Ever wonder how Jordan Rudess gets away with only 1 keyboard?

Progressive Rock usually means stacks of keyboards, right? So how does Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater get away with just one? Usually in live performances you'll be able to see Jordan playing just one keyboard, the Korg Oasis -- and he has it mounted on a cool swivel stand so he can sort of move around a bit when he plays.

Well, I found a video where Jordan explains how this keyboard was able to single-board-edly replace almost all his other instruments in live performances. It's a fun video.

Ayreon Live

Arjen Lucassen's Ayreon albums pull together some of the best musicians in rock and metal to present some great sci-fi progressive rock operas. Here are a couple videos from live performances. You'll see a lot of different musicians -- Arjen of course is the very tall guitarist.

Mike Patton singing Italian with Metropole Orchestra

Mike Patton is best known as the versatile vocalist for Faith No More. Just how versatile? He has fronted several other bands, performed compositions of vocal noises by John Zorn, and performed monster noises for movies. He also sang  in concert with the Metropole Orchestra, performing almost the entire concert in Italian. Here are a couple videos from the performance.

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic

I figured I should post some mention of this great band on the blog, since I recently brought them up in a musical discussion. One of my favorite bands, but unfortunately the only videos I could find did not feature one of their members, woodwind player Ken Fields. Their official site isn't working at the moment, hopefully it will be back. In the meantime you can learn about them and hear their music in these places:

wikipedia
myspace (has some songs you can listen to)
The Classical Connection:

Episode 6: Chamber Prog

Episode 13: Birdsongs of the Mesozoic (hour-long episode featuring, in addition to music by the band, compositions and performances by it's members and music by Schnitke, Piazzolla, Debussy, and John Adams! Go listen to it!

AUDIO PLAYERS FIXED!!!

Just a quick post to mention that I fixed the embedded audio players on the Classical Connection website. I had originally used a google MP3 player, but it inexplicably stopped working. I have switched to Quicktime. You may need to install Quicktime on your computer in order to listen.

Episodes 1-26 are now, once again, available for listening! That's over 26 hours of great music!

I still need to recompile episodes 27-33, save them as single MP3 files, and upload them.

As for new episodes, I have about 10 in the works in various stages of completion, so stay tuned.

Snow Goose

I was listening to music on shuffle today, and Camel's classic "Music Inspired by the Snow Goose" album came up. I realized that I have yet to feature this on my show or blog. It's mellow instrumental progressive rock featuring some beautiful electric guitar and some sections composed for traditional instruments.

This video features a live performance of 3 portions of the album. The middle section, beginning at 3:00 into the video, is a nice woodwind quartet with some help from the keyboards.



I'm working on collecting some more music inspired by The Snow Goose, a short book by Paul Gallico. Hopefully I'll have enough to do an hour-long show on the theme.

I'm Seeing Magenta and hearing Wondrous Stories

Since I posted yesterday about Karnataka, I thought I'd post about another band featuring a female vocalist, the Welsh band Magenta. I have corresponded with keyboardist/composer Rob Reed via e-mail in the past, and they were the first new prog band featured on my show (episode 4). I actually got to see them perform and met them at NEARfest a few years ago - amazing concert, and great people. Christina even gave me a hug!

They're still one of my favorite bands, even though I disagreed with the subject matter and artwork on their most recent album and as a result don't listen to it much. I'm hoping their next one will be more palatable for me. I do really like their previous albums.

Here is the video for a beautiful recording of the Yes song "Wondrous Stories" that they released earlier this year.



And a live performance from a concert DVD that i own: