Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “N.Y. Rush,” which was performed by an all-New Yorker ensemble that consisted of trumpeter Steven Bernstein, saxman Paul Shapiro, guitarist Stu Cutler, bassist Booker King, keyboardist Mark Soskin, and drummer Bobby Previte. A cover of “Rush,” one of my favorite instrumentals Yoko Kanno composed for Cowboy Bebop, “N.Y. Rush” was featured in the Bebop episodes “Honky Tonk Women” and “Wild Horses.”

I’m out of ideas for Couch Avocados prompts, so it’s time once again for me to go see what the Thursday music thread did for its prompts. In 2019, Moon! asked, “What are your favorite concert films? Do you like it when they just show a band playing or do you like some behind the scenes material?”

That’s a good question. I buy Blu-rays mostly for the extras, so I always like behind-the-scenes material. I don’t have a favorite concert film. (But I watched Stop Making Sense for the first time when it was on Tubi a few months ago, and I loved how Jonathan Demme and his editor Lisa Day didn’t do a lot of fast cuts until the film concluded with the Talking Heads’ live update of “Crosseyed and Painless.” That number was when Day finally went to town. Stop Making Sense is definitely in the upper echelon of concert films.)

I can’t decide on a favorite concert film, whereas I can name my favorite live music series from TV. Later… with Jools Holland is a treasure, and so are Night Music and MTV’s Unplugged. The terrific NPR Tiny Desk Concerts and Live on KEXP are the present-day concert webseries that are the most like Unplugged, whose Jay-Z/The Roots episode from 2001 is one of my favorite hip-hop team-ups ever. (Live on Letterman, which lasted from 2010 to 2015, is another webseries that reminds me of the “No bullshit, no artifice” spirit of Unplugged. It blessed us with Gorillaz, Yukimi Nagano, Mick Jones, and Paul Simonon’s live version of “Empire Ants,” a version I love so much that I’ve rewatched it more often than any other clip from Live on Letterman.)

Even though I’ve watched only two full episodes of Soul! on YouTube, that series—which lasted from 1968 to 1973 on the PBS station now known as WNET and was hosted by Ellis Haizlip (the subject of the fascinating 2018 documentary Mr. Soul!)—is pretty damn good, too. The 1972 Soul! episode where Stevie Wonder and his band Wonderlove, the episode’s only guests, performed live for nearly an hour is incredible and one of my favorite things that was directed by prolific episodic TV director Stan Lathan (the father of Sanaa Lathan).

Though I love Soul Train, it does not count as a series where the musical guests performed live. All of Don Cornelius’s guests—except Patti LaBelle, George Benson, and one other act I don’t know of (but Questlove, the world’s greatest Soul Train expert, might know)—were required to lip-synch. Even the Yellow Magic Orchestra, Chuck Mangione, and Herb Alpert had to pretend they were playing their instruments live when they promoted their latest instrumentals on Soul Train.

I’ve said to KingKat—who was a college radio DJ like I was—a couple of times in comments sections that Soul Train’s lip-synching requirement infuriates me so much whenever I watch Soul Train on YouTube or Internet Archive that I fast-forward through every musical guest segment. All of Soul Train’s musical guests—except Milli Vanilli—were good or great live performers. Flying these singers, rappers, and musicians over to Hollywood just to have them lip-synch, which is not what they do best, was such a waste. The Beastie Boys’ response to being told by Cornelius to lip-synch “Shadrach” is one of my favorite TV pranks of all time.

Meanwhile, Night Music would have left Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D alone to do what they want. I’m watching a few Night Music episodes for the first time via Internet Archive. Someone on Internet Archive posted almost every episode of the short-lived ’80s live music series.

I read somewhere on Paste that Sonic Youth, the Indigo Girls, and the late David Sanborn did a spectacular cover of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in Night Music’s second season. Thanks to Internet Archive, I downloaded the entire Night Music episode that concluded with that cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” I haven’t watched the episode yet, and I can’t wait to check out that cover version. KingKat, whom I asked to grab an unfinished post he was trying to write about Night Music and update it for a future Couch Avocados header he’ll be taking over, said to me he discovered Night Music on YouTube during the pandemic.

Hosted by Jools Holland, the future host of Later… and a former keyboardist for Squeeze, and Sanborn in the first season (when Lorne Michaels’s production company, which made the show, initially called it Sunday Night) and then taken over by Sanborn in the second and final one (due to Holland’s departure), the syndicated Night Music was taped at Chelsea Studios in New York—hence my selection of “N.Y. Rush” from Cowboy Bebop.

KingKat knows a lot more about Night Music than I do, and I’m sure he’ll get into its fascinating history in his future post. However, I do know that Night Music was as eclectic as the playlist on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. The current incarnation of MBE, wonderfully hosted by Novena Carmel, the musician/DJ daughter of the late Sly Stone, is currently my favorite thing to wake up to.

One of my favorite elements of Later… with Jools Holland is whenever the camera crew briefly cuts to an off-camera musical guest vibing out to another musical guest’s number. Whenever Carmel interviews another musician in MBE’s second hour, she gets that guest to pick out a bunch of their favorite songs for her to play. My favorite part of KCRW’s YouTube livestream of MBE’s second hour is whenever I get to see Carmel’s guest singing along to a song by another artist, and it reminds me of Later… with Jools Holland.

There’s a fourth live music series I’m fond of just because of one particular episode: VH1’s Hard Rock Live. I frequently watched that series when I was a university student, but unlike Holland’s BBC Two show, Unplugged, and Night Music, almost all of its run is lost media now. Hard Rock Live was the series where I first encountered Curtis Mayfield’s “Move on Up” when Tony! Toni! Toné!, the guest act of the week, did a cover of it. The Oakland band’s version made me fall in love with the Mayfield song. That was in 1997.

Because I never taped that Hard Rock Live episode on VHS and because Hard Rock Live was never archived by anybody on the internet, I thought I never would be able to watch Tony! Toni! Toné!’s cover of “Move on Up” again. Then on August 10, I finally found the band’s entire performance of “Move on Up” on IG. Like Raphael Saadiq would say, it sure feels good to me.

I’m going to take the Thursday music thread’s 2019 prompt about concert films and turn it into today’s prompt: Do you have a favorite series of televised concerts or televised live performances by bands?