Think for A Jester's Tear

Random: Marillion's "Script for a Jester's Tear" comes very close to being the perfect progressive album. Fish delivers empassioned and engrossing vocals that have tremendous melodic components. Rothery posseses a distinctive guitar style that is applied judiciously across all the tracks with some vintage analog synths. Although the rhythms shift and each player contributes substantially, each part remains subservient to the whole of the tune and the mood of the album, avoiding useless wankery. The album begins with a soft ballad and grows through roller-coaster ups and downs through to the end, with continual evolution of the music and growth of intensity. Each track possess a memorable melodic signature and flows into the next track with excellent pacing; this provides a divers and wonderful experience. On the remastered version a bonus disc provides demo tracks as well as the Beowolf inspired, twenty-minute "Grendel."

Selected: On "Think Free," Ben Allison explores the violin as a front-line contemporary jazz instrument with excellent results. Ben produces slow ballad-like tunes with open voicing, but unlike Abercrombie's "Wait Till You See Her," all of these tunes move forward with energy. Perhaps the motion comes from Allison's perspective as a bassist. Light trumpet and violin lines sit well above the guitar, bass, drum rhythm section, in a familiar continuation of Allison's style, soft, but not ethereal. The violinist pushes the intonation to edge more so than Feldman and has a thinner tone overall, which creates some tension in the sound, like a bluegrass fiddle. I find Allison's arrangements simultaneously relaxing and energizing.

Tribes of Tribes

Random: "Live from the House of Tribes" portrays a small venue performance by one of Wynton Marsalis' groups. The album has a number of peculiar qualities that make for difficult listening. The most obvious feature is a an over-miked and likely over-rehearsed crowd. The crowd noise is mixed up equal to the band. In my experience at concerts when people are really into a performance they get lost in what they are doing, they lose self awareness and become quiet, although they may move around a bit. Here the people are performing for the record. It sounds like the "Wheel of Fortune" audience has been dropped in like a laugh track that exaggerates responses to inconsequential actions by the band. It's just odd. The record also starts off with a Monk tune and that is by far Wynton's weakest area of interpretation. Although I had not paid much attention to him before, I really noticed Wes Anderson's sax playing on this record, passionate, creative, and really distinct from the style of the other players in the band.

Selected: I have owned Lost Tribe's self-titled debut since its release, but each time I listen, I hear new things and find more to like. Adam Rogers and David Gilmore have different and very complementary guitar styles. David Binney is very creative sax player, and the bass and drums hold their own against this formidable front line. Excellent diversity and pacing is the hallmark of this disc. Each tune has a unique character and memorable themes. The pieces vary from a mellow sax ballad to rhythmically interesting rap with a lot of subtle interplay in the sound on all tracks.There is a slight studio compression to the disc that would be negative most of the time but here it helps to meld diverse styles and tones into a cohesive disc.

Spectrum of Mine

Brother of Mine

This is an important song from my youth. Were it possible, I'd have worn out several copies of the Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe CD in the same way people used to go through old LPs. Among the many excellent songs on that album, this one stood out to me at the time. I guess I can't really say why, whether it was the arrangement, the surprisingly coherent and optimistic lyrics, or something else entirely. Listening to it now, Bruford's percussion defines a great deal of the mood of the song for me, along with the characteristic "Yes" keyboard and guitar runs from Wakeman and Howe. For whatever reason, this song connected emotively to my teenage naivete. I suppose it still does.


Via the Spectrum Road

I have the excellent Saudades from Trio Beyond, the tribute band for The Tony Williams Lifetime. I figured I owed it to myself to check out the original thing, so I picked up a copy of Emergency! when visiting the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago last week. I am surprised to find the album not nearly so listenable as Saudades. I've selected a track I find particularly distasteful, largely because of the tired and lethargic sounding vocals. The track has no energy, and what little may be in the process of developing is crushed by the dead vocal lines, which is a problem on more than one track on this album. This CD may have to grow on me, I'm not sure, but the first two listens have not turned out as well as I expected.

