Musical Motivation

I was just listening to Kiki Dee 'Loving and Free' from her Amoureuse album.

Isn't wonderful how music can remind us of forgotten or significant times ?
Each is times-tamped within us and it always seems to show up when it is most needed.

 

This track was significant to me when I was having a tough time emotionally as a young adult – I was , truth be known, lonely and scared about that.

The fabulous words to this song took me onto something else in my life. They motivated me and I didn’t realise it at the time.
I have never been lonely since and I rarely experience being scared as a bad thing, more so a motivator

NLP Practitioners' will recognise that as an Anchor.
Tunes like this and Pick Up The Pieces by the Average White Band (My waiting in Queues enjoying time anchor) are my Ear Worms

---

Bound, I am bound, like a knot on a string
Eager to be where my life can begin
Out of the shadow and into the sun
So many things that I should have done

I will untangle myself, so that I can see
I will untangle myself, everything will be
Loving and free

Bound I am bound, like a rope on a swing
Up in the air and then down again
Sure for the first time so clear in my mind
Wise to the feeling I gently unwind

---

Which music or tunes have driven you to a new experience?

Sources You Tube,  www.lyricsfreak.com and .wikipedia.org

and the show went on

6th February, 2010 and Sir Johnny Dankworth and his lifelong Partner and wife, Dame Cleo Laine are due to perform in concert that evening. A 40th anniversary, but Johnny had died that day in hospital.
82 year old Cleo, out of respect for John, went ahead with the show and asked John’s friend Andy to take John’s role in the piece that they were about to play, because, as Cleo said,
“He would have wanted to play this piece if he were here and I know that the one person that he would have entrusted it to would be to Andy ….”
It just make me think of just how important such a meaningless thing as music is. Music, in itself has no purpose other than the importance we attach to it and that attachment makes it so extremely important!
If you ever wish to invoke a memory, refer to the music that was playing at the time and watch how peoples’ state begins to change as soon as the music plays out and their memory recreates.
Yet music is timeless but so clearly leaves pegs in our timelines.
‘Sound pegs’  to which we attach emotional states and visual images.
‘Sergeant Pepper Lonely Heart’s Club Band’, played during the summer when I left school. ‘Stephen Stills’ solo album played when I was 21. The Doobie Brothers ‘Captain and Me’ had a profound impact on me when I first moved away from my home town, in 1973 and so they roll on, sounds as time pegs, each invoking emotional states from me but the biggest emotion of all … familiarity.
Familiarity because each piece of music is an old friend.

What songs or pieces of music are really important to you?

image from play.com amongst others

Earworms seem to have raised their ugly heads again

Earworms seem to have raised their ugly heads again ( :-) )
According to the BBC News article: Earworms: Why songs get stuck in our heads.

Have you registered your earworm at

 

 

 

 

 

http://earwormery.com/

 

Here are some of my earlier posts:

• http://aypee.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/get-that-song-out-my-head-university-of-montreal-study-on-those-pesky-earworms/
• http://aypee.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/more-earworms/
•  http://aypee.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/what-about-ear-worms/

Ian Dury - Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll

I recently watched a biography of Ian Dury and it all came flooding back:
……. Ian Dury, Chaz Jankel, The Blockheads.

Born Ian Robins Dury on 12 May 1942 in Harrow, he contracted Polio as a child and was classed as disabled and yet in 1981 , the International Year of Disabled Persons, Dury showed his disdain in his song “Spasticus Autisticus”. He thought it was patronising and unhelpful
He died at the age of 57 on 27th March, 2000.
He was a surprising and highly individual man having a musical style of his own somewhere between Rock and Roll, Punk, New Wave, Funk, Jazz, Good Old Cockney and all including his own unique poetry – usually adult.
Later in life he was a member of  the Royal Shakespeare Company – such was the depth of his talent
Chaz Jankel’s song ‘Ai No Corrida’  was covered by Quincy Jones, who had a smash hit with it. You can gather from this the talent. Chaz Jankels’s sister Annabel Jankel was the creator of ‘m-m-m-m  Max Headroom’

