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The tender, urgent, raw-raspy voice that came from Janice Joplin still catches me by the throat.
Here she is, live and vulnerable, singing Maybe

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This current iteration of this thread seems to be coming to an end. When I started it I remember wanting to know if great performances are rare or ubiquitous. If there are performances that are universally experienced as being "great" of if it is something subjective. If there is an answer, it has to be both. It is all. In the end really don't care.

Here is Eva Cassidy, ten months before leaving her life behind, singing live and from a place of such rarified air that it takes my breath away, arrests me into thinking that life itself is a singularly great performance. Everything is one great performance. Or could it be that Eva was the one and now she's gone? I'm navel gazing, I guess. Then the coffee wears off.
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That's wonderful. Even better, I'd say, is her Summertime.

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Yes that's a crazy good performance. It seems like she died a little each time she sang a song. She was a comet.

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A Saturday Night Live comedy sketch I enjoyed:

Washington's Dream

Here's Sarah Jarosz again, this time doing a song by Joanna Newsom. I think she does it far better than Newsom, with a very tight arrangement of just three instruments and one voice. I hadn't realized how fine a melody Newsom wrote until I heard these musicians delve into it. Have a listen: The Book of Right On.

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Julie, that SNL skit is a riot. (Well not a riot. There was no rioting. It's a funny word, riot.)

Roger, Thanks for sharing this. I can sometimes be quick to say most music is junk these days but the fact is there is a constant, never-ending stream of music that flows every day, new, suffused through the old, in a never ending self generating stream of aural beauty. I read once that "music is life" and I haven't had any qualms about repeating that when I see/hear music like this, and the link below:

I may very well be late to the party where Yuja Wang plays piano — correction: wears the piano — but for more than an hour now I've scoured YouTube absorbing as much as I can of her enormous talent. She personifies why I think the piano is the instrument of the gods when put in the hands of someone like Yuja Wang. I won't bother to detail why I think that, but it should be self-evident by watching even a snippet of her performances. Here's a clip.

I'm always happy when this thread is revived.

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Hilarious.

Is it my faulty memory, or it did it used to be less obvious that SNL actors read from cue cards?

I think it depends on the actors in the skits. In this case, the person playing George Washington was a standup comedian, I think, with little/no acting background. The others in the skit were probably SNL cast members who are skilled at learning lines quickly. (The comedian may have been the SNL host for the week).

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It's not just this sketch. In fact, this sketch, with everybody seated in a semi-circle more-or-less facing the camera and the cue cards, is less awkward than most I see.

I don't know whether the show used to get more creative about where to put the cue cards, used to give the actors more time to learn the lines, or just used to care more about avoiding obvious reading. (I've never heard anyone else complain about it, so maybe they have no reason to care.)

Weekend Update, with hosts who naturally face the camera, is the only SNL I see anymore that doesn't have this distraction, and that only until a guest commenter sits beside one of the hosts and they're supposed to be talking to each other.