music

Keepin’ It Eclectic and Worldwide!

July 18, 2013   This week’s Rhythm Planet features a wide variety of new music from around the world in many different styles.  We feature some Brazilian classics from the band Azymuth and French bossa novista Nicola Conte’s new collection Viagem 5, some cool

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America’s Jazz Ambassadors

May 16, 2013 During the cold war in the 1950s and 60s, when America was worried about Sputnik, ICBMs, and building bomb shelters, there was a quiet but determined cultural diplomacy going on behind the Iron Curtain. The U.S. State

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Mali: A country under siege; its music silenced.

January 18, 2013 Without music, life would be a mistake. ~-Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Why They Hate Music? When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979, he said the following: “Music is no different than opium. Music

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Adversity and Ingenuity: Partners in Creation

October 11, 2012 Human beings have shown amazing ingenuity in fashioning musical instruments, often in less than ideal conditions. Many of these instruments were conceived and designed by people at the bottom of the social spectrum, most of whom were

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Repetition Plus Expression Equals Satisfaction

May 10 2012 On a week bookended by a beginning guitar class at McCabe’s Guitar Shop and a painting retreat in Encino, I was buffeted by a key challenge of the reinventing Boomer. The guitar classes were held in a

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Henri le Chat and Erik Satie: Partners in Ennui

April 19, 2012 My friend Jasmin S. Kuehnert, a cat lover like myself, sent me this video of Henri, a very French kitty. The music—most appropriate for this video– is by Erik Satie, who left the Paris Conservatory—his teachers called

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Music and Art: Tools for Survival

January 26, 2012 Classical pianist Alexis Weissenberg recently died. He was considered one of the great virtuosos of the last century. He was a child prodigy in Bulgaria when he and his mother were taken prisoner by German soldiers in

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Whatever Happened to Music Education?

December 1, 2011 In writing a recent blog, inspired by LA Philharmonic’s Music Director Gustavo Dudamel’s orchestral version of a popular Puerto Rican band’s hit song, I began to muse on the subject of music education: in Venezuela and the

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