Roger O Green

Music Throwback Saturday: Could It Be Magic

By 1975, Manilow was sufficiently hot that his magical collaboration with Chopin was released as a single

I love the music of Frederic Chopin. Seriously, there’s a piece by him I want to be played at my funeral. This must explain the affection for my favorite song by Barry Manilow (born Barry Alan Pincus; June 17, 1943).

The Wikipedia narrative, which matches Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles information:

Before Manilow’s well-known association with Bette Midler began at the Continental Baths in New York City in 1971, he recorded four tracks as Featherbed, leading a group of session musicians produced and arranged by Tony Orlando.

Three of the tracks, [including]… an early version of his own composition “Could It Be Magic”, all flopped on the charts, a fact for which Manilow himself is fond of saying he is eternally grateful… That was because the arrangement of “Could It Be Magic” was an uptempo pop tune. Manilow had arranged the tune as a classical piece that slowly built.

From the greatest hits Ultimate Manilow album liner notes:

The earliest song here that Manilow actually wrote was Could It Be Magic, which originally appeared on his 1973 debut album… “I thought I had come up with the coolest batch of chords in my composing experience,” he remembers. “And then I realized that before I had that glass of wine, I had been playing my Chopin preludes. And I wrote the song around the Chopin ‘Prelude in C Minor.” By 1975, Manilow was sufficiently hot that his magical collaboration with Chopin was released as a single and rose right into the Top Ten.

Listen to the Chopin Prelude in C Minor, then Could It Be Magic by Barry Manilow, which sounds, to my ear, like an earlier iteration than the hit version.

Or go to WhoSampled.com, linking to both the Chopin Prelude and Could It Be Magic, which went to #6 in 1975.

But to a real shock to the system, listen to Could It Be Magic from Featherbed featuring Barry Manilow from c 1971 HERE or HERE.

Rehearsing with Leslie

As far as we know, there are not any recordings of Dad, Leslie and me singing.

My sister Leslie and I don’t talk that often on the phone, but when we do, it usually goes on for a while.

Recently when we were chatting, she noted that she has figured out the difficulty with singing in the various musical groups she has led or has sung with, over the years and currently.

It’s that, when we were growing up, singing with our father, it felt as though we never rehearsed. That was actually untrue: in singing in the car, at the dinner table, in the living room, and at the campgrounds, we WERE rehearsing all the time. It just didn’t FEEL as though it was rehearsing, because we never had to set time aside to do so.

One of the sad truths is that, as far as we know, there are not any recordings of Dad, Leslie, and me singing, or even of Dad solo when we were still living in Binghamton, NY in the 1960s.

She thinks that we, plus perhaps her daughter Rebecca Jade, ought to get together and work on some musical thing. The family being bicoastal – they live in the San Diego, CA area – I’m not sure how that would work. I did note that, if I get out there, and we were going to try to record something, we would – alas! – have to actually rehearse.

Happy birthday to the middle child.

The Donald v. McCain, et al.

I had this terrible thought recently: Donald Trump, whose corporations have filed for bankruptcy protection four times, could be President of the United States.

OK, I mean I don’t really believe that he could (do I?), but the skirmishes he has experienced recently have only enhanced his brand.

When he made those disparaging statements about Mexicans, the conventional wisdom was that it would hurt him politically. When his poll numbers went UP, early pundits suggested that they rose IN SPITE OF his comments. Now we’re pretty sure they went up BECAUSE OF his remarks.

He’s become a hero to those who are concerned about border security, and they don’t worry about the… lack of nuance, let’s say, in The Donald’s delivery. After Trump’s Phoenix, Arizona visit required securing a larger facility to hold the thousands of folks concerned about Mexican immigration, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) referred to them as “crazies.”

In retaliation, Trump attacked McCain’s military record, first saying that the former Vietnam War POW was not a hero, then, upon prompting, he says he is a hero, only because he was captured. On the subsequent news shows, he says that McCain IS a hero, and blames the media for distorting what he said.

(There’s a small group of Vietnam-era vets who seem to believe that McCain WAS no hero and ratted out the US to the North Vietnamese. Others believe that, as Senator, McCain buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.)

While there were veterans’ organizations that denounced Trump, there are others who embraced him as someone speaking on behalf of the less-than-stellar treatment our returning soldiers have often endured.

McCain’s friend Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who’s running for President, called Trump a “jackass,” and in response, Trump gave out Graham’s personal cellphone number.

The Donald also took a shot at former Texas governor Rick Perry, suggesting those glasses he’s now wearing don’t actually make him any smarter. I may have made a similar observation.

Trump is even being credited by some with getting President Obama to order flags over the Capitol and the White House lowered to half-staff, in respect of the five military service members murdered in Chattanooga.

Currently, Trump holds a double-digit lead over his nearest Republican opponent. The leading paper in Iowa, who referred to him as a “feckless blowhard”, called on him to drop out of the race, which he most assuredly won’t do anytime soon, certainly not before the August 6 debates. Perhaps in January, if he’s tired of the game.

Trump’s biggest problem and this is important to Iowa Republicans, is that he doesn’t sound like a born-again Christian.