Benighted Feeling

Angling Feeling

Kaipa was a nice surprise for me. I'd heard some of Roine Stolt's work with Transatlantic and The Flower Kings, but not anything from the band that gave him his "start". I like the use of two vocalists, one male and one female. Clearly some Yes influence here, including a possible reference with the phrase "Heart of the Sunrise" appearing in the lyrics. There are some nice dynamic transitions as well as Yes style rapid runs of notes in the introduction. I'm eager to hear more from this band.




Benighted

The iPod randomly selected this track from Opeth's album Still Life. I really like this band and this song is an excellent example of why. A death metal band which has been given the label "progressive" presumably owing to the musical range and complexity of their work which shows a wide variety of musical influences. It is typical of Opeth to contrast a harder death metal sound and rough vocals with softer passages and clean vocals. I've long been impressed with Mikael Åkerfeldt's voice in both modes. A strong "clean" vocalist, he also manages to make his "rough" vocals musical, unlike many in death metal whose sound quickly becomes monotonous. Having said much about their death metal roots, this song betrays little of that, being an acoustic guitar driven clean vocal song. It conjures a lonely, somber mood, as suggested by the title.

The Sara Conspiracy

Random: "Inflikted" by the Cavelara Conspiracy marks the reunion of the two brothers at the core of the original Sepultura. Albums such as Chaos A.D. and Roots had a remarkable groove for thrash music. This tune comes very close (closer than the current Sepultura) to achieving that easy groove at times, but never seems to cross the line. The growling vocals in this genre of music have always struck me more as performance art than honest music; however, Max Cavelara sounds like he is trying to honestly drag you into his dark and tragic world. I believe him for some reason. The tune has no real rhythmic changes, but has a nice bridge section to prevent monotony from settling in. The brothers construct the other tunes on the album similarly.

Selected: Apparently there is a new genre of music "bluegrass-chicks teamed with Led Zepplin alums" This could be fine thing except that thus far the genre has been dominated by slow ballads. The instrumental "Freiderick" jumps out with most energy early. John Paul Jones moves between harmony vocal, organ, and bass throughout the disc. "Any Old Time" adds a little vocal energy, but maintains the slow traditional country feel. Heavily applied pedal steel drapes most tracks. Tom Waits' "Pony" doesn't speed things up any, but Sara's voice is great here; there is a lot of room for subtlety. The addition of Gillian Welch to "Lord Won't You Help Me" makes for a beautiful vocal tune. This is another new disc with lots of great moments, but has a need more stylistic (or at least tempo) diversity... more bluegrass... a lot less pedal steel.

Wait Til You See The Concerto da Camera

Random: Fernando Lopes-Graca's Concerto da camera (Chamber Concerto) came up randomly on the squeezebox today. The piece begins with long sustained, slow phrases. I have no doubt that in lesser hand this piece could be very tedious for the listener. This piece, written for Rostropovich, features high-pitched slow lines that seem to pit the cello against the ensemble with constant light tension. Briefly in the second movement, a short run of faster notes punctuated by mallet percussion, breaks the tension. The finale builds to a climax with numerous faster runs and the first prominent appearance of brass. This energy dissipates and the peice fades slowly away for the last few minutes. Initially put off by the slow opening of the first movement, each repeated listen has left me with new musical features to ponder. For some reason there are close intervals throughout that make me think of Ligeti.

Selected: As one of my favorite guitarists, I eagerly awaited the release of this disc "Wait Till You See Her" by the John Abercrombie Quartet. This group features very interesting voicing with guitar, violin, bass, and drums. However, the pacing of these tunes is very, very slow. Interesting tonal interplay abounds, but there is a continual urge to have the music... get up and go! "Out of Towner" poses the first reasonably distinctive melody. Although I like it, I can't decide, if "Chic of Araby", is clever, gimmicky, or just cliche.

Lost ELP Boys

Random: Two-thirds of the tunes on The Lost Boys soundtrack permeated pop radio in the middle 1980's. "Good Times" by INXS has the most energy, "Lost in the Shadows" by Lou Gramm, "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" by Roger Daltry, and "Cry Little Sister" by Gerard McMann got the most radio play. Echo and the Bunnymen's version of The Doors' "People Are Strange" has always been my favorite track on this disc. The main thing that stands out is that even with all the ridiculous reverb, studio effects, and artificial sounding snares, pop music in the 80's was not all that compressed so it still conveys much more vitality than current pop fare.

