Hendrix Recordings Resurrection

Jimi Hendrix, considered by many to be the greatest guitar player of all time, will have three new albums out this week. But sadly, this isn’t a story of resurrection.

Hendrix died 43 years ago of a drug overdose. Since then there have been more than three dozen albums released of his songs, the most recent coming out in 2011.

One of this week’s albums, however, will have 12 previously unreleased studio recordings that the album’s co-producer said is a Jimi many have yet to hear, “away from his record company’s expectations and his working band’s limitations.” [more...]

Hendrix at 70: New album offers different look
Hendrix sought inspiration in the studio - jamming.
http://jimihendrix.com

Celebrating Ceija Stojka

Roma artist, writer on Nazi atrocities, dies at 79

Ceija Stojka survived three Nazi death camps and then found her life's work: Raising awareness of the Nazis' persecution of Roma - also known as Gypsies - in her art and her writings. Stojka carried the horrors of those camps with her until she was in her 50s, speaking out in words and pictures only decades after she was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp at age 12. The Budapest-based European Roma Cultural Foundation described Stokja's concentration-camp themed paintings to The Associated Press on Wednesday as reflecting "entrenched sorrow in the bodies and spirit of the victims." [more...]

CEIJA STOJKA 1933 – 2013 : "If the world does not change now, if the world does not open its doors and windows, if it does not build peace - true peace - so that my great-grandchildren have a chance to live in this world, then I cannot explain why I survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbruck." Go here to watch Marika Schmiedt’s film Vermachtnis Legacy about Ceija Stojka

Stojka, who is self-taught, didn’t begin to make art until she was 56. She suddenly felt compelled to paint and draw and used the materials at hand - pieces of cardboard, glass jars, postcards and salt dough. “I work with everything that comes between my fingers,” she writes. The constant torment of the living hell in her mind takes haunting form in her crude style: Stojka uses her fingers and toothpicks instead of brushes to apply the paint and ink. This lends the work an eerie, childlike quality that makes even more horrific her depictions of the day-to-day anguish of living under constant threat of dying from starvation or the gas chambers.  [more...]

Paul Williams: Still Alive

Paul Williams has always been one of my favorite songwriters.  He wrote and starred in The Phantom of the Paradise, a cult film from the '70s that changed my life!  It was surprising to me that a lot of people thought he was dead! 

Quite the contrary!  Paul is very much alive and still performs and writes songs.  There is a documentary playing now on cable called "Still Alive" that tells the story of this talented singer and composer.

"A funny thing happened to Stephen Kessler on his way to completing Paul Williams Still Alive, his affectionate portrait of the diminutive dynamo who loomed improbably large as a pop-culture luminary during the 1970s. After serendipitously tracking down his childhood idol, and starting production on what he clearly intended - initially, at least - as a melancholy ode to a faded star, Kessler wound up forging an unlikely friendship and, in the process, making a richer, deeper and more idiosyncratic documentary." Go here to watch the official trailer.

I actually heard from Paul in November 2005 and he recommended his fans visit his official site.

Vincent is Back!

Van Gogh dazzles at Netherlands' Kroeller-Mueller

With the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam closed for renovations until April, the world's second-largest collection of the Dutch master's work is stepping into the limelight.

The Kroeller-Mueller museum in the eastern Netherlands is not as well-known but is still considered a jewel among connoisseurs. It has revamped the layout of its central rooms, giving more space and more focus to its very best works.

"Van Gogh really stands central now, both physically in the museum and in the collection as a whole," director Lisette Pelsers said in a telephone interview.

This week the museum announced "Vincent is Back," because after a time in which many of its 91 Vincent Van Gogh paintings, 180 drawings and other works have been on loan, they are set to return in style.

It has opened "Native Soil," the first of a two-part exhibition looking at the spectacular changes that Van Gogh underwent in his artistic career, which took place almost entirely in the decade from 1880 to 1890. The appropriately wintery exhibit focuses on Van Gogh's formative years in the Netherlands, with a dark palette and simple, somber subjects.

