25 July 2012 (Wednesday)

Today was a beautiful 80F day -- I wondered how many students would show up. Plus 10 of us had met the day before (Tuesday) to watch sailboat races and go to flamenco, so maybe my students had had their fill of Steve Z for the week... But 5 students did show up and we had a fun, relaxed conversation until the building maintenance people kicked us out after only one hour.

As I was setting up the computer and projector one of the students was singing to himself as he did something on his mobile phone.  I asked him which song he was singing.  It was "Firework" (video, lyrics, song info) by Katy Perry (info).

The first thing I did was tell them about the Bumbershoot festival (website), one of the best music and art festivals in America, which takes place down at the Seattle Center (very practical to visit!) the first weekend of September each year. This year it will be September 1-3. I look forward to this festival every year and always go all three days. This year there are not that many world music performances, but there are a lot of indie rock bands I am interested in seeing. If the weather is good it will be a great weekend of music! Tickets are a little pricey ($40-$50 per day), but actually for the amount of music you see it's a great deal. 

One student had gone to the Capitol Hill Block Party (website), another music annual festival in Seattle, the previous weekend. But she wasn't very impressed with it.  We tried to find a video of the best band that she saw at the festival, but we weren't sure what the band's name was.

One of the artists who played the CHBP was Allen Stone (info), an up-and-coming singer from Eastern Washington. He is getting great reviews from around the country as have a great soul voice. I haven't seen him in concert yet so we checked out a video of his "Unaware" (video).

He's got a good voice and can hit all the notes, but his voice feels a little too "perfect" to me. A little more "rawness" sounds more soulful to me.

There's a female singer from England, Joss Stone (info) who is like Allen Stone (hey, they have the same last name!) in this way.  She's got a great voice, but it doesn't have much personality for me. To show her voice to the class I played the song "Super Duper Love" (video, lyrics, song info) for the class.

To contrast these two current soul voices, I played "Respect" (video, lyrics, song info) by Aretha Franklin (info). Aretha was about the same age as the Stones when she recorded the song, but listen to how much more soulful her singing is!

One student said she prefers lower voices, so I played her "16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six" (video, lyrics, song info) by Tom Waits (info).  But I think that was a little too low for her taste. I told the story about working in a record store when I was in college and how I *hated* Tom Waits' voice, but after being forced to hear it in the store about 100 times one day I suddenly "got it". It was like a light switch was turned on and now he's one of my favorite singers!

One of the students commented how a lot of heavy metal these days is sung very low. In English we call that "cookie monster" vocals.  The term comes from the puppet on Sesame Street who sings low. As an example I showed the class "C Is For Cookie" (video).

The Sesame Street puppets were the basis for the Muppets. My favorite Muppets song, of course, is "Mahna Mahna" (video, song info). 

My students didn't seem very aware of the Muppet Show (info), which is a class in American culture, so I played the opening sequence to the show (video) to introduce them to the characters.

Apparently Lady Gaga had a Kermit the Frog outfit made. I didn't know that! I wish I had never found out.

I asked if any of the students had a puppet show like The Muppets in their countries. 

I thought for sure there would be a puppet show from Asia, but the closest we got was this Korean video clip.

The student from Austria said Germany has something similar: The Augsburger Puppenkiste (info). We watched "Jim Knopf und die Wilde 13" (video).

In Austria they have a puppet character called Rolf Rüdiger. As an example we watched "Rolf Ruediger sucht das hohe C" (video).

One student asked our Austrian student to explain the differences between Austrian German and German spoken in Germany.  It is interesting to me that the common language between all my Asian students from different countries is English.  We talked a little about the role of English as the "world language" until the building security people kicked us out.

And with that another week's discussion was brought to an end.  See everyone next Wednesday!