"Jazz in Paris" Collection CD 7, 9, and 10

So I've been listening to a lot of stuff lately, but today I paid a visit to the Jazz In Paris collection of my Wish List again. I listened to the following albums on Rhapsody while typing up a few posts and playing around on Flickr.



Talk about a funky album. I'll definitely check out more of Coleman's stuff because it was heavy.

I listened to Dizzy Gillespie's album (#9 in the series, above) next as the eighth disc in the series wasn't available on Rhapsody. It just flowed from the previous album almost seamlessly in style and tempo and then picked up melodically as it progressed.

The last disc I listened to was a lot slower in pace and style. A good work, it actually suited the gloomy weather and rain that suddenly came out of nowhere this afternoon and ended the day for me on a poignant note.

Disc 9 in the series is Chet Baker's "Broken Wing". I'll get to it eventually.

"Jazz in Paris" Collection CD 4, 5, and 6

Well, I've been trying to finish a book proposal that will probably never even get looked at by any literary agents, let alone any publishers, but I need something to do when I'm not looking for work. Yesterday was really cloudy and rainy, and the following 3 cd's couln't have been more appropo.







The Donald Byrd stuff was great. I'd never listened to his stuff before but it was awesomely melodic and up tempo. I've already scouted out other albums by him that were recommended by reviewers of these albums on Amazon.

This 3rd album contains more artists I'd never heard before, and what can I say? I like it.

And on we go...

"Jazz in Paris" Collection CD 1, 2, and 3

So I started listening to Verve's "Jazz in Paris" 75-CD set this weekend on my Rhapsody account. I started with the first three discs, the first two of which were of a Louis Armstrong concert. Though sold individually, they really should be listened to together because they're arranged to play back-to-back without interruption. The concert itself is a great showcase of Armstrong as a singer, arranger, and band leader. Other singers also performing added a nice variety to the whole thing.

The third disc was the soundtrack for a French film done by Miles Davis (the soundtrack, not the film). Critics have described the music as definitive for the style of the film it was written for, with Davis improvising in the studio as he viewed the various scenes for which he was composing. I'll need to read more about the movie itself, in addition to watching it, but the music is very recognizable to the modern listener as it's been regularly emulated in movies and TV since. I guess it's one of those things where you have to hear it. Think "swank" and "slinky" without being "loungey". The version of the album on Rhapsody had a bunch of alternate takes on it, so I edited my playlist to leave them out and listen to the original album in its original order. All in all, not a bad Saturday.

The Verve "Jazz in Paris" Collection

http://www.livingwithmusic.com/index.php/main/jazz_in_paris/


Please take the opportunity to ride the link provided above to read up on this wonderful collection of jazz recordings that documents a pivotal time and place in jazz and music history.

What I love most about it is that it has EVERYBODY in it. And then some.

In the linked blog you'll read about subsequent box sets that followed, but I'll be starting here with the original 75-disc set and disc 1. I did a cursory search on Rhapsody, where I already have an account, and it looks like I might be able to pursue this listening experience for $12.99 a month. Talk about further diluting a fixed cost!

Mozart: The Complete Works CD 1 / Symphonies CD 1

So this weekend and today was quite hectic for reasons too long and drawn out to write about. But listening to some of old Wolfie's earliest symphonies, the first of which was written when he was nine(!) (catalogued as "KV 16"), was quite relaxing.

One thing I found easier to do was to read up on the respective pieces before listening to them. Believe me, between the Mozart book and the classical music guide book, I'm lucky I got through it without paper cuts.

I'm liking it so far.

Today's Listening: Charles Mingus & Genesis

I'm glad I listened to this on my Rhapsody account and didn't spring for it on Amazon. I'm always keen to check out really old jazz recordings that are newly released on CD or just newly released "from the vaults", but if this were a movie I'd rate it a "rental".

Amid nuggets of live virtuosity there are clearly some trainwreck moments that, while they give the CD a bit of a playful charm, make this recording more suited for diehard fans of Mingus.

After the Mingus, I cranked up the Genesis. Having been a real big fan for the Phil Collins years, I started listening to the their earlier prog/art rock albums with Peter Gabriel. I think I have all their albums now, including their two Archives box sets. But I listened to this collection on Rhapsody because it's organized so that the tracks are arranged in reverse chronological order from their more recent to their oldest. That's kind of like the way I began listening to them. Last night I saw a rockumentary on them on VH1 Classic, and so today I had what I needed to listen to while filling out online appications. I'm looking forward to their remasters boxsets that will begin to come out this year.

Mozart: The Complete Works

So last fall I bought this 170-disc collection of everything Mozart composed ($120, Amazon), and since then I've pretty much sampled a few discs here and there every now and then. Let's face it, 170 takes time to go through, and while I consider myself a fan and own many smaller compilations of his works, I've got stuff to do and other things I also want to listen to.

It wasn't until this past January and February that I decided to take a more academic approach to listening to old Wolfgang. I'd started to listen to a 2-disc set of some of his works at night while driving in the cold (or relative cold of where I'm at). It was relaxing, like in the car commercial kind of way. And I developed some favorite parts. But when you've got tracks of varying length for compositions whose structure you're still unfamiliar with, well, all I'm saying is that I can't drive and keep my eyes on the CD player to mark my favorite track and times. Here I was appreciating something, and I couldn't even identify it to look for it elsewhere or name it to anyone if we were talking about it. Yes, I'm sure I could play the "match game" at home with the disc liner notes and a fast-forward button, but that wasn't the point. When you hear a Rolling Stones song on the radio, you know it's them. When you hear Eric Clapton, you know it's him. I wanted to at least be able to know Mozart when I heard him.

Then I found myself wanting to learn more about the man. When I was a kid, parts of "Amadeus" scared the daylights of me, but it was just a movie based on a series of very "creative" plays that just plain made a lot of stuff up. Plus, I knew there were stories about his compositions, too. He was a child prodigy, after all, as well as one of the leading composers both of and after his time. I guess it came down to my wanting to know as much as I could.

The Compleat Mozart is just the book I was looking for, and I got a used copy on Amazon. There's basically a blurb on every composition of Mozart's on a track-by-track basis. I can literally read about a specific composition as I listen to it, because both books use the Kochel notation method to identify Mozart's works, some of whom are named or numbered or have similarities among their names. What's good for me is that includes some biographical information about each piece as well as some discussion about Mozart's possible influences and how the respective piece was critiqued during Mozart's time and since. What's bad for me is that other parts of the discussion are too technical. They're clearly by musical scholars for other musical scholars.

That's where The NPR Classical Music Companion comes in. It's basically the encyclopedia I use to understand the esoteric (to me, granted) musical terms and concepts that are used throughout the book. It's a good thing I got it, too. I couldn't read one passage about Mozart's 1st symphony without referring to the guide after almost EVERY sentence. But I'm coming along. Soon I hope to retain some definitions and move up into concepts. While I do that, I'm also going to look into a book on music theory. Do those come in "book-on-tape" format?

I guess I'll start at CD 1, which also begins the Symphonies section, and list the tracks I've heard. It'll be nice to start the week this way.

New Order: RETRO box set

One of the latest additions to my CD collection is New Order box set "Retro". I was able to get it from my CD club for even less than half of its retail price. That's better than anything I could find on eBay.

"Retro" has 4 discs with each one having its own "personality" which comes from being compiled by 4 friends of the band and showcasing some aspect of their songs. The first disc features the band's greatest hits, or at least as many as could fit on one disc. The second includes fan favorites, but I must confess I never did learn how this was determined other than that these songs were the favorites of the person compiling it. The third disc included dance remixes and extended versions of New Order's songs, and finally, the fourth disc contains live versions of various hits.

While I already had "The Best of New Order" and "Substance" compilations, it was the third and fourth discs, the remix and live collections, that prompted me to get "Retro". With a solid reputation and tradition of "keeping one foot in the rock and the other in the club", New Order has released numerous singles containing various versions and remixes of their hits. And all this was done often alongside the release of an album. While singles for many acts function as promotional tools for an album, New Order's singles have consistently served as stand-alone documents of the band's work that are worth owning and listening to in their own right. But by not being able to get the singles when they were released and not having the resources to pursue them on eBay now, where they are actively sought out and bid on, I was at a loss for a way of listening to them and selecting my favorites. Until now, that is.

