Category: Music

I mentioned that I got a copy of Özel Türkbaş’s album How To Make Your Husband A Sultan: Belly Dance with Özel Türkbaş this weekend.

I know, you’re saying, Did he buy this album because he likes to sample music in foreign languages, and this one was only fifty cents, or did he buy this album because it has a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWoC)? The answer is yes.

The record comes from 1972 which is (counts his rings) forty-nine years ago. It includes some Turkish/Arabic music and a small booklet that includes basic belly dancing directions (swing your hips in time to the music, turn your hands parallel to the ground, bend backwards, wear finger cymbals, basically). I certainly couldn’t do it based on the books; heaven knows I need to take martial arts classes for almost a decade to gain basic competency in body control. Besides, if I wanted to learn belly dancing, I would talk to my cousin, one of the pretty ones, who is a belly dancer and a yoga instructor (one of the benefits of the large family: A cousin for every conversation). But, of course, I’m the husband in my personal situation, so I am the sultanee in the scientific formula and/or recipe.

At any rate, although Özel passed away in 2012, her family keeps alive an official Website offering her bio and theoretically a shop with merchandise, although that link doesn’t currently work. So maybe the site is not being kept alive but instead has a prepaid hosting plan lasting some years. I expect that’s what will happen with me some day, gentle reader.

But I digress. The site and YouTube have a video of her appearance on the Dinah Shore show where she belly dances and then cooks a meal:

She wrote a cookbook and owned a restaurant with her husband at some point.

I’ll drop some stills of Mrs. Türkbaş below the fold.

Continue reading “Strangely, It Is Not An Album About Middle Eastern Court Politics” →

Well, all right, I don’t know that guy, but I see his face on a lot of record covers here at Nogglestead.

One of my current projects is hunting down an article in Newsweek from the mid-1970s. I don’t know the year. I don’t know the month. So I’m accruing some old magazines to try to find it.

In one issue from 1975, as I was flipping through the magazine looking for the article, I came across a picture and story about Herb Alpert:

He seems to be a good guy, and he goes way back being a good guy.

He recently posted on Facebook the question, “Who would you like to see in concert when things are normal?” or something like that. To be honest, I would very much like to see him in concert again, although I should probably have to travel to do it.

We went to the fairgrounds on Saturday, which is half price day at the semi-annual book sale, and I managed to find a few records. By Saturday, or perhaps all week, they were down to something like twelve or sixteen boxes/crates of records, which is less than half of what they often have on the dollar records side, but I still managed to pick up a few.

The gleanings include:

• The Baja Marimba Band Rides Again by the Baja Marimba Band. I think I already have this one, but at 50 cents per, I got it just in case I did not.
• Pete Fountain’s Crescent City by Pete Fountain
• Fowl Play by the Baja Marimba Band. I bought several by this band, as you will see.
• Environments: Totally New Concepts in Sound Disc 8, a soundscape record with Wood-Masted Sailboat and A Country Stream.
• Environments: Totally New Concepts in Sound Disc 4, with Ultimate Thunderstorm (no word on if it’s almost as good as Passion Storm, but time will tell) and Gentle Rain in a Pine Forest. To be honest, I am not sure when I will actually listen to these.
• Saxaphone Christmas from Nashville
• Melanie by Melanie. There were several copies.
• When You Hear Lou, You’ve Heart It All by Lou Rawls. Several Lou Rawls records available. Where were R&B fans all week?
• Coming Out by the Manhattan Transfer.
• Vocalese by the Manhattan Transfer. To be honest, I’m not the biggest fan, but who can pass them up at fifty cents?
• So Rare by Boots Randolph. It must be true; I haven’t seen this record before.
• A Very Merry Christmas Volume 3, a compilation.
• “Do we need any more Christmas records?” my beautiful wife asked, and the woman counting the platters got to Christmas Disco by P.K. & The Sound Explosion. Not any more!
• The Best of Chuck Mangione by Chuck Mangione, a two record set. Since I started collecting Mangione after Christmas, I have been fortunate to find so many.
• Breezin’ by George Benson. I have this one already, but I think mine skips.
• Freetime by Spyro Gyra.
• Space by George Benson.
• Beyond the Blue Horizon by George Benson.
• Jukin’ by the Manhattan Transfer and Gene Pistilli.
• Pure Gold Benny Goldman.
• The Best of Tommy Dorsey by Tommy Dorsey.
• Shirley Bassey Is Really “Something” by Shirley Bassey. Jeez, what one does under the influence of a single Mark Steyn column from likely a decade ago.
• The Dukes of Dixieland featuring Pete Fountain.
• The Best of Henry Mancini Volume 3
• This Is Al Hirt by Al Hirt. Not a big fan of the Dixieland jazz sound, but, hey, fifty cents.
• Pronto Monto by Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Which apparently is Canadian folk rock from the 1970s and not a novelty record.
• Close-Up by Jackie Gleason. My lead over you in number of Jackie Gleason records grows.
• The Genius of Jean-Pierre Rampal, the flutist.
• Heart to Heart by David Sanborn. Lots of good light jazz to be had, and I have it now.
• White Christmas by Pat Boone. Can one have too many Christmas records? I think not! Although I do not buy all of them I see, as they’re plentiful at book sales. And of all the records, they look to be the most heavily used and abused, but that could be because the children are allowed to put them on, and something like Lou Rawls and David Sanborn goes on the record player when Mommy and Daddy are alone after the children have gone to bed–and how would you feel about a little brother or sister?
• Steve Miller K.C. Big Band, apparently a big band from Kansas City. Worth fifty cents, or consider it the GO half of BOGO for a dollar.
• The Magic of Zamfir, the master of the pan flute.
• Don’t Give Up by Brass Impact Singers. Apparently, the band from the Ozark Bible College and no relation to Walter Kime’s band.
• Tell Them by Brass Impact Singers. Both discs are collections of gospel/hymns, so I can play them on Sunday mornings when I have misplaced my Swedish Gospel Singers record. Which is often.
• Life Is Music by The Ritchie Family.
• No Time To Lose by Andrae Crouch. R&B?
• For Animals Only by the Baja Marimba Band.
• Christmas Time in Carol and Song with Leontyne Price and Arthur Fiedler, but most importantly with special guests Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. So this is worth the whole trip.
• Christmas Joy by George Melachrino and His Orchestra. Okay, maybe I did buy several Christmas records, but most of them were by artists that I already accumulate. And Pat Boone. And disco.
• The Christmas Sound of Music, a Collector’s Limited Edition from B.F. Goodrich. From when people got Christmas records from their tire store. I got this because it has Ella Fitzgerald on the cover, and I have not found her Christmas work in the wild otherwise.
• In Flight by George Benson.
• How To Make Your Husband A Sultan: Belly Dance with Özel Türkbaş. “No pressure,” I said to my beautiful when it passed through the counter’s hands. I don’t think she saw what it was.
• Beautiful Noise by Neil Diamond. You really don’t see Neil Diamond records in the wild for as popular as he was. Or maybe dealers are coming through before half price day and snapping them up.
• Waitress in a Donut Shop by Maria Muldaur. The influence of Charles Hill lives on. Also, on a trivia note, I saw when I searched Kate and Anna McGarrigal (above) that Kate provides some background vocals on one of the songs.
• Sketches by Skitch by Skitch Henderson and His Orchestra. I have no idea what this is, but the young man looks very earnest on the cover.
• Their Shining Hour by the Dorsey Brothers.
• Saxsational by Boots Randolph.
• Bits and Pieces by Rod McKuen. You can always find some Rod McKuen at these things.
• The Magic of the Melachrino Strings.
• Flutes Front & Center by Ray Rasch and the Pipers 10. Pretty sure I already have it, but for fifty cents, I picked it up in case not.
• Spark of Love by Lenny Williams. Looks to be R&B. Sometimes, I like to take a flyer on buying some artist I’ve never heard of; sometimes, I really, really like them and get a bunch. Which would be a sad thing if I really like this, as I am pretty sure I have never seen other works by the artist. Of course, now that I have this one, I will probably see them all over, kind of like Phoebe Snow (whose debut album I could have had a third copy of for a buck, further bringing down the average cost of them, but I demurred).
• Too Much! by a very young Lou Rawls.
• Is It Still Good To Ya by Ashford and Simpson.

