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Day 9. Miles Davis.

Posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 5:05 am in Jazz by josh

I finished up the Bach box late last night and picked up with Mira’s next box set choice, the complete Miles Davis Bitchess Brew sessions. ‘Miles Runs The Voodoo Down”… what an amazing track (and title)! ‘John McLaughlin’… really, some amazing music on this album. Miles described ‘Bitches Brew’ as rock music for black people. And ‘Bitches Brew’ does rock. As Miles’ career takes his music through rock, funk and towards the covering of Cyndi Lauper songs, he was a major innovator and risk taker. His genius let him jump into these areas, and he did it while finding the best young musicians around him.

And as much as I love this album, there is so much about what follows in jazz history that I negatively link to it. While rock music is brought into jazz, it also opened the floodgates to where way too many others decide they can simply do the same thing and be ‘innovative’. What we are left with now is a large number of ‘jazz’ musicians today that simply play rock (soft rock, pop, elevator music) without vocals and claim that they belong to the lineage that was established  by Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

I can never express how difficult it was for me to shelve Kenny G next to Red Garland, or the Yellowjackets ANYWHERE near Cannonball Adderley. Now – I don’t blame Miles Davis for the creation of smooth / bad jazz. It would have happened no matter what. But when you talk about the revolution that ‘Bitches Brew’ brought to jazz – how it led to Fusion, etc. – well, that’s a road that I wish Miles wasn’t associated with. ‘Bitches Brew’ may be ‘fusion’ but it certainly isn’t Fusion. It’s rough and edgy and gets a lot of energy from the influences brought in and the performances it creates. But it isn’t simply pop music with an instrumental melody. And this is what I feel most contemporary ‘jazz’ has become. Just adult contemporary bland trash.

I’m not saying that jazz is dead or that there isn’t innovation anymore. There certainly is. You have to look for it (and I don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing). Word of mouth really is how you find the best music out there. For those in the Seattle area, check out Cuong Vu, Evan Flory-Barnes, Sunship and the Tom Baker Quartet. Check out the recordings of  The Splatter Trio and Kip Hanrahan. Check out William Parker. Get to a Cecil Taylor show while you still can. These artists are all finding ways to expand the genre in interesting ways and the are bringing in wide and diverse influences. See how these groups and players connect to ‘Bitches Brew’, and see if that helps you get the 70s turn toward bad jazz taste out of your mouth.

Day 8. J.S. Bach.

Posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 6:10 am in Classical, Mira by josh


Mira’s gravitation towards box sets continues, and today’s picks had to be pared down. She chose both the complete J.S. Bach organ works (17 discs) and the Miles Davis ‘Bitch’s Brew’ box set. Celia chose more Queen and Lou Reed… but due to the size of the Bach box I decided to put Miles, Queen and Lou Reed off until tomorrow.

The Bach set is one of two complete Bach organ works I have. The one from today is Peter Hurford’s London set. The different sets of compositions are also performed on organs throughout Europe. So in addition to hearing all of Bach’s organ works, you also get a great sense of how varied an instrument the organ can be. Organs are pretty unique instrument-wise. In some ways, they are like time-capsules. We know about how tuning has changed throughout history (since the pipes don’t easily go in and out of tune, unlike piano strings). It’s history goes back to the 3rd century B.C., and we can see in it’s key layout and construction how the concepts of scale and music theory evolved. It can be orchestrated, and a major part of the organist’s art is the control of registration. Yet, unlike a piano there is little control over dynamics. More stops will make things louder. More notes will make things louder. The swell box can make things louder. Hitting the keys harder – nothing. So when composing for the instrument the number of notes sounding can be an expressive as well as a textural consideration, and the organist can play with a touch that is most comfortable to them without worrying about how it will effect the dynamics of a performance.

During my time at UC Berkeley, I was lucky enough to have a class on Bach with Prof. John Butt, a wonderful teacher and organist. Watching him play was astonishing. His feet played as frantically as his hands did across multiple keyboards. As he came to new themes or sections in a piece, he would also change the stop configuration – the color and power of the instrument would change greatly just by pulling out a couple knobs. In Hertz Hall there were three organs (including a 17th century (?) Italian organ that sat right behind the double bass section on stage during orchestra rehearsals and concerts) and Prof. Butt’s favorite was situated above and behind the audience, which brings up another peculiarity of the instrument. While pianos rarely travel with a performer, concert organs NEVER do. An organist needs to learn the idiosyncrasies of each new instrument they come across for every performance. And you rarely get to SEE the performance. Organ lofts in churches weren’t designed so you could see the organ being played. They were often tucked away – and sometimes the organist might not even be able to hear the instrument well!

