Siouxsie & the Banshees is a rock band that appeared in 1976 in the United Kingdom ans was formed by lead singer Siouxsie Sioux. In their first appearances in public it seemed that the band belonged to the punk music scene, however, soon it became clear that Souxsie was not willy to limit herself and the group to straight punk rock. They began to experiment with rhythm and sounds, so that the famous London newspager The Times referred to Siouxsie and the Banshees as “one of the most audacious and uncompromising musical adventurers of the post-punk era.”
Later, Siouxsie and the Banshees served as an inspiration for the creators of gothic rock, but also for some pop and avantgarde groups and singers.
Siouxsie and the Banshees disappeared from the music scene in 1995 when Siouxsie felt like the group wasn’t going anywhere anymore. The band broke up and Siouxsie now acts with The Creatures.
Siouxsie and the Banshees Happy House Video Clip
The Nightingale Written by Alban Berg Performed by Anne Sofie von Otter
This video features female soprano singer Anne Sofie von Otter performing The Nightingale, the third song of Alban Berg’s composition Sieben Frühe Lieder (Seven Early Songs). Alban Berg is an austrian composer who together with Anton Webern studied with Arnold Schönberg. Schönberg showed them the rules of modern twelve tone music but Alban Berg developed his own style, combining the twelve tone techniques with more traditional musical forms from earlier centuries.
The most known composition of Alban Berg are probably Lulu and Woyzeck, two operas which stand in the atonal tradition. Atonality was the logical consequence of the evolution of western concert music which can be regarded as the progressive acceptance of formerly not accepted notes in the harmonic context of a composition.
Aretha Franklin Performing I Was Born To Sing The Gospel
Watch this video with female soul singer Aretha Franklin performing I Was Born to Sing the Gospel. The gospel is an early american form of religious music which originally was sung by black people in the churches. I don’t like to attend church services, partly because of the lame organ music usually played in the catholic churches. But I can assure you that I would be a fervent servant of the lord if my parents would have brought me to attend baptist church services in the US. I would hav falllen in love with the choir and solo singers.
The main difference between traditional catholic church music and black american church music is that the catholic version of music tries to eliminate the pleasure the body can feel when executing music. Catholic choirs are standing still, almost frozen while black gospel choirs move from foot to foot and clap the hands.
And of course, the melodies include some blue notes which make the music especially interesting and illustrates how the gospel together with the blues are the base for soul and some rock music. Some catholic pope decided that music in the services should be only to praise the lord and was regarded as kind of marketing effort in order to get simple people into the church.
Unfortunately, the video has a still image instead of moving characters, but we will llok for more gospel music videos and publish them here.
Sarah Vaughan Performs the Bebop Classic Perdido
This video clip shows Sarah Vaughn or Sassy, as she was called by frriends and fans, performing Perdido which has become a jazz standard to play for jazz musicians. The video is a scene taken from Rhythm and Blues Revenue, a movie made in 1955 which you can download without copyright infringement.
Sarah Vaughan was a very important singer in the jazz scene and has influenced the female jazz singer Anita Baker and many others. After she appeared at age 18 on an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in New York and won first prize with her performance of Body and soul, another jazz standard, some jazz critics considered her as the most important singer of the bebop era.
In her beginning days as a jazz singer she formed part of Billy Eckstine’s big band where other jazz giants like Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie played in the brass section. Short time after singing in the big bands, Sarah Vaughan decided to form her own band and had almost inmediate success when in 1947 she became number one of the charts with ther performance of the song Tenderly. From thereon Sarah Vaughan also included some pop songs in her singing enlarging her audience and gaining more popularity. However, at the end of the 60s, Sarah Vaughan dropped the pop singing and returned to pure jazz music singing with jazz legends as Louie Bellson, Don Cherry, J.J Johnson, Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock, to mention just a few.
Among the best known songs associated with Sarah Vaughan are the tastefull ballad Misty and several songs by Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. She did not loose her singing talent until her sixties when she was still performing for large audiences until her passing away in 1990 at the age of sixty-six.
Are Video Blogs Going to Stay Alive or Will Copyright Infringement Claims Kill File Sharing on Youtube?
This post will deal about publishing, republishing and copyright. Due to recent limitations of youtube video insertion into our posts, it has become a necessity to post about this issue even though it is slightly off topic regarding the central purpose of this blog which is to contribute to the presentation of the variety of music beyond the standardized music played by the vast majority of tv and radio stations around the globe.
Youtube has developed into an important communication channel with a lot of videos posted daily by users from many countries and regions of the world. Here internet surfers will find a huge archieve of video clips about many issues and a considerable part of these videos deal with music and musicians beside other aspects of the entertainment business and other fields of interest.
The Music Video Guide was created with the idea to help people navigate this immense quantity of videos published and republished on youtube and other video blog platforms and other internet sites. Our purpose was and is to publish or republish a video clip and comment it so that the reader could have a point of departure for the personal evaluation or the corresponding music video and we were very disappointed when about 10 minutes after publishing our post about an interpretation of ‘Der Hölle Rache’ from ‘The Magic Flute’ (‘Die Zauberflöte’) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the video didn’t show up any more on our blog. Instead there was a short line saying something like ‘Sorry, this video is no longer available’. We inmediately visited the youtube site to learn that in the text fiel which usually contains the code for embedding the video into blogs and other websites there was this laconic line of text: “video insertion disabled by petition”.
