Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Almost 1,374 hours in the kitchen making "Smiles" and other great music

Some wonderful songs here, including "Teddy Bears' Picnic," "I Told Them All About You," "Smiles" and more...  This is last night's episode, Number 1374 of Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod's YouTube and Facebook streamed "KitchenCast," an almost-nightly live event that began when the pandemic cut into their local gigs in 2020.  Posting this episode here will help me share it, find it again, and -- as a bonus -- remind myself how to embed a YouTube video in Blogger, which I haven't been using very often recently. More examples and some extras from my Department of Compulsive Research below!  


Just to see if I've got that embedding technique down, here's a one-song YouTube post from Meredith and Craig, from before the start of their pandemic streaming show four and a half years ago, "The Cubanola Glide," which I like because the town I live in has old Cubanola Cigar advertising painted on the walls of a couple of downtown buildings. I also like Meredith's ukulele playing, and the fact that they make eye contact with each other more than they do when they are watching Facebook and YouTube comment streams like they do in the live Kitchen Cast.

If you'd like to sing along, I found the sheet music a while ago. It looks like Meredith and Craig are playing in the ukulele and guitar friendly keys of G and C, while the original (piano) sheet music has the verses in Bb and the chorus in Eb.




By the way, they are both right-handed, but their Facebook stream and occasional YouTube clips appear with the image reversed. This "Just Another Day Wasted Away" clip not only shows that phenomenon, it also has some lovely harmonizing and "voice trumpet" or "blue blowing" by Meredith.  





Meanwhile, for old-song fans, here are the "Second Hand Songs" pages for the tunes I've mentioned above: