Belated bimonthly roundup of the music playing in my head, March/April Edition.

I'm thankful to you for reading.

There have been 12,787 posts since October, 2004, and while I try to write about topics with some measure of resonance apart from the prerequisites of my own inner world, the blog still functions as a diary at least part of the time. Writing about music probably isn't why you check in, and that's fine. It's something I do for me.

That said, I'm almost a month late in fulfilling my self-directed mandate to regularly summarize the music I've been enjoying, preferably at two-month intervals.

Following is a video sampler of the CDs purchased in March and April. They appear in no particular order, because I'm not organized enough to manage things like chronology.

The Vaccines … Combat Sports

The Decemberists … I’ll Be Your Girl

The Len Price 3 … Nobody Knows

Neon Waltz … Strange Hymns

Gumba Fire: Bubblegum Soul & Synth-Boogie in 1980s South Africa

The Charlatans …Tellin’ Stories (1997)

The Charlatans … Modern Nature (2015)

Travis ... Where You Stand (2013)

Of these, Combat Sports is my favorite, with the three-year-old Modern Nature finishing second. Both proved to be ear worms, and Combat Sports probably will place highly in the year's end Top-Something list. The songs are short, snappy and melodic, with traces of the Kaiser Chiefs.

One of my goals for the year in music, 2018, is to relax and allow myself to follow the passing butterfly. New releases were of spotty interest for me in March and April, so I did something I rarely do and indulged in a few "classic rock" tangents and digressions.

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The 20th anniversary of Bring It On, the first album released by the British band Gomez, came on April 13. I celebrated by listening to all of Gomez' albums. After an extended seven-year hiatus, it seems the group might be going back into the studios. This makes me happy.

Another anniversary (the 40th) of Van Halen's debut album in 1978 had me thinking, and it appears my position has evolved. I wasn't a fan of the band's David Lee Roth era, which ended in 1985. However, I liked Van Hagar. Now, with greater distance, I can see how groundbreaking and revolutionary the early material really was; not just Eddie's guitar, but the sound and attitude, too.

To be sure, Sammy Hagar -- he's 70 years old now -- remains a rock and roll everyman, and an enduring performer to be appreciated. As for Van Halen's mercifully brief third aggregation, my annual listen to the horrid Van Halen III has confirmed that after 20 years, it hasn't gotten any better.

In early April, I accompanied my wife to her appointment for dental work, taking along a book and enjoying a couple of hours of reading.

Unfortunately, the Sirius channel of choice in the waiting room was devoted entirely to Top 40 hit songs of the 1970s, like "Afternoon Delight" and "The Night Chicago Died." Several Bee Gees songs also were aired; at the dentist, as during high school, this band was inescapable. I subsequently retreated to YouTube to give a few Bee Gees hits a second listen.

It's hard to do, but if you can ignore the clothes and wash the palate clean of pop culture at the time and focus on the music, it's far better than I ever thought. The singing, songwriting and production are stellar. Pop music after the Beatles seldom witnessed such an epic, unholy roll as the Bee Gees enjoyed at the band's peak. Here's my favorite song, which was released in 1975 just before the tsunami. You never heard the lovely bridge on the radio; it got chopped.

"Play some Skynyrd," crooned John Eddie back in '03, and of course he was referring to "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama," among other memorable songs from Lynyrd Skynyrd's heyday in the 70s. Everyone knows about the plane crash in 1977, which put a premature end to the juggernaut, killing singer and principal songwriter Ronnie Van Zant.

Lynyrd Skynyrd later reformed, and has been on the road as a working band for decades, stocked by an ever shrinking number of plane crash survivors until now only guitarist Gary Rossington remains. Nothing against the reconstituted Skynyrd, which in its second life became something the same and yet far different, because it's hard to imagine Ronnie Van Zant devolving into parody, like Charlie Daniels.

This prompts a question: exactly what is Lynyrd Skynyrd, and at what point does it cease being so? The farewell tour is underway, and along with the many other summer touring announcements coming in March and April, another rabbit hole opens.

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Lindsey Buckingham's departure from Fleetwood Mac may or may not be noticed by a majority of the ticket-buying fillers of arena seats, but for the pundit class, it ignited all sorts of commentary along the lines of when, if at all, an aging band's replacement parts render it no longer original enough to pass muster.

The discussion is interesting, and ultimately ridiculous. Obsessive true believers like me always have been outnumbered 10-1 or greater by casual thrill-seekers, and so it will remain forever more. In music, you're whatever you say you are, until people stop paying you. Then it changes.

The received wisdom is that older rock and pop artists still possessing the clout and back catalog to fill venues are referred to as "legacy" or "heritage" acts; few fans attend their shows for the purpose of hearing what they've recorded lately, but expect to hear the hits. Because the business model has been flipped, and performance is the money-maker, the hits are what these audiences are sure to hear.