Selected: Emerson Lake and Palmer have never set well with me. While I love early 70's progressive music and particlarly love tunes that require some effort on the part of the listener, ELP sounds... wrong to me. I have not been able to put it into words. Perhaps it is arrogance, perhaps lack of cohesion among the players, perhaps it just a general lack of passion and an aritficial sound. Most ELP strikes me as musical practice exercises rather than passionate music. The best context for my attitued is that Emerson is a great keyboard technician, Lake is a good singer and competent bass player, and Palmer is a good drummer, but they are all weak composers. In playing so much existing music, they sound a but like a DJ that is just dropping samples of other tunes together to make a performance that never sounds cohesive and organic. Having said those things, I would say this disc possesses the least of the bad qualities of ELP; it sounds more sincere, but a bit sloppy. In "Take A Pebble" one can already hear odd "samples" of tunes clashing together in strange ways. However, "Lucky Man" is one of the great all time rock tunes and may be representative of "even a blind squirrel finds a nut occassionaly." Having never felt connected to ELP, I have not learned much about their history and was shocked to learn that they were a huge selling band. Popularity has been said to be proportional to predictability and their inclusion of so much familiar classical-type music may have given them a head start with the public.

Astounding Eyes of Mingus

Selected: Anouar Brahem's "The Astounding Eyes of Rita" would have probably never gotten another listen from me if I had happened to play it first in the car or on some other small speakers. I happened to play it on some really transparent near-field studio monitors and immediately fell in love. The combination of oud and bass clarinet is amazing; the two instruments resonate together very subtly. Coupled with some extremely sensitive electric bass (yes electric, and it works) and percussion, this album draws you in with warm tones and slow, but ever evolving melodies. I've played it almost three times in a row.

Random: The Squeezebox randomly selected Charles Mingus recording made on the Symphony Sid show from Birdland on Oct 19, 1952. This is an unreleased performance, part of what is known as the Boris Rose tapes, which have gone from tape, to acetate, to flac files on the internet. The band here sounds unrehearsed and more interested in entertaining for the radio than getting into the tunes. Typically Mingus ensembles have a big sound, not so here. Eddie Armour (tp), Don Butterfield (tuba), Charles McPherson (as), Pepper Adams (bars), Jaki Byard (p), Charles Mingus (b), Dannie Richmond (d), Symphony Sid Torin (mc). The standout tune is Monk Funk or Vice Versa in which Byard captures some Monk licks well. Lots of clipping and distortion on the recording, but interesting as frozen moment from an average gig.

Dresden Puppets

Random: Puppet Show's Traumatized is a solid average younger generation progressive record like many others in the middle 90's. The second track has a memorable chorus, otherwise melody doesn't seem to be the band's strong point. It seems that 10 years later, this keyboard driven band has produced a second album... probably worth a shot.

Selected: Jan Garbarek's Dresden is a driving performance from the begining to the end of the two disc set. Garbarek has a great sense of melody and creativity, but left to his own devices he can devolve into reverb-dominated tone poems. The other three musician's, particularly Manu Katche, drive Garbarek forward creating sustained energy. With excellent keyboard and bass work as well, it is clear that these four musicians were enjoying the moment. This is one of my favorite Garbarek recordings.

Diablo Swing, Reuben

Selected: Reuben Wilson's Set Us Free is clearly an attempt by the second wave organist, to change the direction of Blue Note organ combos. This 1971 disc established a more mellow organ sound that is occasionally backed with soul-type female singers. The track Mr. Big Stuff stands out as it starts with a soft soul-pop groove and develops into a tight swing with a nice sax solo over the top. Mercy, Mercy Me, of course is such an archetypal tune for the 70'a.

Random: How could I not buy an album called Diablo Swing Orchestra - Sing A Long Songs for the Damnned and Delerious? The shtick here seems to be alternating 4/4 crunch with odd snippets of swing, latin, and other genre tidbits. Female (and male this time) operatic vocals sit on top of this strange creation altough they don't sound quite as sincere or organic as Therion. The music is generally light and all-over-the-place with cello, clarinet, and trumpet melodic lines occasionally sitting on top of the metal-ish guitar. I particularly like the Latin / Brazilian percussion that breaks out briefly. The disc is fun, but a bit synthetic on the first listen. Love the cover art.