"Native Soil" culminates in what is widely regarded as Van Gogh's first great masterpiece, the 1885 "Potato Eaters." It also shows smaller works that presage the colorful brilliance to come, such as the 1885 "Head of a Woman Wearing a White Hat," which may have been part of Van Gogh's preparations for "Potato Eaters,;" and the emotive 1882 study "Sorrowful Old Man" in black chalk.

"You can really see him struggling to find his style as an artist," Pelsers said. [more...]

Maeterlinck Lives!

In Claus Guth's haunting new production of Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande," the characters move as if in a trance between two worlds — both of them unrelentingly bleak.

The French composer's only completed opera, starring baritone Christian Gerhaher and soprano Christiane Karg in the title roles, was seen Thursday night in the seventh of eight performances by the Frankfurt Opera this fall. The final one is Saturday night.

The story, adapted by Maurice Maeterlinck from his own symbolist play, sounds straightforward when reduced to its elements: Golaud, grandson of King Arkel, meets a mysterious, much younger woman, marries her and brings her home to his family's castle. She and his half-brother, Pelleas, fall in love, and Golaud's suspicions that they are having an affair (apparently unfounded) lead him to murder his rival. Melisande dies after giving birth to Golaud's child.

But in Maeterlinck's world nothing is quite what it seems, and as the characters wander through the story, their words, feelings and motivations are often impossible to pin down. Debussy captures this atmosphere of dreamy uncertainty and shifting reality with a score whose chromaticism continually eludes the musical resolution of traditional key structure. [more...]

Picasso, Matisse, Monets stolen from Dutch museum

What's with all the art thefts lately?  Is there no security anymore in these big museums?

Seven paintings by artists including Pablo Picasso, Matisse and Claude Monet were stolen from a museum in Rotterdam in an early-hours heist, Dutch police said Tuesday.

The theft at the Kunsthal museum is one of the largest in years in the Netherlands, and is a stunning blow for the private Triton Foundation collection, which was being exhibited publicly as a group for the first time. [more...]

Van Gogh Moves

AMSTERDAM (AP) — The operation began moments after the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam closed Sunday evening. Men removed alarm tags from behind some of Vincent Van Gogh's greatest masterpieces, including "Sunflowers," ''Irises" and the famously crooked "Bedroom," and quickly pulled the paintings down from the museum's walls.

Fortunately, they were not thieves carrying out an epic heist, but curators preparing the works for transport to a temporary location across town where they will be on display for the next seven months while the museum is closed for renovations.

In all, 75 pieces — the cream of the biggest collection of Vincent Van Gogh's work — are moving to The Hermitage, an Amsterdam dependency of the Russian state museum. [more...]

The Radiant Child

I've always been a huge fan of Jean-Michel Basquiat... this is the best documentary I've ever seen on him.  It really emphasizes how prolific he was and captures the genius of his mind. Jean-Michel Basquiet: The Radiant Child - http://www.jean-michelbasquiattheradiantchild.com/

"The Entertainer" Has Passed

The word "prolific" gets tossed around a lot, but it couldn't be more appropriate in discussing the work of the late, great Marvin Hamlisch. This is especially true in considering his many contributions to film over the past five-plus decades. [more...]

Hamlisch brought us so much wonderful music in his relatively short life... it still echoes in our hearts and minds each day. Here are some of my favorite movies that Marvin scored:

The Way We Were
The Sting
Take the Money and Run
Bananas
Sophie's Choice
Same Time, Next Year
Seems Like Old Times

Stolen Matisse Painting Reportedly Recovered After Almost a Decade

A $3 million missing Matisse painting that had been stolen nearly 10 years ago and swapped for a fake at a Venezuelan museum has reportedly been recovered by FBI agents posing as art collectors at the Loews Hotel in Miami Beach Tuesday. A man and a woman allegedly tried to sell Henri Matisse's 1925 "Odalisque in Red Pants" to undercover agents for $1.5 million... [more...]

More on Matisse... http://www.henri-matisse.net/

There is a marvelous biography called The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling, a brilliant scholar. Second volume: Matisse the Master : A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour: 1909-1954.