A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1975, 2001 Sony Legacy In February of 1975, RCA Records released An Evening with John Denver, a 2-LP "live and in concert" album recorded during several performances by the now-legendary singer/songwriter from Roswell, New Mexico, Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., known professionally as John Denver. Recorded in the late summer and early fall of 1974 at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, this album was produced by the legendary Milt Okun, and featured backup by various gig musicians and an orchestra led by Lee Holdridge. Originally released on vinyl LP and cassette and in various countries (including Netherlands, Japan, and Spain) as well as in the United States, An Evening with John Denver was a significant recording for Denver, who was not quite 31 years old at the time yet was as popular as Frank Sinatra had been in the 1940s and 1950s. He'd started his studio recording career only a few years before under Okun's tutelage, and this was his first live r...

Photo Credit: Pixabay Well, hello there! It's been a while since I've written a non-review post. There are several reasons for this, the biggest being that I no longer write as much about my personal life as I used to. Not that there isn't anything new or interesting going on; au contraire, my friends. My life has changed radically in the eight years since I started A Certain Point of View, and maybe someday I'll revisit those changes here or in another venue. Right now, though, I'll just focus on creating the kind of content you've been seeing here for the past few years - namely, reviews and reflections about movies, books, music, TV shows, and the occasional computer game, as well as a soupcon of political commentary should the mood strike me. I was going to write a review of The Capital of Baseball (1950-1960), the seventh episode of Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns, but my heart is not in it. It would entail rewatching the episode, which I ordin...

(C) 2012 Signum Classics Records On September 24, 2012, Britain's Signum Records released The Best of The King's Singers, a two-disc, 40-track compilation of a capella  performances by the current iteration of The King's Singers (Patrick Dunachie, Timothy Wayne-Wright, Julian Gregory, Christopher Bruerton, Christopher Gabbitas, and Jonathan Howard). As I wrote yesterday on my review of Gold, The King's Singers is a sextet of singers (two countertenors, one tenor, two baritones, and one bass) that performs choral compositions from various historical eras and genres without accompaniment. First formed by six choral students (five from King's College in Cambridge and one from Christ Church, Oxford) in 1968, several iterations of The King's Singers have performed in Great Britain, Europe, the U.S., and other countries throughout the world over the past half-century. Additionally, their recordings and concerts on DVD and other home media formats sell well, es...

Album Cover Design: Tom Wilkes. Photo by: Angus McBean. (C) 1973 Apple Records On April 2, 1973, Apple Records released two double-LP compilation albums by The Beatles: The Beatles: 1962-1966 and The Beatles: 1967-1970. Known respectively as the Red and Blue Albums (a reference to the colors of the album packaging), the two sets presented 54 of the Fab Four’s best-known songs from their eight-year reign as rock’s premier performing act. Produced by George Martin and Phil Spector, the Red and Blue Albums were compiled by The Beatles’ (and The Rolling Stones’) infamously sleazy agent Allen Klein in response to the bootleg collection Alpha Omega , which was being sold without permission via television marketing. Per Klein, Martin, and Spector’s design,   The Red Album covers the first half of The Beatles’ career, featuring 26 songs written and performed by the “lads from Liverpool” between 1962 and 1966. For various reasons – some artistic, some financial – Klein decreed...

Album Cover Design: Tom Wilkes. Photo by: Angus McBean. (C) 1973 Apple Records I became a Beatles' fan when I was 17 years old. That’s rather late in life, relatively speaking, in part because my taste in music tends to veer to the classical/orchestral film score end rather than rock. I was less than a year old when the Fab Four made their American TV debut in February 1964. Then I lived in South America from 1966 till 1972 in an environment where I didn’t mix with too many rock and roll fans. That’s why I wasn't really exposed to The Beatles' music until the 1980s, by which time the group had split and John Lennon had been taken away by a madman's bullet. My fascination with the "lads from Liverpool" began in my sophomore year at South Miami High, when a fellow journalism student took the time to write down the lyrics to Paul McCartney's ode to Julian Lennon ("Hey, Jude"). In chorus class I learned the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby...

(C) 1970, 1987 Nonesuch Records/Warner Communications “Don t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.” – Scott Joplin In November 1970, Nonesuch Records released Joshua Rifkin’s Scott Joplin Piano Rags, an album that featured nine compositions written in ragtime by Arkansas-born pianist-composer Scott Joplin (1868-1917). Rifkin’s album – the first of three such records – became an instant best-seller and helped kickstart the early ‘70s revival of ragtime that was epitomized by the use of Joplin’s rags in Marvin Hamlisch’s score for George Roy Hill’s comedy-drama The Sting.  Official Warner Music Video: Solace - A Mexican Solace “Because it has such a ragged movement. It suggests something like that.” – Scott Joplin on the derivation of the word "ragtime" Although the album only contained nine of Joplin’s rags, Rifkin’s spirited performance of the music that inspired the first musical craze in 20 th Century America became Nonesuch Record...

On May 25, 2018, Walt Disney Motion Pictures released director Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, the second Star Wars Anthology film produced by Lucasfilm and the 11 th feature film in the franchise set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” On the same day, Walt Disney Records dropped Solo: A Star Wars Story – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, a 20-track selection of themes and action cues from the first of what might just be a series of films that chronicle the adventures of Han Solo before his involvement with the Rebel Alliance. Since Solo: A Star Wars Story is set 13-10 years before Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope, composer John Powell doesn’t begin his score with John Williams’ Star Wars Main Title theme. He did, however, collaborate with Maestro Williams, who composed and conducted the first track on the soundtrack album, The Adventures of Han. Although this Williams theme is not the same one that music score fans fondly remember as Han Solo and ...