So to get a set like the Peter Hurford one is interesting on multiple levels. You get a tour of organs while also getting a tour of one of this instrument’s most amazing composers. I haven’t listened to this set for quite some time, and it is getting a little too late here to turn the volume to where it belongs. But I’m sure I’ll have more to say about these discs tomorrow after having some time to listen to it.

Day 7. Muddy Waters and Schubert.

Posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 5:29 am in Classical, Folk / Blues / Country by josh

I forgot to get the girls downstairs tonight before they went to bed, so I closed my eyes and picked today’s rips. Two from blues legend Muddy Waters and Wilhem Kempff’s Schubert Sonata box set.

The first of the Muddy Waters discs is a set of field recordings that were captured in Mississippi in the 1940s. They sound quite a bit like most of the most of the other excellent Alan Lomax recordings that were done as part of a large Library of Congress recordings put into motion by Roosevelt’s public works projects that were contained in the New Deal. When the recordings were made, Muddy Waters (in his mid-20s) was living in a cabin on a plantation. There are interviews between him and Lomax on the disc as well, and I am stunned by how well these recordings capture a sense of what it must have meant to be a country blues musician in Mississippi during the great depression. When Lomax asks: “How did you learn to play with a bottle” Muddy Waters says “I found it on the ground and I picked it up”. They talk some more then Lomax asks him to play another song and they record it. Most of these are solo recordings, though a couple feature a second person. A couple of years later Muddy Waters would move to Chicago, and within a few more years he would become a very successful blues musician. By the time the recordings for “Folk Singer” were done in Chicago in the early 60s, Muddy Waters has a full band and much more then a portable recorder at his disposal. He has a full band and a full studio. You can also tell how much better Muddy Waters had been able to eat from comparing the pictures contained in both discs.

But between both, Muddy Waters still plays and sings like a traditional blues singer. His music was influencing rock singers in the US and UK by this time, and in return he was able to make a living in Chicago and record his music in a studio (so – in a way the music industry that he was influencing was also effecting how he worked!). And while the recordings in Chicago are made by a much more established and comfortable musician, the feeling is still all there. He is the older version of that amazing musician that Alan Lomax caught in the fields of Mississippi. There is change that has occurred, but the ‘Folk Singer’ recordings feel like as much of a document as the field recordings do. The first ‘Ooooh!’ in ‘My Captain’ has the echo of the music in the Lomax recordings. But it is an echo, and you get the sense that what has changed is that the 1960s Muddy Waters remembers his roots as well as the hard work that found him success making a living as a musician in Chicago.

The Schubert box is one that I purchased mostly because of how much I love Kempff’s Beethoven playing. I wasn’t familiar with Schubert’s sonatas when I bought it and had no idea what I was in for the first time I listened to 21 minute first movement to the B-flat sonata. This is huge, expansive and lyrical music. At first it seems to hold such a direct relation to Beethoven, but as the music expands Schubert’s gifts for lyricism become more and more apparent. When I played piano more, I always had a great amount of difficulty in handling the dense textures that Schubert often uses in his accompaniments. Large block chords that are repeated under the melody. To me they always seemed to be a mistake, as though they were actually supposed to be scored for strings (partly because it is a texture that Schubert uses so much in his string quartets as well!). But hearing Kempff play them, there is almost no attack – no repetition. Just swells and decrescendos of pulse and texture. He is able to pull them back like curtains to reveal a counter-melody, then let them fall and obscure again. His touch is amazingly nuanced with these gestures, and after I heard him play these pieces, I felt like I knew what I had to work towards.

I have never been happy with how I play Schubert as a result. And I remember thinking that it must just be something about the recording. How could anyone actually play these block chords so smoothly? But I’ve heard other pianists play this music since (both live and on other recordings), and I am constantly amazed at the effect. How can someone can strike the strings so softly, even when playing loudly? While I feel comfortable playing Bach and even some Beethoven and Chopin, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to figure out the touch that is needed to really play Schubert well.

Day 6. U2, Ravel and Mozart.

Posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 6:31 am in Classical, Rock / Pop, Tamiko by josh

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.

Posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 7:01 am in Classical, Rock / Pop by josh

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.

more connections…

Posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 6:31 am in Tamiko by josh

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.

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

Posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 6:27 am in Classical, Jazz, Rock / Pop by josh

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 3. Ella Fitzgerald and Luciano Berio.

Posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 5:50 am in Classical, Jazz, Mira by josh

Today’s picks come from Mira, and I am starting to notice that she is drawn to wider, more colorful packaging. I guess this means box sets will be ripped first.

The Berio recording I ripped tonight is the ‘complete’ Berio Sequenzas released on DG in 1998 (and I put the quote around complete because Berio composed a couple more after this). I had very little contact with Berio before coming to the University of Washington for grad school, and I was sent to Berio’s scores and recordings of performances of his music early on in my masters degree. I was beginning work on a piece for solo viola, and Richard Karpen scolded me for even thinking about composing works for a solo instrument without knowing these pieces. I wouldn’t be surprised even if he told me that I shouldn’t think about being a composer without knowing these pieces. But it is sufficient to say that I learned quickly that there were some serious holes in my knowledge of repertoire. Berio has become one of my favorite composers. I remember finding the Sequenzas quite uneven on my first listening to these performances (and still find some of these recordings flat). Studying the scores however was like looking at an encyclopedia of extended techniques for each instrument that he composed for. One of my most important lessons about music in general came from further listenings of these pieces. I was amazed how different performances could be, and I came to see the performance of new music not necessarily as a striving for a note perfect representation of dots on a page (where it was the responsibility of the composer to hyper-notate every nuance that is wanted) but as a relationship between composer, performer, performance history and performance practice. These pieces greatly changed how I viewed my role in the world as a composer, and this outlook still changes with every performance I have and piece I write. These pieces also taught me about how important the theatrical performance of a work is. While I have found recordings of these pieces that I enjoy listening to (there will be more writings about the Sequenzas here while the project goes on), seeing them performed (even rehearsed) adds so much to the listening of them. Seeing how a performer grapples with the technical and musical demands of this music is exhilarating.

Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘songbook’ collections came out on Verve first in the 50s and 60s on LP and were reissued on CD in the late 90s. A quick search on Wikipedia (to grab the above dates) also revealed that in 2000 this ALBUM was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2003 the Library of Congress chose it as one of 50 recordings added to the National Recording Registry. To call this album a treasure is an understatement. It is one of the most beautifully compiled set of performances I think I own. I have played this music while closing the record store for the night, I have played tracks from it for my music theory students, and I have played it just about anytime I need something to lighten me up a bit. Personally, I believe these recordings were captured near the peak of Ella Fitzgerald’s career (along with the ‘Cote d’Azur’ recordings that were done with Duke Ellington). Her musicality is startling, and she may be one of the most perfect interpreters of Cole Porter’s music that I can think of. Her voice on ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ embodies the complexity of the story told in the lyrics, full of sorrow and relief at the same time. ‘You Do Something To Me’ and ‘Too Darn Hot’ embody what I imagine Manhattan sexy in the 50s must have been. But it is her version of ‘I Love Paris’ that is probably one of the top 10 songs that I get stuck in my head. Buddy Bergman’s orchestral arrangement does more the compliment Ella’s voice. This song achieves a stunning relationship between the singer and her accompaniment, rising well above a sum of the two parts. Having such a clear image of this song in my head is one of my most treasured musical memories.

Day 2. The Beatles and Miles Davis.

Posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 6:00 am in Jazz, Rock / Pop by josh

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.

Simplify Media

Posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 4:41 pm in DAC Project by josh

I thought accessing the new library while away from home was going to be one of the trickier parts in this whole process. Some quick poking around last night and I found Simplify Media. Took only a couple minutes to set up, and I have R.E.M. playing from the library at home (while I am on the train with iffy Wi-Fi to Seattle). It compresses the sound on the fly down to a 160 kb MP3 stream … not great, but not bad either. I’m curious if the quality will be better when I have a stronger internet connection.
Playlists are one thing I notice as a bit of a problem at the moment. I’m organizing the discs into playlists that are stored inside playlist folders on iTunes. For example, ‘Automatic For The People’ is stored in Playlists->Rock / Pop->R.E.M.->Automatic For The People. But Simplify Media just shows a flattened list (no nesting). As the library grows, this will be more and more of a problem, but this isn’t bad at all for the first app I tried for doing this.