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Archive for the ‘Rock / Pop’ Category

Day 6. U2, Ravel and Mozart.

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Tonight’s picks come from the middle of the U2 stack, a not-so-complete Ravel complete piano music and a VERY complete set of Mozart piano music (Ingrid Haebler’s on Philips).

So first of all, has anyone seen disc 2 of my Angela Hewitt complete Ravel piano set? How many more discs will I open up to find missing? I’ve always felt like I am very careful with my discs, but what does this mean if on Day 6 I am already down a disc???

I have been quite the Ravel enthusiast since I started composing. His later work has such a clarity and elegance to it. So even though I already had a couple of complete sets of his piano work, when Angela Hewitt released her recordings I was quite excited. I love her Bach recordings, and I expected the same kind of care would be apparent with her Ravel recordings. And for the most part it is there. Her “Le Tombeau de Couperin” is beautifully done and ‘Jeux d’eau’ is shimmery. The recordings themselves though seem a little flat compared to the Pascal Roge discs. As with most recent rock recordings, I think there is a bit of compression in the recordings, and as a result they aren’t as dynamic and nuanced as the Roge discs.

‘War’, ‘Under a Blood Red Sky’ and ‘The Joshua Tree’ were the three U2 discs, and I have to say that one of my bigger disappointments in U2 is that in my mind they are one of the bands most responsible for the loss of dynamics in rock recordings. As digital recording became more and more common, U2 was one of the bands that led the way in exploring how best to take advantage of the format. The change in production quality between ‘The Joshua Tree’ and ‘Achtung Baby’ is pretty amazing, but by the time you get to ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’ I feel like you aren’t hearing much of the band anymore. It doesn’t matter if they play soft for a couple notes, it will all get cancelled out in the production. And the sound of the instruments is drowned in effects.

Not so with these three albums though. I had a great conversation with my friend Izzy at Origin 23 here in Tacoma a couple weeks ago after I heard ‘Seconds’ follow up ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ on the sound system. I love it when someone plays an entire album and ‘War’ is a great entire album to play. I mentioned how much I loved hearing ‘Seconds’ (which I think is the best song on the album) and Izzy and I immediately started talking about how great a drummer Larry Mullen is. And ‘War’ just may be his peak in my opinion. While I think the song writing on ‘Joshua Tree’ and ‘Achtung Baby’ is better, the feel of ‘War’ has a cool drive to it. Edge’s playing is great, Bono doesn’t feel like he has started to pull ahead of the rest of the band yet (well, he always seemed to put himself ahead of everyone, but this gets to be much worse later) and Adam Clayton’s playing drives just as strongly as Larry Mullen Jr’s drums.

Tamiko and I saw U2 during the Zoo TV tour (supporting ‘Achtung Baby’ but before ‘Zooropa’ came out). Even with a very sick Bono taking the stage, HUGE screens of TVs and cars hung overhead to use as stage lights, they put on an amazing show. And I remember that hearing them live without the benefit of studio production made the songs from ‘Achtung Baby’ sound so much better. While the tour was promoted as an ‘out with the old in with the new’ kind of deal, the second half of the show had a few older songs as well as a cover of ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’.

Or maybe it was being at a concert with Tamiko (one of our first concerts together). I especially remember holding her close while they played ‘All I Want Is You’. ‘With or Without You’ was an encore. The concert did sound good, but the date was even better.

Day 5. Rubinstein playing Chopin, Queen and Beethoven.

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

I first heard most of Chopin’s music with the performances of Arthur Rubinstein (released by BMG). These recordings are quite possibly the standard for Chopin’s music, 90% of which is for solo piano. This box set (11 CDs total) also includes both of Chopin’s concertos but a number of works are missing. This set doesn’t pretend in any way to be a ‘complete’ Chopin (some notable solo pieces are missing – especially the etudes), but if you are going to grab a strong representation of Chopin’s work it would be hard to find a better choice then this one.

