Something a little different (a bit of a trademark of ours) as we took a look at the songs of Tom Waits. Hugh put this one together, and I was as interested as anyone else, having not followed the man at all, and being only sort of aware of him, largely because of his very recognisable voice.
It was a great show, and I came away more impressed than I’d expected. Many thanks to those who joined us on the plaza, and those who just listened in.

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Part 2 of our Dave Pegg coverage contained a goodly number of side trips into collaborative work as well as some great stuff from his later Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention appearances.  I filled in some of the gaps left in part 1 by getting hold of two or three missing albums – Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter among them.  I was very pleased with the final playlist, and we had a good audience too – many thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Tom, “A Little Light Music” is thoroughly recommended 🙂

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Happy New Year to all our listeners 🙂

Our first show of 2020 began just as the cavern was recovering from a problem, and people had trouble getting in and staying in once there.  Nevertheless, we had a larger audience than expected, 25 for much of the time.

2019 ended up as a very crowded year, with a lot of people we wanted to pay tribute to.  One, surf guitarist Dick Dale, appeared only in the pre-show.  In contrast, Hal Blaine, the drummer who was part of the Wrecking Crew, appeared in five tracks all three sections, befitting his extensive career.

I seem to have mangled the Brazilian Portuguese pronunciations of João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s names.  Apologies to our Portuguese and South American listeners, I’ve been away and looked them up.

João Gilberto should be jzohao(n) DZheel-BAER-to.  The J is soft, close to the French J in Jean, and the ão should end with a faint nasal (n).  The G in Gilberto is soft, and the emphasis is on the second syllable.

Jobim – Jzo-BEEM  also has the softer J and emphasis on the second syllable.  I bet I’ll forget this the next time I have to pronounce their names…

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The show as such went well, but the Cavern was down, so the events scheduled after the show could not go as planned. We decided to add more post-show music for as long as people would listen. In the end, we played the complete albums Colors of a New Dawn and Lotus Land by Gandalf before the MOULa login server came back up.

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An excellent show put together by Hugh that had us re-thinking our concept of Elton John.  Some great cover versions by other artists too.

We had an internet connection failure partway through, and had to reconnect.  And in that connection I should mention that, should we suddenly disappear in mid-broadcast, it may well be an Internet connection issue, which we have to resolve by restarting something. That will break your connection to the broadcast, so you should try to restart or reconnect your browser or music player, since we always continue the broadcast one way or another – and we have many ways.

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Possibly suffering from being too close to Thanksgiving, part 1 of our look at the career of bassist Dave Pegg was a little more sparsely attended than usual. However, we enjoyed it, as did everyone who listened in, so it turned out well.  We covered the period up to the beginnings of his tenure in Jethro Tull, and will finish the work sometime next year.

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The concluding part of our examination of the Chicago band’s evolution was put together by Hugh, who is much more familiar with it than I am, not to mention more accepting.  A failing on my part which I came to regret on listening to the selections here, and I’m now re-listening to the whole of Chicago’s history again.

Pre and post show selections were from a Chicago Christmas album (one of four), the 1999 Live in Concert album and from the slightly unrepresentative set of Big Band covers entitled Night and Day, which was assembled in a hurry to cover up for the sudden disfavour shown to Stone of Sisyphus by the record label.  We put Stone of Sisyphus back in its proper place as Chicago 22…

The latest Chicago album was released on October 11th 2019 and is their fourth Christmas album, simply titled Chicago Christmas.  Were it to be numbered, it would be Chicago XXXVII.  It was recorded during their 2019 tour using a mobile studio setup, but is not a live album.

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Some fumbling with the DST shift in Europe meant that our announced show time in the US kept changing, but we still had a good audience for the second of our Miles Davis shows.  This one covered a great deal of ground, too, from ’55 to ’85 including Kind of Blue, In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

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For our first look at this band, we covered their first years, up to the death of guitarist Terry Kath.  That covers a lot of ground, eleven albums in eight years, with a lot of change.

The preshow and postshow contained a couple of the long suites of songs that were a feature of their early years, but would have been too long for the main show.

Since I talked a lot about the covers, I’ve linked images of them to the album names.  The ones we missed out are Chicago at Carnegie Hall, which is number 4 in the sequence (White Tile), and Chicago IX – Chicago’s Greatest Hits (Painted Billboard)

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We do try to keep you on your toes with different types of show, and this was one of them, looking at big bands in the modern era.  Put together by Hugh, we had an excellent playlist and a good audience too – hope to see you all again.

The preshow consisted of tracks from the Duke Ellington album whose name was shared by the show.

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