Listening to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. Miles was working on it exactly 40 years ago. Some may disagree, but it’s my favorite Miles album, and that certainly is saying something.

Great Mati Klarwein jacket, too. I put it up on my new jazztrain profile on blip.fm

http://blip.fm/profile/jazztrain/blip/20502020/Miles_Davis_Bitches_Brew

But here ya go, should you be interested:

http://www.youtube.com/v/Qn6yP7EiiK0&hl=en&fs=1&

A funky, spacey sound. I think this jazz profile pretty much completes things for me on blip.fm. Maybe someday I might get back in a country / folk sort of mood, but it’s been many years now since I really have been into that. Every now and then I’ll listen to a song or even a CD, but I can’t say I’ve gotten into a particular phase in a long time. While you can search within blip.fm for music–and sometimes it’s necessary, because YouTube doesn’t have everything–yet–YouTube really is, as you probably already know, just an amazing treasury of clips. Mostly I’ve been exploring classical, rock/pop, blues, and now jazz, in that order. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of the nice features of blip.fm is you can link each profile to a Twitter account, which I have, and that enables you to meet some interesting folks. For instance, my first follower on my jazztrain Twitter was TheDaveHolland.

http://blip.fm/~c74to

It seems that sometimes that’s updated by his people and sometimes by him. I was followed by Paul Winter after I mentioned on my classical Twitter http://twitter.com/musicaclassica (linked to my blip.fm that I wasn’t in the mood for classical, but was instead listening to world music, like Kitaro and Paul Winter. This piece, Anabela, is beautiful with Brazilian guitarist/vocallist Renato Braz and Winter sweetly playing sax. I used to apply the now rather musty label, “New Age,” to him, but “World Music” fits well now, because Winter has often incorporated Third World and Native American music, not to mention many nature sounds at times.

Waltraud Meier, soprano
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks / Lorin Maazel, conductor

The text for this beautiful song is taken from a poem by Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866), a brilliant German poet and scholar, whose works became the lyrics for songs by many German composers. Ruckert was also a translator of the literature of Asia and India, and this is often reflected in the spiritual nature of his own poems.

“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” describes a meditative withdrawal from the world:

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben!

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel,
Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet!
Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!

An English translation of this by Emily Ezust is available at http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=14001.  This website is part of a wonderful project called The Lieder and Art Songs Texts Page, a fantastic resource provided by the REC Music Foundation. Check it out!

I started whistling the tune that Peter Lorre kept whistling through the movie. “You know what that’s from?” I asked.

He said, “Can’t get enough of those Sugar Crisps, Sugar Crisps, Sugar Crisps….”

“That’s right!” I laughed. “But originally, it was from Edvard Grieg’s something something Dwarf something…. Anyway, it was Grieg.”

Well, of course, I was wrong about the Dwarf thing. (I’ve added a nice version of Grieg’s “March of the Dwarfs” at the end, anyway, though.) It’s by Grieg, but it’s “In the hall of the mountain king” from Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 (1876).

Here’s a version by the Jerusalem Orchestra:

Here’s a clip that includes Lorre’s whistling it:

Fritz Lang’s M (1931) trailer

And, in case you think my friend and I are just making this up, here’s Sugar Bear himself singing the tune in the Post Super Sugar Crisp commercial, “It’s Sugar Bear vs Granny Goodwitch,” ca. 1962:

I guess what finally made me tie all these essentially meaningless connections together today, because it occurred to me that maybe some perverted adman had the cynical thought that it would be hilarious to pitch sugar to kids using a tune that a child murderer whistled in a famous movie. Some might consider this far-fetched, but I’ve known some advertising people. They’re smart, they’re pretty tuned-in to media history, and they’re just the sort to want to pull one over on an unsuspecting public.

Getting back to Jon J. Muth’s graphic novel, Muth is one of the better graphic novel illustrators around these days. He’s perhaps most famous for his work on some of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman tales, and Muth’s children’s books, such as Zen Shorts:

Muth, Zen Shorts

As for the March of the Dwarfs (or Trolls or Dwarves or Zweig), the best version I could find was once some pianist named A. Totter did in 2007. Pretty good: