Queen's Gardens, Nelson

 

Rainbow-tipped, heart of gold

Thursday music corner: Asha Puthli (b.1945) was born, raised and studied in Bombay, where she developed a passion for jazz singing. After a short stint as a British Airways air hostess, she relocated to New York. There she was signed to CBS Records, on which she released four albums in the seventies. Since then she's released six more albums and developed a cult following.

Puthli's third CBS album, the funky, fluid The Devil Is Loose, was released in 1976. In July 1976 New York Times music critic Robert Palmer (not the singer) wrote of the album:

Miss Puthli's singing is equally extraordinary. There just enough Indian training left in her style to give it an indescribably fluid quality. Her alternation of timbres, from the breathiest sighs to gospel‐derived moans, is unique. She improvises, shows off an impressive range and generally walks through the album with the assurance of a master performer.

Flying Fish is the opening track of the album. Space Talk, another track from the album, has been sampled multiple times by rappers including P.Diddy and The Notorious B.I.G.

Asha Puthli - Flying Fish (1976) 

A calculated, multipart effort to overturn the vote

After interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses and obtaining millions of pages of documents, the Jan. 6 committee has presented a sweeping summation of its case placing Mr. Trump at the center of a calculated, multipart effort to overturn the vote that began even before Election Day.

Despite losing the election, Mr. Trump ignored the facts and aggressively sought to subvert the results, pressuring state officials, strong-arming Justice Department leaders and seeking to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won, according to evidence presented by the committee. Then, with his hold on power slipping, Mr. Trump called a crowd of his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, mobilizing far-right extremists, and told them to march on the Capitol. As hundreds of people stormed the building, assaulting police officers and disrupting the certification of the election, Mr. Trump did nothing for hours to stop the violence, the committee has shown.

Mr. Trump and his allies are the focus of several criminal investigations, including into the events that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Justice Department is conducting its own sprawling inquiry into the roles Mr. Trump and some of his allies played in seeking to subvert the 2020 election. In addition, Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta-area district attorney, has been leading a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.

- 'Jan. 6 Panel Issues Subpoena to Trump, Setting Up Legal Battle Over Testimony', New York Times, 21 October 2022

Tripping at the Funkhaus

Thursday music corner: 40-year-old Hamburg native Nils Frahm has been releasing solo piano works since 2005, focusing on multi-instrumental synthesiser works in recent years. He has released 14 albums and 7 EPs, and in 2015 contributed the soundtrack to Sebastian Schipper's film Victoria, which is presented as one 140-minute continuous take. 

All Melody was Frahm's ninth studio album, released in January 2018. This captivating 14-minute performance of the album's title track comes from the live concert film Tripping with Nils Frahm, which documented Frahm's live experience at the Berlin Funkhaus in 2020, enthralling a politely-grooving German audience in the round.

Nils Frahm - All Melody (live, 2020) 

The timeless elegance of NZ telephone engineering

Bedford St, Northland, Wellington

 

I've come home to stop yearning

Thursday music corner: Singer-songwriter James Taylor (b.1948) had his first hits in 1970 and 1971 with the single Fire and Rain and his recording of Carole King's You've Got a Friend. His 1970 album Sweet Baby James was a triple-platinum seller in the US, and its 1971 follow-up Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon went double-platinum. But his long-term success was truly secured by his 1976 Greatest Hits compilation, which went platinum 11 times over in America and eventually sold nearly 20 million copies.

Taylor's 1977 album JT was his first album release after this huge success, and was another triple-platinum seller. Taylor won a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance Male, for the album's song Handy Man - his second of six Grammys throughout his long career. 

The album track Terra Nova, which is distinguished by its fine harmonies in its elegant coda, appears on side B of the album, and is the only track co-written and performed with his then-wife, singer-songwriter Carly Simon. (The couple divorced in 1983). In addition to the album's band - Danny Korchmar, Clarence McDonald and Leland Sklar - the track features Russ Kunkel and Peter Asher on tambourine and handclaps, and Red Callender on tuba. 

James Taylor & Carly Simon - Terra Nova (1977)

The importance of the movies to the good people of Gopher Prairie

They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as land-speculation and guns and automobiles.

The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore.

The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled Right on the Coco. Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a lifeguard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into the clergyman's rear pocket.

The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes; they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers, while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy Corporation entitled, Under Mollie's Bed.

- Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, 1920