Monday, December 6, 2021

I Just Gotta Have More Theramin


Last month I took a chance on a Naxos CD of Leoš Janáček's Choruses for Male Voices recorded in 1995-96 by the Moravian Teachers Choir in the Minorite Church in Uničov. Pleased with my purchase (I have become partial to choral music), I picked up last week at the Burnaby Value Village an Altos CD (first released by PYE in 1960) that included Janáček's Sinfonietta (1926), whose opening bars and ground bass sounded familiar.

It was only after humming those bars on my way to the grocery store that a lyric snuck in -- "take a look down at the madman" -- which I recognized as belonging to those great song pirates, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Yes, but which song?

After entering the band's name and lyric fragment into a search engine I was led to "Knife-Edge", from ELP's 1970 self-titled debut album. In this period-era "live" recording, keyboardist Keith Emerson is so moved by his band's performance that at 3:56 he takes from atop his Wurlitzer a theremin-strip (like the one used by the Beach Boys in "Good Vibrations", 1966) and anticipates an out-take from This is Spinal Tap (1984).

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