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Judson Laipply's Evolution of Dance II is featured along with his original Evolution of Dance. These landmark videos have registered over 127,000,000 views on Youtube.
Recently added, Mongolia: Concert, Part 1 and 2, video recorded live at Lincoln Center, New York, a 90 minute concert of extraordinary artists from Mongolia. Also music from the Andes and documentary short films on Egypt and Ethiopia that will give the viewer a rare look into these ancient cultures from distant continents. And from South America we have added a live performance of the brilliant 20th century composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Over the coming weeks we will be adding a number of music performances from school students we have discovered in our global search for the artists of today. Check out "New Discoveries" to see the students at Aquilino Bedoya from Pereira, Colombia. We have just added Los Band-Aids and their exciting performance of the rock classic "La Bamba."
Visit their artist page and meet the four 7th graders of this wonderful San Francisco based band.
We have added the "PLAY ALL" video feature on all our artist pages with multiple videos. Scroll through the "Play Clip" video icons on the right margin of each page and you will see the "Play All" button at the top of the list. Or click on this and go to our "10 Favorites," and select "Play All" at the top of the video list for a demo with one hour of seamless video entertainment.
Recently added, the brilliant documentary shot in Cuba, Lukumi, that presents Afro Cubano rhythms.
Havana, photograph by Bradley Martin
Recently added, the Chicago Millennium Park, Pritzker Pavilion, United States debut of Enzo Avitabile and Bottari.
Enzo Avitabile & Bottari in Chicago
This extraordinary fusion of jazz, R&B, and blues, with the ancient Italian rhythm of the Bottari, performed on wine casks, is a must see.
Also just added Mystic Journey in concert at the Ford Theater in Hollywood, California.
This fabulous ensemble has just received the Los Angeles Music Awards Best New Age/Ambient Artist of the Year Award! Al Martinez of the Los Angeles Times claims “Suzanne Teng plays music for the soul.”
StayTunedTV has added "The Evolution Of Dance" and its creator, Judson Laipply to our video collection. Go to his artist page and see the famous dance that turned on the world of YouTube and see the exclusive video interview as he explains how it all happened - - 93 million + views and counting!
BASSAM SABA and Ensemble with Special Guests, recorded in his summer evening performance at Levitt Pavilion, Pasadena, are now on the site. This is a Classical Arab Music Concert featuring Saba's latest compositions including "A Waltz to my Father."
"Brilliant performance by Saba a true master of his art" - The New York Times
"Technical Genius Shines in Saba's nay, flute, oud and violin performance, a true master of his craft" - The Chicago Tribune
And make sure you check out jazz chanteuse Chris Bennett and her very HOT video of "Use Me"
Our latest rock video is "SAVIOR" from Emotional Syphon Records, the indie upstart of James "Munky" Shaffer, the famed guitarist from KoRn.
StayTunedTV's camera crew recently returned from New York City having covered the rehearsals and the First Annual Sudanese Music and Dance Festival
Songs from the concert are now available on the SUDANESE MUSIC & DANCE FESTIVAL page. The following are the original postings for the programs recorded in New York City including the NY Times reviews.
Songs and interviews are currently playing on the Sudanese Music and Dance Festival Page.
From the New York Times
July 23, 2007
MUSIC REVIEW | SUDANESE MUSIC AND DANCE FESTIVAL
Celebrating Sudan, With Songs of Peace and Protest
By JON PARELES
Omar Ihsas Sings for a United Sudan.
For the length of a concert on Sunday afternoon at Central Park SummerStage, Sudan was symbolically made whole. At the Sudanese Music and Dance Festival, dozens of performers shared the stage. They came from northern and southern Sudan, which ended a civil war with a 2005 peace agreement, and Darfur in western Sudan, where violence continues.
Many of the performers are now expatriates, in part because the strict Islamic sharia law now enforced in Sudan has severely restricted music. Muslim women danced onstage with their heads uncovered, as they cannot do in Sudan. And an American audience, as well as the Sudanese who cheered lyrics in Nubian and Arabic, had a very rare glimpse of a tenacious musical culture. It was multi camera videotaped for Webcast by director/producer John Kuri and will be seen on StayTunedTV.tv.
There were traditional and new songs, including one about the city of Kajbar, where snipers recently fired on a peaceful protest march. There were songs about the land of Sudan, which is Africa’s largest country in area. There were songs about lost love, about beautiful girls, about mourning and about unity. In mini-sets of a few songs each, singers chose material from across the regions of Sudan. Nearly all of it was dance music.
