats on how many times the ten nominated directors have been nominated before: this is the tenth directing nomination for Gary’s George C. Wolfe (previously won for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches in 1993 and Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk in 1996, and previously nominated for Jelly’s Last Jam in 1992, Angels in America: Perestroika in 1994, Caroline, or Change in 2004, The Normal Heart with Joel Grey in 2011, Lucky Guy in 2013, Shuffle Along in 2016, and The Iceman Cometh in 2018); this is the ninth directing nomination for Tootsie’s Scott Ellis (previously nominated for She Loves Me in 1994, Steel Pier in 1997, 1776 in 1998, Twelve Angry Men in 2005, Curtains in 2007, The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 2013, You Can’t Take It With You in 2015, and She Loves Me in 2016) and To Kill a Mockingbird’s Bartlett Sher (previously won for South Pacific in 2008, and previously nominated for The Light in the Piazza in 2005, Awake and Sing! in 2006, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 2009, Golden Boy in 2013, The King and I in 2015, Oslo in 2017, and My Fair Lady in 2018); this is the fifth directing nomination for Ain’t Too Proud’s Des McAnuff (previously won for Big River in 1985 and The Who’s Tommy in 1993, and previously nominated for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1995 and Jersey Boys in 2006) and The Prom’s Casey Nicholaw (previously won with Trey Parker for The Book of Mormon in 2011, and previously nominated for The Drowsy Chaperone in 2006, Something Rotten! in 2015, and Mean Girls in 2018); this is the second directing nomination for Hadestown’s Rachel Chavkin (previously nominated for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 in 2017), Ink’s Rupert Goold (previously nominated for King Charles III in 2016), The Ferryman’s Sam Mendes (previously nominated with Rob Marshall for Cabaret in 1998), and Network’s Ivo van Hove (previously won for A View from the Bridge in 2016); this is the first directing nomination for Daniel Fish (Oklahoma!).

[theloniousbach]

50 YEARS OF GOING TO SHOWS, Pt. 6: BECOMING A JAZZ FAN IN KANSAS CITY

As  I often do, let me start this reminiscence with a guitar player or three.  My brief here is to recall the formative jazz experiences that have been part of being in the thrall of live music just as often as I can.

So, even though this is jazz and the piano is the most versatile and enthralling instrument at the center of the music for me, I do come to this iteration of musical virtuosity, intelligence, and intricacy from '60s rock--blues and psychedlia.  Fusion, jazz-rock was created for the likes of me and Miles's "Bitches Brew" with John McLaughlin was the first jazz album of my teen years. So we start with seeing the Mahavishnu Orchestra at the University of Kansas.  I remember being in the balcony and so leaning forward physically while metaphorically being blown back into my seat.  They were loud, both actually and filling every aural space with rapid fire notes in intricate array, mostly from McLaughlin's still just a single neck guitar but also Jerry Goodman and Jan Hammer.  But it was equally Billy Cobham's drums that just pulsed in astoundingly complex rhythms.  Later when I got to know Balkan music, I wondered if those rhythms were head trips, intellectual exercises, or tied to Eastern European dance rhythms (Hammer is Czech, after all).  Pure invention.  It was amazing.

In the same hall, I saw the beloved Jerry Hahn, with Brotherhood brothers, but playing a straight ahead jazz show.  He warmed up for this just emerging band with some local appeal, Kansas.  They too were loud and already pretentious.  We left wrapped in our own pretension of jazz snobbery.

One last guitarist, Pat Matheny, a local hero just a year older than us.  The drummer in Fast Eddie and the Juicers, the garage/basement band I hung out with with some very good friends, had played in a middle school jazz band with him.  He was 16, maybe 17, when he played numerous sets at the all day Kansas City Jazz Festival in Municipal Auditorium.  It was a mostly Buddy Rich, Clark Terry, Marilyn Maye (who was then just the jazz singer in town), Gene Harris and the Three Sounds kind of show.  But Matheny played his own set in late afternoon and then kept being asked to sit in.  He later did two or three Xmas season shows often at UMKC (my alma mater, my Dad's employer) with his original quartet with Lyle Mays with "Phase Dance" to open and "San Lorenzo" to close gloriously.

