I feel all re-patriated: CBC Radio3 has revamped their website and rolled out the red-carpet to artists wanting an in to their Galaxy broadcast universe. Not only a new place to list your download tracks and maybe score an audition for airplay on the streamcast or even on the main networks, but each band gets their own homepage (here's ours) for their bios, photos and tracks, free space to host your videos, and a free blogspace to post your gig schedules and general band-news.  read more »

What is harmony? In music school we get taught something to do with beats and ratios and the harmonics of vibrating strings, but when we stop to actually ask people, that elegant old model very quickly falls apart. In the two and a half millennia since Pythagoras we've tended to all agree on the unison, octave and the perfect fifth as somehow consonant, but what of the tritone? Or the minor second and major seventh?  read more »

Berklee College is poised to launch a new service at the end of April, the Berklee Internet Radio Network (www.thebirn.com), a four-channel 24-hour broadcast for musicians, by musicians and about ...

a highly original and improvisational approach to programming, capturing a phase in a young musician's life when they are hungry to discover new artists and styles, and dying to share the music they love with others. Since all participants are musicians, expect to hear orginal songs by Berklee students and bands, as well as music created by the DJs themselves.  read more »

Submitted by garym on Wed, 2007/04/25 - 8:26pm.

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Well planned, thoughtfully rendered as free PDF practice sheets with MP3 audio podcast instructions full of tips, guest-artists and examples, every Monday a new tune is illustrated by Australian Trad and Bluegrass guitarist Tony O'Rourke and Gerry Gaffney, first class lessons in how to play your reels and jigs up to speed and in the tradition. This is the future of cultural transmission, one tune at a time.  read more »

How about a catchy little ditty about bacteria? Or an Ode to Lewis and Clark? Ok, now imagine both songs penned by 4th grade students as part of their curriculum studies, a product of an accidental grant win funding a classroom program dubbed 'Musically Increasing Content Knowledge" ... or 'MusICK' for short:

Through “Musically Increasing Content Knowledge (MusICK),” Ms. Ford and her partners use technology and music to increase social studies and science content knowledge. Students research topics for each unit of study and work with a visiting artist to write lyrics to reinforce the curriculum concepts. Collaborating with classmates, students record original songs related to social studies and science content and create a resource library of content-based music for future classes.

[ via Innovation Grants: Summer 2006 Recipients ]

Also quite by accident, the program invited the touring Rob Ritchie (ex of Tanglefoot) to stop by for a masterclass in songwriting about pertinent things, backed by Pennsylvania's Dallas Elementary Fourth Grade All-Star Band. Grant money well spent -- Elmo will be so happy.

I've always said our health insurance should pay us for holding old-time jamborees, and now I have solid scientific proof: The American Heart Association reports how Romualdo Belardinelli at the cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at Lancisi Heart Institute is finding better oxygen uptake, better aerobic thresholds, and far more than that, they've found a workout people actually enjoy ... and unlike the cloistered pod-eared gym gear cocooner, seems a good waltz-out is good social exercise too:

The dance proved to be just as effective as bicycle and treadmill training for improving exercise capacity in a study of 110 heart failure patients. Dancers also reported slightly more improvement in sleep, mood, and the ability to do hobbies, do housework and have sex than the others.
[ via Study: Waltzing helps mend hearts ]

There you have it, good medicine for both kinds of hearts. But it is sad and tragic, isn't it, that you can claim upwards of a C-note per hour to be danced-for by a cold hard physio trainer, yet the demonstrably superior mind-body medicine of an hour's sway with your sweetie is 100% out of pocket expense, and if the jam' band don't fuel you all for free, there wouldn't be one. Not to worry tho', 'cause you know your sweetie's worth it, and the band is in it for deep therapy too, which makes the whole scene not just kinetic poetry, but delightfully symbiotic as well.

A new mp3, this one recorded on a portable mp3 by the stage side at the Chesley Opry last Saturday night, a bit of the old school for you: As Long as I Live is some straight-ahead roots country originally made famous by Kitty Wells and Red Foley; this was our opener for the second set, May on guitar, Gary on banjo, Kirk Joch on accordion, and not the best audio quality, but we're still learning with this mp3 thing -- feel free to grab the other tracks over at our our DMusic downloads page.