Idil Birit also did an excellent set of recordings of Chopin’s work on Naxos. She is a wonderful pianist and the recordings are very well done. But one drawback to that box is the feeling that there was a time table set to get the complete Chopin piano works compiled, and as a result there is an unevenness in the performances. None are bad… and her sense of tempo and the all important ‘Chopin rubato; is certainly there, but there are a number of pieces that feel like she isn’t as familiar with them. And while there are many advantages to grabbing all of something in a single box, with only a few exceptions do I really think it is a good idea – especially if that box is part of a ‘project’. One of the things that I think makes the Rubinstein box stand out so well is that it is compiled from recordings that span over two decades. So what you get are recordings that capture not only a huge amount of Chopin’s music, but a significant chunk of Rubinstein’s career. You don’t get a sense with these performances that anything is filler, or being performed to satisfy a completist goal. They all sound quite personal. And though it could be argued that there are probably better recordings of the Nocturnes (for example – I once had a great argument about the Rubinstein vs. the Ashkenazy recordings) I think it would be hard to say that there are any other recordings that feel like you have a performer and composer so close to each other. And you as the listener is brought in close as well. I could probably go into the Romantic notions about why so much of Chopin’s music is written for solo piano, but I would rather just say that this music really is made for a small audience. On a concert stage they seem out of place. But in the studio space where these were mostly recorded, a sense of intimacy is captured that many recital or modern recordings seem to miss. I wouldn’t say they feel like Rubinstein is here in the room with me, but I feel like these are recordings that capture a sense of small space. And that is how I like to hear Chopin played.

So from the small space to the stadium – ‘The Queen’s Jewels’ is a blue velvet box set containing Queen’s first 8 albums (basically all the albums from the 70s). This of course includes Wayne and Garth’s favorite and the theme song to the Met’s 1986 World Series victory. Of the later – whenever I hear ‘We Will Rock You’ start, I generally can’t wait to get through the first 1:15 or so of the song. I can understand how the drums, hand claps and group of voices yelling ‘We Will, We Will Rock YOU!’ can get a stadium full of people pumped up, but it is the slow swell of Brain May’s guitar that makes this song for me. What an amazing guitarist, with an amazing guitar sound. And it is when he finally cuts off the singing with that amazing solo that the song FINALLY does start to rock.

Queen has been one of those bands that has never been at the forefront of my musical tastes. I think they are great, and there is even a nod to ‘Killer Queen’ in one of my pieces. But I rarely think ‘I’m in the mood for listening to Queen’. But then they come on and I have a great time, only to repeat the cycle. But I have seen the fanaticism they can inspire. When I was 16 and first working at Tower Records, one of my fellow employees (Thad) was one of the first people I had to ever really spend time with and I didn’t get along with. The guy was an ass… abrasive, rude and … well, mostly filled with hate. I heard Ministry for the first time because Thad was playing it and I think this was generally on the timid side for him. Anyways, the day Freddie Mercury dies I come into work, and Queen is playing VERY loudly in the store. And there is Thad behind the counter, tears streaming down from behind his black sunglasses onto his black leather vest. On the dry-erase board behind the counter is a red and black dry-erase homage to Freddie. And the second I walk in, he just storms into the back room, leaving me to run the record store solo for the next few hours. This guy has never shown an emotion in the three months I had worked there except contempt, and now here he was bawling his eyes out and needing cover. ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ had been on repeat.

This was my first time ever having the record store to myself.

While Thad had opened ‘A Kind of Magic’ just for that song, I remember continuing the tribute by digging out three British import discs we had (that mostly became the Classic Queen CD here in the US). While ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’ is a beautiful song, I had a feeling that Freddie would probably rather have everyone in the store listening to ‘Bicycle Race’. Whether Freddie did or not, it was certainly what I preferred hearing that day.

The next day, Thad thanked me for covering. It was one of the only times he would ever actually say something directly to me.afterwards he went on being his regular ass self. But quite often when I hear Queen, I think about that scene.

The last set of discs I ripped tonight are David Zinman’s Beethoven Symphonies. For those who keep track of these types of things, these were the first modern instrument recordings of the New Barenreiter Edition. John Eliot Gardiner had recorded these editions on period instruments about five years earlier, and in general both of those sets are lots of fun to listen to. Though when it comes to Beethoven’s symphonies, I still go back to the 1963 Karajan recordings more then any others.

Day 4. Beethoven, Lee Morgan, Billy Bragg & Wilco and Monteverdi

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Tonight’s selections were:

Billy Bragg & Wilco: Mermaid Ave. 2

Lee Morgan: Leeway (the RVG edition)

Monteverdi: L’Orfeo (John Eliot Gardiner conducting on Archiv)

Beethoven: complete piano trios from the DG Complete Beethoven Edition

I can’t possibly talk about all of these at the moment, and I have only listened so far to some of the Beethoven and the Lee Morgan. So I’ll stick to those.