But, particularly now, I don't seek jazz guitar and appreciate more than enjoy such luminaries as John Scofield (though I have seen him with Joe Lovano and also in Jack DeJohnette's Hudson and do like to see him in rockish setting with Phil Lesh and Warren Haynes) and Bill Friesell.  No, it's the piano, best with just bass and drums, that defines the music for me.  

I had a singular formative experience--seeing Oscar Peterson with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen open ($#%Q%#) for the New Christy Minstrels at UMKC in about 1964.  I was 8 or 9 and felt at home where Dad worked, so I just was drawn into the music and sat on stage behind the speaker column.  They were playing selections from the "Canadiana Suite," so that was an album I got my parents to buy for "us."  But they were magical, so fluid and telepathic and powerful.  I treasure the drum sticks Ed Thigpen gave me.  I got to see him here at a conference on Miles Davis with Sam in tow when he was about the age I was then and told him how meaningful that was.

I saw Count Basie (and possibly Duke Ellington) at a free concert but that made little impression except that Basie was bluesy and from Kansas City.  I saw him, once again in Lawrence, probably in that same auditorium, in the 1970s.  By then I had absorbed the Basie aesthetic.  Even if big bands were more than a little corny, this one swung hard, Basie was eloquently powerful with his little right hand lines, Freddie Green was unflappable, and the horns played the charts well with Jimmy Forrest being the tenor star.

Since I've already talked about Herbie Hancock with both his Mwandishi band and the Headhunters as well as Chick Core with Return to Forever and even Weather Report, I will proceed into a remarkable series of largely free jazz in the park concerts, mostly in Kanas City.

A glorious exception was seeing Charles Mingus with the Changes line up (George Adams, Don Pulled, Dannie Richmond, not necessarily but possibly Jack Waltrath) in Bryant Park, for a noon time set while we were in New York City.  That same band did a concert in the park in Kansas City.  I remember no juicy details--particular tunes from the deep Mingus canon, only Mingus in black fully unprepared to suffer fools.

The Kansas City Parks had a great series with Gary Burton a couple of times (I was also a hanger on at a master class on vibraphone at a music store the next afternoon and saw something about how to use two mallets in each hand) and San Getz with Richie Beirach, maybe George Mraz.  It might have been that I saw Mraz with Roland Hanna and homeowner Richie Pratt on drums in another open air setting.  I was probably just another punter in the crowd; I think anymore I would be annoyed at people there for atmosphere and the party.

I saw the Modern Jazz Quartet with the Kansas City Symphony with the orchestra contributing to some suite, almost certainly John Lewis's, before a few tunes by the MJQ itself.  I was bouncing in my seat a bit too enthusiastically for the regular Symphony goers around me.  Sigh.

Dizzy Gillespie played KC a couple of times.  I saw him out of reverence but wished I could have brought more to the table, more lore.  He wasn't Miles but he was playing probably with James Moody and solid jazz guys on Rhodes and electric bass.  I should have gotten more out of that experience than to say, yeah, I saw Dizzy's cheeks and schtick (certainly a subtle Latin rhythm). I lived in Chicago and had a friend with great jazz ears.  He introduced me to Arthur Blythe and some South African players among many others.  I was part of a gang that went a couple of times to the Jazz Showcase, including once to the original near North Side location, once to the one in a Loop hotel, to see Dexter Gordon in the post-Homecoming days.  Again I wish I could savor more details than the impression of his tall elegance, liquid lines, and deep deep repertoire.  That's as much a reconstruction from the albums and the legend but, details aside, I have a strong image of Dexter Gordon and he was the most formidable tenor player I ever saw.  Now, I did see Sonny Rollins in his late 70s and that was remarkable (more in a follow up to this on my jazz revival) but Gordon was in significant command of his craft then and was doing vital music.