Whew. That’s 53 new records/2-record sets that I somehow have to jam into my record shelves. The console stereo has a little bunker that can hold maybe ten or twenty; it looks like I’ll have to make use of it.

Best of all, the total cost here was like $30, or less than a silly lark of a handicraft.

Where one links to a humor piece entitled AN FAQ ABOUT YOUR NEW BIRTH CONTROL: THE MUSIC OF RUSH and one feels compelled to add:

In case you’ve never heard of Rush, you really should. Seriously, love ’em or hate ’em, you’re incomplete if you haven’t heard at least a few of their songs.

What a world we now live in!

(Side note: The three Rush songs on my gym playlist: “Fly By Night”, “Roll the Bones”, and “Dreamline”–coincidentally, what 97 QFM was playing in 1991, when Roll the Bones was something of a comeback album even though the band had not really been away.)

I have given my oldest son a number of Pink Floyd albums (The Wall, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here) for Christmas to hopefully helpfully forestall the day when one has to explain which one’s Pink. (The lad asked me the other day, “Waters or Gilmour?” probably to like the opposite one better–teenagers!)

I know, that’s two music posts in a row. But, c’mon, man, you’re not here for the hot takes on news and politics, ainna?

How black artists are breaking country music’s color barrier

Me, I can’t see color on the radio, but that’s not important. Equity is. And:

Still, country music isn’t exactly woke yet.

Geez Ashlyn Louise. Modern country music is broken enough already without being woke.

Like my books, I tend to prefer my country music from the 20th century.

I got two $25 gift certificates to Relics Antique Mall for Christmas. Relics’ gift certificates are unique in two ways to Relics’ favor: They expire in a mere six months, and you have to spend the total amount on the gift certificate as they give no change and they’re not gift cards that can carry a balance.

I had a couple of minutes between picking up the oldest from his after school activity and picking up the youngest from his after school activity, so I stopped by to see if I could find anything. When I was in during the Christmas season, I had spotted a set of fencing equipment which I believe had two vests, two helmets, four gloves, and two foils, and I would have been all over that if I saw it again. I mistakenly thought I had two $30 gift certificates, so I thought I would almost afford the fencing set which was $75 if memory serves. But I didn’t see it. I started browsing records though, thinking if I could find $30 in records in fifteen minutes, I would spend one of the certificates, and if I only found a couple bucks’ worth of records, I’d pay.

Well, as I have lamented before, record prices have been rising. Not so fast for the old and the obscure stuff I like as much as for more popular fare, but where records would have been a couple bucks a couple years ago, now they’re five dollars and way, way up.

Still, I was playing with house money. And in about twenty minutes, I found enough to spend both certificates.

I got:

