Dave Brubeck Quartet — "Take Five"

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Monterey Jazz Festival. Dave Brubeck played at the first, and he's back for his 14th festival appearance for the 50th. Congratulations to all involved! You can hear complete sets from many of the musicians (including Brubeck) at NPR here.

Meanwhile, here's Brubeck, with Paul Desmond on sax, performing one of their classics (in 5/4 time).

MC Solaar — "Nouveau Western"

The Le Club Bleu pick from 9/22/06.

MC Solaar was born in Senegal and raps in French. The video's pretty cool.

John Lennon — "Watching the Wheels"

The Clue Blue pick for 9/18/06. Guess I was on a Beatles kick.

The Pink Martinis — "Hey Eugene"

The first of the new picks. I'm not going to bother to link the cross-posts for the new set.

A fun, varied and very talented group.

The Beatles — "Hey Bulldog"

This Club Blue pick for 9/14/07 was to commerate the one-year anniversary, hence the Beatles again.

The Beatles — "Don't Let Me Down"

The first Club Blue pick, 9/14/06. The original video was taken down, but here's a replacement.

Luciano Pavarotti — "Nessun Dorma"

This is from Puccini's last opera, Turandot. More on this piece and Pavarotti here.

About This Blog

For the past year, I've done the music picks for Thursday for the nightly "Club Blue" feature at The Blue Herald. I thought it'd be nice (or at least useful to me) to collect them here. Now that Club Blue is one year old, it felt like a good time to start. I'll be cross-posting all my picks here for the future, and for this first year will also recap last year's picks — although it's a bit surprising how many videos are no longer available!