Led Zeppelin

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Update: “Kashmir” On Video

April 15, 2010 | Permalink

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It’s hard to find everything worth noting on a given topic the first time out — such is the nature of the internet. I am no stranger to the sudden moment of “how did I not find this before?”

My first Got You Covered post, focusing on the rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” by Matt Haimovitz and Uccello, has just been updated to include a YouTube video of them performing the song. Here I was all proud of having edited and compressed a 30-second MP3 excerpt of the track, and all the time we could have been watching and hearing the whole thing… duh. Well, better late than never.

As long as I’m calling attention to that post, I might as well mention that a week or two ago I re-wrote part of its text that I found unsatisfactory. I do that sometimes, but unless it’s a substantive change or an addition to the original post, I don’t point it out with an update like this.


Got You Covered: “Kashmir”

March 16, 2010 | Permalink

I’ve always had a particular delight for cover renditions of popular songs. Not just any old covers, though: I mean covers that take chances. Covers that risk taking a song in a completely new direction. Maybe the new version is a surprising genre shift, or an imaginative re-orchestration, or is seemingly chopped up and re-assembled, it all comes down to one definitive cliché: if it works, it works.

Here then is the first of what will be an ongoing series of posts called Got You Covered, showcasing audio clips of some of my favorite cover tracks. Future installments will appear at no particular time interval… but they will appear, I promise you. I have about 20 tracks lined up to use — I just prefer to spread ‘em out instead of running through all of them at once.

Many of you are surely familiar with Led Zeppelin’s driving, semi-orchestral song “Kashmir.” It is one of the band’s quintessential tracks — eight and a half sprawling minutes of wailing, mystical Led Zep bombast. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s about 30 seconds:

haimovitz-cbgbCovering this hard-rockin’ bad boy of a tune are Matt Haimovitz and his all-cello band, Uccello. That’s right, nothing but cellos. Read the rest of this entry »