One of my favourite tracks on Playing For Time is ‘The Anno Domini Rag’. When I arrived in southern Italy last autumn to record some of the tracks for the new album, it was one of the songs that produced the most...
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When, a few days ago, the BBC showed a music documentary, there was a sniffy online reaction from a resident of Twittertown. ‘What is it that bothers me about this? Am I a music snob, an art snob, a massive...
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If you want to see the difference between a great lyric and a moderately good one, here's a place to start - compare and contrast Jacques Prévert's 1946 song 'Les Feuilles Mortes' to the later American version,by Johnny Mercer, released...
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A few months ago, I went to Maurizio Sarnicola's Goldmine studio two hours south of Naples and, with my German friend, the accordionist Hartmut Saam, and new Italian friends Fortunata Monzo (vocals), Giovanni Rago (guitar), Domenice de Marco (drums), Gianni...
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Camping was off. That much was clear as we took our flight from Heathrow to Australia on the last day of 2019. Our first destination, a campsite at Cape Conran on the coast of Victoria, had declared that the risk...
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Something rather interesting happens when a good contemporary artist decides to cover a song from the distant past. When James Taylor sang 'Oh! Susanna!', a Stephen Foster from the mid nineteenth century came out out like a modern(-ish) folk song....
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Should there be a trigger warning for listeners of this week'd Friday Song? Almost certainly. It makes gender assumptions that some might find offensive. Its premise is based on the patronising assumption that, on a date, men will pay for...
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One of the more unusual CDs in my collection - and one of the most frequently played - is Clara and the Real Lowdown by Clara Sanabras, which was produced by her musician husband Harvey Brough. It was this album...
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If ever there were a song which showed how far songwriting travelled in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is Paul Simon's extraordinary, enigmatic 'Still Crazy After All These Years'. In its story, its melody, the atmosphere it evokes, ...
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Fats Waller was quite often in trouble. A man who lived the rock 'n' roll lifestyle back in the 1920s, he had impressive appetites - gin, food, women, cars - and was mind-bogglingly hopeless in the making and losing of...
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