The subtleties quickly become immersed in contradiction. To even casual fan, Buckingham and Stevie Nicks might seem integral to Fleetwood Mac, and yet the band began as a hardcore blues outfit featuring guitarist Peter Green, and it has taken a variety of shapes with various musicians before (and since) Buckingham and Nick first joined.

And, Buckingham left once before.

There are no original members in the band Blood, Sweat & Tears, currently touring with American Idol contestant Bo Bice as vocalist in the job made famous by David Clayton-Thomas. However, Clayton-Thomas wasn't the band's original singer; he came aboard after the group's debut release.

Former singer Clayton-Thomas is 76 years of age and Bice is 43, and therein lies an important lesson, because it comes down to money, as in any business, and if many musical aggregations can plausibly say it's all about the style of music paying customers want, and the songs they want to hear, then it's of less importance who performs it.

Granted, there are on-off talents that cannot be replaced, like Jimi Hendrix, but at the same time, if people will turn out to hear passable renditions, then capitalism will provide them.

Accordingly, tribute bands have changed the world. Journey famously plucked singer Arnel Pineda from the Philippines via the internet. Current Chicago tenor Neil Donnell, the guy singing Peter Cetera's and Jason Scheff's songs, was a member of a Chicago tribute band in Canada.

KISS speaks of keeping the band alive with no original members at all, and Robert Lamm of Chicago confided similar thoughts to a journalist, and if this makes no sense to you, allow me to observe that in the past few years, I've seen multiple shows by the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, neither of which might possibly have "original" members any younger than about 95 years of age.

Miller famously died in WWII, and neither Dorsey brother made it to the 1960s, and yet there's nothing stopping musicians fresh out of college, as well as older players happy to have a regular gig, from performing Swing Era arrangements. The precise experience may not be the same. If you close your eyes, it's also not tremendously different. Symphony orchestras have been doing it since Beethoven was still alive.

As age-depleted rock legacy bands and their tribute bands become one and the same, the chief considerations are legalities: who retains the rights?

Once the lawyers are happy, it's all about selling tickets.

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Another musical post from April, and the previous roundup:

Apologies for this rock-pop digression into my British musical tastes.

Roger's Year in Music, 2018: The onset of a bimonthly roundup of the music playing in my head (January/February).

ON THE AVENUES: Killer Diller.

ON THE AVENUES: Killer Diller.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The last surviving member of Glenn Miller’s “civilian” orchestra has died.

Paul Tanner, a trombonist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra who became a prominent jazz educator at UCLA and created an unusual electronic musical instrument heard on the Beach Boys' classic 1966 hit "Good Vibrations," has died. He was 95.

Paul Tanner’s last performance with Glenn Miller came 71 years ago, prior to the bandleader joining the Army, where he formed a new military aggregation to play for the troops in Europe. Miller died in a plane crash in 1944, and 22 years later, his former employee played on a Beach Boys hit. By then, I was 6 years old, and can remember hearing “Good Vibrations” on the radio.

Will the circle be unbroken?

Mostly I grew up listening to big band records like those of Glenn Miller. They weren’t the original 78 rpm recordings, but the long-playing compilations that began appearing during the 1960’s as original listeners grew older, and a lucrative market for nostalgia came into being.

My father, who served three years in the Pacific during the war, had no musical aptitude of which I’m aware apart from singing Marine Corps boot camp anthems while mending barbed wire fences on the farm, but it didn’t stand in the way of his favored weekly ritual of playing World War II-era songs on Sunday morning.

It was music, not church. If memory serves, his all-time favorite was “Sentimental Journey,” and nothing better describes his customary mood, looking back through the years, than this choice of ditties.

Like so many of his wartime generation, my dad adored the music of Glenn Miller, who was a veritable hit-making machine from the mid-1930s through his death. At the age of 10, I could reel them off by heart: In the Mood, I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo, American Patrol, Tuxedo Junction, Elmer’s Tune, Moonlight Serenade and Chattanooga Choo Choo, among others.

As for the latter, Miller’s big band era counterpart Artie Shaw – an irascible, erudite and unrepentant curmudgeon who died at 94 in 2004 – once said, “Glenn should have lived and Chattanooga Choo Choo should have died.” Shaw’s bon mot reflects a certain annoyance among jazz and swing purists that Miller’s work was overly commercial, and it may have revealed the clarinetist’s own dissonance; he, too, led a military band into war zones (Pacific Theater), but survived into old age, seldom revered. Miller never had to face the post-war shift change in popular music taste, which already was killing the big bands before the war killed Miller.

In short, James Dean wasn’t the first American cultural icon to die young and stay pretty.