Finally, the Chicago Jazz Festival was a relatively new thing when I was there in the late 1970s/early 1980s.  I'm sure I saw as much as I could.  My sole memory--and it is a grand one--is sticking out a rain shower to see Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition to play to a too small crowd, including the absolutely stunning "Pastel Rhapsody" with DeJohnette starting on piano.  It's a glorious tune and DeJohnette's piano is both strong and revelatory.  I learned so much about him as a drummer from that tune.

My rediscovery of jazz over the past four years or so is based on this foundation.  It is also been the basis of so much of this ongoing writing exercise.  

These are powerful memories.

[uneminuteparseconde]

Des concerts à Paris et alentour Juin 20. Kyrie Kristmanson & Jeanne Added + Léonie Pernet + Klaus Johan Grobe + Winter Family + Petit fantôme (dj) + Marc Melià (fest. 36H Saint-Eustache) – église Saint-Eustache (gratuit) 20. Charles De Goal + Zanias + Buzz Kull – La Station 20. Jean-Luc Guionnet & Will Guthrie + Nour – Café de Paris 21. Maud Geffray + Cherry B. Diamond + RKSS + Dustina (Fête de la musique) – La Gaîté lyrique (gratuit) 21. Plomb + Warum Joe + Les 3 Gnomes (Fête de la musique) – Holy Holster (gratuit) 21. Murman Tsuladze + Sathönay + Thiago Nassif – Espace B (gratuit) 21. Cristopher Cichocki + Hector Castells-Matutano + Emmanuel van der Elst + Stéphane Bissières + CT JEROME aka Jérôme Poret – Plateforme (gratuit) 21. Neil Hannon & Tosh Flood (Fête de la musique) – Musée des Arts et Métiers (gratuit) ||COMPLET|| 21. ToutEstBeau + Viegas + Petra Flurr & 89 St + Bleid – La Station 21. Anne Clark : perf. pour "Ocean 21" de Maggie Boggaart – Auditorium Saint-Germain 21. Cleric + Hector Oaks + Randomer + Parfait + Trym – tba 22. The Intelligence + Flatworms – La Maroquinerie 22. LA Witch – Black Star 22. Illnurse b2b absl + Raymundo Rodriguez + K-lamande – Glazart 22. Poison Point + Nostromo + Salem Unsigned + Panzer – Petit Bain 22. Perc + Kas:st + Hemka + Wata Igarashi – Concrete 22. Full Quantic Pass + EYE + Franz France + Mechanical Heaven + Club Z1Z1 + Los Hernanos Martinez + Samantha Mox + Colt + LAZ (Lostsoundbytes & Air LQD) +  La Punta Bianca (Merguez électroniques) – Murs à pêches (Montreuil) 23. Radiante pourpre – La Générale Nord-Est (gratuit) 23. Spoliature + Aymeric de Tapol + Guili Guili Goulag + Wizaeroid + Poulet Bicyclette (Merguez électroniques) – Murs à pêches (Montreuil) 23. La Pince + Leon + Howdoyoudance + Polar Polar Polar Polar – Cirque électrique 23. Bracco + Eddy de Pretto + Bagarre (dj) – La Station 25. Jaap Blonk – Souffle continu (gratuit) 26. Magma – Salle Pierre-Boulez|Philharmonie 26. Cannibale – Safari Boat 26. Caterina Barbieri + SKY H1 – La Gaîté lyrique 26. Pigalle – La Maroquinerie 26. Daniel Menche + Point invisible + Tzii – Instants chavirés (Montreuil) 27. Plomb + Perm36 + Pour X raisons – Cirque électrique 27. JKS + Mayeul + Myler + Khoegma – NF-34 27. La Chatte + Maryisonacid + Dawd – Rex club 28. ARLT + Loup Uberto & Lucas Ravinal + Hervé Bouchard (fest. Tremble parlure) – Pan Piper 28. Cienfuegos + Sacred Lodge + Axel Larsen + UVB76 – Espace B 28. To Live & Shave in LA + Carrageenan + TTTT – Instants chavirés (Montreuil) 