On May 23, 1964, Ella Fitzgerald entered the UK charts with her cover of the Beatle’s “Can’t Buy Me Love”. Ella was the first artist to have chart success with a Beatle tune. Who’d a thunk it?! I couldn’t find a live performance of that song but here’s Ella bringing her unique style and magnificent pipes to “Hey Jude”. Cool, er… groovy… er, awesome!
Joni Mitchell – In Concert at The BBC – London, 1970 (30 minutes)
Let’s stick with wonderful Canadians and 1970. A perfect broadcast of a famous Joni live set. There are timed track links on the YouTube page.
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The Band – Syria Mosque, Pittsburgh, 1970 (Four songs)
Well ain’t this a treat! The full-show soundboard of this gig is one of the best The Band soundboards (available here) of the several I have been lucky to obtain over the years and here we have four tunes professionally filmed: “Time to Kill”, “The Weight”, “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Up on Cripple Creek”.
Bob Dylan – “The Times We’ve Known” – New York City, 1998
Happy 89th birthday, Charles Aznavour!
My introduction to Aznavour was via this cover version of “Les bon moments” as “The Times We’ve Known” by our man Bob during that fantastic year of nineteen and ninety-eight. I count myself very lucky to have attended a Bob show that year, in a club, no less. He was in grand form. This is a fan-shot and edited video with a nice audience recording. Certainly worth a watch (and even an audio rip if you don’t have this gem in your music library).
Cheers to Steve in the UK. I hope the move went well! I’ll be moving myself at the end of the month.
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Jacques Loussier Trio – Jazzwoche Burghausen, 2007 (Full show)
I’ve posted some jazz but not yet dipped back into the classical pool. Here’s a big fat transition post: an hour and a half of the brilliant Jacques Loussier Trio. M. Loussier has made a place for himself by jazzifying classical works of all kinds. I love his takes on the Mozart concertos (YT search result).
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Fats Waller – “Ain’t Misbehavin’” from Stormy Weather (1943)
Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller, born May 21, 1904, died December 14, 1953.
Fats Waller – Ain’t Misbehavin’ with Lena Horne, dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, drummer Zutty Singleton, bassist Slam Stewart, Trumpeter Benny Carter in “Stormy Weather” (1943) by Andrew L. Stone, for Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
Dem eyebrows. 
Hey, cool, I can do italics in post titles. It’s the little things that improve a rainy day.
4K Video Downloader
After I posted that clip of Steve Winwood performing “Can’t Find My Way Home” solo acoustic and re-committed to learning it (I have!) the first thing I did was go a-hunting for a video downloader/ripper app so that I could have the video on my desktop rather than having to watch/navigate it via the YouTube Page. I tried a few different apps and this is the one I have found easiest to use and that is truly free (no limits/ads etc.).
4K Video Downloader our most popular product. It allows you to download video, audio, subtitles and full playlists from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, etc.
I haven’t tried any of their other apps but the YouTube to MP3 might be very useful so I’m planning to test that one out as well. All their apps are available for Windows, OS X and Ubuntu (Linux).
And of course the complementary app to play those videos you grab is the wonderful, free VLC that will play anything…
Cinemegraphs
Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs.
One of the nicer ones I’ve seen. There is a whole subReddit devoted to them. Here are the top of all time (this owl is #5) as voted by Redditors.
Dire Straits – “Sultans of Swing” – London, 1978 & Düsseldorf, 1979
One of the greatest songs in the history of popular music, released as a single on May 19, 1978. It’s amazing on the two performances below how you can see MK develop as a “performer”. Well, by the time the Rockpalast session was recorded he had probably already been hired by Dylan to play on on Slow Train (recorded that spring). That ups your coolness/confidence factor by about a billion percent.
They reportedly recorded “Sultans” on a budget of £120. In the movie world it’s pretty easy to find lists of the most “profitable films of all time” based on the budget-to-profit ratio. It would be a lot harder to do for individual songs (less so albums, I suppose) but I’d be willing to bet that “Sultans of Swing” would be at least in the to 100.
Old Grey Whistle Test – London, 1978
Rockpalast – Düsseldorf, 1979
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