Friday, June 24, 2011

Aaron Meyer: Portland-area rock violinist

Here in Tualatin, Oregon we've got a nice summer "Concerts in the Commons" series of free outdoor concerts with a wide variety of music. As I reviewed this year's schedule I was pleasantly surprised to see a "Rock Violinist" listed! Intrigued, I checked out the artist's website.

Aaron Meyer is a talented musician with great stage presence, and he's put together a great band. His website has several videos, and YouTube has quite a few more. I'm really looking forward to the concert this summer!

First video I'll share is a promo clip from a video CD he released recently that features the band playing along with their studio recording--so you can hear some overdubbed parts that aren't actually being played, and there is no audience, but the camera work is really good:


Then a couple clips from an older live concert, where the sound and camera isn't as clean but it's a genuine live performance with audience:

Friday, June 17, 2011

New Yes Album: Fly From Here





New Yes album will be released in less than a month. It's available for pre-order now, with official release date of July 12. The band has released some clips, and some of them sound quite promising! This is the second album in the band's history to not feature Jon Anderson as the lead singer. Benoit David has a great voice in comparable range and in some parts sounds quite a bit like Jon. The music reminds me a lot of the Drama album, which I guess is no accident seeing as Trevor Horn is at the helm again in the producer's seat. Fellow ex-Buggle/YesMan Jeff Downes joined the line-up in time for this summer's tour, but to my knowledge he doesn't appear on the album; in the studio keys were handled by Oliver Wakeman (yes, Rick's son).


And they've released the first single! Yes, an actual single relased by the band. Imagine that. Pretty cool. Here's an exclusive stream from Rolling Stone:

Here are some other nice clips from the album:


Life On A Film Set by yestheband

Fly From Here part 3 - Madman at the Screens (Preview Snippet) by yestheband

Fly From Here part 5 - We Can Fly (Reprise) by yestheband

***UPDATE: I just found the track listing and credits for the new album on wikipedia, and it looks like Trevor Horn and Jeff Downes in fact did participate quite a bit on this album, with writing credits for a good portion of the music. Sounds like Drama, indeed!

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Barock Project: Rock in Theater COMPLETE! (almost) 1.5 hour playlist of Live Concert

OK, I know i just wrote a post about these guys a few days ago, but they've uploaded more videos! This time it's footage from their yet-to-be released Live DVD featuring a string quartet! I first heard "Un Altro Mundo" from this concert a couple years ago and it became an immediate favorite. Unfortunately the band has still not released this amazing concert DVD.

However, they now have most of the music from that performance on YouTube! It features many of their own compositions as well as music by ELP, Bartok(arr.ELP), Corelli(arr. New Trolls) and Aires Tango. I couldn't find a playlist for the concert, so I've arranged the videos into an order that made sense to me. Here is the entire concert, 14 videos, about an hour and a half of great music.

And yes, I loved watching and listening to it so much that I really did stay up to 1:20AM. I think everybody should get a chance to watch this amazing concert! And now's your chance:



See my other posts concerning Barock Project