Return to Vinyls

Marvin Gaye is certainly a well known Motown star. You may know a bit about the tragic story of his life and death. But you probably do not know all the details and the struggles he went through. Nor the vast catalogue of his many hit records. Add to that all the changes Gaye’s music went through as American society changed in the 1960s and 1970s. And I bet you have never heard any of R&B singer David Porter’s albums on Stax records. Which is amazing because you no doubt do know his songs. But

This episode looks at Time Outtakes‚ a Vinyl, CD and download from Brubeck Editions of just that - outtakes of the famous Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out sessions. The album comes from an earlier recording session where they were still ironing out the details that would become Time Out and Take Five. It is a chance to look further at the process of building the album and explore and compare the original release with this release of alternative outtakes. It is an interesting dive into the creative

Color may not be the first thing you think of with music. But it is there hiding in plain site. Western music is based on the Chromatic Scale from the Greek, chrôma, meaning color. Think of a piano with white and black keys. If you follow through both the white and black keys (the flats and sharps) you get 12 equal pitches — that is the Chromatic Scale. The term Chromatic goes back to the Greeks and was refined in the Renaissance. Or the notion of color in music can be used in the sense that visual

Rhythm and Blues, or R&B as it is normally referred to, emerged on the music scene in the early 1950s. By the early 1960s R&B, particularly that coming out of Detroit from Barry Gordy’s Tabla and Motown labels was popular across a broad spectrum of music. But as the Beatles and British invasion music begin to dominate the pop charts, R&B took a turn from the heavily orchestrated Motown sound of groups like the Supremes and Temptations to deeper soul music. Wilson Pickett was one of the

The thing about a great work of art, a true masterpiece, be it music, visual art or literature is that the person or the people who created it generally had no idea that it would take on a life of its own. The song Take Five and the Dave Brubeck jazz album Time Out were both huge commercial hits. Released in December of 1959 Time Out was the number two selling album in the country in November 1961. Why the almost two year gap? That's what we are here to find out. It is a fascinating story.