Part 2 of Brit's look at the influences on Van Morrison features the Godfather of Soul, the King of Rock 'n Soul and some serious sweating... Few artists, as I noted a few months ago, have been more influential than Van Morrison, and few have been as explicit about their own ... Read More...
Lazy Sunday Afternoon
Dabbler music
This week Mahlerman introduces some of the great music that emerged from the chaos of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia... Few will argue that the 19th Century became a Golden Age for Russian Literature, and similarly it was not until around the 1860's, after the death of the so-called father of ... Read More...
Pink Floyd's enduringly popular Dark Side of the Moon turned 40 this year. But, as Daniel Kalder explains, there was plenty of great rock music around in 1973... This March Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon turned 40 years old to some ballyhoo in the press. Apparently Sir Tom Stoppard ... Read More...
Mahlerman offers a feast of great music for Easter Sunday... On this day last year seasoned Dabblers may remember that we travelled east, to the bleak wastes of Russia, and found Easter nourishment in the company of Sergei Rachmaninoff and his musical father Tchaikovsky. This year we discover inspiring music closer ... Read More...
Ethno fusion: a good idea in principle but usually pretty horrible. Daniel Kalder drums up a fews exceptions... As a bored lad in 1990s small town Scotland my ear craved exotic sounds. I probably discovered “world” rhythms via Talking Heads LPs, before graduating to the harder stuff. And so I dabbled ... Read More...
Bach and Mozart loved the instrument, so why has the viola always languished in the shadows?... Yes, there they are right under the nose of the conductor in the front-middle of a modern symphony orchestra, perhaps four or five desks of two; and yes, that soft-edged, dark-hued baritonal sound does indeed ... Read More...
A treat for you today as commenter and friend of The Dabbler John Halliwell brings you music inspired by the rhythm of the trains... As a child I developed an almost fanatical love of the steam engine; I doubt Betjeman felt that love any more intensely. Winter was a favourite time: ... Read More...
This week, Mahlerman takes us back the 16th and 17th centuries and the sound of the Baroque... When the Renaissance Period in music, which began in the early 1400's, rolled over into the Baroque two hundred years later, the difference between what a composer wrote down, and what a performer played, ... Read More...
Are rock side-projects always self-indulgent rubbish? Not necessarily, says Daniel Kalder, who can think of four non-rotten ones... Ah, the rock n’ roll side project: in any long career it’s difficult for a rock star to resist the temptation to indulge. Weary of their official identities, worn out by fan expectations, ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman takes us on a journey into "a Teutonic soundworld to which few non-German singers posses a passport"... In early 19th Century Germany, ownership of the universal domestic pianoforte expanded from Royalty and the landowning super-rich to embrace the new middle-classes; and in parallel with this expansion emerged just ... Read More...