Hallelujah

A friend just introduced me to Allison Crowe and her cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Crowe, he says, is a Canadian singer-songwriter-guitarist-pianist (classically trained, so I'm told).



So much music, so little time.

My friend knows that I like Cohen's "Hallelujah", one of the zillions of Cohen pieces that zillions of people cover.

Here is Rufus Wainwright (first heard on my daughter's Shrek CD):



k.d.lang (she was Nik's favorite singer for a while, when he was VERY young) has a pretty good one:



One of the first -- and best, imho -- Hallelujah covers I heard was the late Jeff Buckley (why do I come across so many people who think he wrote the song?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AratTMGrHaQ

And, of course, the creator of the song himself:

Kim Sleeps

I have hundreds and hundreds of old slides and negs, never processed or printed or published, that I slowly try to review, cull and scan. I am trying to find at least one I like each weekend. Here is something taken (just barely) with one of my ancient Nikon Fs in our old downtown L.A. loft right after Nik was born, previously unviewed.

I found a couple of others that I am sending over to the family blog, also.

Seeing With A Different Eye

Provocative, and for real: http://www.theblindphotographer.com

Scalable City

A friend sends me this link to a QuickTime video of artist/programmer Sheldon Brown's Scalable City video installation.

Brown is an arts professor and Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UCSD. In a couple of weeks, he will be in one of my favorite college-era haunts, the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City. You can learn more about him and his projects at these URLs:

http://va-grad.ucsd.edu/~drupal/node/170
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/node/view/491/22
http://crca.ucsd.edu/sheldon/
http://www.sheldon-brown.net/

Marian Anderson, 1939 at the Lincoln Memorial

Here it is; spinoff from my previous post. Goosebump time. Something for 9/11 ...



Now it is time to go bed. Goodnight.

Ellens Gesang III D. 839

While crawling around looking for something entirely different tonight, I stumbled upon a CD of Anne Sofie Von Otter performing, among other Schubert pieces, Ave Maria. When I was small child, one of my first musical memories was hearing my mother's favorite recording of Ave Maria. So I went scouting around on You Tube to see if I could find something I hadn't heard before, or for a long time ...

First, I found Pavarotti:




Then Barbara Hendricks in Brussels ...



Here is Renee Fleming:



Oh, yes. Marian Anderson in 193? (must remind myself to chase down her Lincoln Memorial performance!):



Marian Anderson with Leopold Stokowski conducting in 1944:



And a 1947 violin version by Yehudi Menuhin:



Now, it's really starting to get interesting. Jascha Heifetz at sixteen years, in 1917:

Steven Cantor, Rediscovered

Steven Cantor is maybe the best DJ I have ever heard. I grieved over his departure a year or so ago from OPB Radio, and have finally tracked him down at KMHD.org, where he holds forth on Sunday nights from 10pm - 2am. Don't know yet if the site archives its sessions for replay -- I didn't readily find them if they do. If you use iTunes, you can find KMHD listed under Radio | Public. The stream is pretty lo-fi, unfortunately, but how I use it is to capture the stream as one big MP3, then review it with the playlist at hand or onscreen, to note stuff worth tracking down and/or buying; then I can throw the low-bitrate file away. That way I actually get some sleep on Sunday night.

My earlier whinings on this matter: here and here