Name: Rainbow Connection by swintsations
Duration: 2 min 36 s
Description: i found this epic version of 'rainbow connection' in a book of songs for kids. i played it on my parents' old piano. it's pretty dramatic. (:

In South Louisiana, Clifton Chenier (1925-1987) grew up hearing his father play a style of music known as La La at house dances held in Black French Creole communities. It had a percussive and syncopated sound, played in spare combinations of an accordion and a washboard used to scrub out a rhythm. After picking up accordion as a curious teenager, Chenier soon brought into this sound the rhythm and blues that dominated radios and jukeboxes, crafting a new style that would be called zydeco. In the 1950s, he recorded for Elko, Specialty, and Chess, and joined national package show tours with stars like Little Richard and Etta James. A decade later, Chenier was quietly settled in Houston, the big stages seemingly behind him. But one rainy Saturday night at a Houston neighborhood bar, Chenier’s cousin Lightning Hopkins introduced him to Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, where zydeco and Clifton Chenier would find a new home and champion.  

King of Louisiana Blues & Zydeco is a 4 CD/6 LP retrospective box set assembled in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Chenier’s birth. The set features a chronology of Chenier’s landmark work with Arhoolie and other labels, alongside a healthy dose of previously unissued gems. The 160-page book includes photos, posters, and other graphic artifacts from the Strachwitz Collection and deeply researched liner note essays by Grammy award-winning writer Adam Machado, public folklorist and radio host Nick Spitzer and longtime Louisiana journalist Herman Fusilier, along with a moving personal remembrance by Clifton’s son, Zydeco musician C.J. Chenier. The set is the first release on Arhoolie since the label became a part of Smithsonian Folkways.  

With music and storytelling and abundant visual imagery, this set demonstrates Clifton Chenier's life as a transformative artist -- from his earliest days practicing in the barn back home, to his reign as the undisputed King of Zydeco. 

Clifton Chenier - "My Mama Told Me" (Live)

I Believe in You, My Honeydew

I'm Listening

Thunderbird

Wild Ways

Visions and Ecstasies: Classical and folk music of Ireland is an exploration of Irish music and poetry that marks the debut album of Irish-American soprano Francesca Federico ÓMurchú, hailed by Opera News as having a voice of “such strong presence and beauty of tone that she left one longing for more.” 
Visions and Ecstasies highlights Irish music-making from its roots as an aurally-transmitted art form, honouring the melodic and linguistic complexities that illustrate both the beauty and the brutality of the country’s collective experience through centuries. 
The album combines art songs by Joan Trimble, Roger Quilter, Peter Warlock, Rebecca Clarke and Andrew Synott, alongside Irish folk songs sung in their original language. The album aims to articulate the linguistic and cultural links between these two seemingly disparate genres, and provide a snapshot of Ireland’s incredibly rich cultural heritage.
Francesca’s study of this repertoire began when she was selected as a Fulbright scholar to Ireland, and completed an arts residency at the Irish World Academy in Limerick under the mentorship of Irish folk legend Iarla Ó Lionáird, who first suggested she record an album of this unique music. She is joined by violinists Laura Lutzke and Ben Russell, cellist Clarice Jensen and pianist Dan Franklin Smith.

Visions and Ecstasies - Classical & Folk Songs of Ireland - 10 - Peter Warlock - The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love

Simon Gaudenz conducts the Jenaer Philharmonie in the culmination of their series of recordings of the complete Mahler Symphonies, interspersed with world-premiere recordings of pieces by Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini that reflect each symphony and pay homage to Mahler’s soundworld. This fifth volume features Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 as well as his last, incomplete Symphony No. 10, as well as works by Scartazzini that bookend and illuminate both Mahler’s last musical gasp, and the spectrum of Mahler’s symphonic output.

Mahler’s symphonies represent an extraordinary body of work, and it is fascinating to hear them contrasted and commented upon by a new piece specially created to shed light on or pay tribute to that symphony. Since 2018, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini has been Composer-in-Residence with the Jenaer Philharmonie, in which role he has been writing these new companion pieces to each of Mahler’s symphonies, which are being performed in Jena as a cycle in chronological order. 

This collaboration over a period of seven years is remarkable in many respects. Now that the end of the cycle has been reached, there are ten new works, each of which can be performed individually or in groups before the Mahler symphonies, but also as full-length concert works. Scartazzini has been passionately committed to the task from the beginning, especially as Mahler's music is particularly close to his heart: "I have a deep love for the work of Gustav Mahler; his symphonies have been my musical companions for many years, and every time I hear them again I am moved by the sheer abundance of inspiration and emotionality," he wrote at the start of the cycle. 

The title of Scartazzini’s Torso reflects the incomplete nature of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, and it offers both introduction and conclusion to the remaining movement of Mahler’s work. The other Scartazzini pieces on this recording are paired with Mahler’s symphonies, drawing upon key themes from those works in a way that tells the story of their progression, using exceptional colouristic effects – including, in Spiriti, the ‘Nicophone’, a new metal instrument whose immense colour spectrum ranges from long-reverberating metallic tones to sounds reminiscent of those from early electronic studios. The delicate, fragile sounds form a deliberate contrast to the powerful first movement of Mahler’s Third.

Mahler & Scartazzini Complete Symphonies, Vol. 5 - 08 - A. Scartazzini - Epitaph

You Won't Dig My Grave (Solo)

i found this epic version of 'rainbow connection' in a book of songs for kids. i played it on my parents' old piano. it's pretty dramatic. (:

Rainbow Connection

swintsations

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