the Simpsons
Almost three decades since it was the subject of a throwaway joke on The Simpsons, and more than seven months after it became a reality, Cypress Hill are issuing their 2024 performance with the London Symphony Orchestra as a live album and concert film.
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The eagerly-anticipated show, which took place on July 10, 2024, has its roots in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons which sees the titular family’s patriarch going on tour as a member of a Lollapalooza-style music festival.
The “Homerpalooza” episode aired on May 19, 1996, as the penultimate installment of season seven. Homer, Marge and the Simpson family head backstage at the Springfield Fairgrounds where Cypress Hill and other performers are hanging out. Event staff members are surprised to see the London Symphony Orchestra show up, and suspect that the cannabis-advocating crew may have had something to do with it. “Somebody ordered the London Symphony Orchestra. Possibly while high, Cypress Hill I’m looking in your direction,” they said.
A beloved joke amongst fans of the series and the band, the Californian group turned fiction into fact last year when they appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in London to perform 1993 album Black Sunday and other tracks while dressed in suits.
Black Sunday arrived in July of that year and debuted atop the Billboard 200 with 261,000 album units sold in the first week. Triple-platinum lead single “Insane in the Brain” went on to crack the Billboard Hot 100 top 20, where it peaked at No. 19.
“It’s been something that we’ve talked about for many years since The Simpsons episode first aired,” B-Real told the BBC ahead of the highly-anticipated performance. “So it’s very special for us. And it’s coming off the heels of our 30th anniversary for our Black Sunday album. We’ve played a lot of historical venues throughout our career and stuff like that, but nothing as prestigious as this.”
Now, the full show – titled Cypress Hill and the London Symphony Orchestra: Black Sunday Live at the Royal Albert Hall – will be hitting theaters throughout the U.S. and Canada for three days and on March 30, 31, and April 2. Full ticketing information can be found here.
Two months later, a full recording of the performance will be released on June 6 via Mercury. To accompany the announcement, the band have released a video of 1995 track “Illusions,” which originally featured on their Black Sunday follow-up Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom.
“It’s a trip to see that hip hop can be done in this form — and at a venue as prestigious as the Royal Albert Hall,” B-Real said in a statement. “It was truly an honor and a privilege, and now that experience can be shared.”
”I’ve always been excited by the idea of merging genres, and to do it with the most prolific hip hop group of all time and the most exquisite symphony orchestra in the world was an honor,” added Troy Miller, who handled arrangement and conductor duties of the performance.
“The band gave me free rein on the arrangements and we made something truly unique and mesmerizing – what a sublime collaboration!”
Lizzo is feeling good as h-ll about her Simpsons debut. The 35-year-old hitmaker teased her first ever cameo on the iconic TV cartoon Sunday (May 14), sharing a preview video of the jam session she enjoys with Lisa and Bart Simpson in the upcoming episode. In the clip, a Simpson-ified Lizzo — wearing one of […]
Chris Ledesma, who served as the beloved music editor of The Simpsons on every one of its first 734 episodes, from the Fox animated series’ premiere in 1989 through a 34th-season installment in November, has died. He was 64.
Ledesma died Dec. 16 in Los Angeles, a spokesperson for the show told The Hollywood Reporter. No cause of death was revealed.
Ledesma had been hired to fill in as a music editor on Fox’s The Tracey Ullman Show, where The Simpsons began as a series of shorts playing in and out of commercials. He then started on the spinoff on Nov. 22, 1989.
“I was skeptical of turning the little 30- and 60-second featurettes on Tracey into a full-fledged, half-hour show,” he wrote on his blog in 2011. “All that went out the window as soon as I saw the first two shows.”
Ledesma noted on Twitter in September 2021 that he had been with The Simpsons for more than half his life. At the time, he was 23,242 days old and had been an employee for 11,621 of them.
Today is a significant milestone for me.I am 23,242 days oldI have worked on The Simpsons for 11,621 daysBorn 1/28/1958First day on #TheSimpsons 11/22/1989Not many can say they have worked at ANY job any more for LITERALLY half their lives.#Grateful #Blessed— Chris Ledesma (@mxedtr) September 16, 2021
He left the show in May, and his final Simpsons episode aired in November as the eighth installment of season 34. On Sunday night, the series paid tribute to him with an end title card that read, “In loving memory of Chris Ledesma.”
Christopher Frederick Ledesma was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 28, 1958. He started playing piano by ear at age 3, then took formal trumpet lessons beginning in the third grade.
While at CalArts, he decided to pursue a career in music editing after serving in that capacity on a student film. He also was an orchestral conducting major at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
When he wasn’t riding the tram as a tour guide at Universal Studios Hollywood, Ledesma sat in on scoring sessions for such shows as Murder, She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Airwolf and Amazing Stories. He called that “a priceless education that could never have been offered at any college or university.”
In September 1985, Ledesma landed a job as an apprentice music editor at leading music editing house Segue Music, where he handled acclaimed MTM Enterprises shows including Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. He then worked for Music Design Group and Music Works before launching his own company, Click Track Inc., in 1992.
(Through all this, he didn’t give up his job on the Universal Studios tour until spring 1988.)
Starting in 1994, the two-time Emmy nominee also was music editor on another animated show, The Critic, created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss of The Simpsons.
In September 2014, he conducted a tribute to Simpsons composer Alf Clausen, with whom he worked so closely for so many years, at the Hollywood Bowl.
His résumé also included the films Back in the U.S.S.R. (1991), Dark Shadows (1991), Pure Country (1992), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), Blast From the Past (1999) and Dudley Do-Right (1999); 20 Hallmark Hall of Fame telefilms; the 1988 miniseries War and Remembrance; and the 1993 TV movie Gypsy, starring Bette Midler. (He received Emmy noms for those last two projects.)
Survivors include his wife, Michelle; two daughters and two sons-in-law; and three grandchildren.
“The most rewarding part of the job for me is that I have been able to support and care for my family, and I work with genuinely nice people on a show that makes other people happy,” he said.
This article was originally published on THR.com.
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