Music index

cuke.com - an archival site on the life and world of Shunryu Suzuki and those who knew him and anything else DC feels like - originally a site for Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki

cuke-The-Arts as in film n video and art-art and

cuke MUSIC index - a new section starting 1-22-08

Hear DC's music at Defuser Music dot com.

11-26-14 - The latest from Zsolt Suto in CIRCLES OF SILENCE - music with Tibetan Singing Bowls for relaxation, inner exploration & meditation - listen to it online and download for free here.

He sends this "With love, all my best wishes"

8-26-14 - The Melanthium Band - Lew Richmond

I have recently become part of a new music group called THE MELANTHIUM BAND--trumpet, violin, string bass, piano. Many people who know my books and teaching may not know that I was trained as a classical pianist and composer, and now I have returned to that. Our musical style is best described as contemporary classical, with a jazz inflection. Most of the pieces are my original compositions. In order to distinguish that activity from my Buddhist teaching and author work Melanthium has begun its own Constant Contact mail list identity. I have taken the liberty of adding your name to that list, so from now on when you get an email from "The Melanthium Band" you will know it is my group. You can read about the musicians, hear a YouTube clip of excerpts from a recent concert, and read up on the pieces we play. Our website is here:

Tom Silk wrote recently, "Lew Richmond has hit a home run in his composition of a tone poem that serves as a soundtrack for a 20 minute pilot film on the natural glories of Buddha and West Marin."

Lew Richmond cuke page

4-1714 - Rankin & Dub Ainu Band "You can't see it, and you can't smell it either"

This is a Japanese song with subtitles about radiation inspired by the disaster at the nuclear power plant at Fukushima. Ainu are descended from the aboriginal people of Japan. - posted in Engaged Buddhism/Current Events

4-16-14 - Tom Lehrer, an article on Buzz Feed about the great satirical songwriter from the fifties and sixties. I had the Tom Lehrer Songbook in high school and can sing one of his songs from memory right now. OK. I missed a few words. Looked it up. Redid it. Tune approximately correct. - thanks M Katz

and this is M Katz's favorite and it is good advice for aspiring writers

I Hold Your Hand in Mine by Tom Lehrer sung acappella by DC

2-12-14 - And here's Amrita Soon, Vidya and Wai's daughter (see this link)
who can be found on ReverbNation.

Photos
An article on the Penang Jazz Festival where Amrita mentioned

1-07-14 - The Meaning of Life - a favorite song - thanks Joyce Pointe

10-30-13 - Check out Yafiya Susan Deikman's site for her songs (Delving into the mystery of sound). She sang one at her father Arthur's memorial recently which alluded to the Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Soloman, ascribing to it the highest praise and arousing my interest. - dc

5-06-13 - Old buddhy Doug McKechnie and friends have a movie on something they've done and done again since the mid seventies - play the Golden Gate Bridge as a musical instrument. Here's a trailer for the movie: A Day in the Life of the Golden Gate Bridge. Go to Monumental Sounds and you can play it too. Doug writes about it on his blog.

12-19-12 - Check out Paul Durham's Black Lab World music site - thanks Karen Decotis

10-26-12 - Everything Is Broken:
Songs About Things As They Are
by Alan Senauke & his highly musical friends

Alan's Clear View Project

12-07-12 - J Bearden responds to the prior post: ANSWER: I started, and own 333 Records. But it is an artistic collective, and I give full control in every way to any artist that joins the label. I also find them, and sometimes introduce them towards creative collaborations and also try to spawn other creative activities.

Further, Sex Hands has yet to "join" 333, but they are working with other members of 333, and most likely, in some capacity (either the whole band, or one or two members) record tracks that will appear on 333.

This is on 333. And this.

10-25-12 - Sex Hands - sent by JBearden who writes "Fresh from Manchester. Soon to join 333 Records." Not sure what JB has to do with this but dug the tune and fondly remember Manchester where I had an eleven hour wait for a plane to get fixed and discretely plugged my laptop in behind a soda machine at the suggestion of a man with a broom. Might have mentioned it here. Ah yes - just searched cuke for "Manchester" and it was 10-25-07 (the one in England not Vermont). Hey! That's exactly five years ago today. - dc

10-05-12 - Jim Griffin, buddy from the Texas Panhandle, sends a mellow tune he put up on the You Tube and writes, "I fondly remember you playing and singing guitar in our living room...we then motored to Amarillo College to interest that lot with the "Freeze Please" World Suicide LP ..... they are still lost." He says he's reading Thank You and OK! for the third time. Good lord. His buddy, Chris, "Yohmei" Blasdel, another Texan, has lived in Tokyo since 1972. Studied for decades with Kinko Master, Yamaguchi Goro. Chris has written a book about all that - in Japanese - and it won awards. Good lordisimo. Now it's in English: THE SINGLE TONE: A Personal Journey into Shakuhachi Music. Texans rule. - dc

9-28-12 - Intriguing CGI musical instrument and pretty cool, to me, music - I watch and wonder how much work did it take to make the video. - dc

8-05-12 - 8-05-12 - This Old Earthquake's new album, Gospol Flat is now available. Check out their website and get it from there.