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For the longest time, I was unable to square my dad’s attachment to this music with those three years of duty as a Marine gunner aboard the USS Washington. How can music elicit nostalgia about the dangers of combat on the front lines? What’s more, how could such sweet and innocuous music ever have transferred psychologically to a battlefield in the first place? Isn’t fighting about anger? For soldiers in Vietnam to have the Doors, and during the Gulf War to be thinking about Metallica, makes perfect sense – but Moonlight Serenade?

At some point, I finally understood that nostalgic memories like my father’s almost always exclude what was bad about the past, all the better to focus with total recall on what was good; seeing as the whole idea back in the day was to get home alive so there’d be the time needed to grow old, it strikes me that nostalgia usually references the strength, vitality and unlimited horizons afforded youth. Those are the things we miss the most.

While I try to resist the nostalgic temptation, it’s clear that when more of life lies behind you rather than ahead, you understandably enjoy the reverie of recalling when the chronology (joyously) was the other way around, even if nothing can be done to facilitate a reversal at this late date. Hence the old, outdated music, from Genesis to Replacements, still spinning in my own head today as I try to make sense of my 1980s travels in the East Bloc, almost a quarter-century after the Wall came down.

At least it was just a “cold” war.

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The central point here is that thanks to my non-musical father’s musical obsessions, I carry the legacy of the big band period with me always, and when I say “with me,” it’s purely literal in addition to metaphorical. He couldn’t have known it, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain it as a child, but music has been a constant presence with me for as long as I can remember, in spite of my not possessing a shred of vocal or instrumental aptitude apart from frightening the cats while singing while in the shower.

Does whistling qualify as music?

And so music plays in my head every single day. Glenn Miller had a hit song called Juke Box Saturday Night, but with me, it’s Juke Box All the Damned Time. Music plays in my dreams, and the random song generator pops into place when I awaken. In my personal episode of Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone,” it’s a given that when the music finally stops playing, I’ll soon die. Thus, it’s axiomatic that the music … the show … must go on.

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At some point during my teens, it was a late summer’s night in Southern Indiana. The windows were open, it was warm outside but with a slight nip in the air, and leaves just on the cusp of turning were rustling amid a breeze in the woods. The song in my head as I lay in bed was “Manhattan Serenade,” in all respects a forgettable pop song, circa 1942, as performed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with Jo Stafford on vocals.

For whatever reason, something just clicked. Surely it was a coincidence. Probably I was ready to contemplate mortality in some way I hadn’t previously, to imagine an anonymous song, a lost era, a pastoral scene and my own tombstone in a cemetery filled with hundreds of others – the whole, huge, meandering procession of history; somehow grafting the chairs lined up in “Our Town” onto my brief lifespan, the unfulfilled hopes and dreams, the fears and uncertainties arranged like books on a shelf, and basically, momentarily, glimpsing a small bit of the finality of death.

It was confusing, wistful and melancholy. Oddly, it wasn’t debilitating. Rather, it may have been my first exposure to the quality known as the elegiac; by definition, a sacramental summary of what has passed, offered by the living looking backward.

The whys and wherefores are not clear, only that it’s something about Paul Tanner’s wire service obituary, following on the heels of a recent week delving into the Glenn Miller CD archive, while thinking about where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the music still playing all the while. It rouses the elegy gene, and here we are, ruminating ... in the elegiac mood.

Moonlight Cocktail? Need a few.

In the Mood: Saturday at the Speakeasy with the Glenn Miller Orchestra ... and more than a few ghosts.

(Noon update Monday: Here's the Tribune's Monday web "extra" coverage: Speakeasy opens with a bang)

"The clarinet lead, handsomely intoned by Wilbur Schwartz, and the swaying melody pinned to the first beat of each measure evoke a vanished age, even for those who never knew the age."

--Gary Giddins, on Glenn Miller’s original recording of “Moonlight Serenade.”

The Speakeasy’s grand opening was Saturday night, and as many readers probably already know, the Glenn Miller Orchestra played two sold-out shows. With only three “soft” work days under their belts, Brad, Lori and the staff at Speakeasy were setting the bar fairly high by hosting such an auspicious event so early in the game, and they performed admirably under extreme pressure. There were a few problems, but I think most in attendance understood the situation and gave the Speakeasy high marks for attempted difficulty.

Hang in there, guys.

There has been an authorized touring version of the Glenn Miller Orchestra since 1956. The 2007 edition is again being led by Larry O’Brien, who has been at the orchestra’s helm since 1988. The band’s members are youthful virtuosos, stubborn jazz aficionados, and graduates of music schools nationwide. On Saturday evening, O’Brien graciously showcased trombonist Chris Fortner, a Floyd Central graduate who brought his area fan club for the 9:00 p.m. performance. The veteran O’Brien observed that it was one of the few times that audiences were not bewildered by mention of “Floyds Knobs.”

