Space Brothers and Mike Keneally @ Red Dock Saloon, 2009

I’d like to dedicate this particular post to my friend, and fellow KUR-Meister, Balint, who recently reminded so well that sometimes it’s worthwhile just to post just for the fun of it all, and for the love of the music, itself. Nothing could come closer to that description than the few videos I recently discovered while surfing about the internet of The Space Brothers and Mike Keneally (also featuring Bryan Beller) performing on August 16th, 2009, at the Red Dock Saloon in Saugatuck/Douglas, Michigan, on the lakeshore of Lake Michigan – a venue well known for it’s good food, cold beer, loud music, and nasty bathrooms. Although the audio is somewhat muddy at times, the guitar work in these videos is often absolutely sublime – especially the guitar work in their cover of Frank Zappa‘s “My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama” (above). There are instances I am reminded how much I miss FZ’s live guitar improvisation, and why Keneally is considered “the leading progressive rock genius of the post-Zappa era”. Listen to their cover of “Cosmik Debris” as well as a riff from “Inca Roads” (both below) and decide.
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Le Concert Impromptu plays Zappa

The wind quintet Le Concert Impromptu perform Frank Zappa compositions “King Kong” (above) and “Peaches en Regalia” (below) in these extracts from Jean-François Zygel‘s series ‘The Music Box’ with additional guest Didier Lockwood. The theme is on “Bach to the Future”, the concert impromptu interpreter of works by Bach, Reicha, Zappa and other improvisations. Originally broadcast on France 2 on August 26th, 2010.
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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #15

I still recall with great fondness the day I discovered Traffic’s 1967 debut album, Mr. Fantasy and their psychedelic tour de force, “Heaven Is In Your Mind”. Unlike many psychedelic groups of the era, Traffic had the special ability to combine elements from various musical genres – progressive rock, jazz fusion, psychedelic rock, and blues – into a unique sound which would reach it’s creative zenith on their 1970 release, John Barleycorn Must Die.
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Project/Object Winter Tour 2011

Project/Object – The Music Of Frank Zappa – is back on tour with Zappa vocalist/guitarists Ike Willis and Ray White, Denny Walley, and Don Preston & Bunk Gardner (Feb 22 only) – along with Andre’ Cholmondeley on guitar and vocals, 
David Johnsen on bass and vocals, 
Eric Svalgard on keyboards and vocals, and introducing Ryan Berg on drums on the following dates and venues in February 2011:
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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #14

Like a lot of other North American listeners, my first exposure to the progressive rock group, Yes, was via their edited for radio version of “Roundabout” from their fourth album, Fragile. Albeit a small hook, given the edited version, yet like everyone else I, too, was blown away by the sheer prowess of the full length version, as well as the rest of the album. For the rest of the 1970s, the album Fragile was in nearly every record collection I ever looked through. Now, if that isn’t a gage of a truly classic album, I don’t know what is.
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Mothers of Invention on Vinyl – Are You Experienced?

When I came across these posts on YouTube, I could not help but share them here at KUR. Not because of the individual tracks themselves (which have been digitalized) – “Aybe Sea” (above) which closes side one of Burnt Weenie Sandwich and Uncle Meat‘s “Nine Types of Industrial Pollution” (below) – but because as these videos illustrate so well, a way of experiencing music which newer technologies have so hurriedly bypassed. I’m speaking of the whole tactile experience of listening to the vinyl record, itself: from how you held it in your hands, set the vinyl on the turntable, adjusted the amplifier and equalizer, then sitting before your stereo system, examined the album cover in your hands while the music filled the room.
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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #13

Growing up as a Canadian teenager in the 1970s, one could literally count the number of well known “homegrown” musical groups and artists on the fingers of one’s hand (okay, maybe two). The trouble was that, at the time, Canada really didn’t possess a viable recording industry. For any Canadian musician or group to “make it”, they literally had to leave the country to do so. Whether you were Joni Mitchell, Anne Murray, The Guess Who, The Sparrows (who would become Steppenwolf upon their move to the U.S.), Denny Doherty (of The Mamas & the Papas), or Neil Young you had to relocate south if you wanted any kind of career.
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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #10

Although not an actual member of Frank Zappa‘s band, Lakshmirnarayana Shankar definitely made a mark on countless numbers of Zappa’s fans (including myself, I might add) when he first appeared on stage with Zappa in Deutschlandhalle, Berlin, Germany on September 7th, 1978, performing “The Deathless Horsie” alongside Zappa – as well as L. Shankar’s subsequent appearances in concerts in the tours that followed. Whether it was Ponty, or Sugarcane Harris, Zappa always had an ear for the unique and innovative player – and L. Shankar was no exception.
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Women Drummers – The Black Page

Once considered a boy’s only club, more and more women are taking up the drums as an instrument of choice – such as Lucy Landymore* (above) who performs Frank Zappa’s “The Black Page Drum Solo”, as well as Heather Thomas (below) who also performs “The Black Page #1” with the Central Washington University Percussion Ensemble. It bodes very well for equality of the sexes behind the drums.
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