Jessie Ware - What You Won't Do For Love

I heard this cover of the Bobby Caldwell song What You Won't Do for Love on Internet radio yesterday. I'm not familiar with Jessie Ware's work, but I really like this version.

Alan Parsons - Fragile

(Yeah, I know; I'm on a roll. Two days in a row.)

I had heard about Alan's new song, Fragile, some time ago, but I only got to see this music video and hear the song for the first time last night. It's pretty good. Check it out!

Misty Mountains

Inevitably, the various covers of the song Misty Mountains from the film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, are coming out. I'm not sure which version of these two I prefer, although both sound very nice.

"Muslamic Ray Guns"

Now, to get full enjoyment from the second video, you should watch the first video first. This first video is a brief interview with some EDL skinhead done by Press TV and was originally aired on March 9, 2011.



Now, allegedly, this guy is complaining about "Muslim rape gangs," but it comes out garbled as "Muslamic ray guns." :) Enjoy!

Alan Parsons - All Our Yesterdays & Alpha Centauri

My favorite artist, Alan Parsons, continues to keep active in writing and performing new music. Two new songs have just been released (so new that I'm listening to the songs for the very first time as I write this): All Our Yesterdays and Alpha Centauri. The latter song, unsurprisingly, has a sound reminiscent to Parsons' mammothly popular song from 1982, Sirius.

Pomplamoose - Beat It

Here's an interesting cover of Michael Jackson's Beat It by a Bay Area indie jazz-pop band called Pomplamoose ("grapefruit" in French). Nataly Dawn does vocals and Jack Conte is the jack-of-all-trades instrumentalist. It's a rather cool video, in the line of Fabio Valdemarin's work. Check it out!

Colorpulse: "A Glorious Dawn" (Cosmos Remixed)

I forget off-hand how I stumbled across this video tonight, but it's one guy's "remix," if you will, of Carl Sagan's TV series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Intermixed are snips of videos and "lyrics" "sung" by Stephen Hawking, taken from his Universe documentary. If you're interested in downloading the soundtrack from the video, click here.

Fabio Valdemarin: Got a Match?

I haven't done any of my Bedtime Music videos in a long time, so consider this a special edition post of that series. Tonight's video was a recommendation made on, of all places, the Alan Parsons e-mail list (which I've been a member of for a very long time). The musician is Fabio Valdemarin, who does a cover of The Chick Corea Elektric Band's Got a Match?, off the band's 1985 eponymous debut album. Valdemarin's video is unique in that he recorded each of the instruments (drums, piano, guitar and bass) separately, then combined the four videos into one to create an Enya-like recording.

One wonders how many other instruments Valdemarin can play. Looking around his website, he has another video in which he also plays the trumpet.

Happy Birthday, A'ishah! :)

A certain someone is celebrating her first birthday today! :) We'll be off in a few minutes, insha'allah, to the grandparents' home to have cake and ice cream (and spring rolls :) ). So Happy Birthday, A'ishah! (More later.)

How Much is Your Deductible?

"I don't care about no diamond rings
I don't need none of those fancy things
If you really want to be my man
Let me get on to your health care plan."

The Birthday Balloons

Not to be too cryptic this morning, but if The Birthday Balloons means anything to you, you'll know what Milady and I suffer through every evening at dinnertime. ;)

Here are two hints to the uninitiated:


Henri Rousseau's The Merry Jesters, and



Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Eine Kleine Nacht Musik.

A'ishah @ Seven Months

I haven't done a post about A'ishah in some time, but the little darling keeps both Milady and I busy. The first photo is a scene the two of us woke up to on the morning of January 3rd; it's A'ishah's foot sticking out of the side of her crib in the bedroom. I just had to take the photo before we gently extracted her from her predicament. :)


And this other photo is of a brief rest A'ishah had on our bed one day. That's Daddy's manly thigh in the background. ;)


A'ishah turned seven months old a week ago last Tuesday. We discovered on that day that one of her teeth, her left bottom incisor, had broken through her gums; yesterday, I found that the right bottom incisor had also broken through. So she has two teeth already. (We can easily see the upper incisors underneath her gums, but they haven't come out yet.) A'ishah's also learned to crawl very well, and is starting to learn to stand, although she hasn't quite mastered the art of sitting up just yet. Insha'allah.

In recent weeks, Milady and I have discovered a "new" technique to get A'ishah to sleep in the evenings: the lullaby. ;) Except our lullabies are karaoke tunes we both sing to A'ishah off of Youtube. Surprisingly, the tunes that put A'ishah to sleep the fastest are by The Beatles. We've sung a number of songs by other bands (e.g., Abba, The Mamas and the Papas, etc.), but A'ishah stays awake when we sing them. The Beatles definitely put her to sleep the quickest; for example, tonight, we sang All You Need is Love several times and then it was off to bed.

BTW, if you're a "friend" of mine on Facebook, you can see four additional photos of A'ishah there.

Bedtime Music: Bee Gees - You Should Be Dancing

Most people, like me, probably associate the Bee Gee's song, You Should Be Dancing, with the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever (and rightfully so; the song is on the soundtrack). However, You Should Be Dancing was actually released the previous year, in 1976, on the band's album Children of the World. This was the third song overall and the first song for the Bee Gees that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in which Barry Gibb used his now-famous falsetto.

