Ummagumma

Lutoslawski looks admiringly toward his orchestra before he enthusiastically begins conducting. [ Read Part One ] In 1964, Witold Lutoslawski completed a string quartet commissioned by Swedish Radio for the LaSalle Quartet. He had the music. But there was no score. Not in any form the LaSalle Quartet could read, anyway. A conventional score — four staves aligned vertically, showing what each player does at each moment — would have been, in his own words, false. Misleading. It would have represented a different work entirely. So what had he given them? The notes each player was to play. The figures, the gestures, the precise melodic content for each instrument. What he could not give them was a document showing how those parts aligned in time, because the alignment was the piece. The four players were to operate independently of each other — their own tempos, their own rhythmic streams — converging at points the conductor would cue and diverging again freely in between. Write that down ...

I’d rather be lucky than good. That old saying applies in many places in my life, but never more so than on the occasion of my first concert in high school. I was 17. I didn’t know anything about life yet though I had strong opinions. My first concert happened to be Fleetwood Mac with the Eagles at Atlanta’s Omni 50 years ago tonight. I went with eight or so of my high school friends, including my future first love. We were just flirting and having group fun then. On a grander scale, it was Bicentennial weekend. Being a lifelong history buff, I knew its significance and probably more about its history than anyone I went to that concert with. But still, I was just a kid, and it really wasn’t that big for me. But the Omni electrified me that night. Just entering the space, we were kids and got there early, and seeing a vast indoor arena for the first time in my life was somewhat awe-inspiring. It was a cool building, constructed so it would rust through time. It has been bulldozed since....

Almost all of my video time is devoted to YouTube. I sponsor some content creators and I follow a lot on that platform. I pay a monthly fee for NO ADs. Everything is content now. One of the types of content I enjoy are first-reaction videos to songs I grew up loving. Watching them experience what I once experienced for the first time. It always puts a smile on my face. I was that way once. I especially enjoy compilation first-reactions, where 10-12 reactors have separately listened to a piece of music and someone edited their reactions all together as a highlight reel of listening to the song. These are usually great fun. Little wonder that the YouTube algorithm fed me the compilation for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s epic masterpiece “ Free Bird .” “Free Bird” (or “Freebird”) is an anthem from my early college years. I became aware of it in high school but it became an indelible part of my life during my first quarter in college. My roommate was into Lynyrd Skynyrd the way I was into Eag...

Witold Lutoslawski. For rather random reasons, I made a New Year's resolution to devote 2026 to Witold Lutoslawski, one of my favorite “modern” composers. I have posted about him before (see here , here and here ). So I am working through his catalog chronologically, and this is a progress report through what I call “the first leg” of the journey — the early pieces up through and including his Concerto for Orchestra (1954) . Lutoslawski was born in Warsaw in January 1913, the youngest of three brothers, into a family of Polish landed nobility. His father Józef was a political figure, active in the National Democratic Party, intimate with its founder. The family had estates. They had standing. Then the war came, and then the Revolution, and then the Bolsheviks arrested Józef and his brother in Moscow, where the family had relocated. Józef was executed by firing squad in September 1918. Witold was five. The family returned to newly independent Poland to find their estates ruined. ...

Proof of purchase. Other than One of These Nights , I didn’t own any of the earlier Eagles albums when I purchased Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975)  fifty years ago. I just knew the radio songs, the Top 40 stuff that floated through the air with plenty of commercial interruption. What I didn’t know was that this record would define a whole internal season of my life. I was driving around in a ’65 Ford Falcon, which felt like freedom simply because it moved and I was inside it alone or visiting friends. This album was on the radio and on my mind constantly. I played it endlessly, easily a hundred times, probably more. Every song worked. At the time, I found it amazing that one band could produce so many terrific hits.  I was sixteen and full of myself.  I loved to laugh.  I was discovering Tolkien and Thoreau and Kurt Vonnegut. My mind could not fully absorb my curiosity of and passion for the world. Eagles were my favorite band to all that fresh freedom. Since the...

Fifty years ago this year, three albums came out that deserve more than silence from me. I didn't blog about them on their actual anniversary dates—not because I didn't listen to them, but because I wrote two books and am about to publish another. I listened to Tonight's the Night , Zuma , and Eagles' One of These Nights more than once in their turn. The tunes were churning over in my head for days and weeks after. So here they are, three rather incredible records from 1975 that shaped the sound of that year and, in different ways, shaped me. The story of why Tonight's the Night finally came out in June 1975 starts with a listening party at Neil's ranch early that year. He'd finished Homegrown , a clean, mostly acoustic album about his breakup with Carrie Snodgress, and it was ready to go. He invited some friends over to hear it, and (supposedly) at the end of the night someone suggested they play the Tonight's the Night tapes that had been sitting...