New World Punch

Selected: Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World." The Georg Solti version with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has great tone and balance in the strings, and a very warm resonant brass section. The dynamic swings are more pronounced and Solti keeps a more organic tempo than Masur. This is probably the best of my recordings of this piece, but my familiarity with the Batiz version makes for a difficult choice.

Random: The debut album from The Punch Brothers sounds essentially like another Chris Thile solo effort. His incredibly sensitive voice and magical mandolin playing take center stage in an ensemble that performs lengthy compositions that sound alternately like mellow bluegrass and a classical string quartet. The group throws in a few challenging rhythms along the way along with some responsive group interplay. While some of the compositions seem to lack energy at times, they provide a rewarding listening experience overall, particularly on a sound system that can adequately reproduce the subtle acoustic resonances of the instruments.

New World Roots

Selected: Kurt Masur and The New York Philharmonic's performance of Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World." The strings here have a much more balanced sound in the soft sections, particularly in the opening of the first movement and throughout the second movement. The dynamics do not swing as widely within movements as Batiz's version, but rather the volume builds consistently across all the movements to the end. This dampens some of the energy of the piece and almost makes my favorite descending brass run in the third movements indistinguishable. Masur also keeps a more clockwork-analytical pace that seems artificially restrained.

Random: Jethro Tull's "Roots To Branches" sounded a lot like just another 90's Tull album when I purchased it on release day. Listening to it now on a good sound system the subtleties of Anderson's voice and flute as well as the emotive guitar work by Martin Barre really stand out. Barre is greatly under appreciated by the public. There is a warmth and resonance to their playing that passionately supports Ian Anderson's razor sharp observations of human nature. The backing instruments do not detract although at times they can seem a bit synthetic, probably the result of numerous overdubs. I noticed for the first time the great musical work on "Valley"; although more quiet and subtle, it is currently my favorite track on the album.

Kinda Give, Take Yours

To make up for lost time, here's 4 tracks: 2 selected and 2 random.

Take a Pebble

An early example of the progressive era's blending of classical and popular music. What begins as a simple ballad turns into extended sections of instrumental music with more complicated arrangement. Much of this (as with much of Emerson, Lake & Palmer) is a showcase for Keith Emerson's piano playing. Equally as interesting though is his companion's use of their traditional rock instrumentation of bass and drums. Palmer in particular has very little traditional rock space here but nonetheless presents a percussion part that fits both idioms extremely well.


Yours Is No Disgrace

This is the first song I on the first CD I owned, The Yes Album. This album marked Steve Howe's first appearance on a Yes recording, although it was his second album cover with the band, since Peter Banks left Yes before the photo shoot for Time and a Word. It was also one of my earliest exposures to progressive rock, in that I'd never really been exposed to extended arrangements and classical influence in rock music. It's also easy to claim that this song would hold a special place for me even beyond nostalgia. Chris Squire's bass playing stands out to me in particular with his melodic lines as does Bill Bruford's drums.


Kinda I Want To

I walked into my dorm room in college one day to hear my roommate listening to something. My immediate reaction was, "why are you listening to a guy and a computer?" He answered, "This isn't a computer; it's a band called Nine Inch Nails." To settle the argument we had to go to the liner notes which of course, read "Nine Inch Nails is Trent Reznor" and "All programming by Trent Reznor". I can appreciate some of Nine Inch Nails industrial sound, but the recorded music sounds so still and lifeless to me, dominated as it is by programmed synthesizers. It must be said that at least this track does not sit entirely still, but rather progresses and builds in intensity. I'm told the touring band is a different beast owing at least to the fact that it is a full band of musicians, but as yet I've not had any exposure to NIN's live music.


Give It All

I have to confess to cheating a bit today. I've leaned heavily toward progressive rock so far and the first two tracks that popped up on the iPod were King Crimson and Pete Sinfield, followed by a recording of a Number Station. Skipping past those brought me to Rise Against, which is an example of "nice find" for me. I heard this particular track in the game Rock Band and picked up the CD on a whim when I found it for $5. A more poppish hardcore punk band influenced by the likes of Black Flag and Minor Threat, among others. More polished and with vocal harmony, that influence may be less obvious in their more well known albums, like this one. It served as a nice introduction to punk for me, since I'd never really paid much attention to the genre.

