Four Boys and a Guitar. The Mills Brothers sounded so much like a jazz band back in the early 1930s that the company wrote on their record labels “No musical instruments or mechanical devices used on this recording other than one guitar.” And they sang great scat, and great tight harmonies. And they had class, In abundance.

I’ve just returned from the Aarhus Vocal Festival, the most moving musical gathering I’ve been at since Woodstock.

Ten albums that have shaped my life.

So much of The Band’s essence can be found in the instrumental introduction to ‘Tears of Rage’—the lead voice of the guitar so integral to the whole; the floating sustained organ; the interplay of the bass and the drum and the rhythm piano providing an implicit rhythm created as much by the gaps as by the beats, as intimate as lovers, as self-effacing as monks, as synchronized as guys who have been on the road together for six years.

Why does free jazz/Chabad soprano saxophonist Daniel Zamir draw materials from an old Israeli song glorifying a watchman from the 1930s? Why is today’s Israeli jazz a natural, organic expression of early Zionist settlement? Why is Jeff calling a 21-year old drummer a genius? The answer to these and many more questions in Song of The Week.

‘Tears of Rage’ is Dylan’s “King Lear”, a brutally painful description of a daughter’s love denied. The Basement Tapes, recorded in 1967 as he convalesced from his motorpsycho accident, lay underground for decades. But their impact on the way we perceive the world is greater than any other pop music, including “Sgt Pepper”.

It’s been pouring here, so we’re visiting the whole soggy genre of Crying In The Rain songs. Guess which one we like best?

Twelve years ago this week my sister Madelaine passed away, long before there was a Sibling’s Day. James Taylor wrote the moving song ‘Enough To Be On Your Way’ as a lamentation for his late brother, Alex. My love for my sister is bigger than any pop song. But in the real world, what comes through the car radio is the soundtrack of our lives.