Word: pianos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Through The Morning is about fifty percent hard core country music, expertly performed. Doug Dillard comes from a family of bluegrass musicians and plays banjo, fiddle and guitar more than competently. David Jackson, bass, piano, and cello, scales down the harshness of the other instruments: and Jon Corneal (drums) gives the music the rhythmic patterns of rock. Sneaky Pete, listed as a "Special Picker," plays a very fine steel guitar, sometimes mimicking Clark's mouthharp or the piano, sometimes taking the role of lead guitar...
...style. "So Sad," and Everly Brothers tune which was soggily sentimental in the original, becomes much more alive with a rock background. Lennon and McCartney's "Don't Let Me Down" also comes off with considerably more personality than the original, with some very effective slide guitar and piano work...
Edgar Varese's Octandre (1924), one of the two modern works, did not compare favorably with Stravinsky's pivotal Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1959), with Harvard's Luise Vosgerchian as soloist. Octandre, for seven winds and contrabass, seemed individual but not highly original, consisting of some explorations of the percussive possibilities of wind articulation, propulsive rhythms, and generally uninteresting timbres. The piece seems much less provocative than the contemporary experiments of Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Cowell. The Movements, however, a strictly twelve-tone piece, is characterized by pellucid, crystalline registration, pointillistic rhythmical control, and Stravinsky's unique unsentimental lvricism...
Stylistically, The Band is Country and Western rock, with mandolin, jew's harp, and some very funky ragtime piano to hint at the down home atmosphere, while drums, organ, and electric guitar give the music a drive which CandW does not possess. The album is technically sound and it is the kind of music you can hum in your mind when you're falling asleep in lecture. Each cut is very professionally arranged and performed to project the atmosphere which the Lyrics describe. As a unit then, the Band works. But judged according to standards set by people like Cream...
...melody lines and the whole thing still makes beautiful sense. Or how else to explain the presence of "Oh Darling" on the album, a song which would have been no more than a flat 1950's period piece if not for the breathtaking ripples of drums and piano that accent it? All the music on Abbey Road is vaguely familiar in broad outline but it might as well have not been for all the good it does anyone trying to put the album down for that reason...