New World Fleet Foxes

Selected: Dvoark's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" This disc represents my first ever classical music purchase. At the time, in college, it was a completely random action. This piece is one of the most performed works of classical music. Each of the four movements has distinctly memorable themes that will be familiar to most people as they have been used in radio shows, as bumper music on NPR, and have been closely quoted by other composers. I can think of no other work with so many memorable themes. The piece features dynamic swings from soft string work (a little muddy in this performance) to boisterous brass themes which flow in counterpoint to the strings. Having heard this performance so many times over the years it has become my reference point for future comparisons. The first movement has a couple of memorable themes, both soft and loud. The second movement plays principally from the softer strings, while the third and forth movements return to intermittent contrasts of brass and strings. The third movement has a descending brass run that is particularly pronounced here and has become one of my favorites.

Random: I'll have one of these... hold the reverb. While it's nice to see a pop band which features strong vocal harmonies, this disc from Fleet Foxes beats the ears to numbness with unending, surreal, almost comical, reverb. The sparse and creative (mostly acoustic) instrumental parts are completely swamped out by the heavy compression and reverb. The style is a refreshing retro 60-70's pop folk, but by the end of the disc the vocal reverb has made all the tunes indistinct. The vocals sound like they were recorded in a cavernous cathedral which can be nice, but the rest of the instruments don't have that much reverb which results in a comical, artificial sound. I'd love to see these guys in a bar with no PA system.

Blue Horizon

Random: U2, No Line On The Horizon. U2 means energy and passion to me. On this album the tunes seem too lethargic for the first half of the disc and the usually distinctive guitar and vocal melodies blend homogenously into the heavily compressed sound. The enthusiasm seems to pick up in the latter half of the album, even when the songs slow down. Nothing stands out here.

Selected: Steve Kahn's The Blue Man (1978) uses a smooth jazz-ish sound pallet to convey some really tight fusion ensemle playing with good, but not distinctive song writing and interesting guitar with a light but searing edge. Too much of the spirit of the disc is lost in the dense studio mix, but I bet these guys are memorable live. I like this album and play it with some regularity, but always feel pushed away by moments where the smooth-ish jazz sounds come on too strongly. Fortunately this album came before most of the electronics that make smooth jazz unlistenable.

Great Lizard!

Great Expectations

My random selection for today was a pleasant surprise indeed. It has been awhile since I've pulled out this set of the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions; and what a great set this is! This track shares the general character of many of the pieces of this famous album: a driving rhythmic drone, held constant and intense by the band with Miles' trumpet sitting on top, punctuated by short moments of relief after which the drive begins and builds again. Underneath is a vaguely Peter Gunnish bass line and I believe I hear a tambura providing a genuine "drone". The melody reminds me of Nefertiti in its simplicity. I certainly need to dedicate some time in the near future to the rest of this music.



Lizard

I still remember when I first heard this. I'd just gotten into King Crimson and was starting to explore what they were all about. Already a Yes fan for years, I was happily surprised to hear Jon Anderson's voice carry the initial vocals on this track. A beautiful melody! This extended piece has some of progressive rock's best examples of blending western classical tradition with rock and jazz sensibilities. The oboe solo in the first half remains one of my favorite musical experiences, a very haunting and lonely melody. Later sections show a more jazz oriented approach, but each section is bracketed by an appropriate transition so that the piece naturally builds and never seems forced. All above a marching snare drum, we move from the trumpet and woodwind solos to the group improvisational jazzier sections, which return us eventually to the beautiful oboe melody. How many rock songs have trombone solos? The dynamic range of this song is likely responsible for the overall loudness of the album being so low, requiring a reach for the volume knob right from the start of the first track. I'm not sure this would be tolerated from a rock band in today's "loudness war" climate.

So Sue Me, Ron

Selected: I picked up this disc at random in New York in 1998 having never heard of Sue Foley. I instantly became intrigued with her voice... dry, high, no reverb, no vibrato, no resonance of any kind. She rarely bends a note and when she does she pushes the boundaries of intonation. Sue's voice sits on top of the tight standard blues ensemble in a distinctive and memorable way. I have always eagerly purchased each of new albums since encountering this one.