Fortner merely played brilliantly.

Judging from the listing of tour dates at the orchestra’s web site, most of the band’s shows these days are in concert hall settings. The Speakeasy’s gig was described as a dance, and that’s considerably different. The music originally performed and perfected by big bands was designed to serve as entertainment in venues where drinking, laughing, eating and dancing were part of the expectation of those in attendance. In old air checks from the golden days, you can hear glasses clinking and conversations humming during the brief silence between songs. You can almost hear the cigarettes being smoked.

The atmosphere was like that at the Speakeasy for the Glenn Miller Orchestra on Saturday night, minus the tobacco smoke (malfunctioning kitchen vents are another story), and I was very happy for the informality of the evening. Formality would have been too much. Sunday was Father’s Day, and my dad, who died six years ago, was a Glenn Miller fan without equal. Obviously, to me, there can’t be one without the other, so here’s a bit more about the music in context.

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Long before teenagers in suburban bedrooms played “air guitar” to Eric Clapton or Eddie Van Halen, there undoubtedly were “air trumpet” displays in the vicinity of crackling urban household radio sets, with young fans patiently waiting for the end of FDR’s fireside chat to listen for the sophisticated big band arrangements aired live from clubs and ballrooms, knowing by heart when the solos from Ziggy Elman, Bunny Berigan, Roy Eldridge and dozens of others would come blasting through the damp night, to be imitated and admired.

It was all the norm during the Swing Era, or the Big Band Era, or any other convenient phrase coined long afterward to describe a pervasive phenomenon whose zenith was long ago, short-lived and very far away from the present time of computers, terrorists and global warming. Thankfully, the art form is being kept alive today by sturdy traditional practitioners like the 25-year-old players and 74-year-old musical director currently inhabiting the Glenn Miller Orchestra, which does 300 road shows a year.

Many theories have been advanced purporting to explain the demise of the “big bands,” from transportation costs to technological and communications advances. Truth is, the world just went and changed, but one of the beauties of today’s niche-driven marketplace is that there’s still an audience for big band music, which is at its most vital performed live before an enchanted local audience.

These musical aggregations, which combine elements of small group improvisational jazz with the more formally scored tradition of symphonic bands, enjoyed their golden age in popular culture from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II. During the post-war era, big bands barely survived, being supplanted first by a greater emphasis placed on individual vocalists, and then later by various tsunamis of rock ‘n’ roll, pop and country, and the myriad cultural diversities of an ever smaller planet.

Big bands never really went away, but their pulse grew very faint as time inexorably marched, and generations of people who played the music or knew it as their own sadly passed from the scene.

To my mind, the “big band era” in America did not truly end until May, 1992, when Johnny Carson departed from the “Tonight Show.” He took with him Doc Severinsen’s “house” big band, which was the last regularly broadcasted link with the halcyon days of Miller, Shaw, Goodman, Ellington and Dorsey, a sound accessible weekly to any person with a television set and rabbit ears. During the fifteen years that have followed, big bands have gone from being an active memory for many in the populace to occupying a status somewhat in line with Civil War re-enactors, who are charged with making ghosts relevant and educating those who aren’t in the know.

How many people under the age of 50 know that Glenn Miller abandoned the music business at his band’s commercial peak and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942? That Miller subsequently organized a military orchestra that eschewed his trademark civilian arrangements for jazzy reworkings of stodgy marching band music, annoying hidebound military traditionalists and entertaining hundreds of thousands of Allied troops overseas? That Miller’s airplane mysteriously disappeared over the English Channel in December, 1944, with the wreckage never located?

The author is 46. I knew all about Glenn Miller, his music and the songs and stories of the big band era courtesy of my father, for whom these numbers and legends were the soundtrack accompanying his military service in the Marines in the Pacific Theater from 1942 to 1945. Growing up at the tail end of the baby boom generation, I spent countless Sunday mornings listening to long-playing 33 & 1/3 compilations of big band swing – “sweet” ballads, “hot” orchestral charts, novelty tunes, and the radio fodder of wartime.

It was almost more fun watching my dad listen, tapping his feat, with songs like “Sentimental Journey” or “String of Pearls” prompting stories and memories of the time in his life when he was a part of something far, far bigger than himself. He came back home after it was over, lived his life by his terms, worked six days a week, and relaxed on Sunday morning over sausage, eggs and Glenn Miller … and usually went back out for more farm work on Sunday afternoon.

That’s a hard habit to break (the music, not the fence mending), and the tradition lives on in the Confidential household on most Sunday mornings, albeit without children present for instruction. For this reason, I’m depending on readers to pass this information along to someone younger, and perhaps even join in listening to a few of the standards like “American Patrol,” “In the Mood,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000, or one of my signature songs for late at night, “Serenade in Blue.”

I can loan you the CDs.