Parsons Playlists: Autumnal Mellow

Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today’s playlist is curated by Music Library associate Melanie and features some autumnal music.

Autumnal Mellow

It’s the autumnal equinox, which means that fall is officially upon us, so here is a playlist of some mellow tunes that make me think of the fall season.

Justin Hayward – “Forever Autumn”

Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong – “Autumn in New York”

Ben Folds Five – “Don’t Change Your Plans”

Harry Nilsson – “Everybody’s Talkin'”

Nat King Cole – “Autumn Leaves”

John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman – “Autumn Serenade”

The Neighbourhood – “Sweater Weather”

The White Stripes – “We’re Going To Be Friends”

Vince Guaraldi Trio – “Great Pumpkin Waltz”

girl in red – “We Fell in Love in October”

Billy Joel – “Vienna”

Bob Dylan – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”

Neil Young – “Harvest Moon”

The Moldy Peaches – “Anyone Else But You”

Carole King – “It’s Too Late”

Sting – “La Belle Dame Sans Regrets”

Paul McCartney – “Calico Skies”

King Harvest – “Dancing in the Moonlight”

Lindisfarne – “Lady Eleanor”

Dee Clark – “Raindrops”

Vince Guaraldi Trio – “Thanksgiving Theme”

Sting – “Soul Cake”

Van Morrison – “Moondance”

The Zombies – “Time of the Season”

Here is a link to the whole playlist on YouTube:

And here it is on Spotify:

Parsons Playlists: Holiday Mix

Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a selection of holiday music curated by Eli (class of 2024).

Tired of hearing the same few Christmas songs over and over? I’m not! But in case you do wish to branch out, here are ten Christmas songs you may not have heard.

Bumble Snow Monster

David Phelps – “Catching Santa”

Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters – “Mele Kalikimaka”

Stevie Wonder – “Someday At Christmas”

Sia – “Santa’s Coming For Us”

Mariah Carey ft. Ariana Grande & Jennifer Hudson – “Oh Santa!”

Paul McCartney – “Wonderful Christmastime”

Victor C. Johnson – “Stars I Shall Find”

Louis Armstrong – “Zat You, Santa Claus?”

Leslie Odom, Jr. – “The Christmas Waltz”

Stevie Wonder – “What Christmas Means To Me”

Here’s a link to the full playlist on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU94rco57ZewOxwXb5rdEE4pWs3vYSaue

Parsons Playlists: Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!: Fun with Non-Lexical Vocables

Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a collection called “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!: Non-Lexical Vocables” curated by Music Library associate Melanie Armstrong.

This playlist began as a discussion with a friend online a couple months ago. I had shared a song that I’d had stuck in my head and my friend said that it was their least favorite song by the group because (and I quote) “SHA LA LA is a terrible lyric 🙂”. The discussion that followed was all in good fun, but led me to want to research songs that have nonsense syllables in them just to prove that “sha la la” is NOT (necessarily) a terrible lyric.

scat singing notation

Vocals like “sha la la” in songs are called non-lexical vocables. Basically, they are nonsense syllables which may or may not be mixed together with meaningful text and they appear in all manner of different musics. This, of course, led to me being extra geeky and having a lot of fun creating a playlist highlighting a variety of different songs that use nonsense syllables in this way. In point of fact, it goes all the way back to at least the middle ages with songs using things like “fa la la” in them – but I decided to stick to more modern examples for playlist purposes. Which means this playlist starts with some scat singing (from circa the 1920s-1940s) and goes on from there.

Your mileage may vary in terms of your tolerance of the non-lexical vocable, but I maintain that sometimes one doesn’t need an actual word to create musical meaning and that non-lexical vocables can be super fun!

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five – “Heebie Jeebies”

Cab Calloway – “The Scat Song”

Ella Fitzgerald – “Blue Skies”

The Crew Cuts – “Sh-Boom”

Little Richard – “Tutti Frutti”

The Muppets – “Mah Na Mah Na”

The Jackson 5 – “ABC”

Suzanne Vega with DNA – “Tom’s Diner”

Primitive Radio Gods – “Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand”

Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps – “Be Bop A Lula”

Louis Prima & Phil Harris – “I Wanna Be Like You”

The Del-Vikings – “Come Go With Me”

Ben Folds Five – “Magic” (this is the song that triggered the whole list!)

