I see no New England dates. That's unpossible! They went to UMass!

Preach it, but I always got the feeling they hated the music scene up here. I don't know where I got that impression, but I always got that feeling.

Their Coachella show is floating around on the net -- one of my coworkers was playing it. It rocked.

Kate, CDs are en route to you as of today.

A while back Teppy said she was suffering from random dread or anxiety attacks or something like that. So I started to put together my Random Dread Alleviation Mix, which was just a bunch of songs that make me happy. Some are goofy, some are upbeat, some are slow, some are instrumentals, some are actually kinda deep and soothing; the only common thread is that they make me feel happy. I had way too many for one disc so I decided to go with mp3s. Unfortunately when I burned it a bunch of files got truncated. I thought maybe I had put too many on and that was causing the screw up, so I deleted a bunch... and had the same problem. Tried a different software when burning. Same problem. It worked on my mp3 player because the songs were already there & I was just importing the playlist, but I couldn't get it to work otherwise. This is the kind of thing that makes my head explode so I gave up before someone or something got hurt (i.e., before I broke my hand by punching out my computer.) Anyway, I have one of the screwed up discs at work & have been listening to it and it's making me very happy, f'ed up files notwithstanding. (For every truncated one there seems to be another with 10-30 seconds of silence tacked on to the end. Weird.) There's Bud Powell and "Un Poco Loco", about which I've already talked way too much in these parts. Couple Spike Jones tunes -- love the gargling of the "William Tell Overture." Not a bossa nova fan but one of my favorite Sarah Vaughan recording's is her 1964 "Corcovado." Joe Ely's "West Texas Waltz". Couple tracks from Have Moicy!. Monk's "Bye-Ya" and "Bemsha Swing". Some Chic, some Bing Crosby, buncha Sinatra, "All Shook Up", Howlin' Wolf, Jeff Beck, Doug Sahm, Le Tigre, Lenya, Led Zep, Susannah McCorkle, Count Basie & Jimmy Rushing's "Mama Don't Want No Peas and Rice and Coconut Oil", Tom T. Hall's "Ballad of Bill Crump" and John Prine's "Grandpa Was a Carpenter", "Mothership Connection", "Adelaide's Lament" from Guys and Dolls... if it makes me happy I included it. And I'm having so much fun listening to it I'll take the chance of my head exploding just so I can fix the technical difficulties & share it with anyone who wants it.

Kate, CDs are en route to you as of today.

Woohoo!

I'm kind of hooked on "In the Shadows" by The Rasmus. Is that okay?

And I'm having so much fun listening to it I'll take the chance of my head exploding just so I can fix the technical difficulties & share it with anyone who wants it.

Oooh! If you fix it, I'd love a copy!

Hayden, they're singing you're song. I don't expect you to make the trip to see this, but if anyone else in NYC wants to check it out I'd be happy to give it a shot.

Oooh! If you fix it, I'd love a copy!

I'll work on it, but for various reasons (including but not limited to laziness & incompetence, not necessarily in that order... actually, yeah, in that order) it could take a while.

Going to see the great Clark Terry tonight at the Village Vanguard. To continue mixing the themes of music and theater, Terry "played" Puck on Duke Ellington's Such Sweet Thunder, a suite inspired by Shakespeare's plays and characters (Johnny Hodges' alto starring as Juliet in "The Star-Crossed Lovers" is another highlight). Not long ago I saw a great production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Edward Hall's Propeller Theatre. The only bad thing about it was that I saw it on the day it closed & didn't have a chance to see it again. I've tried unsuccessfully to find out if it moved to another city or just ended. If it shows up near you GO SEE IT! Unbelievably funny. In lieu of that, or better yet in concert with that, give the Ellington a try.

Wow, that sounds great, Joe. I wish I could up & head to Manhattan every time the urge struck me.

In addition to a BBC radio documentary being narrated by Brad Pitt (uh-huh) that will be broadcast soon, there is a newly released short film biography of Nick Drake.

NYT reviewed it today. Here is the link and since it's short - I just copied the text.

The Short, Sad Life of Nick Drake
By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: May 7, 2004

How do you film a biography of an enigma who died at such a young age (26) that he barely had a life? One way is keep it short. Jeroen Berkvens's tender tribute, "A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake," is only 48 minutes long. During part of that time the camera gazes at the pastoral landscape around Tanworth-in-Arden, the English village where Drake grew up in upper-middle-class comfort. With his haunting music playing in the background, these scenes define the film, which opens today in Manhattan, as a cinematic tone poem as much as a biography.

The word haunting is not idly chosen. Before he died in 1974 from an overdose of the antidepressant Tryptizol (whether accidental or deliberate, no one will ever know), Drake released three albums that carried a strain of introspective British folk-pop to a zenith of pure beauty. A folk crooner in the tradition of Donovan in his hippie pied-piper days, Drake wrote songs suffused with dreamy private imagery that drifted like smoke rings around his intense, rich guitar, finished off with some of the most evocative orchestrations ever attached to popular song. Even the peppier songs hinted at an underlying melancholy.

The movie's main voice belongs to Drake's older sister, Gabrielle, an actress, who outlines the family history and plays a recording of a song written by Drake's mother, Molly (a composer and poet herself), that is astoundingly similar in mood to her son's work.

Drake emerges as a painfully shy introvert, obsessed with his guitar, who expressed himself predominantly in music. He attended Cambridge without finishing. In 1969, under the aegis of the record producer Joe Boyd, he undertook a commercially unsuccessful solo career. In the movie Mr. Boyd recalls that Drake was deeply disheartened at having to cancel a tour because no one in the noisy clubs paid attention.

Drake fell into a depression so profound that in his final recording session he could no longer play and sing at the same time. By then he had retreated to his parents' home, where he died, Nov. 25, 1974. Since then his legend has circulated first through word of mouth and later through a television commercial several years ago that featured his song "Pink Moon." Today if you type "Nick Drake" into Google.com, you will find 150,000 references.

A SKIN TOO FEW
The Days of Nick Drake

Directed by Jeroen Berkvens; director of photography, Vladas Naudzius; edited by Stefan Kamp; released by Roxie Releasing. Shown with a short film, Coco Schrijber's "In Motion: David S. Ware," at Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 48 minutes. This film is not rated.