Welcome to THE ART MOVEMENT, a radio show about arts and culture, where all art forms and free thoughts are allowed. The show is hosted and produced by globe-trotting arts presenter Matt Micucci, and features plenty of music, interview clips and thoughts on current events.
Here are five clips from the latest episode of my radio show, THE ART MOVEMENT, the weekly radio show hosted/produced by arts presenter Matt Micucci. The show revolves around art and culture, and where all art forms and free thoughts are allowed.
(To listen to/download the full radio show, scroll to the bottom of the page.)
Trans-genderism in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando.
The problem with major bookstore chains like WHSmith.
The music of planets.
What Pablo Picasso told the Nazi secret police force about Guernica.
A tourist damaged a 19th-century Antonio Canova artwork while taking a selfie.
Lots more where that came from! You can listen to the full epsiode of THE ART MOVEMENT (including the music) via the player below.
This week’s Matt’s Art Chat is a conversation with French-born Tango dancer Eva Laura Madar about the Tango culture and the different kinds of Tango. Here, we also talk about her experience of living ten-years in Argentina, which she calls her second home, as well as her time in Patagonia and her connection with nature, among other things.
MATT’S ART CHAT is a series of podcast conversations about the arts with creators, curators and art lovers from all over the world. The series is hosted by arts presenter Matt Micucci.
Here’s the list of songs played on the last episode of THE ART MOVEMENT – the weekly radio show about arts and culture, where all art forms and free thoughts are allowed, hosted by Matt Micucci. (To listen to the full show, scroll to the bottom of the page.)
A partial transcript from Episode 21 of THE ART MOVEMENT. Scroll down to listen to the full radio show.
So, when I think of music and space, one of the things that comes to my mind is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Steven Spielberg movie where the benevolent aliens and humans essentially use the language of music to communicate with each other.
I also think about that Canadian Space Agency astronaut who recorded a version of David Bowie’s song, “Space Oddity,” and recorded a video for it on the International Space Station in 2013. The video was posted on YouTube and went viral. Bowie himself states that he thought it was possibly the most poignant version of that song ever created.
Another famous story is that of the Voyager probes, a sort of time capsule launched by NASA in 1977 that was intended to communicate a story of the world of humans on Earth to any interplanetary civilization out there.
These time capsules were records featuring spoken word greetings in 59 languages, sound recordings of locations and things on earth and a 90-minute selection of music from many cultures. One of which, I’m sure, was Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
In fact, if you’d like to know more about the Voyager mission, there’s a fascinating documentary about it called The Farthest, which was directed by Emer Reynolds, whom I interviewed in my hometown of Galway, Ireland, when she premiered the doc there at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2018. Interesting to note that Chuck Berry had died just a few weeks before then.
Then of course, there is the whole thing about the sound of planets. Apparently, the earth and each of the planets of the solar system revolving around the sun make a musical note so low that it cannot be heard by human ears.
Ok, so sound doesn’t travel through space, which would explain that famous tagline from Alien, “In space no one can hear you scream.” But NASA has used powerful radio telescopes that can pick up the electromagnetic signals coming from the planets, especially the active ones like Jupiter, and convert them to sounds the human ear can hear.
A partial transcript from Episode 21 of THE ART MOVEMENT. Scroll down to listen to the full radio show.
Gregory Porter actually made history last week by singing a special rendition of “America the Beautiful” as part of the live coverage of NASA’s historic Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission.
The performance was broadcast from his home in California and this made Porter the very first ever recording artist to be invited by NASA to perform a Mars mission launch. So that’s pretty cool, Gregory. We at THE ART MOVEMENT speak your name and we salute you.
By the way, just in case you are as interested and fascinated with space exploration as I am, the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover was launched on the 30th of July and it’s expected to touch down on Mars on the 18th of February. And the official goal of the mission is to search the Red Planet for signs of ancient life and collect samples to send back to Earth.
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “Perseverance is going to make discoveries that cause us to rethink our questions about what Mars was like and how we understand it today.”
