6 feb 2008

I have my "purchased" music on random rotation. It's like my own private radio station. Let's see what it gives me, out of the 304 songs I have there.

1. Mozart's "dissonance" quartet, first movement. Emerson String Quartet. Very nice. I've played this 15 times apparently. You'll probably think I manipulated the results just to make myself look good.

2. Ornette Coleman. "Song X." From the Sound Grammar album. If there were a Nobel prize for music... I liked the original Song X Album back in the 80s.

3. A Sarabande from the Bach Cello Suites. #6. I'll have to get back to blogging through those.

4. Lee Konitz: "Mean to Me" (take 4). He's a purer improviser than even Ornette. I wonder who this bass player is.

5. "Think of One." Sonny Rollins, from the Prestige Profiles. With Monk on the piano. I must like saxophone players! There's a nice trombone solo too.

6. Stan Getz playing "Four," which I believe Miles Davis wrote. I love Stan Getz, except the bossa nova stuff gets overplayed. This is off the West Coast Jazz album, with Stan Levey on piano and Shelly Manne drums. His tenor sounds like an alto compared to Rollins. Conte Candoli plays trumpet on this. I had this playing in my car for a month.

7. Rollins again. "Nishi," off the recent "Sonny Please" album, his best in years. I've never really noticed this guitar solo before. My wife Akiko has played this album in her car and ipod probably 100 times. Julia's played along to it.

8. "Just one of those things." Sinatra, off "Songs for Young Lovers."

9. Goldberg Variations (#3) played by Simone Dinnerstein. I found out about this recording through my friend Bob Basil's webpage (basil.ca) and have been listening for quite a few weeks obsessively She plays with such a sense of calm. When I have this on in my car I am still alert, but also transported to another place. Listening to Gould, on the other hand, makes me nervous...

10. "Can't We Be Friends." Off the "In the Wee Small Hours of the Night" album. Sinatra's finest.

Two sinatras, two Rollins, four or five saxophones, two Bachs.

5 comentarios:

Andrew Shields dijo...

"Song X": I used to play that on KZSU in the early morning. Even all 13 minutes of "Endangered Species." Perhaps I was cruel to my listeners, who did not think of that as "morning" jazz! :-)

Jacob Russell dijo...

Novel novels...

Manil Suri's latest? The Age of Shiva?

Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke works pretty well as a novel novel... Have you read Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus? ... or anything of Richard Powers ???

John dijo...

Monk wrote "Think of One" and was the leader on the session. If I remember correctly, the brass solo was a French horn, not trombone.

Computer listening is the minority of my listening, but I looked at its "most played" list recently, and it was three Beatles, two Streisand, two Preservation Hall Jazz Band, three Brazilian, one Mississippi fife-and-drum 1940-ish recording of a 1900-ish Tin Pan Alley hit ("Sidewalks of New York"), one Toots Thielmanns, one Sinatra, one Nat King Cole.

John dijo...

Spelling error -- that's Toots Thielemans. Tune is, "Struttin' with some Barbecue," an Armstrong tune from the '20s.

Jonathan dijo...

Yes, it must be Julius Watkins on French horn.