12-16: The Skids : Scared To Dance 1979/2005 - Charizma & Peanut Butter Wolf : Big Shots 2003/2011 - Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony / Comissiona 1982 - Hasse Sonatas / Epoca Barocca 2004

Not shown: George Simon Löhlein, Ludwig August Lebrun, Friedrich August Kanne, Henri-Jean Rigel, Otto Vrieslander & Boris Shekhter

1781 – George Simon Löhlein (German composer & music theorist, active also in Poland)
1783 – Johann Adolph Hasse (German composer, singer & teacher, active also in Italy)
1790 – Ludwig August Lebrun (German oboist & composer)
1833 – Friedrich August Kanne (German composer & music critic, active in Vienna, friend of Beethoven)
1852 – Henri-Jean Rigel (French pianist & composer, took part in Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, c. 1800)
1861 – Karol Lipiński (Polish violinist & composer)
1870 – Stanisław Duniecki (Polish composer & conductor)
1914 – Ivan Zajc (Croatian composer, conductor & teacher)
1921 – Camille Saint-Saëns (French composer, organist, conductor & pianist)
1923 – Pongrác Kacsóh (Hungarian composer, teacher & writer)
1927 – Hugh Archibald Clarke (Canadian composer, organist & teacher)
1940 – William Wallace (Scottish composer, writer & opthamologist)
1950 – Otto Vrieslander (German composer & musicologist, pupil of Heinrich Schenker)
1961 – Boris Shekhter (Ukrainian composer)
1961 – Cato Engelen-Sewing (Dutch soprano)
1978 – Blanche Calloway (American jazz singer, bandleader & composer, sister of Cab, first woman to lead an all-male orchestra)
1988 – Sylvester (American disco & soul singer & drag performer)
1993 – Charizma (American hip-hop MC, associate of Peanut Butter Wolf)
1994 – Samuel Lipman (American music critic, pianist & founder of literary magazine The New Criterion)
1995 – Mariele Ventre (Italian founder & director of Bolognese children's choir Piccolo Coro dell'Antoniano)
1997 – Nicolette Larson (American country & pop singer & guitarist)
2001 – Stuart Adamson (English-born Scottish singer, guitarist & songwriter, The Skids, Big Country)
2003 – Gary Stewart (American country pianist, guitarist, bassist & songwriter)
2006 – Pnina Salzman (Israeli pianist & teacher)
2006 – Taliep Petersen (South African singer, composer & music theater director)
2007 – Dan Fogelberg (American rock & folk singer, songwriter & multi-instrumentalist)

I'm liking this post. It's a good mix of different stuff. Hey... you know, all of you who are hunting around the blog would help me out if you could leave a comment at specific posts where the links aren't good any more. That way I can look for replacement links for those posts first... or else you might have to wait a long time!

10-31: Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer / Chowdiah / UK Shivaraman / Vinayakraman : Parvathi Mysore 1965 + Beaucoup de Danses Macabres!

1634 – Erasmus Widmann (German composer, cantor & organist)
1654 – Francisco Correa de Arauxo (Spanish organist, composer & music theorist)
1744 – Leonardo Leo (Italian composer)
1768 – Francesco Maria Veracini (Italian composer & violinist)
1815 – Daniel Belknap (American farmer, mechanic, militia captain, poet, composer, singing teacher & tunebook publisher)
1870 – Mihály Mosonyi (Hungarian composer)
1887 – George Alexander Macfarren (English composer & pianist, blind from a young age)
1923 – Charles Jean Baptiste Collin-Mezin (French luthier & bowmaker)
1969 – Hugo Pfister (Swiss composer)
1975 – Sachin Dev Burman [শচীন দেব বর্মন] (Indian composer, Bengali singer & Hindi film music director)
1989 – Conrad Beck (Swiss composer)
1995 – Alan Bush (English composer, pianist & teacher)
1995 – Lavada "Dr. Hepcat" Durst (American blues pianist & singer)
1995 – Lloyd Lambert (American R&B & rock bass guitarist)
2003 – Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer [செம்மங்குடி ஸ்ரீனிவாச ஐயர்] (Indian Tamil singer of Carnatic music)

Not many familiars for this Samhain, but I was fortunate enough to locate a recording of the legendary Tamil singer Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer that is as historic as it is lo-fi. Other than that, nada. So I thought we'd have a little fun and belatedly celebrate the holiday right (hey, it's Hallowe'en everyday here at YiDM) with a little mix featuring a variety of recordings of the delightful Danse macabre, Op. 40 by Camille Saint-Saëns (1874). In it, you'll find not only complete orchestral versions (ranging in date from 1927 to 1959), but versions for violin & piano, violin with chamber ensemble, and organ. In addition, you'll hear the chanson of the same name Saint-Saëns wrote in 1872, the "Fossils" movement from his Carnival of the Animals, and a Horowitz transcription, which, if you know anything about those, takes some extreme liberties with the original material. Enjoy! And be safe, kiddies...

