SOUNDTRACK: BEN WILLIAMS & SOUND EFFECT-Tiny Desk Concert #170 (October 24, 2011).
Ben Williams is a jazz upright bass player (I didn’t realize bass players made band leaders, but clearly they do). In 2009, he won the Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition. And is an up and coming star.
He plays two original songs from his album State of Art.
It’s not often that the blurb describes a song, but it does a better job than I could have so for the first song, “Home”
the guitar (Gilad Hekselman) and drums (John Davis) lay down an aggressive, snappy foundation. The bass and electric keyboard (Christian Sands) fill out the polyrhythms. That groove, with its snappy hip-hop flavor, feels at home cruising down Georgia Avenue, then turning right on U Street NW, the historic African-American commercial district of Washington [D.C. where Williams is from]. Then the saxophone (Marcus Strickland) enters, and it’s game on.
That saxophone really runs the show on this song. There’s an interesting keyboard solo (I like the sound he chose, very Stevie Wonder-ish, but it’s a little quiet).
The sax switches to a smaller sax for the second song, “Dawn of a New Day.” The song is much slower and is more than twice as long as “Home.”
There’s a pretty lengthy bass solo (which sounds very old-school to me). It’s followed by an electric guitar solo that has an interesting effect on it which made me think at first that it was a horn. The horn comes next with a lengthy sax solo. The final solo comes from the keyboard (which now sounds like a piano). And then the song returns to that interesting main riff.
[READ: April 20, 2016] The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Sarah brought this book home and told me the premise–imagine what the stories of the other kids in the Buffy Universe would be like–wondering about all of those weird kids fighting vampires or whatnot.
At first I thought she meant that the other kids didn’t know what was going on, which would have been funny. But in this story, the kids know that there are vampires and other mystical things, they just aren’t any part of the action–they are not the Chosen Ones.
It’s a very funny premise for a book, and I looked forward to how Ness would create a story around people who aren’t “doing” anything.
But that’s not the only thing that the story is about. Ness makes the lives of the other kids so compelling and so, human (even if one of them is a quarter god). (more…)
I Just Read About That... 