• Torch Songs for Trumpet by Doc Severinson and His Orchestra.
• Catching the Sun by Spyro Gyra.
• All Access, a two record live album it looks like, by Spyro Gyra.
• Hollywood Byrd by Charlie Byrd. A jazz musician who the people who price records for antique malls don’t seem to have heard of as both his records were on the low end of the price scale.
• The Touch of Gold by Charlie Byrd. Of course, both records are ‘pops’ more than jazz maybe.
• One of Those Songs by the Fluegel Knights. It looks to be a compilation; the name would seem to indicate a fluegelhorn somewhere, ainna?
• Here’s Jody by Jody Miller. She looks very country, but she’s PWOC (Pretty Woman On Cover), and the record has a version of “Won’t You Stay (Just A Little Bit Longer)” that I want to hear.
• Organ Moods in Hi-Fi with Buddy Cole at the Pipe Organ. C’mon, man, can you have too many organ records? I mean, I have bought Klaus Wunderlich new on CD. You know how I would answer. Plus, this record was fifty cents.
• The Best of Tim Weisberg by Tim Weisberg. Two bucks; on the low end of the price scale, and I already have several Tim Weisberg albums. Again, I guess this is the obscure stuff I accumulate.
• Impressions for Flute by Ransom Wilson. He looks much more serious than Tim Weisberg.
• A Nonesuch record with works by Francis Poulenc. I have no idea who he is, but I know Nonesuch records.
• Around the World by Frankie Carle.
• Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione. Because it has a better cover than the other one that I recently bought at another antique mall.
• Golden Classics by Ace Cannon.

I carefully estimated and thought I’d picked out about $65 in records (profligately). It was only when I got to the register that I re-discovered my gift certificates were for $50 total. But with the discounts applied, the total came to $53 something.

Which means that the records I got only cost me $4. Many of them came with their own mylar sleeves, which is further savings.

However, as my recent tidying of my record shelving has indicated, I really need to build more shelving. Especially with the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale coming up later this month with its fifty cent records on the Saturday. Ay, if only I had a pickup truck to easily haul lumber.

On Facebook, Jane Monheit touts that her new album, released last week, is doing well:

Which led me to wonder, Who is Veronica Swift?

A “prodigy” of jazz, the child of jazz musicians, who recorded her first album at the age of nine. Now she’s 26 and has a new album out.

I ordered it. Of course, the new Monheit album is also on order. Which means my musical balance is way out of whack lately. And, given that I’m ordering a lot from artists’ Web sites, it will be harder for me to track them down since they’re not all on my Amazon orders list.

Apparently, the musical fiscal year has changed or something–the local Jack radio station (best of the 80s, 90s, and today, where “today” presumably covers the last twenty years) has started playing some different songs–which I will hear over and over as I work the dial for the next year.

Including “Unskinny Bop” by Poison:

Eesh, that song is from Flesh and Blood. In 1990. That song is 31 years old.

I saw Poison twice on that tour: Once at the Milwaukee Arena with Warrant and once at Summerfest.

I need to refactor my listening to contemporary music and to old music from the 1940s through the 1960s and leave a big doughnut hole in the playlist for the music from when I was young because the calculations are making me feel my age.

So, yesterday, Kim du Toit extolled the virtues of symphonic metal, recommending the works of Nightwish (both Floor and Tarja), Epica, Ayreon, Within Temptation, and Battle Beast (I happened to be listening to their eponymous album whilst reading his post).

No mention of Semblant (whose album Obscura I listened to before the Battle Beast, and who properly is classified as Brazilian death metal, but Mizuho Lin was also trained classically) or Amaranthe.

Also, no pictures, which is unlike him.

So I will remedy that.

Elize Ryd, Amaranthe	Mizuho Lin, Semblant	Sharon van Adel, Within Temptation	Noora Louhimo, Battle Beast

Also, let us not forget that Amaranthe’s “82nd All The Way” is the best Swedish band cover of another Swedish band’s (Sabaton’s) song about American Congressional Medal of Honor winner Alvin York you’ll hear all day:

Or, as I like to call it, The Plank Song, because when it comes on at the gym, I have to stop what I’m doing to try to do a plank through the whole song. I’m not there yet.

As you know, gentle reader, I received a gift certificate from a real record shop for Christmas and went to spend it over the holidays. Was that only two weeks ago? Man, it seems like a long, long time ago.

At any rate, I had just bought a couple Chuck Mangione albums three days earlier while redeeming gift cards with the children, so I was clearly in the mood. But I didn’t find Feels So Good, the album that contains the nine-minute version of the hit song which WSIE plays from time-to-time and what I consider the epitome of light 1970s chill music.

