Music & More

  Photos courtesy of the artists Having gotten their start in 2014 posting DIY videos that went viral due to their artistic excellence,  Martina DaSilva and Dan “Chimy” Chmielinski performing as ChimyTina, released their debut full length album in 2019. The album, which featured their take on a number of Christmas classics, knocked me out with its groundbreaking arrangements and the sound of their performance, especially the voice of Martina DaSilva. I enjoyed it so much in fact, I sought out DaSilva's earlier work with The Ladybugs. The jazz repertoire of Christmas music has been done so many times in so many ways that to break through you really need to do something different and do it quite well. That they did. For their second album  Constellations,   ChimyTina applies their innovative arrangements to some jazz standards, as well as a pair of new originals penned by DaSilva. The originals are "Twin Flame" (watch the video, below) and "My Universe".  The basi...

Photo: Tom Lynn, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel In February 1964, when The Beatles played on Ed Sullivan, my world changed forever. Even though I was only ten at the time and my mom bought Meet The Beatles for me, somehow it took until 1965 for me to discover record stores and then it was all over ( I've written about these events previously in this blog ). Record stores, for me, started with Gimbels' record department. In those days, most department stores had a record department. Some were even good; I'm thinking not only of Gimbels, but EJ Korvettes and Sears, which had record departments that could compete with record stores. In the 60s, whatever the record store, they all had survey sheets from the local Top 40 stations. In Philadelphia, we had WIBG (990am) with a weekly survey of the Top 99 records of the week. Later, WFIL (560am) joined the fray with their Famous 56 survey. Both of the surveys reflected sales and airplay. Ultimately, data such as this contributed to the...