This ment a lot of frustration to us. We believe that things like that should not happen and are avoidable. For example if the youtube system would offer the possibility to disable the video embedding at and let’s say within the next 15 minutes after publishing time. Then we could save our efforts of investigating and commenting and focus on other videos whose publishers or republishers aren’t governed by envy or greed but by the sane intention to bring good stuff to the general public’s attention.
Anyway, the Music Video Guide continued with it’s publishing scheme of a video with the corresponding comments and everything went fine for a while until our last post which was about the first movement of the Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Op. 69, by Ludwig van Beethoven performed by the marvellous piano player Glenn Gould and the cellist Leonard Rose and recorded around 1960. This time it took only a day to see that the republisher of this video clip had solicited the disallowment of embedding of the clip into other sites.
The preceding lines are about the why of this post, now let’s get into substance.
According to the republisher of this video on youtube, it is extracted from “The Glenn Gould Collection: VOLUME 8 – Interweaving Voices” (Sony SHV 48412, VHS, NTSC). We are strongly convinced that this youtube publisher didn’t upload the video on behalf of Sony who seems to be the copyright holder, as far as we can deduce from the information provided and will do a little research about the authorisation for uploading on youtube, among some other actions related to this incident.
The easiest thing would be to download this video from youtube which is very easy if you have installed Realplayer or other similar software and then upload it on our own account so that we could embed it pointing to our own upload.
However, at uploading time youtube show a copyright notice, telling you to not upload anything which isn’t your work or public domain. Now, we could edit the video a little bit, to comply with the rule of utilization of only a certain percentage of original material and make it “ours”. Or we could argue that since the mentioned video only represents the first movemento of three of the Cello Sonata No. 3, this is already sliced down to comply with this kind of rule (note: correction subject to detail investigation regarding varying national and international legislations).
But maybe, the youtube republisher (http://www.youtube.com/user/inwit) considers that this video clip is already reduced in size and quality in comparison with the original Sony VHS tape and that this fact is enough to not infringe the rights of copyright holder Sony. We will find out and would appreciate your comments regarding the issue.
Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster and Billie Holiday playing the blues
Watch this video with some of the greatest jazz musicians ever playing and singing the blues. Listen to Coleman Hawkins sweet mellow tone and enjoy Lester Young leaping in on this song.
At the beginning of the video, Billie Holiday is talking about the blues music, dividing it into sad blues and happy blues and stating that everything she sings is part of her life.
The lineup is an all star band with the following personel in order of appearance: Ben Webster – Tenor Sax, Lester Young – Tenor, Dick Dickenson – Trombone, Gerry Mulligan – Baritone Sax, Coleman Hawkins – Tenor and Roy Eldridge onTrumpet. It’s interesting to look at Billie Holiday’s face while the cats are soloing, she really is with them. And of course, listen to her voice when she is singing.
We know that the video’s sound quality isn’t the best, but this was recorded around the mid fifties, so please be indulgent… As always in these cases, we believe that it is much better to know and listen to the original versions even though they have less sound quality than listening to perfectly dolbey stereo recorded sound with poor content. If you can’t enjoy the music because of the sound impurities, we feel sorry for you but we suspect you also like studio made porn pictures better than an original photograph showing an american indian at the beginning of the 20th century, just because the porn pic is very well produced while the grain and contrast of the photo from the early days of photography is relatively coarse.
As always when I post about saxophone players, I like to mention our poll about the best tenor saxophone player ever. Go there and speak up.
Charles Mingus Hazel Scott ‘A Foggy Day’
Watch this video clip with early Charlie Mingus playing the accoustic bass in the trio of femal singer, piano player and band leader Hazel Scott. In this cover version of the jazz standard ‘A Foggy Day’ Charles Mingus plays a straight forward walking bass. These were the beginning days of the great bass player who soon formed his own group and entered the field of free jazz. Charles Mingus has formed a lot of goups ranging from trios and quartets to big band orchestras. This video here is more of a documental but you still can enjoy the music. This seems to be recorded at a tv studio set.
Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass – ‘Stormy Weather’
Watch this video of two jazz giants treating the classical blues theme ‘Stormy Weather’. As always, Joe Pass plays his guitar in a superb manner and building an excellent base for the divine voice of Ella Fitzgerald. This video was recorded around 1975 in a german television studio.
Maria Callas – Angelical Soprano Voice
Marias Callas, the famous greek female opera singer appears in this video clip singing a part of the second Act of the opera Tosca by italian composer Giacomo Puccini.
As so many other video documents, this video’s sound quality is not excellent but fair enough to transmit the music with the state of the art technology of the moment. It is amazing to watch and hear classical performances and rare songs, technical flaws should be no reason to ignore these recordings, after all, aesthetisicm is an exageration.
Music and Video Guide 