Kelly Boesch On Impostor Syndrome

 Another superb effort from Kelly B . . . . . 

Kelly Boesch

Kelly says in a revealing note:

Kelly on Impostor Syndrome

This song is about my horrible imposter syndrome that I live with and try to get over. This has been a strange and wild ride. I have lived my life pretty simple and quiet and started making these videos, then music just for a fun hobby. I never in my life thought it would take off like it did. So it’s hard sometimes to feel like I deserve it. I do know I am good at this but am also having a hard time admitting it. And now, with millions of followers across platforms, including Spotify (which was a shocker all in it’s own) I sometimes feel the pressure to have to do better and better with each video, instead of just making what I want to for fun. So I try to just do that. Make what I want to make, not what I think would please the most people. Creating with ai, for me, has been the most incredible experience I have had in my artistic life. The possibilities are endless. In video, images and music. I started making music just as a necessity for background to my longer videos. I started loving writing again and really take the time to make the songs good. I am just as artistic with the music as I am with the video. I want the songs to sound different and reflect the feeling of the video. I am so thankful to all of you who have sent message about loving the music. That part was really such a wonderful bonus. Music and art are connected and this new genre really reflects that. :-)

#ai #aiart #aivideo #music #art 

Lyrics written by me, Kelly Boesch. Music created under my creative direction with assistance from Suno.

I hope she got my message of support on Facebook but how you suffer from Imposter Syndrome with these talents shows what an unfair world it is and how people are mistaking so called AI for lack of something and not tools to creativity as Kelly uses these very particular technical skills and she is absolutely correct here about art and music and some new form of creativity (anyone remember what the first responses to synthesizers and the computers Fairlights and such were a ‘threat’ to music?!)

James Taylor and Shawn Colvin - ‘You Can Close Your Eyes’ 2015, Austin City Limits

 

Shawn Colvin

A dream come true, and then some. How many years did I spend singing harmony to this song in my room, again and again? And again???

This is 2015, Austin City Limits. I just happened to be in town. 😆 I was too star-struck and too giddy to be truly nervous, and besides, I sure did know the song.

But to sit side by side with one of the most brilliant songwriters, singers, guitar players in the whole world, a superhero, a huge inspiration to me….and then to sing with him? I cannot express it. “Honored” comes to mind, so does “heaven”, so does “out-of-body-experience”. And pure JOY.

I remember when I was about 18 seeing James in concert, a solo show. I had this fantasy he might ask me up to come up and sing with him. That’s just all I wanted in this world. I knew then I wanted to do what he was doing. I wanted to move someone with my guitar and my voice as much as he so deeply moved me. That is success.

Thank you, James Taylor. I’ll never get over it. Im still on cloud 9 and can die happy!

Postmodern Jukebox | Cover Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance"

 

Enjoy our 1920's remake of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance", feat Ariana Savalas & Sarah Reich✨

“China Boy" Paulus Schäfer Joscho Stephan Volker Kamp | Gypsy Guitar Academy

 "China Boy" (by Phil Boutelje and Dick Winfree)

🎶👉For all guitarists interested in learning this version, the full transcription is available here: ►https://gypsyguitaracademy.com/lessons/advanced-transcriptions

A pleasure to share this performance of "China Boy" (by Phil Boutelje and Dick Winfree) recorded during a great studio session with the fantastic Paulus Schäfer from the Netherlands. This is the third release from our collaboration. Hope you enjoy it! ------------ 🎸Free Guitar Lessons: https://gypsyguitaracademy.com/free-lesson 💿 Music: https://www.joscho-stephan.de/shop 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/joschostephan ------------- Guitar: Paulus Schäfer Guitar: Joscho Stephan Bass: Volker Kamp ------------- Audio-Mix: Joscho Stephan Recording & Video: Malte Weber

Sophie Ellis-Bextor (on her famous Mum!)

 Now I am of an age where Janet Ellis was a favourite presenter on children’s TV ubiquitous iconic universal masterpiece, Blue Peter, and yet when I also heard a band called Theaudience I liked the singer and then of course followed Sophie Ellis Baxter without really paying too much attention to her famous Mum! Even being aware of Sophie’s Kitchen Disco and her wonder family during the COVID-19 outbreak was a joy to behold but didn’t really think much about her famous Mum!

When you discover they are related you get that Sophie may have wanted to make it on her own merits and not wanting to appear as a some kind of Nepo baby but then to discover the respect and obvious love daughter has for her wonderful Mum is just simply joyous and so heart warming

I guess we knew it really but to hear here say it is just so cool! 

MUM'S RULE!

Ooops . . . . for Dave!

theaudience - A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed 

 . . . . . . . . .

Jaco Pastorius (From John French at the Drumbo Club - Facebook) | Remember the Past

We had been reflecting on Jaco Pastorius’ story before and this account is a harrowing read but John French thought it worth posting and re-visiting . . . and so do I

The bouncer didn't recognise the homeless man at the door. He had no idea he was about to kill one of the greatest musicians who ever lived. 