This particular video came from the end of a television show (the credits start at the 4:11 mark) in which the Bee Gees performed live at the Manhattan Center on April 17th, 2001.

Bedtime Music: Chic - Le Freak

One of the more popular songs when I was a teenager was the 1978 hit, Le Freak by Chic. The song has an interesting history. Guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards were supposed to have a meeting at Studio 54; however, singer/actress Grace Jones forgot to leave word with management that Rodgers and Edwards were coming. As a result, the two were denied entry into the club. Upon returning home, Rodgers and Edwards began jamming together. Their anger at not being allowed into the club resulted in the beginning of a "protest song." As Rodgers later noted, "...we started singing, 'f*** off!' [Repeats the lick.] 'Aaaaahh, f*** off!'" Later that night, the "f*** off" became "freak off" and then "freak out." The rest, as they say, is history.

The song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 not once, but three times, and was the best selling record ever for the band's label, Atlantic Records. It was also the best selling single for Warner Music (Atlantic's parent corporation) for twelve years, until 1990 when Madonna released Vogue.

Bedtime Music: The Trammps - Disco Inferno

We're running a bit late tonight, but we can still get this in before we actually go to bed. ;) Tonight's song is Disco Inferno by The Trammps, released on their 1976 album of the same name. In the initial release the song didn't do very well in the pop charts, reaching only 53rd place on the Billboard Hot 100. However, Disco Inferno got a second chance when it was used in the soundtrack for the 1977 movie, Saturday Night Fever; by the spring of 1978 the song's re-release had risen up to #11. Disco Inferno is The Trammps' biggest and most recognized song in the band's history.

Unfortunately, this video isn't of the best quality, although it's interesting for the flashback to '70s fashion. ;) I don't know when the video was shot although, obviously, it was done in New York City.

Bedtime Music: Gloria Gaynor - I Will Survive

This week's theme: Disco. Yeah, sure, why not? ;)

And what better song to start with than the classic I Will Survive, released in 1978 by Gloria Gaynor on her album, Love Tracks. The song, about a woman who realizes she doesn't need her ex-boyfriend back in her life, was immensely popular back in the day and continues to be popular through numerous covers, parodies, and pop culture references (not to mention karaoke). Interestingly enough, George Carlin ranked this song #9 in his list of the "ten most embarrassing songs of all time." (Then again, lots of people hated disco. Who cares?)



Personally, I've also liked Victor Navone's Alien Song parody. In case you didn't know, the alien's name is Blit Wizbok, and he recently celebrated his 10th birthday.

Bedtime Music: Swing Girls - In the Mood

In the movie Swing Girls (which I briefly mentioned a few days ago), the actresses (and one actor) had been taught how to play music for several months prior to filming; as a result, all of the performances in the movie were "real," performed by the actors themselves. When the film was released, they did at least one promotional concert, entitled "Swing Girls' First & Last Concert" (although I've read on IMDB that several concerts were performed in both the U.S. and Japan). This video is of Glenn Miller's 1939 classic, In the Mood.

An interesting side note: In the Mood was apparently based at least in part on the melody of another song called Tar Paper Stomp, written by jazz trumpeter and bandleader Wingy Manone, who recorded the song in 1929 and 1930. After the success of In the Mood, Manone apparently was paid off by Miller and his record company not to contest the copyright.

Bedtime Music: Ray Anthony - Harlem Nocturne

I'm happy to say that this is the 100th post of my Bedtime Music series.

Tonight's song is a familiar melody to me, Harlem Nocturne, originally written by Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers in 1939. In writing this song, Hagen was trying to imitate Duke Ellington's sound; since then, Harlem Nocturne has become a jazz standard, covered by many artists and bands.

This particular cover is by Ray Anthony (whose birth name is Raymond Antonioni) from The Ray Anthony Show, a TV variety show broadcast in 1956-57. Anthony is still alive (he turns 87 on the 20th), and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Happy birthday, Ray!

Bedtime Music: Rak Bela Combo - It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)

Sorry about the lack of a video for last night's Bedtime Music; I was quite busy yesterday.

Tonight's video is of the Duke Ellington classic, It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing). The song was written in 1932, three years before the birth of the Swing Era. The title was based on the oft-stated credo of Ellington's former trumpeter Bubber Miley, who was dying of tuberculosis. According to Ellington, the song became famous "as the expression of a sentiment which prevailed among jazz musicians at the time."

This particular cover of the song is performed by the Rak Bela Combo, a trio of guitarists: Bela Rak Jr., Bela Rak Sr., and bassist Kristof Gelley. I like this video because it's a good example of the versatility of music in performance, in this case playing swing on acoustic guitars.

Bedtime Music: Santo & Johnny - Moonlight Serenade

New theme this week: big band/swing music. Milady and I watched a cute Japanese movie over the weekend, Swing Girls, which featured this type of music. Insha'allah, I'll talk about the film again later this week.

Moonlight Serenade was originally written and recorded by Glenn Miller in April 1939. The song was actually derived from an earlier song (1935) entitled "Now I Lay Me Down to Weep," the music to which Miller also wrote. This particular video features Santo & Johnny's cover of Moonlight Serenade.