how cool is this?

Thomas Dolby and ETHEL: Music for the morning after

Jimmy Guterman
Face it, music friends: plenty of times you come home from a club or theater convinced you've seen an amazing performance. The morning after, as evidence of the concert leaks onto the Interwebs, you are disappointed to learn that what you see and hear doesn't match what you experienced in the moment. It doesn't mean the moment was any less transcendent; it just means that the transcendence didn't last. That makes it even more welcome that rare time when the morning after is as great as the night before.

People go to TED for many reasons: the quality of the content, the quality of the networking, the ability to say "I went to TED." (Mark has written about some of this year's standouts, among them talks by Bill Gates and Temple Grandin.) I go, in part, for the music. For many years, Thomas Dolby has been the conference's music director, booking an eclectic, surprising, yet entirely appropriate cast and also leading a house band (a new one every year) to kick off each of the conference's dozen or so sessions. This year Dolby chose the rogue string quartet ETHEL as his accompanists, and they were standouts through the event, playing a wide variety of covers (including Led Zeppelin, New Order, Tracy Chapman, and The Verve), backing other performers (David Byrne, Andrew Bird, Jake Shimabukuro), and showing up in at least one club and one hotel lobby for semiplanned jams............

the embedding is disabled but here's a link to my personal favorite thomas dolby song hyperactive (makes me smile AND tap my toes EVERY time i hear it)

but here's a live performance of it: