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Archive for the ‘Tamiko’ Category

Day 29. Miles Davis, John Coltrane (alone and together).

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

I spent a good part of last night and some time this morning listening to the earlier (Prestige) Miles Davis and John Coltrane set that I ripped last night and today. There were three boxes in all: The Miles Davis Quintet recordings (the first quintet with John Coltrane), ‘Fearless Leader’, the Coltrane Prestige recordings that featured Coltrane as the head of the group (also featuring Red Garland on piano) and ‘Interplay’ which is a Prestige set of recordings with John Coltrane in a supporting role. I am pretty sure I got all of these sets throughout a couple years for Christmas from Tamiko, and they mostly filled in holes from the music from these periods. The Miles Davis boxes (which encompass ‘Workin’ ‘, ‘Smokin’ ‘ and a few other Prestige discs) really are Miles Davis albums. Some of the quintessential cool Miles Davis before he starting doing more recordings for Columbia records. How cool? He does ‘Surrey With A Fringe On Top’ and it’s brilliant. There are other standards mixed in, and the music fuses into what may be Miles’ first REALLY solid group.

The two Coltrane boxes are quite interesting. Nothing on ‘Fearless Leader’ caught me by surprise… I owned a good number of the discs already covered in this set (‘Soultrane’ for instance) and they show Coltrane coming into his own both as a band leader and as THE saxophonist of his generation. There are moments of the brilliance that will come, but for the most part you can see him polishing his early talent. Again, some very cool recordings. But ‘Interplay’ introduced me to some music I hadn’t heard before. The stand out for me were the recordings with Mal Waldron who, for some reason, I hadn’t heard of until I head John Coltrane playing with him. And wow! What a great pianist. I can kind of understand why he was overshadowed at the time… not as idiosyncratic as Monk, and not as polished as Red Garland, but like the other two he has a genuinely unique voice that is recognizable.

The other interesting thing about ‘Interplay’ is there is a certain amount of performance tension that I head among groups that are more or less just getting together for some sessions. The players are figuring out what they are going to do while at the same time learning from other players that they have little experience with. There are a few times were someone tramples over someone else’s solo for instance, but I like the feeling of spontaneity that also comes out of these recordings. You still get lots of Coltrane, but you also get LOTS of others that you may not have heard of before. Fun box to say the least.

In fact, it was while listening to these boxes this morning and last night that the goal of this project – revisiting and rediscovering music that I have – really brought a smile to my face.

Tags: John Coltrane, Mal Waldron, Miles Davis
Posted in Jazz, Tamiko | No Comments »

Day 25. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Friday, February 12th, 2010

I was 9 when ‘Born In The USA’ came out and I got the LP that year for Christmas. Two years later the live box set (’75 – ’85) came out and it was that year’s Christmas present as well. While ‘Born In The USA’ is a good album, when I got the box set all of the pre-‘Born In The USA’ stuff was finally introduced to me. My dad had ‘Born To Run’ but I don’t really remember hearing it growing up. But that morning after I broke open the shrink wrap, my dad grabbed the second disc and immediately put on ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’. I felt like this was a completely different Bruce Springsteen and I saw the E Street Band as more then just the backing group. Hearing how all of these guys played together (and how Springsteen introduced all of them in the middle of ‘Rosalita’) made the group seem more like a hard working team. Stories of 3-4 hours concerts and the energy on these live recordings seemed super-human to me, and I wanted to be able to do this. It was these records that made me REALLY want to be in a rock band.

I bought ‘Greetings From Asbury Park’ and ‘The Wild, The Innocent And The E Street Shuffle’ on LP that next year, and I’m pretty sure I basically let my dad’s ‘Born To Run’ disappear into my collection. Except disappear wouldn’t be the right word since I played it pretty constantly. And these three albums have never really left my music rotation. In Nick Hornby’s book ‘Songbook’, he talks about how ‘Thunder Road’ is the song he has played more then any other song in his life. And it is a great song… easily one of my favorites. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it is in my top 50 songs as well. But I am almost positive that ‘Rosalita’ is in the top 10. If I’m doing work and need a kick to get going again, I put on ‘Rosalita’. If I have a little bit of time alone and want to play something loudly, ‘Rosalita’ is close to the top of the list. I’ve listened to this song for 25 years of my life, and I’m stunned how good I still think it is.

But as much as I love ‘Rosalita’, my favorite Springsteen song is on ‘Greetings From Asbury Park’. When I first moved Roseville from San Jose, for some reason I put on ‘Greetings From Asbury Park’ right after I got my stereo set up in my new bedroom. And while I was unpacking, ‘For You’ caught my ear and I stopped for a few minutes and listened. I remembered this moment when I first moved to Berkeley and started renting a room on Page Street. This time, I was living on my own for the first time and moving to the Bay Area (with little money and a low paying job) for many reasons. I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to go to UC Berkeley, and I didn’t want to move to Texas with my parents. But the main reason, the one that really makes the reasons above look like excuses to satisfy parents and others, was that I wanted to live and be with Tamiko. As I was unpacking, I remembered putting ‘For You’ on when I first moved to Roseville (where Tamiko and I would meet) and I immediately got my stereo hooked up, speakers plugged in, and put on ‘Greetings From Asbury Park’. I have done this as a bit of a ritual since then… every place I have moved the stereo is one of the first things set up, I dig out the LP, and I play ‘For You’. It makes wherever I am, whatever new strange apartment or house feel like home within a couple of minutes. And it reminds me that while I am a composer, musician, teacher and many other things, when it all comes down to it I am Tamiko’s husband and now the father to our kids. I can’t imagine being anything else to anyone else… I’m very lucky.

Tags: Bruce Springsteen
Posted in Celia, Mira, Rock / Pop, Tamiko | 1 Comment »

Day 24. J.S. Bach.

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Mira is still under the weather, but for the first time since last Sunday both Celia and Mira are (for the time being) sleeping in their own beds. Hopefully I can get back to the tradition of the girls choosing the ‘DAC’ discs soon. But I tried my best by closing my eyes and grabbing some Bach off the shelf. I grabbed a couple of different recordings of the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ as well as a Brandenburg Concertos recording and a recording of the sonatas for violin and continuo for tonight.

My senior year at UC Berkeley I was very fortunate to take a class on Bach by Prof. John Butt. Tamiko had taken a more general Bach survey from him during one of her first years at Cal and he was one of her favorite professors. He was an amazing performer, great lecturer and VERY funny (Tamiko made a comment once that it was like having Monty Python teach her about Bach). While I was going through the major, I eagerly anticipated each semester’s course schedule to see if Prof. Butt was teaching a Bach class, and he finally did my senior year. The course was a much smaller seminar and focused on Bach’s Passions (and the tradition that they came out of). There were five of us in the class and we spent 12 of the 17 weeks just looking at the two Bach pieces. I had never looked at any pieces in such depth before, and while getting to spend most of an entire semester with Bach I also learned a huge amount about how to look at music itself. A couple years ago, Prof. Butt (who left Cal for Cambridge in the late 90s) released a recording of the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ with the Dunedin Ensemble. Like Joshua Rifkin’s recordings of the B Minor Mass and a few of the cantatas, the John Butt ‘St. Matthew Passion’ is recorded with a single performer on a part. While performances usually range from large modern orchestras and choirs to smaller baroque ensembles, a good amount of research shows that one player per part performances were a good possibility during Bach’s time. This performance (along with the Rifkin recordings) present convincing arguments. The pieces present the music with a clarity that I had never heard before, and it is amazing how much more can be heard with a smaller ensemble.

The other recording of the St. Matthew I pulled tonight is the John Eliot Gardiner recording with the Monteverdi Choir. These were actually the recordings we used as a reference in John Butt’s class. At the time of their recording they were one of the first period instrument recordings of these works. The performance is very dramatic, and if you have only heard recordings of this piece with larger forces (like most of the recordings from the ’50s and ’60s), I highly suggest finding the Gardiner recording.

The Brandenburg Concerto recordings are by ‘Il Giardino Armonico’. The performances are lively and fun. Tamiko and I had a chance to see the group perform Bach and Vivaldi in the 90s (also at Berkeley) and it was one of the most enjoyable concerts I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if I have ever seen a group play with such big smiles before. Between the first and second movements of the Vivaldi concerto they opened the concert with, there was some clapping (which doesn’t bother me personally as much as it does many musicians). The players in the group paused and acknowledged the applause, then played the rest of the first half of the concert without a single break… one movement into the next with only a brief breath in between. The line between pieces was broken down, and the audience could do nothing but listen for about an hour. The result was wonderful. No one was worried about clapping at the right time, and after about 20 minutes I remember feeling like the group had taken their energy and were propelling us along with them.

Tags: Il Giardino Armonico, J.S. Bach, John Butt
Posted in Classical, Tamiko | No Comments »

Day 16. More John Coltrane.

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Tonight’s post will need to be quicker, but it is also partly a continuation from last night’s. ‘The Last Giant’ is a 2-CD Coltrane retrospective (another box-set choice, courtesy of Mira) that I bought before I knew much of anything about jazz. ‘Blue Train’ was the first jazz album I ever bought, and I had loaned it out before a road trip from Roseville, CA down to SF. But the title song was stuck in my head and I couldn’t get the disc back in time for the ride. So I bought ‘The Last Giant’ which had ‘Blue Train’ on it, and tons of stuff I had never heard.

So – I was 19 years old, and meeting family in SF for dinner, then I was driving back to Berkeley to spend the weekend with Tamiko at her new apartment on Arch St. just north of UC Berkeley. I finished dinner and hopped into my ’78 Corolla and started trying to find my way to the Bay Bridge. I could see it, but I had never driven to it myself and had to figure out how to get there. I was the end of May, and you could tell the Bay Area summer was around the corner. Fog was rolling in, and it was almost cold enough to roll up my windows. But I wanted to play the music loudly with the windows down while driving across the bridge. ‘Russian Lullaby’ came on… crashing piano chords from Red Garland, then the song takes off with an amazingly tight ride cymbal pushing the whole thing along at a break neck pace. Then the sax starts in on the melody. The notes feel incredibly long compared to the tempo of everything else. Between the drums, the bass, the piano and the tune, everything is locked in rhythm, but it feels like four different tempos. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I repeated it again across the bridge… on to ‘Blue Train’ then ‘Giant Steps’. The smell of the bay and fog came in through the windows, and I was off to see my girlfriend for the weekend. I can still feel that excitement.

Three months later I would move to Berkeley.

Tags: Berkeley, John Coltrane, San Francisco
Posted in Jazz, Tamiko | No Comments »

Day 12. Waiting, waiting … then Louis Prima.

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

After letting the backup run overnight two nights ago (then into the day yesterday, then into last night) I finally got to pull the Capitol Series collection of Louis Prima (with lots of Keely Smith and Sam Butera as well!) onto the computer.

I get my love for Louis Prima from my grandfather. He told me as a kid that while most Italians listen to Frank Sinatra, all REAL Italians listen to Louis Prima. My grandpa was also on a quest for a live album of Louis Prima live in Lake Tahoe that featured a performance of Tony Bennet’s ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’ that wasn’t really sung, but was spoken in a thick Italian accent with confused lyrics. And I think a performance like that really shows the difference between Ol’ Blue Eyes and The Lip… there was always a deep sense of humor that Prima brought to his show. Actually – Prima saw his performances (even on disc) as a show, filled with humor and sight-gags in addition to some great playing. The sight-gags often included Prima’s ‘straight-man’ (and wife) Keely Smith, or him and Sam Butera (his long time saxophone player) battling it out with musical jabs.

The ‘Capitol Collector’s Series’ disc is a great one disc set of studio recordings mostly made in the 50s and 60s. There are songs about Sputnik. There are a number of standards that turn into the signature Prima Jumpin’ Jive (‘Lazy River’, ‘I’ve Got The World On A String’), remakes of some Prima standards from his earlier days as a swing band leader (most notable ‘Sing Sing Sing (With A Swing)’) and some early mash-ups (‘Just A Gigolo / I Ain’t Got Nobody’ and ‘Angelina / Zooma Zooma’).