Sudan’s music is not insular. It takes in Arabic and Egyptian influences from the north; the Nile Music Orchestra, which accompanied the singers and duos, resembled an Egyptian pop orchestra, including strings, saxophones and accordion. (Ancient Nubia overlapped what is now Egypt and Sudan.) From the South, Sudanese music draws on sub-Saharan rhythms — often six-beat, three-against-two patterns — and modal or pentatonic melodies, along with the gleaming lines of Congolese-style electric guitars. Vocal styles arrive from both directions, with Arabic-style glides and quavers — echoed by the strings — or African leaps and exhortations.
There are also touches of Western styles. The strongest music was a kind of Sudanese funk, similar to music from Ethiopia but with Sudanese roots. Different grooves — galloping, handclapping, bouncing, pattering — backed the singers Ali al Sigeed, Atif Anees, Al Balabil, Omar Bannaga, Ahmed Bass, Abd Al Hadi, Osama al Elshekh and Hadeel & Azza. Yousif Elmosley, the music director, also took a turn as singer, remaking a traditional song with new lyrics urging men to support women.
Triplet rhythms moved in syncopated, overlapping patterns as violins introduced melodies and countermelodies, then replied to the vocal lines, along with the saxophones. Omar Bannaga, who updates traditional songs, started with a sustained vocal prelude like a classical Arabic singer, then moved into a galloping, accelerating beat that pulled people upfront to dance. Abd Al Hadi began one song with a tambur, a traditional Nubian lyre, to be joined by the orchestra with an Afro-Cuban lilt. Emmanuel Kembe looked to the West, using a reggae beat and singing part of his songs in English, urging change in Sudan.
Al Balabil (The Nightingales)
The concert featured two-thirds of one of Sudan’s most popular groups: Al Balabil (the Nightingales). They are a trio of sisters, formed in 1971, who continue to record and perform together. Two sisters who now live in the United States, Amal and Hadia Abdelmageed, appeared on Sunday while the third sister remained in Sudan. Their four songs — with high, curving unison vocal lines as asymmetrical as traditional music — were drawn from western, central and southern Sudan, and their mini-set included a costume change, from national to Nubian-style dresses.The final songs were by Omar Ihsas, who is from Darfur. “We are all here for our homeland, for Sudan,” he said. With vehement, determined phrases, his song urged, “Let’s live together."
COMING EVENTS
THE EVOLUTION OF DANCE II is in pre-production. Judson Laipply made an appearance on OPRAH in November to announce the new video. www.staytunedtv.tv will update this page as soon as the new dance is complete. We will debut it here and Judson will announce this on the NBC TODAY show.NOW FEATURED
StayTunedTV covers The North American Premiere of,
“MONGLOLIA: CONCERT", presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. as part of the 2007 Lincoln Center Festival. Co-produced by Festival d’Automne à Paris.
Performers: Burenbayar, Buuveibaatar, Chuluunbaatar, Lkhagva, Naranbat, Narantuya, Odsuren, Zagd-Otchir, Zinamyetr.
Felt Installation Design: Blanche de la Taste, Aline Desherbais. Artistic Advisor, Ethnomusicologist: Alain Desjacques. Coordinator in Mongolia: Amarsanaa Altansan”
Nine musicians and storyteller from Inner Mongolia offer a rare glimpse into the art of the remote, fascinating nomadic culture. This will be a 90 minute concert presenting a wide range of Mongolian music that is typically practiced by the country’s nomads. Far from being a catalogue of exotic vocal techniques, the performance is about the reconstitution of the rhythms of community and familial gatherings and entertainment, as they are still found in the Mongolian countryside. The musicians perform on traditional instruments that include various lutes, fiddles, and flutes, as well as the two-stringed horse-head violin (morin khuur). The concert will also feature indigenous dance (biyelgee) rarely seen outside of family reunions in Mongolia, epic song (tuul), long chant (urtyn duu), and overtone singing (khöömii).
StayTunedTV's camera crew covered this exceptional concert and is presenting the entire performance as streaming video. From The New York Times - -
July 26, 2007
Dance Review | Mongolia: Music, Dance & Ballad
From Mongolia, Layered Voices and Intimations of the Eternal
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Who in the West knows much of the dance and music of Mongolia? Or that its dances aren’t like those of anywhere else? Or that its singing is, by any standard, phenomenal? Thanks to the Lincoln Center Festival’s two-part production “Mongolia: Music, Dance & Ballad,” some of us are learning more about these wonders.
I am sorry that I cannot catch the one-man epic ballad “The Secret History of the Mongols” at the festival. (Part 1 was performed last Sunday; Part 2 is this Sunday.) But I was more than happy to spend most of Tuesday imbibing the strange Mongolian sound world, first with lectures, demonstrations and film at Asia Society, then with a 90-minute performance at Clark Studio. By the end of the evening concert the sense of timelessness that is a goal of this music had indeed arrived. And my head was full of the extraordinary singing for hours.
