Show 131: Swinging Bach, and The Entertainer

[Added on 2015/7/18:  This used to be called Show 27.  I've renumbered the shows, so that this one is Show127.  The first digit will indicate which series the show is from: 1 for the first cycle, 2 for this second cycle, and so on.  For instance, the July 4^th show for this year will be numbered numbered Show201, and so on.  If you didn't figure this out yet, my first show aired the week of July 4th, 2014.]

You'd think, because the school year is over (for our school, anyway), that I would produce better crafted shows, but no; they're even more arbitrarily slapped together than ever.

This show was initially inspired by Scott Joplin's The Entertainer which was being broadcast from a passing ice cream truck, and I got to thinking that it might be fun to make a MIDI file out of it, by ear, and feature that on the show.  Then, I got to thinking, it might be nice to show how I go about doing it, in stages.  (It's still by ear, mind you; I did not go to the written score, as I do with Bach, for instance.)

Once I got started, I ran out of material pretty soon, but I stumbled on the DVD of Swinging Bach, from 2000, centered around Bobby McFerrin.  Now, the WXPI agreement with ASCAP and the, er, corresponding institution in the UK permit us to play any music from any recorded source, for non-profit purposes.  So I went about trying to acquire the soundtrack of the movie, but I failed.  But I acquired the video of it, and extracted the sound from that instead.  That provided about another half hour.

Then Uma, a close friend, posted a page that linked to several tracks of the music of the band she plays with, Minstrel's Ghost.  That was the last track for the night.

So there's really no rhyme or reason for the compilation for tonight; it's a bunch of music that hit my radar over the week, filled up with recordings from my collection, to balance classical, popular, folk, humor, and curiosities.

Unfortunately, my plan of making each show balanced with all these elements has resulted in less of an overall theme for each show.  Now, it is possible impose an overall structure for each show even while maintaining the four or five departments of classical, folk, popular, humor and curiosities.  For instance, for the week of July Fourth, you can easily imagine a program that concentrates on nationalistic music in each of those categories.  (I try to imagine that I live in a post-adolescent USA, in which the common man is comfortable with hearing music of foreign lands even during Independence Week.  In some parts of the country, people listen to nothing but the Star Spangled Banner all year long.  These are the places where people don't pay taxes.  Did you get the irony there?)

But I get into an "Off Duty" sort of mood over the summer, and it feels like a lot of work to put together a show that has structure in the rows as well as the columns.  Still, I think I will do a careful job for July Fourth, the first week of July; in fact, if I repeat last year's show, it already has all these elements.

Part A
Part B
Part C
Part D

Archie