Traverse City + currently reading + The Dan Band

I went out to Traverse City this afternoon for some local, non-Starbuck's coffee shop time and a good meal. There's a great french bistro downtown called Amical that serves crazy good food.
















I had the eggplant lasagna. Fresh out of the oven...oh so good.
















Cheers! I'm not a fan of Chardonnay but this stuff was awesome (and cheapish).
















The Weed Man even showed up outside to make a delivery. He's pretty quick so this picture is a little blurry.
















I'm currently reading John Adams's's autobiography, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.





















It's totally different from other composer tomes I've cut into lately (John Tavener, Dominick Argento and Ned Rorem to name a few). This is mostly because his language is so erudite. But not in a bad way. For instance:

Another cemetery, only a short distance up the road from our house, featured a large gravestone with the name "Pecker" on it. It commemorated the family of Jeremy Pecker, a local from the nineteenth century, whose name would surely have delighted Charles Dickens. The Pecker pedigree had died out by the time I arrived on the scene, but the gravestone continued to provide inexhaustible fodder for jokes. My school chums avowed that East Concord had originally been known as Peckerville, and that it even had played host to a baseball team, the Peckerville Moles.

I love how he makes a dick joke sound incredibly smart. I would never be able to do that.God bless you, John Adams.

I'm in the "Here's How I Grew Up" section at the moment so I can't wait to get into the actual musical stuff (especially Nixon in China...ohmygodIlovethatopera). Right now I've got JA learning the clarinet and playing with the local orchestra as a boy. It's pretty interesting stuff, actually.

So, for a little low-brow contrast, I'll quickly mention that I'm in love with The Dan Band. If you've seen Old School (or, more recently, The Hangover) you'll remember them as the wedding band that puts their own unique spin on Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart". Their live album on iTunes is hilarious and you should totally buy it. Here's their interpretation of Wilson Phillips's's hit, "Hold On" with a little intro from the band's namesake.

currently listening

I've raved about them before but, having just bought their recent recording of Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna, I totally feel justified mentioning Stephen Layton and Polyphony once again. This is truly an amazing record.



















The singing is peerless, phrasing is seamless, blah blah blah. What I find myself completely drawn to is the patience that they have with dynamic shifts as well as the ends of phrases (especially in the Madrigali). They wait exactly the amount of time that they should between phrases...not more and not less. And no crescendo or decrescendo is too fast...just the right amount of spice on it.

The result is a spontaneous, organic sound that is incredibly difficult for a choir to pull off with such a uniform gradation in the sound. But, having listened to this for a few hours now, it's obviously well worth the effort. Their second Lauridsen disc, Nocturnes, is also awesome in the truest sense of the term.

Speaking of English people, check out this picture of Edward Elgar. Some day I want to be able to rock the leather driving gloves with a cane like the Enigma does here amongst the evergreens.

go frances & marlow!

Someone recently sent me this and I've been smiling continuously for the last 20 minutes. May I present Frances and Marlow Cowan:

They tell more of their story here.

last will and testament

OhmygodIamreallysick. I think I caught some sort of super bug from the Uptown environment which is probably H1N1...it's just gotta be, right? I had a cold way back in January and hadn't been sick for ages but--damn--I have a crazy fever right now and I'm sweating like some sort of farm animal. It has been forever since I had one of these bad boys and holy crap is it debilitating. If whoever invented aspirin is still alive I have no qualms kissing them right on the lips in order to show my gratitude (after I get healthy, that is).





















Okay, but whatever. Have you guys heard of Microsoft Songsmith? I might be the last one in on this but it's mildly entertaining if not a bit insulting. Here's Dr. Frankenstein:

One of the most telling things he says is near the beginning: "This came out of a research project called MySong that you might have heard about where we looked at the statistical relationship between chords and melody and developed an algorithm to come up with chords to back up a melody."

Gah! Really?! Sometimes one of the coolest things about a melody is how it interacts with a supporting chord in a non-traditional way.

This just isn't musical creativity. Oh, it's definitely creative (I can't even imagine the time it took to figure out how to write that code) but it completely misses the point of what music is in the first place. He wants people to "make music" but this isn't even close to it.

Could this be a symptom of the "muzaking" of the world? (Side note: there's an actual Muzak Corporation that is responsible and supplies all that shit...thanks a lot, douchebags.) I don't know but I'm not happy. It reminds me of a great article I read about Auto Tune and how it's Auto Awful.

Songsmith does, however, produce some pretty funny results when you pair it with well-known songs. How about a little MJ (before he went kuh-razy)?


Let's Rickroll this thing. (Embedding was disabled on that one but, damn, is it ever funny. Seriously, click that link.)

Of course, the minute you listen to any of that crap it's patently obvious that this is not going to take at all. The "accompaniments" are so terrible that no one in their right mind would be satisfied with them.

All right, that's enough for now. I'm off to drink copious amounts of water and sit through Eastern Promises. A friend of mine forced it in my face the other day and declared that I had to see it. I watched Live Free or Die Hard a few nights ago so this has to be at least better than that.

moving and 3eb

Happy June, everybody. The last week has been a crazy blur as I moved out of the burbs and into the epicenter of the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis (it's cheaper and a lot closer to the things that are important to me). To cap it off I went to a Third Eye Blind concert with a few friends at First Avenue the next day and, except for a few band-t-shirt-wearing, don't-be-that-guy drunks in front of me who were occasionally annoying, it wasn't even close to a bad show. The opening act, Low vs Diamond, was pretty good as well and, thanks to the instant gratification of iTunes, I've been listening to their eponymous debut album for a few days now.

Third Eye Blind was the first band I ever saw live when I was 18 (I was a late bloomer...sue me) and First Ave was a vast improvement over the previous venue I saw them: the Minnesota State Fair (which has its own brand of charm, to be sure...but you know what I mean). However, I liked their show enough at the time to go buy their album and--10 years later--pick up some tickets on a lark to see them in one of the state's musical landmarks.

Is it just me or does their lead singer totally look like Paul Rudd?

On another, more musically-oriented note, I'm headed out to spend the summer on the campus of Interlochen. I have absolutely no idea what to expect but, from what I've been told (and what I here on From the Top all the time), it's amazing. The downside is that I have absolutely no break from the stress of moving and unpacking before I start re-packing for 7 weeks in Michigan. It's a bit frenetic but I have the feeling the payoff will be awesome. Their summer concert series looks really interesting.