Category: Music

Puttin’ on the Ritz

Lyle Ritz

NPR has a super nice feature on session musician Lyle Ritz, who played acoustic bass on many famous recordings in the 60’s, including Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds. Ritz has also had great success with his sideline of playing the ukulele.

Here are some comments by Ritz, taken from the booklet “The Making of Pet Sounds” taken from The Pet Sounds Sessions CD box set.

What made Brian’s sessions different was the family kind of atmosphere. At first, as I recall, Brian didn’t have any preparation. He didn’t write anything down; he would dictate notes to us on the piano.

What I remember from Pet Sounds was that during that time, his craft was more honed. He brought in music and parts that were written. And he was more intense, more focused.

Fight the URGE

FiOS TV has added URGE Radio, on the stations that follow Music Choice. As I mentioned in a post in early June — unfortunately lost in the Great Database Debacle — the sound quality of the Music Choice stations is uniformly excellent. The same cannot be said of URGE Radio. Played over a digital coaxial cable going from the Motorola DVR into my Kenwood THX receiver, what I’ve heard so far sounds, at best, like a 128 Kbps MP3 at 22050 Hz. The player has four minutes of URGE Radio. Don’t judge the sound quality by this, as it’s encoded here at only 64 Kbps/22050 Hz.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/URGERadio.flv 400 300]

As you can see, there’s a progress bar, but it doesn’t appear on all of the screens within a track, which sort of limits its usefulness. I’m not complaining about the service being added. I continue to be impressed with everything that FiOS TV offers for the money, but URGE Radio’s audio quality relegates it to the TV speakers.

Petula Clark: Blue Lady

Last November, the BBC ran a long overdue one-hour documentary on Petula Clark, called Petula Clark: Blue Lady. In thanks to whomever started the Petula Clark blog, here’s the entire show. Honor Blackman, the first leading lady of the The Avengers TV Series and Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, narrates.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Movies/Wordpress/NOV06/PetulaBBC.flv 440 330]

Maryann Price, A Lickette No Longer

I was just getting caught up on the local papers, and I spotted this article. Maryann Price is making an appearance tonight, not far from here. If I’d known sooner, I would have been interested in seeing her.

Who’s Maryann Price? She sang with Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks, a string-and-vocal group I enjoyed a lot back in high school and college. That’s Maryann on the left, and Naomi Ruth Eisenberg on the right. Together they were called, respectfully and not derisively, the Lickettes.

Dan Hicks with Maryann and Naomi

Rather than try to explain them, just give a listen. In the first song, “I Feel Like Singing,” Maryann does the scat bit heard in the left channel. The second song, “I Scare Myself,” features the spine-tingling violin playing of Sid Page.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JUL07/IFeelLikeSinging.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JUL07/IScareMyself.mp3]

Next, Maryann sings “I’m An Old Cowhand.” Can you tell I like songs with titles that start with “I”? All tracks were taken from the original vinyl disks I loved listening to 35 years ago.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/JUL07/ImAnOldCowhand.mp3]

Finally, if you read the article at the link above, you know there are recent home videos of Maryann on YouTube. This one includes a bit of her doing “I’m An Old Cowhand.”