Category: Sunday Big Note

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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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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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 #12

I’m certain each of us has our own personal experience in relation to Pink Floyd‘s masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon. The band itself had conceived the album as a concept reflecting themes such as conflict, greed, the passage of time, death, and insanity. Indeed, the album struck such a universal chord during those early years of the 1970s, both the band and the public having witnessed the death of the idealism borne of the 1960s and the emerging cynicism of the 1970s, the tracks of Dark Side of the Moon were a sort of common recognition of a shared humanity. Perhaps, at very least, that’s why the album “remained in the charts for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988, longer than any other album in history.”
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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #11

The choice of this week’s Sunday Big Note was an easy one as it is also one of our webmaster’s favorites as well. Indeed, it put a smile on my face to learn that he had this very recording in his own private collection for a long time now. On Friday, October 22nd, 2010, in his post entitled “Hey Nineteen“, Barry said:
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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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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #9

As I chose today’s Sunday Big Note Listening Session, I was struck at how, over time, the details of many of these concerts and broadcasts are either lost or omitted by successive trader, poster, torrenter. Venue. Date. Location. Line-up. Important details. Indeed, most of the live music I have collected throughout the years has lacked some, if not all, of these details. Almost as important a hunt than that of the music, itself, are the details behind each concert. So was the hunt for the details behind today’s Sunday Big Note.
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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #8

For as long as I have been a Zappa/Mother‘s freak – going four decades strong and showing no evidence of slowing down – almost every fan of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention I’ve encountered has also been a fan of Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull. Odd, since in the 1970s Frank Zappa, himself, stated in the press that he didn’t care for the music of Jethro Tull. In a Montreal Mirror interview, Ian Anderson was asked about this:
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Sunday Big Note – Listening Session #6

For this week’s Sunday Big Note, I’ve got a fantastic gem of a listening session in store – a soundboard of Wishone Ash from 1976. Although short (approximately one hour in length), the sound quality is excellent, and the performance, superb.
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