A very happy birthday to Miles Davis.
To commemorate this great man I am including a piece I have on my “Rhapsodies Soundtrack” for when I am writing, “I Could write a Book”
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A very happy One Hundred and Twelfth birthday to the great Duke Ellington.
To commemorate the anniversary, allow me to share one of my favorites, New World a Comin’. Regrettably I wasn’t able to find a copy of the orchestral version of this which I love. The things Duke could do with an orchestra transcends… well, just transcends.
What I love about New World A Comin’ is how it stands for a higher ideal. While this particular version doesn’t have it, I love how Duke’s introduction to the piece spells that higher ideal out.
“New world a ‘coming… is a place… in the distant future… On land, at sea, or in the air… Where there will be no war, no greed, no categorization. No non believers… where love is unconditional and there is no pronoun good enough for god.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpIfCw0LodA
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Today’s Rhapsody is Ton?i Hulji?‘s performed by Maksim Mrvica. I’m embarrassed to say I only heard of this one, as well as the performer until after I started researching more obscure rhapsodies but I really like it.
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Today’s sketch is from the Seattle Art Museu’s extensive collection of West African masks. This one is a wooden Baga headdress from Guinea called a Baga Nimba or D’mba.
The D’mba serves as a symbol of motherhood for the Baga people. They were also an inspiration for Pablo Picasso who bought two from Gertrude Stein in 1918.
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For today’s sketch Is one I did last November at the Seattle Art Museum of 
‘s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, It’s a small and very complex bronze statuette which I’m comfortably sure I could spend days on doing sketches at different angles with hardly a single image being remotely the same.
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Today something a little different. The mad scene from Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Okay, technically not a rhapsody, but it’s rhapsodic in form, so it counts.
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