When Tamiko and I would throw dinner parties in our older apartment living days, I would throw Louis Prima on if we were making Italian food … while the red sauce was simmering and the bottle of wine had already been opened. And I finally did find a disc of the live Tahoe show for my grandpa… it was a riot to hear, and he had the biggest smile on his face while listening to ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’. I could tell he was remembering the performances he saw back in the 60s. Just hearing it was lots of fun for me… I can’t imagine what it would have been like to see this group play live.

Tags: Keely Smith, Louis Prima, Sam Butera
Posted in Jazz, Tamiko | No Comments »

Day 11. Nina Simone.

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

The first time I heard Nina Simone was a late night at the Tower Records in Berkeley (while shelving some discs). The song was ‘Sinnerman’, and when I heard her voice I had to find out who it was singing. And as the song builds up, the piano playing becomes manic… frantic… and I had to figure out who was playing piano. And it was still Nina Simone! Then the clapping begins, some vocal utterances, and the piano puts a simple melody over the top of it. And then it brings the rest of the band back in. Nina sings out an ‘Oh yeah!’. Then everything picks up again. The energy in this performance is simply amazing.

I picked up a single greatest hits disc on Philips records that night that had ‘Sinnerman’ on it, and was amazed by the whole disc. From the vocal standard styling on ‘I Loves You Porgy’ to the driving and tight flute and drums of ‘See-Line Woman’. ‘Pirate Jenny’, ‘Four Women’ and ‘Mississippi Goddam’. The variety and breadth of her performances on this single disc stunned me.

The discs tonight are that ‘Best of’ disc and the ‘Four Women’ box set of her Philips releases. Where the ‘Best of’ collection contains mostly serious and dark songs, I was surprised to hear how much humor Nina Simone also had at times. In ‘Go Limp’ she leads the audience in what she calls a ‘hootenanny time’ sing-along… mostly a drunken waltz that sets women’s rights and the civil rights movement against the story of a mother telling her daughter how to snag a man. It is a drunken waltz that lets her vamp as she laughs at the song, and criticizes her audience for not singing along as loud as they should. The song is also filled with a number of pregnant pauses while she waits for the audience to get the jokes that are in the song’s lyrics.

‘Love Me Or Leave Me’ shows off her classical training (with some wonderful imitative playing in the middle of the song) and ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out’ shows how bluesy she could get.

A couple years after Tamiko and I moved to Seattle, Nina Simone played a concert at the Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall. She was making a rare appearance in the States (she had moved to Paris decades before after deciding that she couldn’t live in the U.S. anymore since she would always be treated as a second-class citizen because of the color of her skin), and I know I should have found some way to get tickets. They were well outside our graduate student budget but I should have realized that this was surely the last chance we would have to see her perform live. The reviews talked about how stunning the performance was. She passed away two years later. I regret not seeing James Brown before he died. I regret skipping on Elvin Jones thinking I’d catch him the next time around. But missing Nina Simone will probably be one of my biggest concert regrets for some time.

UPDATE: the backup is STILL running… guess this one isn’t going to get ripped until tomorrow.

Tags: Nina Simone
Posted in Jazz, Tamiko | 1 Comment »

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.

Tags: Mozart, Ravel, U2
Posted in Classical, Rock / Pop, Tamiko | No Comments »

more connections…

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

now the laptop that is managing all the conversion / storage is hooked up to the stereo in our basement! And using the ‘Screen Sharing’ function in Mac OS X, I can control that computer from my laptop. The sound is pretty good (1/8 headphone jack to RCA inputs on the amplifier), but a little dull. It will work for now, and my laptop is basically a remote control to the computer.

Posted in Tamiko | No Comments »

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.

Tags: ABBA, Air, Elliott Smith, Mozart, R.E.M., The Smiths
Posted in Celia, Classical, Mira, Rock / Pop, Tamiko | No Comments »

Archive for the ‘Tamiko’ Category

Day 29. Miles Davis, John Coltrane (alone and together).

Day 25. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Day 24. J.S. Bach.

Day 16. More John Coltrane.

Day 12. Waiting, waiting … then Louis Prima.

Day 11. Nina Simone.

Day 6. U2, Ravel and Mozart.

more connections…

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

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