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.

Sonny Rollins Settles the Score

I've heard some bitchy arguments lately about songs that have been "stolen" from other songs, usually from someone who wants to claim moral superiority over the song thief. One I've head a couple of times recently revolves around how John Lennon wrote "Norwegian Wood" after hearing Bob Dylan's "Fourth Time Around." (One of the rare times Bob doesn't get called the thief.)

Ever the sage elder statesman, Sonny Rollins settles this in an essay from the New York Times.

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.

Top 8 for October 8, 2015

Haven't done this in quite a while, but it was a good music day.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard - Musica Ricecarata - II: Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale

from the György Ligeti Edition, Volume 3

You may know it as the that three note piano piece from Eyes Wide Shut, but it's hauntingly effective in its simplicity.

Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

The title song from their second album, Brian Eno's presence is strongly felt, just before his absence was.

J. S. Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 

Top 5 for May 15, 2014

In my time of dying – Led Zeppelin, from Physical Graffiti

Oh let's see here, the label says this is an original composition by the four members of the band from 1974. Um, wait, didn't Bob Dylan record this song twelve years earlier? I mean this song was probably 100 years old, but by this time Jimmy Page's habit of putting his name on other people's songs was well ingrained. And, after all, you get paid a lot more for writing a song than for arranging one. This is what Homer Simpson is talking about when he call Page “one of the greatest thieves of American music” (And to think he was recently honored by the institution that once granted me a degree in composition.)

(Sure, Dylan's capable of this too, but he's usually pretty blatant about it, as if he wants to get caught in order to promote the source. His recording says “traditional arr. Dylan” but he probably copped the arrangement from Dave van Ronk or somebody).

Correcting Bob's grammar

I don't really go around being a persnickety grammar enforcer, but every time I hear Positively 4th Street, I cringe at "you know as well as me, you'd rather see me paralyzed", not only for the grammar, but for how "I" would rhyme with "paralyzed". I guess "me" makes an OK internal rhyme with "see", but it's not worth it.

Someone might argue "no man, he's saying the guy knows he'd rather see Bob paralyzed as well as he knows Bob", but it's just time to take that person in out of the sun, cause obviously Bob is arguing that this person doesn't know him very well at all.

Top 3 for March 2, 2014

4^th Time Around by Robyn Hitchcock from Robyn Sings

“One of Uncle Bob's”, this performance gives the listener a glimpse at how the singer interacts with the lyrics. Robyn (who turns 61 tomorrow, by the way) replaces the line “I asked her how come” with the “and when she did come” from later on in the song and initially continues on from that later point before he realizes he's in the wrong place, stops and asks the audience for help, and continues on from where he left off. It's one of Dylan's more convoluted and dense lyrics, one that justifies the poet label that's sometimes too automatically placed on him.

Top 3 for February 15, 2014

In the Heat of the Night dir. By Norman Jewison

All I can say is I watched this on a night when a jury in Florida would not convict of murder a white man who shot into a car full of black teenagers who would not turn that shit down.

Lennie Tristano Solo in Europe and Lee Konitz Quartet in Europe

Bootleg recordings mostly from 1965 in TV mono with copy of a copy hum. Tristano brings more than the usual dissonance especially “Everything happens to me.” I wish I had known this recording of “Darn That Dream” when I tried a similar idea for an assignment back at Famous Music College. The highlight though are the tacked on Lee Konitz tracks, especially the with backup from Bill Evans, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and Alan Dawson.

Top 7 for January 15, 2014

Not Dark Yet – Bob Dylan from Time out of Mind

...but it's getting there

When it came out, we were all like “that's about the end of his voice” and now 15 years later we're like “his voice still sounded good then, compared to his latest record.”

JS Bach: Concerto for flute, violin, harpsichord & strings in A minor ('Triple'), BWV 1044 - I: Allegro

performed by Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert in 1984

Top 8 for January 2, 2014, plus an aside

I Need to Know Where I Stand by Rhett Miller from Live at Eddie's Attic

Pitchfork describes it as “a decent Meg Ryan movie of a pop song”. I'm not sure if that's a compliment (it wouldn't be, coming from me) but I think it's a darn fine song.

Tombstone Blues by Bob Dylan from Biograph (originally from Highway 61 Revisited)

The sun ain't yellow, it's chicken. Jes' sayin'.

Top 5 from November 26, 2013

Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat – Bob Dylan from The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert

A particularly rockin' blues from the “what the audience doesn't want” segment of the show. Also notable for a rather terrible guitar solo (Is that Bob?, it can't be Robbie. There's a song with a terrible Bob solo on Blonde in Blonde which I thought laid to rest any expectation the he would ever play lead again, but, then again, this came first) The song itself is distinguished by being in an otherwise standard twelve-bar-blues form, but having its lyrics organized into four-line stanzas (he fourth line occupying the usually vacant bars eleven and twelve). Dylan didn't like to waste space in songs. The performance of She Belongs to Me and in another couple of spots on the solo first disc of this set has measures dropped here and there between lyrics.

Stuck Between Stations – The Hold Steady, from Boys and Girls in America

Love this song, usually gets me pumped-up and air drumming, singing or at least mouthing the words, volume cranked. I heard it this morning stuck in the back corner of the 71 bus and had to do this all internally. The archetypal Hold Steady song, for me at least - probably as it's one of the first I knew. Kerouac and Berryman are invoked here. The line between Springsteen and Strummer is walked.

(h/t @FakeCraigFinn)

Top 6 from November 5, 2013

Rock & Roll – The Velvet Underground from Live MCMXCIII

Even after the amputation you can dance to a rock & roll station.

A lot of folks put down this album. It is the Velvets playing in the style of a 90's Lou Reed album, but frankly that's a better idea than trying to recreate the 1969 live album, and these were good years for Lou anyway. You can still dance to it, you know. It's also sort of is Sterling's valedictory.

Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue - Duke Ellington from Live at Newport 1956

Yeah, the solo, but, the tunes are pretty good too. Two sides of Duke's early style - contrapuntal, busy swinging, trying to cram in as many notes as a side of a 78 could hold, the frenzy of the audience providing the underlying energy that the super-fast revolutions of the turntable once did.