Unpopular Music - August 5, 2024

 This month, things start a bit raucous before mellowing out for a while, before getting noisy again around the 50 minute mark, before heading to a swinging ending.

 

See the playlist after the break...

Unpopular Music - June 24 2024

A program featuring some new discoveries, some rediscoveries, and some stuff I should have discovered decades ago.

I for some reason had poo-pooed the early-70's Charles Mingus big-band albums, mostly because the arrangements were farmed out to Sy Johnson, fearing the results would be like the kind of meh Monk's Dream from a few years earlier. After a kind of random introduction to both albums, my sincere apologies to Mr. Johnson.

A pit stop at a record store in Vermont led me to the Gil Mellé and Elmo Hope albums. Digging through my own boxes revealed a David Byrne soundtrack album I'd not really given full consideration. And more...

 

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And for the opener, as this program likes to remind you, just because it's played by an orchestra doesn't mean you can't turn it up!

See the playlist after the break...

Unpopular Music - April 35, 2024

 Well here we posting a little bit later each moth. This month it's a sort of what-have-I-heard-lately program without any (intended) connecting theme As always I fail at trying to repeat certain artists too often. Here's Dave Holland again, and Bill Frisell sneaks in through a side door. All and all it's a mostly jazzy show, a couple of pop songs with outside influences thrown in. And if your the unlucky person who had "Chopin Etude" on their bingo card, well this program's for you.

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See the playlist after the break...

artist	title	album	comments	label / date
Roy Haynes Quartet	Snap Crackle	Out of the Afternoon	Roy Haynes (d) Roland Kirk (tenor saxophone, manzello, stritch, C flute, nose flute) Tommy Flanagan (p) Henry Grimes (b)	Impulse! 1962
George Russell and his Smalltet	Livingstone, I presume	The Jazz Workshop	Barry Galbraith (g) Art Farmer (trp) Hal McKusick (as) Milt Hinton (b) Bill Evans (p) Joe Harris (d)	RCA 1956
Artie Shaw and his Gramercy Five	Dr. Livingstone, I presume	Self Portrait	Artie Shaw (clt) Billy Butterfield (trp) Johnny Guarnieri (hpd) Al Hendrickson (g) Jud DeNaut (b) Nick Fatool (d)	Bluebird 1940
Russ Garcia and His Orchestra	Volcanoes of Mercury	Fantastica - Music from Outer Space	electronic devices and effects created by Ted Keep	Liberty 1958
Bill Evans	Time Remembered	Bill Evans with Symphony Orchestra	Bill Evans (p) Chuck Israels (b) Larry Bunker (d) Claus Ogerman (arranger, conductor)	Verve 1965
The Clientele	Stems of Anise	I Am Not There Anymore	Alasdair MacLean (voc, g, tps, beats, bouzouki,) Mellotron (org) James Hornsey (b, p) Mark Keen (d, prc, p, clst) Sarah Field (trp) Dave Oxley (hrn) Ruth Elder, Non Peters (vln) Stella Page (vla) Sebastian Millett (vc	Merge 2023
Joni Mitchell	In France They Kiss on Main Street	Shadows and Light	Joni Mitchell (voc, g) Pat Metheny (g) Jaco Pastorius (b) Don Alias (d, prc) Lyle Mays (keys) Live at the Santa Barbara County Bowl, September 9, 1979	Asylum 1979
Kris Davis	Bird Suite, Part 2: Bird Call Blues	Diatom Ribbons Live At The Village Vanguard	Kris Davis (p, syn) Val Jeanty (turntables and electronics) Julian Lage (g) Trevor Dunn (b) Terri Lyne Carrington (d) includes the voices of Olivier Messiaen and Paul Bley, and is influenced by Messiaen’s “Petites Esquisses D’Oiseaux”	Pyroclastic 2022
Heinz Holliger, Aurèle Nicolet, Ursula Holliger, Basel Ensemble, Jürg Wyttenbach	Eucalypts I	Garden Rain	Heinz Holliger (obe) Aurèle Nicolet (flt) Ursula Holliger (hrp) composition by Tōru Takemitsu	Deutsche Grammophon 1972
Anthony Davis, James Newton, Abdul Wadud	After You Said Yes	I've Known Rivers	Anthony Davis (p) James Newton (flt, comp) Abdul Wadud (vc)	Gramavision 1982
Ron Miles	Mother Juggler	I Am a Man	Ron Miles (trp) Bill Frisell (g) Jason Moran (p) Thomas Morgan (b) Brian Blade (d)	yellowbird 2017
Dave Holland, Zakir Hussain & Chris Potter	Bedouin Trail	Good Hope	Dave Holland (b, tune) Zakir Hussain (tbl) Chris Potter (ts) aka Crisscurrents Trio	Edition Records 2018
Vladimir Horowitz	Étude in c-sharp minor, op. 25 no. 7	Great Pianists of the 20th Century, Volume 49: Vladimir Horowitz III	music by Frédéric Chopin	Philips 1980
Bud Powell	Woody N' You	Inner Fires: The Genius of Bud Powell	Bud Powell (p) Charles Mingus (b) Roy Haynes (d) tune by Dizzy Gillespie	Elektra Musician 1953
David Murray Octet	Train Whistle	New Life	David Murray (ts, b clt) Baikida Carroll, Hugh Ragin (trp) Craig Harris (tbn) John Purcell (as) Adegoke Steve Colson (p) Wilbur Morris (b) Ralph Peterson Jr. (d)	Black Saint 1985

Unpopular Music - March 31 2024

 A day late with the blog entry once again. One of these months.