Read Paul Liberatore's Marin IJ review

Congrats to Ethan Okamura and the rest of you. - dc

7-09-12 - A little of the Ludwig Van - via flashmob

3-24-12 - Michael Komatsu Doherty's shakuhachi

2-25-12 - Somebody That I Used To Know - different music presentation - thanks Howie

2-23-12 - Copenhagen Philharmonic amazed commuters at the Copenhagen Central Train Station - Love these flash events - dc

2-5-12 - Austin Zen Center now has a video of a song I sang, Travelin' Alone, after the Friday pot luck dinner. Thanks Kim Mosley for putting this up and adding the words. - dc

1-12-12 - The Griffin Bros in Fort Worth do weird music and put it on YouTube. I want to do that too - music and other stuff. No time for that now but just wait. Tom did the cover art for me for the Boat of Dreams cassette done back in '86. - dc

1-10-12 - Dick Hensold in Concert: Northumbrian Smallpipes and other Strange Beasts. West Coast starting in Sebastopol January 19th, ending in Tacoma February 7th.

8-05-11 - John DeSmidts' Kitty Litter Music - Gene's brother

7-13-11 - Tristan music dot com - from Oklahoma - Tristan is the brother-in-law of Paul Speir who prepared and published the dubious To Find the Girl from Perth. Paul worked with Tristan on this debut EP. Paul and I are also now just finishing up a devastatingly brilliant new publishing consumer product. Stay tuned.

6-29-11 - On YouTube tumbled on Bouquet of Weeds and Destroy What You Don't Understand from my 1985 LP, Music for a Comic Book Video.

Listen to them on YouTube while viewing a bad scan of the cover. - dc

6-28-11 - Heard a sixties song on the radio the other day and wanted to find it on the web the next day but couldn't remember any of the words for sure and was working with hearing Internet through Windows media player because of its equalizer and went to their Internet radio station and hit "Oldies" thinking it would be forties and glory be, heard that song again. Searched for the repeated line of "She's got it" and found it eventually under that name with several versions, my favorite being a young guy lip-synching to it and then found the real name is Venus by Shocking Blue, a Dutch band that came out of nowhere and it soured to #1 on the Billboard chart in January, 1970. Turns out it was based on The Banjo Song released in 1963 by a folk group with Mama Cass named Big Three. The Banjo Song was was basically Oh Suzanna published in 1848 and written by Stephen Foster who might sound square as heck now but who was influenced by African music and who helped to bring the banjo, of African origen, into the American mainstream. It bothered some people, not me, that the song wasn't totally original. So listen to Venus by Shocking Blue in this video, almost identical to the version released on record.

6-26-11 - MK sent me the words to "The Guy's Only Doing It for Some Doll" by Frank Loesser six months ago. I found some versions of it and then heard it driving home from dinner out with mother on a Loesser special on a Night on the Town Loesser special on a classical station she keeps her car radio tuned to. I keep hearing it in my head so I thought I'd share. Bobby Darin, who sang to the old-fashioned crowd but became a sixties progress, made a both-gender version but that's post Loesser. Here's the song with Frank Sinatra plus two other guys from the movie.

6-20-11 - Jerry Ray's YouTube music site of his live recordings of mainly Fort Worth, TX, bands.

Jerry's Ray's memories of Shunryu Suzuki

5-07-11 - Clay C submits three links to new music from his gang back home.

Shlump Crime - produced by Michael Petzel

Check out Facebook slideshow with him and Sleaze

raps by Sleaze Loccust

like To High to Kick It

12-18-10 - Farewell Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart - site for his music

Van Vliet art

Rolling Stone obit

DC song for him (1st verse) - The Madman Minstrels Hall of Fame

10-10-12 - None of Us are Free - RIP Solomon Burke

8-21-10 - This Old Earthquake

Rave review for this new Bolinas band in yesterday's Marin IJ.