September 12, 1987. 2 AM. A drunk man kicked at the glass door of the Midnight Bottle Club in South Florida.

Tangled hair. Filthy clothes. Demanding entry to a members-only establishment.

The club manager, Luc Havan, stepped outside. At 25, he was a martial arts expert with years of training. The homeless man before him weighed maybe 140 pounds.

What happened in the next few minutes would silence a sound the world had never heard before.

But the man kicking that door wasn't just anyone.

His name was Jaco Pastorius. And ten years earlier, he had changed music forever.

Fort Lauderdale, 1951. Young Jaco grew up with salt air and jazz rhythms. His father was a traveling drummer. His mother was Finnish. Music was the family language.

Jaco started on drums, following his dad's path. Then at 13, a football injury crushed his wrist. Surgery saved his hand but ended his drumming dreams.

He picked up the bass guitar instead. 

What looked like an ending became the most important beginning of his life.

By his late teens, Jaco was consumed by jazz. Then around 1970, he did something that would echo through music history.

He took a screwdriver and removed every fret from his Fender Jazz Bass.

Those metal strips that mark each note? Gone. The smooth fingerboard allowed him to slide between notes like a vocalist. To create vibrato that made the bass weep. To produce sounds no one had imagined possible. He called it his Bass of Doom.

The Florida scene embraced him. He absorbed R&B, funk, soul, Caribbean rhythms. He married Tracy in 1970. They had two children. By 23, he was teaching at the University of Miami.

But he wasn't meant to teach. He was meant to set the world on fire.

In 1974, destiny arrived in the form of Bobby Colomby from Blood, Sweat & Tears. He met Tracy on a beach. She mentioned her husband was the greatest bass player alive.

Colomby was skeptical. But he was also scouting talent. Curiosity won. He went to see Jaco play. 

One song changed everything.

Colomby offered him a record deal immediately.

The 1976 self-titled album exploded onto the scene. Jazz and funk collided with bass playing that defied physics. "Portrait of Tracy" featured Jaco playing completely alone, creating harmonics that sounded like three instruments at once.

Two Grammy nominations followed.

 

That same year, Jaco walked up to Joe Zawinul from the legendary fusion band Weather Report and said:

"I'm the greatest bass player in the world."

Zawinul laughed him off.

But Jaco was relentless. He sent demos. He wrote letters. Finally, Zawinul listened.

His world tilted. 

Jaco joined Weather Report in 1976. What followed was revolutionary.

The 1977 album "Heavy Weather" became a landmark in jazz fusion. The opening track "Birdland" showcased Jaco's bass singing melodic lines that sounded extraterrestrial. Over a million copies sold.

Before Jaco, bass players were the foundation. They kept rhythm. They stayed in the background.

Jaco made the bass a lead instrument. 

He played solos in registers that sounded like guitar. He used harmonics to extend the instrument's range impossibly high. He played chords. He transformed four strings into an entire orchestra.

On stage, he was pure electricity. Barefoot and shirtless like a beach kid, leaping across stages, spreading powder on the floor so he could dance. Audiences didn't just hear Jaco. They felt him in their bones.

He collaborated with Joni Mitchell, giving her songs a floating dreaminess no one else could create. He played with Pat Metheny. He formed the "Trio of Doom" with guitar legend John McLaughlin.

In 1979, he remarried. Twin boys arrived in 1982.

Everything was perfect.

Until the shadows arrived. 

The warning signs had always been there. Jaco's boundless energy. His fearless confidence. Everyone thought it was artistic temperament.

It was bipolar disorder.

The manic phases—those explosions of creativity and energy—had fueled his genius. But the cycles were accelerating out of control.

Drugs and alcohol amplified everything. Fans offered the world's greatest bass player free drinks, free cocaine. He accepted it all.

In 1982, during a Japan tour, his behavior terrified his bandmates. He shaved his head. Painted his face. Threw one of his precious bass guitars into Hiroshima Bay.

His wife had him hospitalized when he returned.

The diagnosis: bipolar disorder with rapid cycling. Manic episodes crashing into depression, faster and faster, like waves destroying a shore.

Doctors prescribed lithium. He hated how it dulled his mind and creativity.

He stopped taking it. 

The descent was swift and merciless.

By the mid-1980s, the man who had filled stadiums was sleeping in New York parks. He crashed with friends until they couldn't endure it anymore. He burned every bridge. Pushed away everyone who tried to help.

His modified bass guitars—his Bass of Doom instruments—were stolen while he slept in Washington Square Park. Never recovered.

In 1986, Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward held him for eight weeks. The diagnosis was confirmed: severe bipolar disorder, worsening.

He briefly tried to stabilize. Returned to Fort Lauderdale near family. For a moment, there were glimpses of the old Jaco. Drinking tea instead of alcohol. Speaking calmly.

It didn't last. 

September 11, 1987. Jaco jumped onto the stage during a Santana concert in Sunrise, Florida. Security removed him. They didn't recognize one of music's greatest innovators.

