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.
See the playlist after the break...
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...
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.
See the playlist after the jump...
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...
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 20th 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.
Playlist and program notes after the break...
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.
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...
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.
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.)
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.
In the absence of me playing DJ there are some program notes below, along with the playlist.
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.)
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...
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.
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,)
See the playlist after the break...
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.
See the playlist after the break...
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.
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.
There’s an axiom that says there is no such thing as “original” music. After what we could consider to be the first sound, from a spiritual perspective — “om” to some, “amen” to others — it’s all the same. Musicians borrow different parts and make them their own, but there’s nothing really new, nothing that hasn’t been done before. Claude Debussy and Johann Sebastian Bach may sound different, but what they did was all there already, in a sense.
“When I started doing these house concerts, I realized that every single problem I had ever had with the performing world suddenly disappeared. I never really cared about acoustics. I never cared that much about the quality of the piano. All I wanted to do was play. The important point about these concerts is not how they sound but the fact that they happened. Everything is getting reduced to the essential thing of being there and playing.”Ross' essay shows that this attitude applies not just to Levitt's recent lockdown performances to the pianists entire career, his choice of repertoire, and his outlook on life.