28. Gesloten Cirkel + Identified Patient + Roza Terenzi + Tryphème + Villette 45 + Foreign Sequence – La Station 28. Frankie Bones & Adam X + Lenny Dee + Herrmann – Concrete 28. End of Mortal Life + IV Horsemen + December + Myako + Opäk – NF-34 28/29. Rammstein – La Défense Arena (Nanterre) ||COMPLET|| 29. Sara Fuegos + Techno Thriller – Espace B 29. Les Daltons + Jad Wio – Le Chinois (Montreuil) 30. Le Réveil des tropiques + Monolithe noir + Fantôme+ Colin Johnco (dj) – La Station Juillet 02. Interpol – Olympia 04. Cat Power + H-Burns (fest. Days off) – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 04. Bernardino Femminielli + Jean Redondo + Thi-Léa – Café de Paris 05. Klimperei, Sacha Czerwone, David Fenech, Denis Frajerman & Christophe Micusnule – Chair de poule (gratuit) 05. Pantha du Prince + Scratch Massive (fest. Days off) – Cité de la musique|Philharmonie 05. Laurent Garnier (fest. Days off) – Belvédère|Philharmonie 05. I Hate Models (dj) + Derrick May + Jardin + Mount Kimbie (dj) + Oktober Lieber + Rodhad + Mor Elian + Olivia... (The Peacock Society fest.) – Parc floral 05. The B-52's – Olympia 05. Ancient Methods + Die Selektion + Ideal Trouble – La Machine 05. Marc Acardipane + Ida Engelhardt + Radium + Wixapol + Parfait – Concrete 05/06. The Psychotics Monks + La Jungle + Yachtclub + Zombie Zombie + Frustration + Fleuves noirs + Bruit noir + Le Singe blanc + Le Sacre du tympan + Enablers + Os Noctambulos + The Scanners + Dick Voodoo + Le Réveil des tropiques + Quizequinze + Make-Overs + Canari + Tonn3rr3 + Enob + Casse Gueule + EggS + Keruda Panter + Fumo Nero + Famille Grendy + Deux Boules vanille + Lèche-moi (fest. La Ferme électrique) 06. Jonsi & Alex Somers jouent "Riceboy Sleeps" (fest. Days off) – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 06. Helena Hauff b2b DJ Stingray + Jon Hopkins + Motor City Drum Ensemble + Len Faki + Robert Hood + Octavian + The Black Madonna + Clara! + Nicola Cruz... (The Peacock Society fest.) – Parc floral 06. Inhalt der Nacht + Marai + Munsinger + Felicie – La Station 07. Jonsi, Alex Somers & Paul Corley : "Liminal Soundbath" (fest. Days off) – Cité de la musique|Philharmonie 07. Ministry + 3teeth – La Machine 07/08. Thom Yorke (fest. Days off) – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 08. Gossip – Salle Pleyel 08. Melvins – La Plage|Glazart ||ANNULÉ|| 09. Noir Boy Georges + Periods + Les morts vont bien + Corps (fest. Restons sérieux) – Supersonic (gratuit) 10. Francky Goes to Pointe-à-Pitre + Pratos + ToutEstBeau + Dune Basement (fest. Restons sérieux) – Supersonic (gratuit) 11. Pogo Car Crash Control + Mss Frnce + Baasta ! (fest. Restons sérieux) – Supersonic (gratuit) 11. Full of Hell + The Body + Pilori – Gibus 11. Masada + Sylvie Courvoisier & Mark Feldman + Mary Halvorson quartet + Craig Taborn + Trigger + Erik Friedlander & Mike Nicolas + John Medeski trio + Nova quartet + Gyan Riley & Julian Lage + Brian Marsella trio + Ikue Mori + Kris Davis + Peter Evans + Asmodeus : John Zorn's Marathon Bagatelles – Salle Pleyel 11. Flamingods + Warmduscher + Triptides (Garage MU fest.) – La Station 11. Setaoc Mass + VTSS + Opal – NF-34 12. Carambolage + La Secte du futur + Entracte Twist + Order 89 (fest. Restons sérieux) – Supersonic (gratuit) 12. Tomaga + Утро + Tôle froide + Society of Silence + Sharif Lafrey + Elzo (dj) (Garage MU fest.) – La Station 11>13. Kraftwerk (fest. Days off) – Philharmonie 13. Miel de montagne + Raymond Amour + La Pince Monseigneur + Amazone (fest. Restons sérieux) – Supersonic (gratuit) 13. The Will Gregory Moog Ensemble (fest. Days off) – Le Studio|Philharmonie 13. Chloé & Vassilena Serafimova : "Sequenza" + Apparat (fest. Days off) – Cité de la musique|Philharmonie 13. La Récré (Garage MU fest.) – canal de l'Ourcq 13. Metz + Bo Ningen + Ashinoa + Die Ufer + Panstarrs (Garage MU fest.) – La Station 13. Karenn + Casual Gabberz + D.Carbonne + Rendered + The Mover + Tim Tama + Attention Deficit Disorder + Freddy K + James Ruskin + Ascion + Bleaching Agent + Darzack + Hemka + Kotzaak & dj Skinhead + Lars Huismann + Damoclès + Demian + Dersee + Felicie + Herr Mike + Koboyo & Jarod + Scry & Theophiluss – Studio du Lendit (Saint-Denis) 17. Grand Blanc – Safari Boat 18. Neurosis + Yob – Bataclan 19. Illnurse + 74185# + Stefano Moretti – tba 26. CJ Bolland b2b D. Carbone + Endlec + Onhalt der Nacht b2b Echoes of October + SNTS + 138 + Animal Holocaust + CRDN + Falhaber + H880 + Injected + Keepsakes + Monsieur Nobody + Morneck + MSKD + Oposition + Paramod + Protokseed + Shirin + Van Der Wiese + VCL + Vortek's + Yannou (Thunder fest.) – La plage de Glazart 27. Anetha + Sentimental Rave + Fjaak + Parfait + Spfdj – tba Août 01. Thou + Yautja – Gibus 08>11. Deena Abdelwahed + Officine + December + En attendant Ana + A Strange Wedding + Avventur + Cuften + Poupard + Legion 808 + Hystérie + Summer Satana + Flore + Graal + KX9000 + Myako + The Homeopathics + Meuns... (Fest. Qui embrouille qui) – La Station 18. The Driver – But Mortemart|Bois de Boulogne 23. The Cure + Eels + Jeanne Added + Johnny Marr + Süeür... (fest. Rock en scène) – parc de Saint-Cloud 25. Aphex Twin + Foals + Deerhunter + Le Villejuif Underground... (fest. Rock en scène) – parc de Saint-Cloud 26/27. Patti Smith – Olympia ||COMPLET|| 28. Arnaud Rebotini – Safari Boat Septembre 05. Oh Sees + Frankie & The  Witch Fingers (20 ans du disquaire Born Bad) – Bataclan 06. Frustration + Arndales + Ero Guro + Bracco + Succhiamo + Maria Violenza (20 ans du disquaire Born Bad) – La Station 06. The Horrorist + Kobosil + VTSS + Airod + Félicie – La Machine 07. Le Prince Harry + Exek + Entracte (20 ans du disquaire Born Bad) – Point FMR 07/08. Vitamin X + N0V3L + 11Paranoias + The Rebel + 7Occvlta + Roy & The Devil's Motorcycle + Harry Merry + Holliday INN + Années Zéro + Chevignon + La Secte du futur + Hippie Diktat+ ZOH/astre + Pow! + Pile + Pious Faults ... (fest. Frissons acidulés) – Théâtre de verre Co-Arter 11. Crack Cloud – Petit Bain 12. Blawan – NF-34 14. Clan of Xymox + Plomb – Gibus 14. Danny Elfman & le Grand Orchestre d'Ile-de-France : cinéconcert sur "Alice au Pays des merveilles" de Tim Burton – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 18. The Wedding Present – Petit Bain 18. Lust For Youth – La Boule noire 20. Spiral Stairs + Canshaker Pi – Olympic café 23. The Foreign Resort + Seventeen at this Time + Trancept – Supersonic (gratuit) 23>25. John Cale – Cité de la musique|Philharmonie 24. Drab Majesty + SRSQ – Petit Bain 25. Dälek + L'Envoûtante – Petit Bain 26. Burial Hex + Les Chasseurs de la nuit + Common Eider, King Eider + Visions – Les Voûtes 27. Noseholes – Espace B Octobre 01. Emma Ruth Rendel – Petit Bain 01. Sleaford Mods – La Cigale 04/05. Blush Response b2b Thomas P. Heckmann + Dave Clark + Rebekah + Regis + Tommy Four Seven b2b Ancient Methods + ABSL + AZF + Dax J + DVS 1 + Marcle Dettmann + Poison Point + Anetha b2b Randomer + Ben Klock + Andrejko + Amato & Adriani + Bassam + Boston 189 + Charles Green + Dersee + DJ Bone b2b Ben Sims + Fabrizio Rat + Felicie + Louisahhh b2b Maelstrom + Newa + SHDW & Obscure Shape + Thomas P. Heckmann + Tripeo b2b Hemka (Pulse fest.) – Le Grand Dôme (Villebon/Yvette) 05. Nuit de l'orgue avec des œuvres d'Éliane Radigue, Arvo Pärt, Olivier Messiaen, Phillip Glass, Nico Muhly, Jonathan Fitoussi... (Nuit blanche) – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie (gratuit) 06. Daughters – La Maroquinerie 08. Sleep – Bataclan 09/10. Ty Segall & Freedom Band – La Cigale 11. New Order – Grand Rex ||COMPLET|| 14. King Gizzard & Tle Lizard Wizard – Olympia 14. Shannon Wright – Trianon 17. Puppetmastaz – Trabendo 18. Dream Syndicate – Petit Bain 19. Sisters of Mercy – Bataclan 19. Pixies – Olympia 23. Four Tet – Le 104 25. A Certain Ratio – Petit Bain 26. The Monochrome Set – Petit Bain 29. Agent Side Grinder – La Boule noire Novembre 08. Bedroom Community – Cité de la musique|Philharmonie 08. Boy Harscher – Trabendo 10. Amiina : cinéconcert sur "Fantomas" de Louis Feuillade – Le Studio|Philharmonie 10. Ôlafur Atnald + Hugar – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 10. Fontaine D.C. – Bataclan 14. Girl Band – La Maroquinerie 15. Chemical Brothers – Seine musicale (Boulogne-Billancourt ) 17. Nitzer Ebb – La Machine 19. Earth – Petit Bain 24. The Young Gods + Les Tétines noires – La Machine 26. Wardruna – Olympia Décembre 06. Phillip Glass Ensemble : cinéconcert sur "Koyaanisqatsi" de Godfrey Reggio – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 07. Phillip Glass Ensemble : cinéconcert sur "Powaqqatsi" de Godfrey Reggio – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 08. Phillip Glass Ensemble : cinéconcert sur "Naqoyqatsi" de Godfrey Reggio – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 12. Mono + Jo Quail – Petit Bain 2020 Janvier 04. Rokia Traoré + Ballaké Cissoko & Vincent Segal – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 31. Tindersticks – Salle Pleyel Février 16. Orchestral Manoeuvre in the Dark – La Cigale 24. Sleater Kinney – Le Trianon Mars 07. Ensemble intercontemporain joue Steve Reich : cinéconcert sur un film de Gerhard Richter – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 20. Ensemble Dedalus joue "Occam Ocean" d'Éliane Radigue – Le Studio|Philharmonie 21/22. Laurie Anderson : "The Art of Falling" – Cité de la musique|Philharmonie Mai 08. Max Richter : "Infra" + Jlin + Ian William Craig – Cité de la musique|Philharmonie 09. Max Richter : "Voices" – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 10. Max Richter : "Recomposed" & "Three Worlds" – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie 24. Damon Albarn – Salle Pierre Boulez|Philharmonie en gras : les derniers ajouts / in bold: the last news