‘Leeway’, and the series from Blue Note that it is released under the ‘Rudy Van Gelder edition’ sounds like what Blue Note jazz in the late 50s and 60s sounded like, mostly because so much was recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s living room (and later his custom studio). The number of GREAT jazz albums recorded by RVG is astounding, and when Blue Note started re-releasing these recordings in the 2000s (remastered by RVG himself) I grabbed as many as I could every time Blue Note discs were on sale. They sound great. And even better is the exposure you get to some great artists that may seem peripheral to the jazz greats. But you really do get a sense of how all of these guys worked and played together on each other’s albums. Hearing a ‘Lee Morgan’ album isn’t just a Lee Morgan album. Art Blakey, Paul Chambers, Jackie McLean and Bobby Timmons are in on the session as well. All of these guys had albums under their own names, most notably Art Blakey. And I love Lee Morgan – but how were the decisions made about who would get the album credit? Why isn’t this an Art Blakey album? When it comes down to it, this one really does feature Lee Morgan… hands down. But then you listen to “Lazy Bird” on John Coltrane’s album “Blue Train”, and how is THAT not something that belongs on a Lee Morgan album???

Nice stretched out performances (the shortest track is still over 8 minutes) that are just cool. And what the RVG recordings show you is how important a recording engineer can be. The sound on RVG recordings really have a signature. There is a story I remember hearing about the first time Herbie Hancock recorded at the studio. Apparently he came in and started to move the piano a bit away from a wall, then started to move a microphone boom stand, and Rudy freaks out. The piano and microphones HAD to be in those spots for it to sound right. The way the sound bounced off the wall and the distance of the mic from the piano had been tuned over years of trial and error…

The recording engineer (and producers) are often the most overlooked musicians. Without them, sound wouldn’t be captured and made available for us to listen to. And they need to learn how to play their instruments in the same way a saxophonist does. It takes years of practice to get your sound, and after a little practice on a listeners part you can recognize RVG recordings (on many labels) just like you would recognize Lee Morgan’s trumpet sound.

The Beethoven discs are the piano trio recordings by Wilhelm Kempff, Pierre Fournier and Henryk Szeryng made in the late 60s. Kempff and Fournier are two of my favorite classical musicians of all time. I also have live recordings that the two of them did of the Beethoven Cello Sonatas. What is so fun about both the piano trio recordings and the sonatas is the sense of enjoyment these performers bring to pieces that they had probably known for 3 to 4 decades at this point in their lives. This is music that is in their muscles. A part of their physicality. But with the wisdom comes age. The performances are not ‘perfect’… there are missed notes here and there, and sometimes you can feel the group pull back a little to regroup. But everything is so musical. There actually isn’t a single note in these recordings. There is such a continuity that it is hard to believe that what we hear these three men playing is somehow represented by something as finite as dots and lines on a page. Beethoven is so lucky to have had people in this world that know and play his music with such connection. Well – Beethoven is lucky, but we are just as lucky! I could go on further, but I need to save something for the many returns to these artists I will be making in the future.

Day 2. The Beatles and Miles Davis.

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

For tonight’s decisions, I decided that I needed to pick Mira up so she could choose something from a higher shelf. At the girl’s current height, the bookshelves would have quickly become top heavy. Celia chose The Beatles, and Mira went for the shiny ‘Seven Steps’ Miles Davis box set (the period on Columbia Records between his group with Coltrane that produced ‘Kind Of Blue’ and the famous Quintet.

I could talk about how great this music is… I could talk about how influential The Beatles’ seven years of recorded output was to the history of pop music. I could talk about how these transitional years of Miles Davis’ career produced some great performances while a new group slowly came together. But I could fill books with that kind of talk, and my guess is that if you are reading this you don’t need to be convinced about The Beatles or Miles Davis. So, I’ll talk about packaging.

I don’t think I have any memories of music in my life pre-Beatles. Ever since I have known music, I have known The Beatles and there are two visuals that come to mind – the cover for Sgt. Pepper and the Apple / half-Apple record labels on the later LPs. I can’t tell you how sad I was to see the CD cover for Sgt. Pepper when it first came out. The original LP that folded out, had lyrics printed on the back (first pop record to do this!!!) and the Sgt. Pepper cutouts were as much a part of the record as the music was. The White Album and its four full color photos that my dad hung in the garage. And the 12 x 12 cover of Abbey Road. The size mattered, and so did the way the album covers wore with time. They were old when I got to know them, taken in and out of shelves over and over again to be played. The jackets aged the more you played the LPs they conyained.

So much was lost with the compact disc. 98% plastic standardized jewel cases. The yellow spine for R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic For The People’ seemed special when it came out, that’s how boring and homogenized the packaging was. Especially after the death of the long box, which was meant to just be thrown away anyways (though I would save them and plaster them to my teenage walls). So when a company DID do something different with packaging, it caught attention. After some time, there were even awards for it. Packaging! Did it matter what was on the discs? Nope – just awards for packaging… and I think that shows just how bad it got.