I don't know if I can make their Wed. 8-25 concert August 25 at a very cool performance hall in SF called Viracocha cause I'm gonna be with Edward Browns Fairfax CA Zen group from 7 to 9:30 and the show starts at 8 but maybe it goes late. Liz Tuomi's son Ethan Okamura is part of this trio. - dc.

4-14-10 - I've got this new site for my music, defusermusic.com which is just getting going, and found an old experimental sort of industrial sampled album of mine on the Internet here at this site for weird stuff where my entry is flattered by being called the weirdest of them all. I blush. Anyway, if you like obscurata check this site out. It's called A Viable Commercial: Obscure and unknown 80s post punk, minimal wave, electropop, new wave, and other stuff. I link to the page my old album is on. - dc

4-12-10 - Yesterday went to Buddha's birthday ceremony at Genjoji which is the next ridge over and just before Shinko Laura Kwong doused us all with petals, Brendan Buss made a sax offering. As I type I'm listening to his music on MySpace/ve55el. Cool. Check it out. - dc

4-05-10 - Mariah Carey's Hero. After seeing the movie Precious I was impressed with her (and the movie and the special features) and listened to a bunch of Carey's songs on YouTube. Not the sort of music I normally listen to but it's all good and her voice is great - with a five octave range - and this one is pretty inspiring. In her videos she mainly comes across as sexy but to me her persona in the movie was the most appealing. She funds a camp to give inner city kids a fresh air experience. I appreciate her efforts, like Opra, to empower others. A lot of people put that sort of thing down but what are they doing to help others? What are any of us? Reminds me tangentially of the time when some of Trungpa Rinpoche's students were ridiculing Guru Maharaj Ji and he told them to shutup, that at least he was giving others hope (something like that).

9-19-09 - Birds on the Wire - thanks Kelly and Renée

9-14-09 - While in Germany, looking forward to visiting my old friend Richard Schoenherz in Frankfurt. Richard generously played keyboards brilliantly for me on a few musical creations of the 80s. Check out his website - Schoenherz and Fleer. - dc

7-31-09 - Crooks and Liars is not only a great site for short videos of and links to what's happening in the news like this cool move from the house floor and this clip from my fave, Thom Hartmann, there's an occasional far out flick like this. it's also got a great selection of music videos usually put on at the end of the day. And there's the Late Night Music Club with a wonderful array of music at the end of the day - like this great piece by Cab Calloway and two great dancers.

7-01-09 - The CD of Songs for To Find the Girl from Perth is now available here, soon in more ways. Buy it and in this tiny way help to support shunryusuzuki.com and so forth. For more on the girl from Perth, go to this site.

Songs for To Find the Girl from Perth

6-20-09 - Gene DeSmidt singing Brand New Heart with the Elephant crew at Blue Lakes. - link no good anymore. Sorry.

4-05-09 Linked to this last year and was reminded of it today. A little song and dance filled with appreciation for people and peoples everywhere. Where the Hell is Matt dot com.

2-12-09 - Under the whether or not but coming up to share son Clay's MySpace music link. Beware, death metal. He's the drummer.

12-20-08 - Thanks to Rico Provasoli for sending Playing For Change: Song Around the World "Stand By Me"

12-07-08 - Prop 8 Musical number

11-07-08 - Sophia Baker woos audience in Crestone Charter School cello performance.

9-22-08 - Lots of folks to put in here from past mentions. Check out Kamala Buckner (dance) and her husband Tom (voice). There are links to more about him at the bottom of her interview which is where that link with her name goes.

6-22-08 - Words to Songs To Find the Girl from Perth - with or without chords - wanted to put this somewhere for people I'm working with on this and thought - why not here - it ain't no secret.

5-12-08 - Listen to Luther Barnes & The Red Budd Gospel Choir sing:"My God Can Do Anything." When I was working on Crooked Cucumber, I'd do various things to encourage myself. Putting this song on was about as good as it got. I'd dance around and cry and get all enthused and get back to work. - dc

2-23-08 - Read about Australian Zen teacher and musician Ross Bolleter, read praise for this CD, Paradise Cafe, and learn how to get it, other CDs of Ross's experimental music - mainly ruined piano and also links to his Zen writings.

2-02-08 - Songs by Ben Gustin

1-23-08 - Suzuki by Tosca

1-22-08 - Where is the Love by Black Eyed Peas.

1-21-08 - Lew Richmond releases new music CD, Songs of Lazarus.

Music by Lew Richmond

See more on Lew Richmond - interview, links.