[jefferyryanlong]

FEEL with DJ Jeff Long - May 29, 2019

what is there to say when a love affair is over

First Light - Freddie Hubbard Country City Country - James Moody Brother Yusef - James Moody In a Japanese Garden - Oliver Nelson The Jasmine Tree - The Modern Jazz Quartet Laughter - Norman Connors Tow Away Zone - Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Hey Jude (live) - Don Ellis Mizrab (live) - Gabor Szabo Jamaican Lady - Cornell Dupree Up From the Sea It Arose and Ate Rio in One Swift Bite - George Duke The Night Has a Thousand Eyes - Gary Burton and Stephane Grappelli The Night Has a Thousand Eyes - Herb Ellis and Remo Palmier Once I Loved - Bill Hardman How Insensitive - Astrud Gilberto And I Love Her - Gary McFarland Alabama - John Coltrane Tessassategn eko - Bahta Gebre-Heywet Tamalpais High (at about 3) - David Crosby Original Faubus Fables - Charles Mingus Georgia - Django Reinhardt In a Sentimental Mood - Duke Ellington and John Coltrane Farewell to Rahsaan - Bennie Maupin In a Silent Way - Miles Davis John McLaughlin - Miles Davis Theme from the Godfather - The Professionals Suicide Is Painless - Johnny Mandel Baby - Os Mutantes Rainbow Connection - Willie Nelson

KTUH FM Honolulu - ktuh.org

[millicentsopeculiar]

For years, many in Hollywood thought it was only a matter of time until the six major movie studios that have dominated the industry for decades would shrink to five or even four.

Few, however, thought the first to go would be Twentieth Century Fox.

Fox has performed in the middle of the pack among major studios for the past decade and the conventional wisdom has been that one of the laggards, Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures or Sony Pictures Entertainment, would be bought first.

But now that Walt Disney Co. is in talks to buy most of the assets of 21st Century Fox Inc. in a deal that could be announced as soon as next week, people with knowledge of the deal talks said Fox’s movie studio may be scaled back significantly and folded into Disney’s own film operation.

The talks may not result in a deal, people close to the discussions cautioned. Fox and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.

Founded in 1935 with the merger of Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Films, the studio was in its earlier years known for stars like Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple and films including “Gentleman’s Agreement,” “The Sound of Music” and the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton epic “Cleopatra,” which became a cinematic icon but nearly bankrupted the studio during its troubled production. In 1977 it released “Star Wars,” the beginning of a relationship with George Lucas that would span six films and generate $4.6 billion at the box office.

Since Rupert Murdoch took control of the studio in 1985, it has had its biggest successes with “Avatar” and the “X-Men” film series, as well as hits such as “Independence Day,” “Home Alone” and “The Martian.”

Disney is looking to buy Fox primarily for its television distribution and production businesses, the people close to the talks said. It would gain control of Fox’s foreign satellite services, a set of U.S. cable networks and majority control of streaming service Hulu.

Those assets would largely be put to work in Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger’s goal of transforming Disney into a direct-to-consumer digital powerhouse that can rival companies like Netflix Inc., rather than simply selling content to them. With Disney in talks to acquire most of 21st Century Fox, Hollywood could lose one of its major studios.                                                           

The Twentieth Century Fox television studio would be kept busy producing shows for Disney-owned streaming services, as well as for other outlets, people with knowledge of the deal talks said.

But it isn’t clear how Disney would integrate the Fox movie studio, which is ranked fourth at the domestic box office this year, with hits including “Logan” and “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” and disappointments such as “Alien: Covenant” and “Snatched.”