Random: The Squeezebox randomly pulled up this Ron Carter album. While there can be no doubt about Ron's substantial musical ability (as evidenced by his many sessions as a Miles sideman), his solo albums from the 70's have always posed difficulty for me. I like to close my eyes and visualize the ensemble in front of me. With Ron's solo albums I feel like he is standing with his bass leaned against my ear and the rest of the band is outside on the lawn playing through open windows; the bass is mixed unnaturally loud and separately from the other instruments (in this case, thick Sebesky-arranged strings). Ron also tries to overdub solos like a guitarist in places which sometimes comes off awkwardly to my ears. The whole package sounds artificial. From back beat jazz, to a strange rag fronted by the bass, to string-soaked ballads, to a blues... this disc sounds like a bunch of forced experiments. With this listen I have, for the first time, caught moments of energy and resonance in the bass work. Perhaps Ron will grow on me. Jazz, more than other genres, should be organic and natural.

Foxy Babe

Foxy Lady

I've been exploring the roots of some of the music I particularly enjoy, which has taken me back to the early blues rock of Led Zeppelin and Cream. Strangely, I hadn't gotten over to Jimi Hendrix until the iPod randomly selected this track today. What hasn't been said about Jimi? Heavy blues rock sound, embracing the spirit of the tradition while carrying an edge with growling distortion.






Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You

The second tune on Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut album. I'd completely missed this piece of music until recently. A marvelous juxtaposition of acoustic steel string and classical guitars with electric instrumentation, this track demonstrates Zeppelin's excellent use of dynamics, famous in the now cliched Stairway to Heaven from whatever you wish to call that album. The song moves between quiet acoustic driven interludes and heavy crunching riffs to good effect. Having never heard this before, it really turned my head and gave me a new appreciation for the band.

Fixxing Mates of State

Random: "Have you heard of this?", she asked. No, but I did have a Mates Of State track on a Paste Sampler CD. Fraud in the 80's, displays catchy vocal harmonies from the husband and wife duo, and some interesting pop breaks, but utimately the only thing that comes though is the super compressed, super loud, and slightly distorted mix. They should back off, try to sound a little more organic, and preferably add in more subtle vocal voicings like The New Pornographers to let the passion though instead of the loud.

Selected: Afer listening to Reach the Beach, I began to ponder whether the music was attractive only as nostalgia or if it had more depth. 1011 Woodlawn yanks The Fixx out of the studio, replaces the abrasive drum machine, with drums that show a bit more musical touch (though still too drum machine-ish) and reduces the loudness to allow some more subtle textures and the pure melody of these minimal pop songs to shine through. This disc definitely will stand up to more repeat listens than the studio discs.

Floyd the Ripper

Jack the Ripper

The website of Belgian Rock-in-Opposition band Univers Zero states, "If Stravinsky had a rock band, it would sound like this . . .". Certainly the band has unconventional rock instrumentation. Oboe, bassoon, violin, viola, harmonium, and organ join more traditional instrumentation. Although the band added electronic instrumentation later on, this piece is from the earlier album Heresie, which Last.fm tells us has been called some of the "scariest music ever committed to record". It is dark. It begins slow and ominous, a steady forboding tone emerging from the voices of woodwinds and strings, laying the groundwork for the tension to build. By the time the percussion joins, one can easily picture the work's namesake pursuing his victim. The non-traditional rock instrumentation works to particularly good effect here; the woodwinds and strings provide the right texture to characterize the feeling of dread in the piece. Despite the march to the inevitable frightening climax, there remains enough space for the soloists to work and express themselves.

Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3

My random selection for today. Despite being a fan of progressive rock, I never really got into Pink Floyd. The Wall is the only work with which I'm familiar. I haven't listened to it in awhile, so it's difficult to give impressions, particularly so when given such a brief portion of a larger work. Whether justified or not, the overdubbed audio at the beginning of the track may indicate an aspect of the band which may explain why I never became more of a fan. Beyond that, this is largely the famous "Brick in the wall" chorus which many people have likely heard in some context.