Ultimately, I think that some people are impressed with the way he will take on all comers. Most of the folks, who appreciate The Donald bringing up issues they believe in, also know in their hearts that he doesn’t have the temperament to hold the highest office in the land.

Or so I’m counting on. David Kalish wrote a humorous column about dreaming about Trump, who has a case of NTBH, or “Need to be Hated” syndrome. I quipped that NTBH is currently covered under Obamacare, but as David noted, it wouldn’t be if Trump were elected.

B is for The Disputation of Barcelona

“The Jews were forced to listen to the sermons preached by the Dominican friars. “

Here’s something I’ve only known about for a few weeks.

“The Disputation of Barcelona (July 20–24, 1263) was a formal ordered medieval debate between representatives of Christianity and Judaism regarding whether or not Jesus was the Messiah.” Apparently, these disputations, over matters of faith, and other important topics, took place from time to time.

“Martin Luther opened the Protestant Reformation by demanding a disputation upon his 95 theses, 31 October 1517. Although presented as a call to an ordinary scholastic dispute, the oral debate never occurred.”

The Barcelona disputation “was held at the royal palace of King James I of Aragon in the presence of the King, his court, and many prominent ecclesiastical dignitaries and knights, between Dominican Friar Pablo Christiani, a convert from Judaism to Christianity, and Rabbi Nahmanides (Ramban), a leading medieval Jewish scholar, philosopher, physician, kabbalist, and biblical commentator.

“During the Middle Ages, there were numerous ordered disputations between Christians and Jews. They were not free and authentic debates (like modern ones), but were mere attempts by Christians to force conversion on the Jews. They were connected with burnings of the Talmud at the stake and violence against Jews. The Disputation of Barcelona was unique, in that it was the only occasion on which the Jewish representative was allowed to speak freely.”

So it sounded like a respite from the general persecution of the Jews on religious grounds, and the rigging of the system. However, the aftermath, according to the Jewish Virtual Library:

The [Barcelona] disputation… prompted the Dominican Raymond Martini to devise a better method of providing christological interpretations to the aggadah. In 1280 Martini concluded his book Pugio Fidei (Paris, 1651), and henceforward it was used indiscriminately by every Christian controversialist wishing to invalidate Judaism.

The king cooperated with missionary activities throughout the realm and the Jews were forced to listen to the sermons preached by the Dominican friars. An order was issued by the latter between August 26 and 29 directing the Jews to erase from their copies of the Talmud any passages vilifying Jesus and Mary. Failure to do so was punishable by a fine, and books which had not been censored as required would be burned…

This was, functionally, a less bloody event of the centuries-long Inquisition, “one of the great blights on the history of Christianity.”

And what, you may reasonably ask, piqued my interest in this arcane topic? It was the death of the actor Christopher Lee at the age of 93 in early June 2015. A Facebook friend posted a reference to The Disputation, a 1986 TV movie starring Lee as King James of Aragon.

Better still, you can watch the hour-long drama here or here.

ABC Wednesday – Round 17

Flinching from the “new” Atticus Finch

I found myself watching the movie To Kill a Mockingbird in the context of the release of the new book by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman.

The family went to the Madison Theatre in Albany last Wednesday night to see the classic movie To Kill a Mockingbird. I had never watched it before at a cinema, only on TV. The Wife had viewed only bits of it, and The Daughter had not seen it at all. It is a fine film, of course, and I need not review it here.

The great music of Elmer Bernstein made The Daughter nervous, especially around the storyline of Boo Radley. And she was confused by the scene in the woods near the end as to what really happened, given the subsequent dialogue.

While I appreciate the timeliness of the showing, I should note that the experience was lessened somewhat by a large amount of sound “bleed” from the adjoining theater. In fact, it got SO loud that I could almost not hear the film I was watching. What the heck was playing over there, anyway? It turned out to be the earthquake disaster film, San Andreas.

I found myself watching Mockingbird in the context of the release of the new book by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman. This novel has been mired in controversy. First, the argument was that the author was “increasingly blind and deaf,” and that the book’s release was somehow contrary to her real wishes.

More importantly, the new tome redefines Atticus Finch, the practically saintly protagonist of Mockingbird, so well played by Gregory Peck in the movie, and is so popular that children have been increasingly named after him. Watchmen suggests that Atticus, was, in his later years, a racist on the wrong side of history.

Some folks, like my buddy Chuck Miller, have chosen to ignore Watchman, considering it not part of the canon. I used to read comic books, so I recognize that writers are often mucking up beloved characters in ways we do not recognize. We often pick and choose what we will choose to accept. (Hey, kind of like the Bible!)

As someone who participated in a marathon of To Kill a Mockingbird reading a few years back, I’m excited to read Go Set a Watchman, even if it’s less compelling than its predecessor. Because, as NPR put it: Harper Lee’s ‘Watchman’ Is A Mess That Makes Us Reconsider A Masterpiece.

The screenplay for the movie To Kill a Mockingbird was written by the late Horton Foote. His third cousin, the late writer Shelby Foote, was an apologist for the Confederate flag. I have a feeling that the “new” Atticus is more complicated than we want to accept.