Some people close to the deal talks said Twentieth Century Fox could become a production label within the Walt Disney Studios, akin to Pixar and Marvel. In that scenario, Fox operations such as theatrical and home-video distribution would likely be cut back, resulting in job losses among the studio’s approximately 3,200 employees.

Fox under Disney would likely make fewer movies, further reducing the number of releases from traditional Hollywood studios at a time when Netflix and Amazon are aggressively expanding their film output, primarily for their streaming platforms, these people said. The six major studios released 139 films last year compared with 189 in 2007, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Movies are essentially a stagnant business, with global box-office revenues up just 1% last year and U.S. home-entertainment revenues down 7%, according to the MPAA and the Digital Entertainment Group. That is why many in Hollywood believe consolidation is inevitable.

As he has reshaped Disney’s movie operation in his 12 years running the company, Mr. Iger has reduced the number of films it makes. Disney now focuses almost exclusively on big-budget pictures based on existing properties—meaning sequels, remakes and comic-book adaptations.

The strategy has been successful, with higher average grosses per picture and higher profit margins than competitors.

Fox’s movie studio, led by CEO      Stacey Snider,       has a reputation as more “filmmaker friendly” and releases more movies—24 this year compared with Disney’s eight—at all budget levels. Unlike Disney, it makes a number of original live-action movies.

Combined profits from Fox’s movie and television studios were just over $1 billion in the company’s most recent fiscal year, compared with nearly $2.4 billion for Disney’s film studio alone. Fox doesn’t report separate movie-studio results.

One certain thing, the people familiar with the talks said, is that Disney has its eye on Fox’s two biggest movie franchises. “Avatar,” which still ranks as the highest-grossing movie of all time with $2.7 billion world-wide, was recently turned into a set of attractions at Walt Disney World in Orlando. Fox recently began production on a quartet of sequels to the 2009 hit and Disney would likely integrate the brand into its movie business and exploit synergy with its theme parks and merchandise units.

Fox also controls the movie rights to Marvel’s X-Men under a deal that dates to the 1990s, before Disney owned the super-hero company. Reuniting characters that have long coexisted in comic books but not on the big screen would be a creative coup for Marvel Studios and create new merchandising opportunities.

​Fox’s Marvel pictures, including the R-rated hit “Deadpool,” have been less family-friendly than Disney’s, though, and it may be a challenge to merge the two sensibilities.

On Fox’s Los Angeles studio lot, anxiety is high as staffers speculate about their future while also trying to focus on three movies they will be opening in the next two weeks: the animated “Ferdinand,” the musical “The Greatest Showman” and the historical drama “The Post.”

Nodding to wildfires raging just a few miles away from the studio, a Fox staffer on Wednesday tweeted, “Power outages here at the office. Not sure if it’s related to the fires or just the first phase of Disney cost cutting measures.”

“TOO SOON,” replied a colleague.

Executives and producers who work at Fox say they expect their business would be slimmed down but hope Disney would allow them to maintain an independent culture and continue to make a range of films, some of which aren’t based on existing franchises. They said they recognize their business would likely be oriented more toward providing content for streaming platforms like Hulu, but hope Disney would keep releasing movies of all types in theaters first.

               By Ben Fritz  Dec. 11, 2017    Source X  

[bungitonthen]

30/4/20

so what - miles davis;

giant steps - john coltrane;

better git it in your soul - charles mingus;

blue rondo a la turk - the dave brubeck quartet;

ramblin’ - ornette coleman quartet;

work song - cannonball adderley;

wrap your troubles in dreams - sarah vaughan;

my favourite things (single version) - john coltrane;

waltz for debby - bill evans; 

round midnight - george russell sextet;

cotton tail - ella fitzgerald / duke ellington & his orchestra

isfahan - duke ellington & his orchestra;

the new anthem - gary burton;

matrix - chick corea;

miles runs the voodoo down - miles davis;

celestial terrestrial commuters - the mahavishnu orchestra;

watermelon man - herbie hancock;

  -  (jazz: the smithsonian anthology)