We have a jazz program this month, but a variety show within the genre, even hitting divergent points on the Herbie Hancock spectrum. Mostly culled from recent additions to the Unpopular Music library, including items I coulda shoulda bought 30 years ago. 

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 See the playlist after the break...

Unpopular Muisic - February 29, 2024

 Despite this February having a built in overtime, I only barely managed to finish this month's post in time, but alas not to post it. (I've been putting off putting up a tribute to Peter Schickele for even longer.)

This a variety show mix for sure. Jazz, film music, classical from a variety of centuries, some oddball pop music. Perhaps a bit haphazardly sequenced, but that's how I like it and I'm taking you with me.

 

See the playlist after the break...

Unpopu;ar Music - Jamuary 15, 2024

 The first offering of 2024. Nothing particularly special. Just some tracks that have been lying around which stood out to me and I thought you all (whoever you are) might enjoy, too.

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See the playlist after the jump...

Unpopular Music - December 10, 2023

Well then, remember how almost two years ago I said that I was going to try to post to Mixcloud once a month? Well, that didn't really work out did it? I was intermittently tempted to jump back in. I let opportunities to pay tribute to heroes like Wayne Shorter and Carla Bley pass by. And let's just say that 2023 has been a bit of an odd year for me and leave it at that. I'm not making that promise again here, but now that I've succumbed to Mixcloud's recent pay-to-play system, I'm going to try harder to put my mouth where my money is.

 

Today's genre- and century-spanning mix was slowly assembled over the last few weeks and came out a bit on the mellow side, with some exceptions. Several of the usual suspects appear, but there are some new faces here too. No program notes today, but the playlist with the usual information is available after the jump...

Unpopular Music from the Boston Public Library LP Collection

 

About a year ago, I stumbled across a link for the Boston Public Library Vinyl LP Collection hosted on the Internet Archive, and have spent several chunks of time listening and downloading many of the thousands of titles found there. I spent much of my misspent early-twenties perusing these bins, both in the main library in Copley Square (pictured, although the records were in the ugly addition built alongside it in the 1970's) and the branch library in Brighton.

This is another of the dormant playlists I'm finally getting around to finishing. It consists mostly of 's 50's and 60's jazz and third-stream, with a side trip into a not terribly broad sampling of 20^th century American classical music. Needless to say, with all of this music coming off much handled library records, be forewarned that this program contains a lot of surface noise.

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Playlist and program notes after the break...

Unpopular Music - Contemplation Compilation

One of my New Year's resolutions is to post to Mixcloud more regularly. There are a few half-finished playlists lying around waiting to be molded into their final form. I've been working at home for the past two years, and too often doing the work to put up a mix also seems enough like working at home make me want to do something else. 

This one has been sitting around since Thanksgiving waiting for its finishing touches. My idle listening is on shuffle a lot of the time these days and I will sometime put songs aside for early morning listening on days when I don't need to get up or can't sleep or what have you, and thus the Contemplation Compilation was born. 

 

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Just because I find something “contemplative” doesn't necessarily mean its “quiet”, or “consonant”, or “doesn't have a drum solo”, but merely that it leaves space to get lost in for a while. Your results may vary. There is quite a bit of sacred choral in the program for non-evangelical reasons. Do with it what you wish. The playlist and a few bits of commentary on the music (but not full program notes this time), appear after the break...

Sadly I only just had this thought today

As much as I love Bob Dylan, if anyone was going to win a Nobel Prize for writing song lyrics, it should have been Stephen Sondheim.

Carla Bley on BBC Radio 3

... or perhaps the other way around.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week series focused on the redoubtable Carla Bley, longtime Unpopular Music All-Star. 

Each of the five episodes considers a different aspect of Bley's compositional style in chronological order (although there are significant overlaps), often showing how the same source material gets recomposed over time. I have some quibbles about the commentary - there could be a bit more depth on the compositional detail without getting bogged down in theoretical details that only appeal to music theory nerds like myself, and her work with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra is only briefly mentiones in passing (if her reworking of her own material is worth examining, why not her reworkings of Haden's?) However, the balance greatly favors the music over the commentary, and five hours with Carla Bley's music is time well spent. (These shows are only available for a few more weeks.)

Unpopular Music - July 18, 2021

 

Here's another upload mostly featuring recent additions to the Unpopular Music library. Hopefully not so big of a break until the next one, but it's been an odd year.

 

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 In the absence of me playing DJ there are some program notes below, along with the playlist. 

Unpopular Music - April 24, 2021

 I believe this program takes you on a journey. Or, perhaps it picks you up off the street and into a windowless van and drops you off in a completely different neighborhood (with the best of intentions, of course), with a side-trip across the faces of Mt. Rushmore.

