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Hooteroll? & The Forest Play The 5 Spot This Saturday!
Saturday, April 9, 2022 at 6 pm
The 5 Spot, 1006 Forrest Avenue, Nashville 37206
$10
I’m back in Nashville this week – we attended a beautiful wedding yesterday, and this week will be filled with family, friends, and rehearsals for another highlight of my year: The Forest joins Hooteroll? once again for a Saturday night performance at East Nashville’s iconic venue The 5 Spot. (more…)
Hooteroll? & The Forest Ride Again
Saturday, November 13, 2021 at 6 pm
The 5 Spot, 1006 Forrest Avenue, Nashville 37206
$10 / COVID restrictions apply
click images to enlarge
Although the upheavals of the last two years have brought many difficulties and challenges to my life, as they have to everyone else’s, there have also been some silver linings. Any major dude will tell you.
This is the story of a silver lining.
The Forest, our band formed initially in 2018 to perform Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, reunites for a double bill with Hooteroll? at Nashville’s The 5 Spot on November 13, 2021. This will be the first time I’ve performed with The Forest since we performed with Hooteroll? at The 5 Spot on July 20, 2019, on the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk. (more…)
Rain Music
Cliffs at Pourville Rain 1896 by Claude Monet (1840-1926)
It has been raining here for weeks. The rivers are overflowing their banks, school districts all over the region canceled classes yesterday because of flooding, and all of us who work downtown are watching the water rise anxiously.
It is difficult to escape a sense a déjà vu as memories of the 2010 flood that devastated our city resurface and fears that history could repeat itself arise.
As I drove into town this morning to produce our annual concerto competition, I found myself thinking about all of the music about rain that has been a part of my life.
The Forest presents Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Part 2
The Forest at The Barbershop Theater, Nashville, October 31, 2018. (l to r) WB, Kate Atanian, Ryan Middagh, Eric Brewer, Andrew Guinn, Mario Galati, Michael McLemore, Alex Blizniak, Danesa Harper, Kari Leigh Ames, Brian Hull (click images to enlarge)
Continued from Part 1
Taking it apart in order to put it all together
Concurrent with all the logistics and planning for the show’s “big picture”, I spent time last summer trying to figure out exactly what keyboards I would need to be able to play the show and how they would be set up.
The Forest presents Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Part 1
The Forest performs Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon at The Barbershop Theater, November 1, 2018 (l to r) Michael McLemore, Alex Blizniak, Eric Brewer, Andrew Guinn, Danesa Harper, Kate Atanian, Walter Bitner, Ryan Middagh (click images to enlarge)
In 2018, I found myself playing in a rock band for the first time in over thirty years. This is what happened!
On The Dark Side of the Moon Part 3
continued from
On The Dark Side of the Moon
Part 2
The Dark Side of the Moon
Side B
Money
The sound effects loop that Roger Waters made in his garden shed from coins jangling, paper ripping, and other cash-related sounds begins the B side of The Dark Side of the Moon, followed almost immediately by Water’s driving bass line – one of the most distinctive and instantly recognizable in the history of rock. Money was Pink Floyd’s most successful single from the album, and like many rock hits, it is based on a twelve-bar blues. The resemblance ends there, however: Money is set in the dark and serious key of B minor, with seven beats to the bar.
Money‘s three verses are a cocky paean to greed, a caricature of capitalist values. Waters lays the irony on thickly: clearly living one’s life in pursuit of money for its own sake or for the luxuries that great wealth can bring may interfere with the attempt to live consciously. Do greed and a distraction with materialism proceed from the irrational part of human nature?
On The Dark Side of the Moon Part 2
continued from
On The Dark Side of the Moon
Part 1
The Dark Side of the Moon
Side A
Speak To Me
The opening track is a brief sound collage, little more than a minute long, which introduces and foreshadows some of the album’s themes in the manner of an overture. The opening heartbeat draws the listener into an intimate relationship with the music from the very beginning. It is nearly half a minute before snippets of sounds hint at what’s to come: clocks ticking (Time), a cash register (Money), the rotor sound effect (On The Run), lunatic laughter, and the first spoken words “I’ve been mad for fucking years, absolutely years” introduce the album’s primary themes as the sounds overlap, increase in volume, and build to a climax that features a woman screaming into
On The Dark Side of the Moon Part 1
“All you touch and all you see
is all your life will ever be.”
~ Roger Waters, Breathe
Forty-five years after its release, Pink Floyd‘s monumental The Dark Side of the Moon remains the most important musical document on the human condition in the history of rock music. It is arguably the most important musical recording ever made to address its subject matter: universal humanist themes that include the finite compass of human experience, the passage of time, death, greed, conflict, insanity, and the irrational.
Pictures at an Exhibition
Viktor Hartmann: Plan for a City Gate in Kiev, watercolor, 1869
Modest Mussorgsky (1839 – 1881) was a Russian composer best known today for a few celebrated works, including Night on Bald Mountain – a musical depiction of a “witches sabbath” most often played on Halloween programs and other programs depicting musical grotesqueries – and Boris Gudunov, an opera based on a drama by Pushkin: the butt of one of the first classical music jokes music majors learn in undergraduate school:
Q: Why did Mussorgsky only write one opera?
A: Because one Boris Gudunov.
His most beloved composition today is Pictures at an Exhibition, which was originally written as a large suite for solo piano but is best known to the listening public as a large-scale symphonic work in its orchestration by the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937).
Chris Squire 1948 – 2015
Chris Squire circa 1972 – from Fragile
Chris Squire, who laid down the bass line for much of the soundtrack of my adolescence, died yesterday of leukemia. He was 67.
Chris and Jon Anderson founded Yes in 1968. The band has gone through many permutations in personnel and evolution in style since then, but Chris has always been at the heart of the group. His unique sound, approach to playing bass, and contribution to crafting the group’s compositions have been an integral part of what makes Yes Yes. When Billy Sherwood joins the band on stage as bassist at the beginning of their North American Summer Tour in August, it will be the first time that Yes has ever performed without Chris since the band was formed 47 years ago.
Walter Bitner 