All the World's a Cage. John Cage experiments with musical chairs.

NEW YORK (Special to TSD AfterDark) Leonard Phelps, 61, a renowned sculptor and architect, still enjoys a successful career, as well as spending time with his family, shuttling between his Manhattan penthouse apartment and Long Island weekend home.  However, Phelps continues to battle nightmares from an incident that occurred fifty years ago in a 6th grade music class visited by composer and “chance” musician, John Cage, who was invited to participate in Mrs. Thelma Prescott’s musical chairs experiment.

Though Cage, who died in 1992, wrote hundreds of compositions in his long career, it is his 1952 piece entitled 4’33” (four minutes, thirty-three seconds) which consists of environmental sounds, amounting mostly to silence, which left Phelps and several other friends and classmates confused and horrified.  (more…)

Note to Self: Don't finger sync Scriabin.

MOSCOW (Special to TSD AfterDark) In a page torn directly from the world of pop divadom, comes the bizarre saga of renowned concert pianist, Evgeny Zarafiants and his apparent near perfect finger syncing of Etude opus 42, no. 5 in C sharp minor by Alexander Scriabin. (more…)

Con-Fusion? Not according to Ashleigh Carter. She's all about fusion.

ALLENTOWN, PA (Special to TSD AfterDark) Ashleigh Carter, 15, of Allentown, Pennsylvania is confounding friends, family, psychiatrists, clergy and members of the media for what Tiger Beat Magazine® is calling “an unexpected, unprecedented and highly disturbing transformation into a world of staggering sophistication.”

“This just doesn’t happen to young girls, ever.” said Dr. Leonard Heinlein, leader of the psychiatric team studying Carter. “We’re at a complete loss as to why a young lady of fifteen would abandon a world of texting, poorly applied makeup, ending every sentence with a rising inflection and thinking everything that happened before 2005 is gay, then suddenly immerse herself into the harmonically enlightened, melodically challenging, polyrhythmic juggernaut that is fusion jazz. Why? We are just scratching the surface of the teenage female brain. The answers may be decades away.” (more…)

Distant Relative, Smooth Jazz, on Respirator

Foretelling the Future? Did the band, Jazz Is Dead have inside info on yesterday's hit?

NEW ORLEANS (TSD After Dark) Jazz, the only true American musical art form, was killed in a hail of bullets, towering indifference, and overall lack of good taste yesterday afternoon in New Orleans. Most of Jazz’s family members, including Bebop, Cool, Post Bop, Modal, Third Stream, Fusion, and Acid were also killed. Jazz was estimated to be 106 years old. Acid survived the initial attack, but later died in transit to the Musical Heritage Medical Center.

A distant relative, Smooth Jazz, barely survived the assault, and remains in critical condition in an unspecified hospital.

“Fuckin’ Smooth survived?” lamented fusion guitar great Allan Holdsworth. “I could make a really tasteless Yoko Ono reference here, but I won’t.” (more…)