Earth, Wind & Fire – “September”

Spice Girls – “Wannabe”

Tenacious D – “Classico”

Lady Gaga – “Bad Romance”

Bobby McFerrin & Chick Corea – “Song for Amadeus (Improvisation on Mozart’s Sonata No. 2 in F Major)”

The Beatles – “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da”

Mungo Jerry – “In The Summertime”

The Tokens – “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”

Wilson Pickett – “Land of 1000 Dances”

The Chips – “Rubber Biscuit”

Ben Folds – “Army” (Live at Roseland Ballroom New York, NY – June 2002)

The Beatles – “Hey Jude”

Here is a link to a YouTube playlist version: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU94rco57ZeyCsgxI0Edsp3YEZWPigCRX

And here is the playlist on Spotify:

Parsons Playlists: Halloween 2020

Welcome to the third installment of Parsons Playlists, back after a hiatus and featuring a Halloween playlist from Music Library Associate, Melanie Armstrong.

Halloween 2020

Melanie says: “Since Halloween 2020 is going to be a bit … different, I – your friendly neighborhood Music Library Associate – made a playlist in that vein.
I’ve left out some of the more obvious Halloween playlist picks (like “Thriller“, or “Spooky“, or “Ghostbusters“), and hope you’ll enjoy this idiosyncratic selection! I’ve included some songs for the Halloween blue moon (the first Halloween blue moon since 1944) among other things.”

Otis Redding – “Trick or Treat”

Billie Eilish – “Bury A Friend”

billie eilish

The Cramps – “I Was A Teenage Werewolf”

Missy Elliott – “Get Ur Freak On”

Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On

The Marcels – “Blue Moon”

(This doo-wop version is arguably the most famous version of “Blue Moon”, but it was written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in 1934!)

King Harvest – “Dancing in the Moonlight”

blue moon

Electric Light Orchestra – “Strange Magic”

Squirrel Nut Zippers – “Hell”

Vintage Halloween Dance

Van Halen – “Runnin’ With The Devil”
(in tribute to Eddie Van Halen who passed away this month)

Talking Heads – “Psycho Killer”

The Police – “Murder By Numbers”

Halloween dogs

The White Stripes – “Little Ghost”

Louis Armstrong – “The Skeleton in the Closet”

Le Squellette Joyeux

The Divine Comedy – “The Happy Goth”

They Might Be Giants – “Dead”

Groovie Ghoulies – “(She’s My) Vampire Girl”

Black Cat and Jack O'Lantern

Yoko Ono – “Yes, I’m A Witch”

Eels – “My Beloved Monster”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer stake

Billy Joel – “The Stranger”
(a song about masks feels EXTRA appropriate at the moment … plus fun with metaphors!)

R.E.M. – “It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”

And here it all is as a Spotify playlist for you:

Plus here’s a bonus (not available on Spotify) cheese-tacular Halloween artifact from the 1980s featuring the inimitable Tim Curry:

We sincerely hope that everyone has a safe & fun Halloween (despite the particular weirdness of 2020).

jack o lantern

YouTube playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU94rco57Zew8nvrzDii5yoNOsWmj69_s

Spider Sounds: “Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism”

Editor’s Note: “Spider Sounds” invites members of the University of Richmond community to share their thoughts about items in the Parsons Music Library’s collection. The links included will take you to the library catalog record for the item in question, or to additional relevant information.
Today’s installment of “Spider Sounds” comes courtesy of UR Music Department faculty member Dr. Gene Anderson. Dr. Anderson is the author of a number of articles about early jazz and the analysis of wind music. He has been kind enough to share a review of a recent biography about Louis Armstrong’s early career entitled Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. Thanks, Gene!

Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism
by Thomas David Brothers

Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism book cover

Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. By Thomas Brothers. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014.

It is difficult to imagine what more there is to know about Louis Armstrong. WorldCat lists over 9,000 works about the musician in over 17,000 publications scattered among libraries throughout the world. Besides two published autobiographies and dozens of unpublished autobiographical writings, Armstrong’s life has been recounted in a host of personal interviews, recollections by contemporaries and published biographies. Of the latter, Thomas Brothers’ Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism is the most recent, winning the 2014 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and becoming a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Master of Modernism is the third Armstrong-related book by Brothers, a Professor of Musicology at Duke University, preceded by an edited selection of Armstrong’s unpublished writings, Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words (1999), and Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006), of which this volume serves as a sequel.

The main thesis of Master of Modernism, which focuses on the period between Armstrong’s departure from New Orleans to join King Oliver’s Creole Band in 1922 to his successful transition into the swing era in the early 1930s, is that the trumpeter’s success “depended on his ability to skillfully negotiate the musical and social legacies of slavery,” and whose career, “can be understood as a response to these interlocking trajectories.” The fulfillment of such a thesis demands nothing short of a cultural history of the period, which Brothers eloquently and compellingly provides. Although the author contributes few new revelations to Armstrong’s well-known life story, he furnishes the most coherent narrative of these years to date by adding details and filling in chronological gaps by means of little-known archival photographs, first-person recollections from contemporaries and primary sources like black newspapers and periodicals.

Armstrong, armed with an exceptional ear, extraordinary memory and a nascent ability to read music, left his hometown with a thorough grounding in black vernacular music—its blues-infused aspects of collective improvisation, freak and obbligato playing (“playing second”) having been fostered variously by plantation music, the heterophonic singing of the Sanctified Church, King Oliver’s “monkeyshines” or “ragging the tune” to Manuel Perez’ leads, and the hawking of wares by street vendors, Lorenzo and Santiago. Most importantly, he was immersed in what Brothers calls the “fixed and variable model” of performance which “became the key ingredient in Armstrong’s mature style.”

Brothers concludes his investigation by summarizing the characteristics that made Armstrong a great melodist. The author’s stances on a few controversial issues have been addressed by others, but this exquisitely written and exhaustively researched work stands as an invaluable addition to the literature and will very likely come to be regarded, with its companion, Louis Armstrong in New Orleans, as the definitive study of Armstrong’s early career.

Spider Sounds

New CDs added in April!

New CDs for April 2016

Classical

Johannes Brahms – Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano
Karen Gottlieb – Music For Harp
Mitchell Lurie – Mitchell Lurie, Clarinet

Mitchell Lurie, Clarinet

Mozart/Beethoven – Quintets for Piano & Winds
Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach – Genius – Music of Johann Sebastian Bach & Antonio Vivaldi

Quintets for Piano & Winds

Pop/Rock/R&B

Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn – Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn
Big Sean – Dark Sky Paradise
Tamar Braxton – Calling All Lovers

Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn

Death Cab For Cutie – Kintsugi
Aretha Franklin – Aretha Sings The Blues
Jason Isbell – Something More Than Free

Aretha Sings The Blues

Jazz

Karrin Allyson – Many A New Day
Louis Armstrong – Blow Satchmo Blow
The Bad Plus – The Bad Plus Joshua Redman
The Bad Plus – The Rite Of Spring

The Bad Plus - The Rite of Spring

Terence Blanchard – Breathless
Michael Dease – Decisions
Chris Dingman – The Subliminal and the Sublime
Gil Evans Project – Lines Of Color

Michael Dease - Decisions

John Fedchock – Like It Is
Marshall Gilkes – Ko¨ln
Scott Hamilton & Jeff Hamilton Trio – Live In Bern
Lionel Hampton – 50th Anniversary Concert – Live at Carnegie Hall

Lionel Hampton - Live at Carnegie Hall

Tommy Igoe and the Birdland Big Band – Eleven
Joe Magnarelli – Three On Two
Matt Ulery’s Loom – Music Box Ballerina
Matt Ulery’s Loom – Wake An Echo

Matt Ulery's Loom - Music Box Ballerina

Marcus Miller – Afrodeezia
Sun Ra and his Arkestra – In The Orbit Of Ra
Matt Ulery – By A Little Light
Matt Ulery – In The Ivory
Matt Ulery – Themes And Scenes

Sun Ra - In the Orbit of Ra

World Music

Andy Lau – Love: Special Edition
Amira Medunjanin – Silk & Stone

Amira Medunjanin - Silk & Stone

Electronic Music

Qluster – Tasten
Jane Rigler – Rarefactions: Compositions via Improvisations
Madeleine Shapiro – Sounds Nature: Works for Cello and Electronics

Jane Rigler - Rarefactions