The packaging for the Miles Davis Columbia Records compilations won several of these awards. ‘Seven Steps’ has a metallic silver spine, surrounded by a grey canvas-like sturdy box. You can’t open the booklet to save your life, and the cardboard sleeves inside certainly can’t be good for the discs. But they look sharp, especially when they are all lined up in a row on a shelf. Well… now there is one less on mine.

Included in ‘Seven Steps’ is ‘Live In Berlin’ (pictured above). I originally bought this one disc for about half the price of this box set as a Japanese import. It is still one of my favorite live discs. The group as it stands on this recording probably existed for 6 months or so, and they are mostly playing music that was written and performed when John Coltrane and Bill Evans was playing with Miles in the late 50s. There is tension there, and often the tempos are faster. They are exciting performances, but you can hear that the players realize there are ghosts on the stage. They were following greatness, and at the time were probably wondering if THEY were the next great group, trying to prove to the audience and Miles that they could make the cut. Well – this isn’t the Quintet to come, but this isn’t to slight them at all. These are some fine performances… and I’m glad I got the import version when I did. The extra cost was well worth the extra time I had with this music.

Day 1. ABBA, Air, Elliott Smith, The Smiths, Mozart and R.E.M.

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

I want to avoid going through my whole collection and ripping the CDs in the order they are stored on my bookshelves. This does make packing the discs away a little tricky after I rip them, but it also gives me a wonderful randomness to this whole process. To make things a little more random, I went into the extra bedroom this morning at asked Celia and Mira to pull a few discs off the shelves. Celia went for some red spines (ABBA and Air), and Mira just went to the shelves and started to pull discs down. Whether or not Mira did this in response to my request isn’t known – this is what Mira does when she is around the CD shelves. Today, Mira grabbed off the The Smiths and Elliott Smith. R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic For The People’ was just above those and fell down with the ‘Smiths’, and I also grabbed ‘Marriage Of Figaro’.

I got ABBA for Tamiko some time ago (a download that I burned to disc), and I admit they are quite a guilty pleasure. It’s hard not to have fun when ABBA is playing. I remember listening to ABBA in spanish class in high school (ABBA Oro), and I love to hear Tamiko sing along with them. Celia loves to dance to them (and she loves to dance to Kylie Minogue, who I am sure would not be who she is without ABBA). And as Mira gets her feet under her, I imagine she’ll enjoy them too. What a stark contrast their music is to Elliott Smith’s. The two discs I ripped today were his first album (fairly dark, just Elliott and his guitar) and ‘From A Basement On A Hill’ (released after his suicide). His first album is a wonderful, moody record, and in hindsight probably hints at what will happen in his future. ‘From A Basement On A Hill’ is simply to sad for me to listen to. I have never even listened to the whole thing. When I first bought it, I got about halfway through it before I turned it off. It was just too sad for me at the time, and I have never brought myself to listen to the whole thing. The unfinished quality of what I remember hearing was quite fitting.

The Smith’s ‘The Queen Is Dead’ and R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic for the People’ both bring along lots of high school memories. Heavier on the R.E.M. side though. Not that I don’t appreciate The Smiths, but I was always more of an R.E.M. fan. And while I really got into R.E.M. with ‘Document’ and ‘Green’, ‘Automatic For The People’ was one of my favorite albums of theirs at the time it came out. I understand why it didn’t catch the ears of a lot of other R.E.M. fans, but the more acoustic, orchestrated feel of this album spoke to me at the time. A couple of weeks ago ‘Monty Got A Raw Deal’ was featured in an NPR interview about songs and game shows. And hearing only 30 seconds of the song left me wanting to hear the whole album again. ‘Man On The Moon’ doesn’t stand up as well for me now (a casualty of radio overplay) but ‘Try Not To Breathe’ and ‘Everybody Hurts’ strike me as even more amazing the I remember. And the strings in ‘Drive’ still sound unexpected to me… fresh and dark at the same time.

‘Marriage Of Figaro’ is one of my favorite operas. But over the past couple of years, I have started to feel it is just wrong to only listen to opera. It is such a visual and dramatic medium that so much is lost when you only hear it. A couple years ago I thought I would eventually want to replace all my opera recordings with DVDs, but when I finished transferring the disc today I played a few tracks (as part of my streaming test). And it is so amazing to hear this music. Sure, the visuals and staging are missing, but a Mozart aria has no problem standing on its own. The recording is a live one (with John Eliot Gardiner conducting, Bryn Terfel and Alison Hagley). I watched the video a couple of times during shifts in the video store at Tower, and it is an amazing performance. Gardiner shapes an amazing performance, and the sound quality is stunning. I look forward to listening to the whole thing again very soon.