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Barn3Y@2377

About Barn3Y@2377

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Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis Quintet

Kind Of Blue – Miles Davis Quintet

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Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis Quintet

With repeated listenings Kind of Blue continues to reveal its depths and complexity..like a good wine! For those of you not yet into jazz, it is lyrical, melodic, peaceful, and elegant; which makes it accessible. Yet this comes subversively within a ground breaking approach to music making.

Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans abandoned the status quo of improvising around Ballads or Standards from the American Songbook. Instead the rule book is jettisoned, and the tracks are improvisations starting from just a few notes, or a chord, or a mood.

It is called Modal, and echoes developments in Contemporary Classical music, and which has influenced popular music since from jazz to Talking Heads.

Planxty by Planxty

Planxty – Planxty

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Planxty by Planxty

The first ‘real’ Planxty album 1973 (the musicians had recorded Prosperous previously with Christy Moore), was at once a heresy to the purists, and an inspiration to the younger generation…Greek Bazoukis!!…no accordions!!… rock band swagger!! (well, almost). 

They created a unique and fully formed sound of percussive stringed instruments overlaid on the melodic, droning foundation of the Uileann Pipes, with not a dud track as the album flows from first track to last in the way great albums used to.

Standouts are ‘Arthur McBride’, ‘The West Coast of Clare’ and O’Carolan’s  ‘Si Bheag Si Mhor’.

Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd

The Dark Side Of The Moon – Pink Floyd

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Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd

Madness, War, futility of existence… its Singalong Sartre!

Rock music’s ‘Kind of Blue’ moment. Following its release on St Patrick’s Day 1973 it went on to spend over 40 weeks in the Top Ten (yet interestingly never No.1) and stayed in the US Album Charts for 741 weeks. The Dark Side has sold over 50 million copies.

In contrast to Kind of Blue’s spontaneous creation over just 2 days in an Upper East Side Manhattan studio, Pink Floyd used the studio as an instrument in the same way as The Beatles and George Martin were doing at that same late 60’s early 70’s period, with the album recorded over a 7 month period at Abbey Road Studios, done simply with cutting and splicing reams of tape, and echo machine or other such now antiquated technology, before the digital age.

So what’s it all about? It begins with a heartbeat, and an invitation to ‘Breathe in the air’ and don’t be afraid to care and reach out for your fellow humanity. Because the danger is that ‘one day you’ll wake to find ten years have got behind you’ and you have wasted Time in pursuit of Money and selfishness (‘don’t give me that do goody good bullshit’), or the futility of war (Us and Them ‘after all we’re only ordinary men’) and hatred, or succumbed to madness!

And all told through the medium of some of modern rock’s greatest music.
For best effect listen in one sitting start to finish in a dark room, as millions have done before you………until in the end ‘the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon’.