The fourth "live" disc was a real treat as I didn't know they were touring again after re-forming. When I was a kid I couldn't have seen them live even if I wanted to. But the fourth disc is a great addition to their live DVD's, and they sound incredible on it. That I was spared the agony of having to pick and choose such tracks from any of the assorted bootlegs out there is, I believe, a gift to the fans.

The liner notes of the box set are a great read and feature commentaries on all the songs by Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morrison. In addition, there are contributions from each disc's respective compilers and other friends of the band. The reader truly gets a sense of what times were like for the band in their transition from Joy Division, their subsequent musical growth, and their progressive impact on music and musical culture. This is something especially significant for fans outside the UK who may not have had access to journalism about New Order through out their career.

At a time when I'm scraping by, I know I should't be blowing money on stuff like this, but for New Order's "Retro" I have no regrets.

Good Old Desk

If blogs could have a theme song then mine would be Harry Nilsson's song "Good Old Desk".

Everyone knows the "coconut song". Even if you don't know the title, which is simply "Coconut", you know what to do when presented with the terms "lime", "coconut", and "doctor" in any sing-along or karaoke scenario. It's a shame that people may know "Coconut" but not know or remember Harry Nilsson.

I'd first heard of the man through one of my CD clubs (yes, Timmy, there used to be more than one major CD club once) when they were really pushing me to buy whatever albums of his they stocked in the time shortly after he died in 1994. I was a sophomore in college. And I felt weird about it.

That a person dies shouldn't make his work any more appealing than it would the day before, should it? It bothers me to this day as I see other artists of my time and the times before pass away. On the other hand, though, wouldn't you want that artist's heirs to be taken care off as a result of those sales? At the very least, couldn't the heightened awareness of their work after their death be a better fate than the irreversible obscurity reserved for the exponentially greater number of artists who die with their work never recognized for what it was? Maybe it all depends on who's getting paid what.

In any case, I stayed away from Nilsson's work (or what parts of it I had seen) because the budgetary constraints of college life and the post-college work experience only allowed for spending on works I was more familiar with.

I finally bought "Nilsson Schmilsson" a little over a year ago after learning that he'd performed the songs "Without You", which I remembered from my FM-gold childhood, and "Jump Into the Fire", which was used in the helicopter scene in Goodfellas. By then a remastered version of the album was available with some bonus tracks, so it was all good. As soon as I began listening to the album I wanted to kick myself for not buying it 10 years ago. I'm talking real regret here, folks, like the kind that makes you wonder what kind of man you could have been having been affected by this art way back then.

The next CD I got by Harry Nilsson was was a collection of his greatest hits (pictured above). Many have been released before and since, but "All Time Greatest Hits" presents a good starting point for new audiences by presenting works from the entire spectrum of Nilsson's career with the critically acclaimed material presented comfortably alongside those hits from the radio and initially lesser known works that later gained exposure for their use in movies, like the song "Everybody's Talkin'", which has been used in Midnight Cowboy as well as the recent Crank, for example.

Recently, in an attempt to find the album that "Good Old Desk" originally appeared on, I came across his first 9 or 10 albums as UK reissues available only as high-priced imports in the US. Remastered and repackaged to combine more than one album on a single CD, some of these were remastered by Nilsson himself, and I feel cheated that they never found their way to American shores with the same popularity that his last few albums have. Still, better late than never I say, and they're on my Wish List should some spare cash find its way to me.

Nilsson's appeal as a recording artist is three-fold, combining a superior vocal range, gifted lyricism, whimsical musicality, and - FOUR! There are four reasons why I like Nilsson's work:

1. Superior vocal range
   
2. Gifted lyricism
   
3. Whimsical musicality, and
   
4. Diverse and unpredictable topicality

Pythonian digressions aside, it's the musicality, provided in many instances by assorted members of the Beatles, who were contemporaries and huge fans of his, that helps the listener appreciate the diverse concepts Nilsson presents us with along his career. In addition to the love/hate songs are the concept children's record (induced by an LSD trip, allegedly), an album of musical standards, an album about vampirism, and of course, songs about arrows and desks.

For me, it's the simple things he sings about that endear me to his work and I look forward to listening to more of it.