Chuck Berry talks about genre on Soul Train

Laquinta asks "Do you find blues more soothing than today's sounds?"¹ to which Chuck Berry replies "Well, to me, each type of music is a feeling, and blues, there's nothing that can replace it when you're blue. And there's nothing that can replace rock when you're reeling, and so on..."

Top 2 for December 17, 2013

In Nativitatem Domini Canticum H. 416 by Marc-Antoine Charpentier performed by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants.

That's H. 416 recorded on Erato in 2000, not H. 414 of similar title recorded by the same forces on Harmonia Mundi in 1982, also essential. Both the composition and performance have such an ease and inevitability, you feel you could just sit write down and write it like you might make a grocery list, or get up and sing it like you sing “Roxanne” in the shower. Like the best Christmas music, it acknowledges the need for salvation before the arrival of salvation (see also Honnegger's Christmas Cantata).