10-19a: Son House 1941-1942 Library of Congress - Jacqueline Du Pré : Elgar | Delius | Saint-Saëns 1

1758 – Johan Helmich Roman (Swedish composer, the "Father of Swedish Music")
1786 – Pietro Alessandro Pavona (Italian organist, composer & church music director)
1932 – Arthur Friedheim [Артур Фридхайм] (Russian pianist, conductor & composer, active in Britain, the United States & Canada, pupil of Liszt)
1956 – Isham Jones (American jazz bandleader, saxophonist, bassist & songwriter, "It Had To Be You")
1959 – Stanley Bate (English composer & pianist)
1960 – Günter Raphael (German composer & music editor)
1961 – John Fernström (Swedish composer, conductor, teacher, violinist, poet & author)
1987 – Jacqueline du Pré (English cellist, spouse of Daniel Barenboim)
1988 – Son House (American blues singer, guitarist & songwriter)
1992 – Maurice le Roux (French conductor & composer, pupil of Messiaen, known for soundtracks)
1995 – Don Cherry (American jazz pocket trumpeter, cornetist, pianist & composer)
1997 – Glen Buxton (American rock guitarist & songwriter, Alice Cooper)
2000 – Hortense Ellis (Jamaican reggae singer, younger sister of Alton)
2005 – Dallas Cook (American ska-punk trombonist, Suburban Legends)

Jacqueline du Pré, Son House, and Don Cherry. There are three names that likely wouldn't be mentioned in the same book, much less in the same phrase, if it weren't for October the 19th. But they do have one other thing in common, which is that all of these musicians were at the absolute top of the heap within their respective genres - namely, classical violoncello, Delta blues, and avant-garde jazz. Let's examine the three of them chronologically, but according to year of birth, rather than year of death, as above.

Son House was not from that very first generation of Delta bluesman who were born in the 1880s and 90s, and which was occupied by the original himself, Mr. Charlie Patton. However, with a birthdate of 1902 he lay, along with Skip James, in a middle-ground between Patton's generation and that second generation of Delta bluesman, represented most famously by Robert Johnson (b. 1911). But any way you wanna slice it, it cannot be denied that with Son House's passing in 1988, it really was the end of an era, because it meant that the very last of the old-time Delta bluesman who'd made their first commercial recordings in the 1920s was now gone.

And what a great bluesman he was. Often using a slide on his National steel guitar, House infused his fervent vocal performances with a rare amount of borrowings from the style of 19th-century black spirituals, and the hypnotic repetitiousness of plantation work songs. It may represent as close a performance style as many 20th-century performers ever got to the proto-blues of those years before recording technology existed, or before people who had access to such technology thought music of this sort was worth using it for.

Don Cherry, player of both the tiny pocket trumpet and the normal-sized cornet, was one of the pivotal figures in some of the most exciting developments in avant-garde jazz in the 1960s thru 80s. He's most associated with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, nine of whose albums he played on between the late 50s and early 70s. He also appeared with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and was one of many players to appear on Carla Bley's avant-garde jazz opera Escalator Over The Hill.

But Cherry also led a couple dozen visionary sessions of his own, in which his musical explorations led him to what would become known as "global fusion," a style which signaled jazz finally dissolving into the larger world of music, incorporating not just jazz and rock but potentially all music of all peoples into its improvisational framework. In the hands of Cherry, and similarly-minded individuals, jazz was now becoming not just the music of African-Americans, and of hip and educated European-Americans, but of the whole planet.


(more on Jackie later...)

BACH / STOKOWSKI BONUS ! Orchestral Transcriptions (plus more space for The Dead and Dying)

The fine transfer work of F. Reeder at the Internet Archive. Half of these 10 tracks are Stokowski transcriptions, performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The remainder are the work of Frederick Stock & Fritz Reiner with Chicago, Dimitri Mitropoulos with Minneapolis, and Pierre Monteux with San Francisco:

J. S. Bach: Transcriptions for Orchestra

If you've reached this post looking for Felix Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns, Alexander Glazunov, Antonín Dvořák, or Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, I have some bad news for you: they're dead! But you can find some of their music here:

Stokowski Sampler