I came across Dury watching a Simulcast on BBC 2 television with BBC Radio 1. Television sound was Monaural but with Radio 1 producing Stereophonic sound. This was the time of his superb album “New Boot and Panties” – not for the faint hearted!!
1. Wake up and Make Love With Me (Dury/Jankel) - 4:21
2. Sweet Gene Vincent (Dury/Jankel) - 3:32
3. I'm Partial to Your Abracadabra (Dury/Jankel) - 3:12
4. My Old Man (Dury/Nugent) - 3:38
5. Billericay Dickie (Dury/Nugent) - 4:15
6. Clevor Trever (Dury/Jankel) - 4:53
7. Is I Was With a Woman (Dury/Jankel) - 3:23
8. Blockheads (Dury/Jankel) - 3:30
9. Plaistow Patricia (Dury/Nugent) - 4:12
10. Blackmail Man (Dury/Nugent) - 2:14
11. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll [#] (Dury/Jankel) - 3:12
12. Razzle in My Pocket [#] (Dury/Jankel) - 2:55
13. You're More Than Fair [#] (Dury/Hardy) - 2:58
14. England's Glory [live/#] (Dury/Melvin) - 3:27
15. What a Waste! [#] (Dury/Gallagher/Turnbull/Watt-Roy/Charles/Melvin) - 3:26
This album contained tracks like “Billericay Dicky” about  the explicit love life of  Billericay Dicky. …. # Had a love affair with Nina in the back of my Cortina (Ford) ….#
and yet despite all this he and the Blockheads had extraordinary talent and produced extraordinary lyrics:

“Einstein can't be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest
When you did a bit of splittin'-ness
Frightened everybody ****less”

~ from There ain't half been some clever ***tards

Wonderfull stuff!
(very naughty but nice)

source AyPee, clashmusic.com,  wikipedia.org .iandury.co.uk, amazon.co.uk

Kodachrome | When I look back

Mashable carried an article on 30th December, 2010 reporting that Kodachrome had been discontinued by it’s manufacturers Kodak.

No surprise really as Digital cameras are so dominant!

BUT, for me it reminded of a time in 1973, when I spent a weekend, with my wife, decorating a house that we had bought ready to move into, in the September.

We had taken a break, gone to town and I found a Compact Cassette of Paul Simon’s "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" which I duly purchased and played for the rest of the weekend.

The first track was Kodachrome and the lyrics unforgettable:

When I think back
on all the crap I learned in high school,
it's a wonder I can think at all
and though my lack of edu---cation
hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome:
They give us those nice bright colours.
They give us the greens of summers.
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah.
I got a Nikon camera.
I love to take a photograph,
so mama don't take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
when I was single
and brought them all together for one night.
I know they'd never match
my sweet imagination
and everything looks worse in black and white.

Kodachrome:
They give us those nice bright colours,
they give us the greens of summers
makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah.
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Words & music by Paul Simon

Kodachrome was introduced by Kodak in 1935 and was the first commercially successful colour film and my choice over the years that I used film.

When I look back ……….. fondly!

sources Mashable, Wikipedia and You Tube

If you are questioning your teacher …..

My nephew Martin “Magic” Johnson travels the world as a professional drummer and just like a sailor has a girl in each port, he seems to have a drum kit in every city.

In the following video he explains his strategy to learning. Filmed during a Q&A session at a drum clinic in South Africa in 2009, he explains how he learnt from his first drum teacher – he says:

“find a teacher you have a great respect for and absorb everything they do”

“if you are questioning your teacher then question yourself and if you are still questioning your teacher, after that then find another teacher”…
“the best thing a teacher can give you is that kind of inspiration”….
“if you are going to fake it, fake it convincingly”

This is a very interesting video in many respects, his philosophy, certainly his skill!  Watch him play one handed!  and his sense of reality.  Way  To Go Mart!

“the best thing a teacher can give you is that kind of
inspiration”

 

Mr Noisy in action - “The one that got away”

http://martinmagicjohnson.com