A Few Zen - Music, Fusion, and Life

I have always regretted missing Beck's "Sea Change" Tour because he toured with the Flaming Lips. The major upset besides missing them both was that the Lips were Beck's whole band for his part of the show. As a huge fan of both bands, I missed it totally. But I found it on www.youtube.com. I love that site. It is a webcast and the picture quality is bad, but it's the whole Beck show with the Lips as his band. I am glad I didn't miss this show forever. If you like either band, this is cool. Beck is a great singer/songwriter/guitarist and the Lips are very talented band of musicians. Enjoy.

Posted by JJ at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you haven't heard of this site, go and bookmark it now. This is the video napster (but more legal). This site was made for you to load your home videos onto this site to make them available for anyone to watch. BUT people started taping shows off TV or taping DVD's or old VHS tapes and uploading them also. Pretty much anything people have owned on a video tape is here. I have searched for the most obscure bands I like and this site has concert footage of all of them. Every single band and group I have never seen live from the beginning of film up until now is here. Music videos, bootleg concerts, tv shows, funny ass amateur video, and everything else in between. If you are a music fan, play around with this site. I know alot of people have loaded bootleg VHS tapes of alot of these performances onto this site and they exist nowhere else in the world except for someone's home tapes. I posted recently on my blog about a Hendrix jam on some guy's bed that is definitely some guy filming Hendrix in his pad in the 70's. You couldn't buy this if you wanted. Plus the site makes it easy to e-mail a video to a friend or add it to your blog. This site is legally allowed to exist for this reason, if an artist sees his copywritten material on this site, there are easy ways for them to report that to the site, and the site removes that video and will not allow it to be uploaded again. Quite ingenious. Artist doesn't like it, they take their stuff off. This site is the greatest site I have yet to find on the net. Check it out.

www.youtube.com

Posted by JJ at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This band has always represented to me a technical, musical, virtuosity. No singing and insane musicianship! I am THE music nerd, so cut me some slack. These guys are widely unknown everywhere. You can't imagine how many blank stares I've seen when I bring these guys up at parties. They were as big as any jazz fusion band went back then (1970's), but they didn't have any real fame. But they toured arenas, which barely any jazz bands get to do. Particularly because they were electric. A mash of jazz, indian, classical, blues, and drum n bass. They toured the US as one of the highest paid arena rock jazz fusion bands in the US in the 70's (a small list of bands in this genre really). The band was also made up of musicians from all over the world. This video shows an utterly original band that no one can touch in the chops department. Check it out. You may not dig it, but it's one of the most complex pieces of music ever played live by 5 people.

Posted by JJ at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)