Musical Space

It’s August, and chances are either you or your kids are back at school. I think a lot about school, too, because of the bearing it has on music. School was where you learned what music you liked. Research tells us it suddenly became important to you at around age ten or eleven, and that by fourteen your musical taste was pretty much solidified. Emotions and hormones ran high back then - your musical soundtrack is connected to some heady memories. You were also making your way in the world

Memphis in 1950 was the logical time and place for a musical sound to be born. Here was the biggest city on a trade route between the blues players of the Mississippi delta and the country musicians of Appalachia right at the introduction of amplification and the 45 single. With impeccable timing, a radio DJ named Sam Phillips opened a recording studio then and there to capture that sound. Sun Studio was the only one around, and he recorded everyone - pro and amateur, black and white. He first

At a club the other day I saw a sticker for a band called REO Speedealer. I checked into them; as far as metal records go, they were OK, but the name is hilarious. Every town has them - bands with joke names.

Music news has caught my attention recently. There was the Fyre Festival debacle, where people paid $12,000 apiece to go to an island in the Bahamas, thinking they were going to an exclusive music festival, but finding out it was conceptual existentialist theater. Then the news that tickets to the upcoming Wichita Paul McCartney concert were going for $7000. These are both symptoms of price gouging, which happens a lot in the music biz in ways big and small. Like the fees tacked on to the price

Today, the 4th of July, has me thinking about musical revolutions. Styles rise up from social change, and the United States has been an incubator for so many types of music because of our history of political upheaval; the revolutionary spirit behind the Declaration of Independence has continuously shaped our musical space. You can hear it in our own national anthem: words of defiance set to an English drinking song. What better way to invoke the enlightenment-era ideal of liberty than to

Tuesday is the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day, and it’s been a big deal for music since the Stone Age. There must be something about the sun refusing to set that makes cultures want to dance, sing, and party. It’s the Midsummer that Shakespeare named a play after, also known as St. John’s Feast Day, and the Wiccan holiday of Litha. Druids gather at Stonehenge to sing at dawn; Norwegians sing around huge bonfires far into the sunlit night. The ancient observance of the

A “hook” is any feature that makes a song memorable. It could be a distinctive rhythm, a sound, a melody, a lyric, anything that catches the ear of the listener and sets a song apart from others.

Top 10 lists are cliche, but there are so many reasons to congratulate the organizers of this year’s Riverfest music lineup that I needed to itemize them. So please forgive the format and see if you agree the 2017 Wichita Riverfest concert schedule is the best ever.

Every year the U.S. Library of Congress compiles a list of 25 important records to be placed on the National Recording Registry, with a mandate that they be preserved for future generations.

Lots of actors and actresses try their hands at being musicians. It shouldn’t surprise me I suppose, but once I started researching it, my list of names became unmanageably long.