To an unaccustomed Western ear the most startling feature of Mongolian music is its overtone singing (also called diphonic): the production of two vocal sounds at one time by the same singer. At the risk of diminishing its impact, this recalls the Disney cartoon “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” (one of the episodes in the 1946 film “Make Mine Music”), in which the lead character, Willie the whale, sung by Nelson Eddy (never better), is joyously triphonic, and can sing tenor, baritone and bass simultaneously in the “Rigoletto” quartet. But it’s astounding to hear diphonic singing in live performance.
It isn’t exclusive to Mongolia — the Tibetan monks have brought it here, and a colleague recalls having heard it with performers from the Aleutian Islands — but it is very seldom heard in the States; and even among Mongolians onstage it varies fascinatingly from performer to performer. Usually it arrives in the middle of an already extended phrase. One man, while continuing a firmly resonant vocal line from the chest, suddenly overlays it with a high head tone that sounds something like a piccolo, and the phrase continues with the same single breath just as long again. The range of vocal resonance is staggering: Another man sings at times with the kind of buzzing hum normally only achieved by banging on big rubber tubes, and, though nobody sings with more than two voices at the same time, some of them seem to use more than four or five vocal sounds within a single song.
The delivery is calm, dispassionate, and the male singers all play instruments while singing. The mouth when singing is never opened wide, and looks as if you could scarcely place a quarter between its parted lips. The one female singer, Narantuya, neither plays an instrument nor sings with more than one voice. And yet hers is the most haunting singing of all, both sweet and firm, effortlessly passing from loud to soft, from high to low, and including midphrase ornaments that sound related now to yodeling, now to trilling, now to those soft one-note repetitions in Monteverdi and Cavalli.
Anyone following singers with a watch becomes aware how few of them sustain a changing vocal line for as much as 15 seconds. But lines this long are commonplace among these Mongolians, and the most remarkable moments of the phrase often occur only in its second half.
And the dancing? This is engagingly — although too briefly — performed by two bright-eyed men, the boyish Chuluunbaatar and the weather-beaten Zinamyetr, with a male accompanist. At first it looks as if they’re marking the movement, but soon it’s apparent that this is through-the-body movement, sometimes with a series of wrist-flicks that send keen currents rippling down to the feet. Often they mime actions (archery, lassoing, flying) above the waist while bouncing or pacing a rhythm with the legs. No part of the body is livelier than the shoulders, chugging together or in alternation, and they are always involved in a larger action.
The diphonic aspect of the singing is part of a dualistic harmony that runs through the performance. In one dance the two men suddenly become conjoined at the waist (to illustrate branches of one tree) not unlike images common to Pilobolus Dance Theater, with the older man’s legs locked around the younger’s waist, and his torso arching back and forth. The tone is merry. The male flute player produces a chesty singing sound out of the corner of his mouth while playing his instrument. (To this alien ear, this sonority is the least rewarding.) The stringed instruments frequently are bowed to play two notes simultaneously.
Screens at the Clark Studio performances show translations of the Mongolian words. Often it seems (as recently occurred to me with the wonderful Noche Flamenca performance at Theater 80, and as strikes anyone who listens to some opera) that the music is suggesting something quite unlike its words; and this multilayering only enriches the experience. As the concert progresses, space and time feel transformed. One hears movement within stillness, action within reflection, and time — especially amid those long vocal phrases — suspended.
“Mongolia: Concert” will be performed tonight, tomorrow and Saturday at the Clark Studio at Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500; lincolncenter.org.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
StayTunedtv.tv is streaming the entire concert. A preview taken from the Asia Society Symposium on the art of this performance is available on StayTunedtv.tv as well. You will find both on this page and in the Mongolia artist listing.
CURRENT ARCHIVE:StayTunedTV's camera crew recently returned from the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas and our coverage of the 38th Annual World Series of Poker. Among the celebrities we interviewed, Adam Sandler, Donnie Wahlberg, Charles Barkley, and others that will be upcoming in the Las Vegas section of Staytunedtv. We also recorded an interview with Judson Laipply, of the YouTube video "Evolution of Dance," and will be presenting the story behind the famous dance along with the dance itself very soon.
Earlier our crew covered a live concert in Chicago at the Millennium Park, Pritzker Pavilion. This is a landmark event, the North American Premiere of Enzo Avitabile & I Bottari. In excess of 6,000 people were in attendance. The concert will be will be available on www.staytunedtv.tv in coming weeks and will be accessible through the Enzo Avitabile artist listing.
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