Hours later, drunk and spiraling, he arrived at the Midnight Bottle Club. The staff refused him entry.

He started kicking the door.

Luc Havan came outside.

What happened next would be disputed in court. Havan claimed he pushed Jaco once. That he fell and hit his head.

The medical evidence told a darker story.

Multiple facial fractures. A ruptured eye. Teeth driven through lips. The imprint of Havan's ring embedded in his face. Massive internal bleeding.

Doctors said those injuries required repeated trauma. Multiple blows from someone trained to fight. 

When police arrived, a woman knelt beside Jaco's body, wiping blood from his mouth so he wouldn't drown in it. His long hair spread around his head like a halo, soaked red.

She looked up at the officers: "Jaco's hurt."

He was rushed to Broward General Medical Center and fell into a coma. For days, hope flickered. Then a brain hemorrhage caused brain death.

On September 21, 1987, his family faced an impossible choice. They removed life support.

His heart beat for three more hours. Tracy, his first wife and mother of his oldest children, held his hand as he died.

Jaco Pastorius was 35 years old. 

Luc Havan pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He received twenty-two months and served a fraction of that time.

Jaco was buried at Our Lady Queen of Heaven Cemetery in North Lauderdale. His funeral was held at the same church where he'd served as an altar boy. 

Today, his legacy lives in every bass player who refuses to accept limits. His children all became musicians. Instruments and parks bear his name.

But the man himself—the beach kid from Fort Lauderdale who revolutionized music, who played with joy that made audiences cry, who introduced himself as the greatest bass player in the world and then proved it—was destroyed by an illness he couldn't accept and a society that failed to save him. 

His modified bass guitars were never all recovered. But the sound he created echoes through every note that followed.

The greatest among us sometimes burn with impossible brightness.

And sometimes they burn out while the world watches, unable to stop the flames.

 

The Drumbo Club

Remember the Past 

  

Photo of The Day: Bongo Fury cover shoot

Rare photos from The Archive 

Rex Lowe

"This photo was taken at a cheap burger joint on Sierra Highway in Palmdale CA. A buddy’s mom owned it. She was paid a day’s receipts for closing for this shoot. It nor those pictured exist any longer"

Robert Carradine Dead At Age 71

 

Robert Carradine Dead At Age 71 

A beloved member of the storied clan of actors, Carradine was the bedrock of his family, according to surviving older brother Keith Carradine. But he struggled for two decades with bipolar disorder and ultimately it got the best of him.

The Long Riders is one of my favourite films.

 

Leaving Missouri - The Long Riders - Ry Cooder (for Robert Carradine)

February 25: On this day in 2011, Suze Rotolo died. + Bob Dylan Boots of Spanish Leather, Springfield, MA 1992

 

https://youtu.be/opFd2PeHchk 

Bob Dylan’s early love/muse was immortalized both in song (“Don’t Think Twice” - “Tomorrow is a Long Time” - “Boots of Spanish Leather”) and visually, on the iconic cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. She’s credited with awakening her beau to political concerns - a major advance in his evolution as an artist.

The two parted by the fall of 1963, and for many years, she avoided discussing their time together before succumbing to the inevitable and penning, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, in 2008. A Hollywood version of her was depicted by Elle Fanning in the recent Dylan biopic (with the name changed). I suspect she would object to the characterization.

Bob Dylan Boots of Spanish Leather, Springfield, MA 1992

Artur Artist presents "The Casper Collection" YouTube

On October 16, 1992, a who's who of music stars came out to help Bob Dylan celebrate the 30th anniversary of his professional musical career.

A week later he was back at his more usual kind of gig, playing lightly publicized shows in small, intimate theaters, particularly old movie palaces, one of his favorite type of venues.  One such is the historic, approximately 1,500-seat Paramount Theater in Springfield, MA-- more recently known alternately as the Paramount or Springfield Performing Arts Center.  This pretty version of "Boots of Spanish Leather" was recorded in that once grand movie palace 12 days after the gala tribute bash.

 

Bridget St. John - If You Got Money [ A Pocketful of Starlight ] | Herberg De Kelder + Live version and links to full album

If You’ve Got MoneyBridget St. JohnA Pocketful Of Starlight

HERBERG DE KELDER

Bridget St. John - If You've Got Money (A-Side) -

 SINGLE 1970 Produced by Kevin Ayers

Bridget St John - Pocketful of Starlight (Whole Album) here . . . . . .

The full album for A Pocketful of Starlight: The Best of Bridget St. John  

Music by Bridget St. John playlist

A Pocketful of Starlight: The Best of Bridget St. John tracklist (Bridget St. John):

Ask Me No Questions

Back to Stay

Fly High

A Day Away

Autumn Lullaby

Some Kind of Beautiful

Jumblequeen

City Crazy

Curl Your Toes

If You've Got Money

Nice

Long Long Time

Yep

Thank You For...

Bumper to Bumper

Catch a Falling Star

Goodbye Goodbye

The Whole in Your Heart