Fixxing Glass

Random: A quick flick of the ipod wheel brought up The Fixx's Reach the Beach. Aside from a great album cover, Reach the Beach brought back a flood of nostalgia. In the early 80's tunes from this album permeated local pop radio; it inadvertantly became a soundtrack to many Jr. High moments. Political and thoughful lyrics sit over catchy, spacious guitar riffs that along with appropriatly light bass lines preserve the musical energy against synth washes and programmed loops. It has become very difficult to distinguish quality in old pop albums. It seems as though once a song reaches a certain critical mass of airplay, it acquires a cultural value beyond it's initial artistic integrity. Stand Or Fall, Saved By Zero, Less Cities, More Moving People, and Red Skies stand out, perhaps more as audible waypoints in history than as musical milestones. The steady droning of a drum machine, or drum machine-like rhythms squash half of my enthusiasm for this album; the incessant and unsubtle pounding wears a groove in my ears.
Selected: Philip Glass is unsurprising. Seeing his name in the composer slot, one can immediately picture the type of arpeggios, the changes in rhythm, and the voicing that will be forth coming. The first couple of Etudes, played on solo piano by Bruce Brubaker, fit the expectation perfectly. Interestingly the later etudes have some new spacing and rhythms that preserved my interest in Glass for one more disc. Having not heard William Duckworth before, I found his Time Curves to be a good companion for the Glass piece. Time Curves is slightly less repetitive, with shorter and more angular movements that would seem almost like piano exercises if they were any longer. Minimalist music requires virtuoso performers as the life of the music lies in the artist's managing of very subtle changes over the iterations of patterns. I didn't hear a lot of expression in Brubaker's playing here, although he felt more in touch with the Duckworth pieces that with the Glass.

Berning Ladyhawke

Random: The first track off of this month's Paste Magazine's free sampler "Manipulating Woman" by Ladyhawke is a bit of an 80's throwback pop track right down to the gated reverb on the snare and the super heavy studio processing. It has even more compression than tunes from the 80's; the VU meters on the stereo hardly moved. I could not remember the melody 30 minutes afterward.

Selected: At the time I first heard Tim Berne's Sanctified Dreams on cassette in 1989, it sounded like random noise. After 20 years of regular jazz listening, it seems very structured and less adventurous. The chords have a number of very close intervals and the outside playing can easily fade to noise if one's attention wanders. Unlike much free music, the voicing is very bright and the tunes are pushed forward with a driving rhythm that stirs up the listener's energy. Two of the tracks slow the tempo with the rhythm section work underneath ambient vocal and sax parts that float above the fray and made the greatest impression on this particular session. I did not remember slow tunes with such expression from Tim Berne and this listening has altered my perception of his work.

Across the (Open or Closed?) Universe

For perhaps obvious reasons, I've been learning more about The Beatles. I've also been exploring the roots and origins of progessive rock and experimental music. These selections are from those searches, the first deliberately chosen and the second a track essentially selected at random.

Across the Universe

A beautifully simple John Lennon song. This is a wonderful example of lyrical imagery and musical ideas combining in a nicely synergistic manner. I particularly like it because it resonates with my own naturalist view of existence, of the universe as a complete interconnected whole. The stream of consciousness lyrics reinforce this to me.

Sadly, it is also attached in some way to a con artist, having clearly been influenced by the time The Beatles spent in India and from the associations made there. A phrase from the chorus, "Jai Guru Deva" has been interpreted as a reference of sorts to this con artist (or at least a figure important to him). It can also be interpreted in a more general spiritual manner. This is the one I choose.

Open or Closed?

A piece of music from The Science Group's "...A Mere Coincidence..". It should be impossible for a physicist like myself not to be at least amused by this album, replete as it is with lyrics discussing quantum mechanics, mathematics, and cosmology. This particular song actually references the energy density of the universe Omega. Naturally, the title refers to the question of whether the universe is open or closed. The lyrics are cute, to a physics geek, but the music, fortunately, is also excellent, although perhaps not to many people's taste. The band was founded by Henry Cow's Chris Cutler and pianist and composer Stevan Tickmayer. Henry Cow veteran Fred Frith is also on the album, but not on this track.