We start off with some mellow, classical sounds before we go into some jazzy neighborhoods, before ending up with some "popular" sounds where we ponder the compatibility of such possibly incompatible philosophies as "fear is a man's best friend," "purity of heart is to will one thing," and "we all shine on" (and perhaps even "shut up and eat.") (Albeit, with some moments of raucousness.)

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The first five tracks came around in that order on the shuffle play one day during my evening constitutional, the rest were added haphazardly over time until I had achieved critical mass for a playlist. Finding the right order actually came about rather easily considering the arbitrary selection process.

And yes, this episode of "Unpopular Music" does contain a hit song by one of the most popular musicians of all time. (Sorry for the inconsistency, but where else do you hear him paired with Eric Dolphy and Buxtehude?) It showed up in some of the appreciations of the producer when he died earlier this year, and it struck me as being the sort of thing that a Beatles/Spector collaboration was expected to sound like, discussions of which will start up again in the fall, for sure. 

See the playlist after the break...

Unpopular Music - January 18, 2021

The first upload of 2021 is a grab-bag of recent acquisitions to the Unpopular Music library. A lot of the same old faces, and not even the first stunt arrangement of Satie's First Gnossienne that I've posted, but all worthy of checking out.

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See the playlist after the break...

Unpopular Music - November 1, 2020

At the risk of appearing productive, we have another mix this week. It's actually a playlist I started months ago, but never finished. I was going to give it the title "Mostly Classical", but, not having done the math, it turns out just "More Classical Than Usual". And, of course, like "jazz", "classical" ends up labeling a lot of music that doesn't really sound like each other anyway, and, well ... you've seen all my "genre" posts, haven't you?

There was another stub of a playlist that got tacked on the end, which, repeats an artists from the first, and ends with a couple of pop songs. I was planning to use one to mark my and Robyn Hitchcock's shared birthday, and the other marks how I felt during primary time, and how I'm likely to feel the next couple of weeks (but hopefully not the next four years,)

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See the playlist after the break...

Unpopular Music - October 25, 2020

This first offering in a while offers mostly new acquisitions to the Unpopular Music library. While my July Bandcamp binge fit together nicely, if I may say so myself, my later purchases did not.

So this playlist grew very slowly. We start out with some upbeat, and eventually a bit noisy, jazz, followed by introspective, contemplative, perhaps a bit ruminative sounds, wordless vocals appearing more than once. I even remembered a Van Halen track that can hang with Bill Frisell and Mary Halvorson. We end up back in the jazz zone before closing off with some cheerleader pop. Enjoy.

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See the playlist after the break...

Credit where credit's due

Back in March, I posted a rant about how Arkiv Jazz, in its weekly marketing email, was promoting Women's History Month with a promotion almost exclusively featuring singers, at the expense of the ever-growing number of talented women instrumentalists and composers. 

In this week's email, they are promoting and album by the all female all-star group Artemis, centered around the veteran pianist Renee Rosnes and also featuring Unpopular Music favorites Anat Cohen on clarinet and drummer Allison Miller. The newsletter also features some of the band members' various solo albums and other projects. The musicians' gender is not referenced anywhere. 

Bill Frisell on genre

 In an interview posted at Grammy.com centered around his new album and other topics of the day, Bill Frisell touches on one of my recurring topics, and unsurprisingly, we are in total agreement.

 

On Harmony, you interpreted songs ranging from Pete Seeger to Lerner and Loewe. On Valentine, you draw from a similar well — there's a Hal David and Burt Bacharach song sharing space with a traditional hymn. To you, how does American folk music connect to the Great American Songbook?

I've always had a problem with how we put [them in separate categories]. I know we need words to describe things and we have to talk about the music, but when we put these labels and names on it it always has the effect of making it smaller than what it really is. To me, they're all part of one thing, whether it’s Beethoven or Monk or Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix or Morton Feldman. It's all music and it all fits together in my imagination.

Unpopular Music - July 12, 2020

8/1 - addendum to the playlist

 

For today's offering, we have mostly selections from this month's Bandcamp binge (on the day they were waiving their fee for the artists and labels), plus a couple of other recent additions to the Unpopular Music Library. When listening through the recent purchases, I found some similarities across the selections (which were somewhat arbitrarily chosen) and many potential segue points. Current events are somewhat indirectly invoked.

This mix is a little less jazzy than usual. It starts off atmospheric, electronic, and rhythmic, before a bit of a spiritual jazz interlude, a more atmosphere, before ending with exuberant, and the a bit more calm pleas for peace, love, and understanding.

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See the playlist after the break...

June 2, 2020

These tracks have been sitting in a folder waiting to be assembled after last month's Bandcamp binge. (On the first Friday of each month Bandcamp is waiving their cut so all proceeds go to the musicians and/or labels. This is happening again this coming Friday June 5.) There was also a mini-binge after hearing some other Lee Konitz tributes. It's kind of percussion-centric and occasionally long-winded, but with the usual variety.

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See the playlist after the break...