Well, I had a little time to kill yesterday before picking my youngest up from an afterschool activity. Instead of going to Hooked on Books, I went to the nearby antique mall flea market, Ozarks Treasures, to walk off a half hour. I figured if nothing else, I might find some Christmas gifts for 2021’s survivors.

But I found Feels So Good. For $2.

Someone has written TNT over his mouth; they did not selectively blacken teeth. Which is a subtly less offensive defacing.

I might have flipped past this record several times in 2019 and 2020 and only consciously discovered it now as I am building up my Chuck Mangione collection.

The guy behind the counter recognized Chuck Mangione, but only because the cashier said Chuck Mangione played himself in the cartoon King of the Hill several times over that shows run (which ended 10 years ago, old man). Which probably explains why the fellow at the record store recognized the name Chuck Mangione but not the album Feels So Good or the song by the same name. Ay. I am an old man: recognizing the old musicians for their music and not their appearances in animated television shows.

At any rate, a word about the antique mall/flea market market: I have noticed over the late Christmas shopping season and this trip that the stores have a higher than normal number of empty booths. Perhaps the new normal temporarily until these places go out of business completely, the next new normal. The number of booths with records was smaller, too, weighted a bit more heavily to booths with $10 common records versus $2 common records. I saw piles of video media, some booths with DVDs at $1 or $2 (cheaper than buying them at a defunctuating video store, but not the same experience browsing) and some booths with VHS cassettes at $10. So less to look over overall, but still, one always has the chance of finding a steal like I did yesterday.

Well, now I have done it.

I mentioned in December that I had heard a song on WSIE sung by Charles Glenn, the former St. Louis Blues hockey national anthem singer–although to be honest, I kind of missed the Charles Glenn era, attending the majority of my games when Edward Curtis, the previous national anthem singer, held the office.

I thought I would buy the album it was on if I could find it, and a couple of Internet searches could not identify the source. I suppose I could have reached out to WSIE, but, c’mon, man, it was a passing fancy.

But sometime between the original post in December and an allusion to the song in a January post, the name of the album appeared on the Soundcloud post. Or maybe it was always there and I just didn’t see it. Regardless, I visited Soundcloud to hear the song, and in another round of searching, I found a copy of it available.

Which arrived today.

Nominally, it’s Larry Barker’s, the pianist’s, album with Charles Glenn providing the vocals on a number of tracks. It’s fourteen songs:

1. “The Character of God”
2. “John 4:24”
3. “Octavius”
4. “All Hail The Power of Jesus’ Name”
5. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”
6. “The Very Thought Of You”
7. “Deep and Wide”
8. “O Lord, Draw Near”
9. “Lord, I Give My Praise To You”
10. “Ray of Hope”
11. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”
12. “My Attorney Bernie”
13. “On the Street Where You Live”
14. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness”

So it’s got a couple of jazz standards, a couple of jazz piano numbers, but it’s mostly hymns, albeit jazzy hymns.

I’ve already listened to it and have passed it onto my beautiful wife because I think she’ll enjoy it.

And I’ve already taken a moment to taunt the Internet that I own this rather collectible bit which I bought from a bookstore in Michigan, apparently, that did not know what it had.

Sure, who here hasn’t confused Royal Blood:

with Royal Bliss?

I mean, they don’t even sound alike.

But the local rock radio station has been playing them both, and when the former came on the radio, and I mentioned I liked it, kind of, to my beautiful wife who was trapped in the car with me, a couple of teenagers, and a pre-teen. I was very careful and only ninety percent sure I got the name right.

But I did.

And I bought the single “Trouble Coming”–I would have bought the whole album, but it’s not out yet. Which is just as well.

I will leave it to speculate, gentle reader, which is actually the British Royal family and which is the guy and his American wife who left because they didn’t like the attention, only to spend all of their time trying to get attention.