So, in short, with the launch of this mission, NASA is essentially asking one simple question: was there life on Mars?
Here’s the list of songs played on the last episode of THE ART MOVEMENT – the weekly radio show about arts and culture, where all art forms and free thoughts are allowed, hosted by Matt Micucci. (To listen to the full show, scroll to the bottom of the page.)
MADNESS, “Baggy Trousers”
FLEETWOOD MAC, “Oh Well (Part I)”
CHUCK BERRY, “You Never Can Tell”
AUDIO BULLYS, “We Don’t Care”
STEPPENWOLF, “Born To Be Wild”
FRANCOISE HARDY, “Comment te dire adieu”
THELONIOUS MONK, “Well, You Needn’t”
PAUL SIMON, “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard”
COCTEAU TWINS, “Iceblink Luck”
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, “Just Like Honey”
MADISON AVENUE, “Don’t Call Me Baby”
TINY TIM, “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight”
I would consider myself an “albums guy” and my taste in music is very varied. In this new feature, I list the albums that I listened to most intensely during the week. The list will include albums old and new, and the number of albums listened to every week will most likely vary on a week-to-week basis.
Chloe X Halle, Ungodly Hour (Parkwood/Columbia)
TRACKLIST (favorite tracks underlined): 1 – Intro; 2 – Forgive Me; 3 – Baby Girl; 4 – Do It; 5 – Tipsy; 6 – Ungodly Hour; 7 – Busy Boy; 8 – Catch Up; 9 – Overwhelmed; 10 – Lonely; 11 – Don’t Make It Harder On Me; 12 – Wonder Whats She Thinks Of Me; 13 – ROYL.
A surprisingly sophisticated R&B release from this sister duo. Lush, inventive and revealing honesty in its lyrics.
Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, Dinner Party (Sounds of Crenshaw/EMPIRE)
Tracklist (Favorite tracks underlined): 1 – Sleepless Nights; 2 – Love You Bad; 3 – From My Heart and My Soul; 4 – First Responders; 5 – The Mighty Tree; 6 –Freeze Tag; 7 – LUV U.
A mellifluous blend of soul, jazz and hip-hop by four of today’s top names of these musics. A little empty at times but great, laid-back music to counter contemporary madness.
Here’s the list of songs played on the last episode of THE ART MOVEMENT – the weekly radio show about arts and culture, where all art forms and free thoughts are allowed, hosted by Matt Micucci. (To listen to the full show, scroll to the bottom of the page.)
It’s time to talk about music for a bit as last week, we lost a music genius, Annie Ross, who passed away just a few days shy of her 90th birthday. She was a jazz singer/songwriter and also an actress of both film and theatre.
She was born in London, and came from a family of vaudeville performers. But they all moved to New York when she was about four. As a child, she got her start in show business relatively early and after winning a songwriting competition at age 14, embarked on a lifelong career in music.
Annie Ross is remembered as a pioneer of the vocalese style, which simply put is a style or musical genre of jazz singing in which words are added to a soloist’s improvisation. And she is particularly well remembered for her collaboration with vocalists Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks, with whom she formed the vocalese group Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.
She contributed several of her own compositions to the groups repertoire and recorded seven albums with them between 1957 and 1962. These include the self-titled album from 1960, also known as The Hottest Group in Jazz, which I recommend to anyone who has not heard it. It’s absolutely mindblowing what these guys could do with their voices and just the chemistry and understanding that they share.
This is of course just scraping the surface of a career that included many accomplishments. She even used to run her own nightclub in London and received many accolades including the NEA Jazz Master Award, which is generally considered the highest honor that the United States bestows upon jazz artists and important figures in jazz.
The song that I will be playing right now to remember Annie Ross is one that she had originally written in 1952 and had set to a tenor saxophone solo of the same name by Wardell Gray that was recorded in 1949. The song is titled “Twisted” and a new, upbeat version was included on the 1960 album I mentioned earlier, with Lambert and Hendricks. Hopefully this will give you an idea of just what a music genius she was and just her amazing interpretive skills.
In Arte Matt 