So What: Local News, Notes & Links

Here's this week's wrap-up of assorted links and short local news items of interest:

* Should have linked to it on Wednesday, but singer Jane Monheit was interviewed for an article by the Post-Dispatch's Calvin Wilson published earlier this week. Monheit continues at Jazz at the Bistro through tomorrow night.

* DJ and historian Dennis Owsley muses about holiday themed jazz for his December post on St. Louis magazine's arts blog Look/Listen.

* And speaking of holiday jazz, Don Wolff just posted word that he's showcasing a sleigh-full of seasonal songs in the current edition of his Internet radio program "I Love Jazz."

* Singer Erin Bode's most recent CD Photograph was reviewed for AllAboutJazz.com by Dan Bilawsky.

* Supporters of the current effort to purchase and restore the Goldenrod Showboat have produced a short video on the history of the boat, which spent 53 years on the St. Louis riverfront and served as the site of many traditional jazz and ragtime performances. You can see the video in the embedded window below.



* The St. Louis-based blues label Broke & Hungry Records will celebrate its fifth anniversary early next year with the release of a two-CD collection called Mistakes Were Made: Five Years of Raw Blues, Damaged Livers & Questionable Business Decisions. The 30-song compilation will feature 15 tracks drawn from the label's catalog, plus 15 previously unreleased cuts from rural Mississippi performers such as Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, Wesley Jefferson, Pat Thomas, Terry "Big T" Williams, Bill Abel, The Mississippi Marvel and Terry "Harmonica" Bean.

(Edited after posting.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Miles Davis, the electric years

In recent weeks, this Saturday video feature has been focusing almost exclusively on previewing musicians who are coming to St. Louis in the near future. Today, let's change pace - it's been at least six months since we've featured any Miles Davis video here, and in that time, some interesting new things featuring the trumpeter have come online. We've also dug up a couple of older clips from Miles' electric period that have not been seen here before.

First up is a version of "Bitches Brew" recorded in 1969 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The album of the same name wouldn't be released until the following year, so the lucky Danes in the audience were getting an early look and listen to part of what would become one of Miles' best-known and most influential recordings.

For the next clip down below, we fast-forward to 1973, and the searching quality of the 1969 performance has given way to a more aggressive, almost atonal funk in an excerpt from a concert in Berlin titled "Live Electric & Brutal."

The third video is from a mid-1980s VH1 program called New Visions, and features Davis talking, sketching, showing off his artwork and providing intros for some music videos.

Batting cleanup is a rare clip showing Davis and blues guitarist and singer B.B. King on stage together in 1973, with Miles noodling for a couple minutes over some ballad changes. (Anyone recognize the tune?) While this is noteworthy more for its novelty value than for any musical virtues, one can't help but wonder what interesting variations on the blues might have been produced if B.B. and Miles had decided to collaborate at greater length.

UPDATE, 12:30 a.m., 12/9/09: StLJN reader "donmalcholm" identifies the tune in the Miles/B.B. video as "Guess Who," noting that it's "a Jesse Belvin number that B.B. King frequently includes in his set." Thanks!

(For more on all things Miles, check out Jeff Hyatt's fine site Miles Davis Online.)

Another way to save YouTube videos

There's lots of great jazz video footage available on YouTube, Daily Motion and other online video sharing services, but those sites don't make it easy to save copies of the videos you view on your own hard drive. Back in March, StLJN covered one way to save those videos, and while the site mentioned in that post, SaveYouTube.com, now is known as Downloader9, it still seems to perform the same video-saving functions in pretty much the same way.

However, given the ongoing battle between the online video services (who want you to watch videos on their sites, so as to increase their page views) and would-be video savers, it's always good to have alternative methods available. Which brings us to TubeSock, a piece of shareware that gives you another way to sock away those clips. I haven't tried the fully enabled version, which costs $15, but the demo, which allows you to save 30 seconds of a given video, seems promising. You can read more about TubeSock and/or download a copy here.

Gaslight Square documentary available free via Google video

And speaking of free stuff available online, Gaslight Square: The Legend Lives On, a 2005 documentary about the famed St. Louis entertainment district of the late 1950s and early 1960s, can now be viewed for free via Google video.

There's been a short video teaser of the film available on YouTube for a couple of years, but now you can see the entire 2 hour and 12 minute movie, which was directed by St. Louisan Bruce Marren, either by activating the embedded video window below, or by visiting the Google video page here.