So I was looking at Semblant’s latest album, Obscura on Amazon and really thought about buying it since their penultimate album is available for $1000, and I even added it to my cart before signing in. I know, everyone is signed into everything all the time except the crazy conspiracy people on the Internet like me. Or, Web software testers who clear their cache and cookies several times a day.

And I got this recommendation from Amazon:

C’mon, man. Amazon, you know I already bought Manifest, Abyss, and Human. :||: Nature.

Of course, Amazon is playing coy, as though it is not using advanced and shady tracking techniques to monitor my every move, click, and time my eyes focus on something in the virtual world and maybe the real one.

Although the recommendation did lead me to Ad Infinitum, which might be worth a listen.

The lead singer, Melissa Bonny, a Swiss miss, looked kind of familiar. Which made me wonder where I’d seen her before. Oh, she’s also in Rage of Light, whom I’ve heard before:

Kind of like Nicoletta Rosellini is in both Kalidia and Walk in Darkness. Even down to the band itself wearing masks.

I have to say, I’m a bit topped up on symphonic metal presently. I’m more looking for numbers I can put on my gym playlist; as I’m going several days a week for an hour or so per, I’m rolling through my existing playlist fairly frequently.

But YouTube’s suggestions are just as amusing:

Semblant, Rage of Light, Accept, Warkings, and…. An Abbott and Costello bit?

I think the algorithms and artificial intelligence is just playing dumb so we don’t know the Internet is alive.

For Christmas, my beautiful wife gave me a gift card for $60 to an actual record store downtown, and after taking down the Christmas decorations and cleaning the house, I headed out in the snow to go.

I haven’t been in an actual dedicated record store in…. well, probably since the 1980s, when the music stores were predominantly record stores. This shop, Stick It In Your Ear, has mostly used records but also some new titles–which, as you might know, run $25 or more. So I was prepared to run through the gift card quickly.

Also, browsing Vintage Stock, the antique malls, or the book sales pretty much means flipping through uncategorized, jumbled collections of records and being sometimes pleased with what you find. An organized record shop means I would have to think of an artist first and then look to see if the store had the artist and what by the artist.

I got over my trepidation and went in. And found more than I expected at the worst.

I saw the Chuck Mangione section pretty clearly, but I had trouble finding the Herb Alpert section. I mean, what was he? Jazz? No. 80s/90s? No. Pop? No. He was in the 50s and 60s section along with the bubblegum pop from that era. I had all of the records except the live album Main Event that he did with Hugh Maskela. I had heard a song from this record on WSIE and went looking for it, but it was pretty expensive on Amazon at the time. But I got it for $8.

I could not figure out where Eydie Gorme might be, and so I returned to the Chuck Mangione selection. I mean, it’s only been a matter of days since I got my first Mangione albums, and I wanted more. They had plenty; I got Journey to a Rainbow, Friends & Love (the Chuck Mangione Quartet), Main Squeeze, Eyes of the Veiled Temptress, and the eponymous Chuck Mangione Quartet album.

I did the calculations, and I had a couple albums’ worth of money left, so I got two by trumpeter Maynard Ferguson: Body & Soul and Trumpet Rhapsody.

The records ranged between $4 and $10, which is to say about what they run at the antique malls. So maybe I’ll drop in at the record shop more often. Or maybe I just like hunting for $1 or $3 steals more than buying records on their own.

But the Chuck Mangione records led to a slightly comedic exchange through mandatory speech mufflers.

The record store guy, flipping through and calculating the total: “Ah, Chuck,” as though he was familiar with the oeuvre.
“No Feels So Good,” I said.
“So you came out and bought some records,” he said.
After a beat, I replied, “You don’t have Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione.”
“If we did, it would be in the Chuck Mangione section.”
But I wasn’t asking it as a question.

Ah, well.

I have listened to some of them, but I forget which ones.

I guess I will have to listen to them all over again.

And probably hold off on the record buying until I build another set of record shelving.