Getting to a higher musical level meant that this time around Bandana wasn’t the only musician playing on this album. Yes, he still plays instruments such as keyboards, guitars, bass, flute, harmonica and sings the lead vocals. But when he asked other musicians to contribute to the songs that he had written, the music sounded more professional than on the earlier released Birzer Bandana albums. He got some musical assistance from people such as Peter Jones (Camel, Tiger Moth Tales, Red Bazar) on vocals and saxophone, Gareth Cole (Under A Banner, Tom Slatter band, Fractal Mirror, Mike Kershaw) on guitar, Kevin McCormick on guitar, Tim Gehrt (Streets, Steve Walsh) on drums, Paolo Limoli on keyboards, Glenn Codere on backing vocals, John William Francis on Marimba, Mike Warren on Cello and Robin Armstrong (Cosmograf) on keyboards, guitars, bass, drum programming and backing vocals. Together they came up with a rather strong progressive rock album which is full of soundscapes and has musical references with bands such as Pink Floyd and Talk Talk. But also, I can hear influences from another band. Namely Freedom To Glide. A band from the UK which also makes concept album about war and conflicts around the world in general! They pay tribute to the fallen soldiers in meaningless wars.
— Read on www.backgroundmagazine.nl/CDreviews/TheBardicDepthsTheBardicDepths.html
Category Archives: Republic of Letters
Forthcoming: Genesis 1967-1975, The Peter Gabriel Years
[Our friend and ally, Greg Spawton, has begun a book publishing firm, Kingmaker, and has announced the first book, Genesis, 1967-1975: The Peter Gabriel Years. Here’s the announcement, with the pre-order link at the bottom–}
Two of the almost constant elements of my life have been music and books. On the music side of things I am a member of Big Big Train, but involvement in book publishing remained an unfulfilled dream. However, last year I formed a company with journalist Nick Shilton which has a goal of publishing high-quality books about music. Our first book is now available for pre-order from our official store Burning Shed. The book has been written by Italian author and journalist Mario Giammetti and is called Genesis 1967 to 1975: The Peter Gabriel Years.
I have read of lot of books about rock bands and music in general and I have to say that this volume is an absolute gem. It tells the story of the early years of one of progressive rock’s most important bands. It is full of original interviews with band members and associates which have never before been published in English. There are photographs and insights in the book that cannot be found anywhere else. Most importantly, while the Genesis story is an interesting one full of personalities, the focus throughout the book remains on the most important thing of all: the music.
I would like to thank Mario for trusting us with his wonderful words. I would like to thank Octavia Brown who translated the book into English from the original Italian and has put her heart and soul into this project. I would like to thank Geoff Parks who proof-read the book with his customary eye for detail. Finally, I would like to thank Nick for being a most excellent publishing partner.
–Greg Spawton (of Kingmaker and Big Big Train)
If you would like to pre-order the book (a highly recommended course of action!) the Burning Shed link is here:
Pat Metheny : News: NEW ALBUM ‘FROM THIS PLACE’ AVAILABLE NOW
Music continually reveals itself to be ultimately and somewhat oddly impervious to the ups and downs of the transient details that may even have played a part in its birth. Music retains its nature and spirit even as the culture that forms it fades away, much like the dirt that creates the pressure around a diamond is long forgotten as the diamond shines on.
— Read on www.patmetheny.com/news/full_display.cfm
Jazz is alive and doing well
Jazz is alive and well. Stunning piece of work from Pat Metheny.
New Lectures Available
Hey everyone, I got caught up and uploaded four new videos to our Youtube channel yesterday. Here they are:
The Christian Humanism of Willa Cather:
American Slavery:
George Washington, American Demigod:
The French Revolution:
George Washington: American Aurelius ~ The Imaginative Conservative
In his own day and age, George Washington was the greatest and best-known man in all of Western Civilization. Washington (1732-1799), indeed, served as a pillar of Atlantis, recognized not only for his willingness to sacrifice his life for the great Republic, but also as the founder of the first serious Republic a weary world had witnessed since the martyrdom of Cicero. A true genius when it came to geometry, trigonometry, and surveying, he also read deeply in military history, biography, agricultural science. His loves, though, were hunting, adventure (as in traveling), and farming. Surveying, especially, allowed him to combine many of these loves into one. Ironically, given the status he attained as a living hero or demigod in his own lifetime, Washington suffered from a lack of liberal education, strange by the standards of his day. Much of what he knew of the classical world came not from a study of Greek and Latin (as with many of the founding fathers), but from his reading of biography and, especially, from his love of the Joseph Addison play, Cato: A Tragedy. Despite this, he earned innumerable classical titles during his lifetime, including: the American Achilles, the American Cicero, the American Aeneas, and the American Cincinnatus.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/02/george-washington-american-aurelius-bradley-birzer.html
Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time
I remember something the philosopher Gerald Heard told me. The first thing a man is aware of, he said, is the steady rhythm of his mother’s heartbeat and the last thing he hears before he dies is his own. Rhythm is the common bond of all humanity: it is also the most pronounced and readily misunderstood ingredient of jazz.
— Dave Brubeck
We’ve waited way too long for a serious biography of Dave Brubeck — but at last we’ve got it, and it’s a good one. British music journalist Philip Clark’s Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time rises to the challenge of portraying the pianist/composer in his fullness — his days, his works, his friendships, and his ideals.
Fittingly, Clark plays with time to unlock the rich pageant of Brubeck’s 92 years. Pivoting off a extended interview conducted on a 2003 British tour, the narrative unpacks Brubeck’s career in progress, building from West Coast beginnings through growing popularity coupled with critical puzzlement on the jazz scene to the mass culture break-out of Brubeck’s classic quartet (with Paul Desmond on sax, Eugene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums) via 1959’s “Take Five” and the Time Out album. It’s only the strangely muted reception of Brubeck’s ambitious 1962 cantata The Real Ambassadors (a sly satire expressly written for Louis Armstrong) that sends Clark doubling back again — to Brubeck’s upbringing in rural California and the influences that forged him as musician and man.
Democrats 2020: Two CS Lewis Villains, and a Bunch of Tom Wolfe Lampoons | The Stream
The lesser Democrats (Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and now Biden) are minor comic figures from one of Tom Wolfe’s satires. (Think of The Bonfire of the Vanities.) Each has clawed his way to the top of a different greasy political ladder that stops well short of the presidency. And each now waves around his 10-point, single-spaced resume, crowing about how he followed all the rules, so now it’s his turn. It’s only fair. Watching such stunted people flail around at the end of their tethers is ultimately kind of … sad.
But Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg are different. They’re major characters, and from a more important writer. Each of them could have sprung from the pen of C.S. Lewis, and stepped out of the pages of the dystopian satire That Hideous Strength. In fact, the two candidates seem like colleagues at the conspiratorial think-tank, the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.).
— Read on stream.org/democrats-2020-two-c-s-lewis-villains-and-a-bunch-of-tom-wolfe-lampoons/
Tears For Fears’ Songs From The Big Chair Set For Reissue
Looking back at the album, Roland Orzabal commented, “Pop music was still a growth industry. It hadn’t sort of stagnated, stalled, diversified into streaming like it is nowadays. We were young, we were both good-looking and we had the right music. As we move further and further from that decade and you keep hearing ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’, in various forms I do think it is an era-defining album”.
Curt Smith “You would never normally get three songs that strong in an album. But balance that out with tracks like ‘Listen’, ‘The Working Hour’; all those things that give it air and give it time to breathe I think is what makes it something more than just the sum of its parts. I think the album had a lot more depth than a lot of those other albums of that time. And albums of more depth tend to stick around longer”.
— Read on www.udiscovermusic.com/news/tears-fears-big-chair-reissue/
Brad Birzer writes lyrics for progressive rock album – Hillsdale Collegian
Track 1: “The Trenches.” Underscored by ambient whistling, rifle shots, and single notes struck on a piano, Brad Birzer’s voice fades in softly at first, repeating, and echoing over itself. He speaks C.S. Lewis’s description of his experience in World War I: “The frights, the cold, the smell of human excrement, the horribly crushed men still moving like crushed beetles…”
Then, cue an electric guitar intro, a chorus of “This is war!” and, finally, drop in some heavy metal drumming.
These are the opening lines and sounds of the progressive rock epic chronicling the meeting, developing relationship, and, ultimately, failed friendship between J.R.R Tolkien and Lewis. Birzer, professor of history, wrote this seven-track album, “The Bardic Depths,” in collaboration with progressive rock musician Dave Bandana.
— Read on hillsdalecollegian.com/2020/02/brad-birzer-writes-lyrics-for-progressive-rock-album/
Spirit of Cecilia 
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