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Archive for July, 2010

Day 131. Bob Dylan, Dire Straits, The Shins, South San Gabriel and Nada Surf.

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Tonight is a nice mixture. Some Bob Dylan, Dire Straits, The Shins, South San Gabriel and Nada Surf. These were my picks tonight though (forgot to get the girls downstairs) and one of the things that was on my mind was that it is that time of year – time to get going on this year’s mix disc.  And I often start thinking about what will go on a disc by going back over what has been on mix discs that I have gotten over the years. The main people I trade mix discs with are my friends Charles and Colin, but I also have a disc or two from my friends Robert, Matt and a few people I have worked with in record stores.

South San Gabriel and Nada Surf are both bands that I got turned on to by Charles. Charles puts together a couple mix discs a year. His taste in pop music is impeccable, and over the past few years (wow – probably the last ten years to be honest) I have discovered more new good pop music from Charles’ mix discs then I have from just about any other source.

Charles and I worked together at the Tower in Berkeley in the mid ‘90s for maybe a year and a half. But I think I have stack of over 20 discs from him. If I was to also go through and count the number of discs I have bought because of tracks I’ve heard on these discs, I bet there would be another fifty or so. There is a good chance that one in ten pop discs I have are because of Charles. Probably the only people to have more influence on my CD collection Tamiko and my dad.

I don’t get to see Charles that much any more. We usually email and catch up a little a few times a year, but I think it has been two years since we last saw each other and I actually dropped mix discs I had made in his hand. Charles stopped burning his discs a couple years ago (and now posts links for downloads for his friends) that I finally picked up on last year. The funny thing is, pretty early on in this project, Celia picked up a cassette tape from Charles for her pick one night. I realized that through our friendship (over fifteen years) our mixes have gone through three formats… tapes, CDs and now mp3s. This year, as I have ripped about a fourth of my discs onto my computer, I will actually be able to transfer tracks and set up playlists to try different mixes out with. Though I will still be putting things together on the laptop, I might actually be putting together my first mix discs that won’t involve me staring at the bookshelves. I’m wondering how different it will be not digging through actual discs to find what to put on the mixes.

Day 130. Stray Cats, Sundays, 3 Leg Torso and Smokey and Miho.

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Just a very quick post about tonight’s discs… a couple from one of Portland’s finest groups 3 Leg Torso, some Stray Cats, The Sundays and Smokey and Miho. And these quick notes are about music that I imagine doesn’t get around much.

I imagine just about everyone would recognize at least a couple Stray Cats songs, but if you are into digging around for obscure discs, the actual album releases that the Stray Cats put out are well worth the effort. Nothing against ‘Rock This Town’ and ‘(She’s) Sexy & 17’, which are fine songs, but on the albums you often had long stretches (this means greater then 30 seconds in Stray Cats song terms) of the group really taking off and jamming. Some of Brian Setzer’s finest playing is in these stretches. In the ‘90s, Brian Setzer would do some cool stuff that was heavily involved with lots of the swing music revival going on around the same time, but it is really the sound of him, Lee Rocker and Slim Jim that produced such an exciting and tight sound. ‘Blast Off!’ and ‘Built For Speed’ are in my collection, if anyone happens to have ‘Rant and Rave’, please let me know… One of my earliest memories at Tower in Roseville had to do with walking into the art office where Jude and another guy (covered in tattoos) were listening ‘Built For Speed’ at a pretty high volume, and there was lots of air guitar going on.

Smokey and Miho put out two EPs, available on a one disc compilation as well. The group came together after Miho left Cibo Matto, and she and Smokey Hormel discovered a mutual love of Bossa Nova. The playing on these ten songs is great, and if you like Bossa Nova, this is another disc that I highly recommend trying to track down. One EP is covers, the other is (I think) all originals, and they put together a great group for the project.

3 Leg Torso’s albums are much trickier to find. Released on smaller labels (and at one time distributed by Tower Records, which is how I came across them… we were even lucky enough at Tower Berkeley to have them stop in for a performance), the music is a beautiful mix of Eastern European folk music, jazz, early 20th century classical music and tango. Originally a trio of violin, cello and accordion, the group now tours with a larger ensemble. If you live in the Northwest, keep an eye out for them.

Day 129. The Animals, David Grisman and Jerry Garcia.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

After listening to Eric Burdon and War earlier in the day, Celia pointed to a two disc compilation by The Animals for tonight’s rips. And I grabbed my Jerry Garcia and David Grisman discs.

When the Grisman / Garcia discs came out, it seemed like they were released just for me. At the end of high school and the beginning of college, after growing up with the Grateful Dead and finally getting into David Grisman after getting over my fear of the cover of ‘Hot Dawg’, the collaboration of these two (and really, the whole group on these recordings) opened my eyes up in many ways to what making music can be. These are recordings made by two guys that were getting together just for the love of getting together to play, and they had the means to record it as well. These were put out by Grisman’s label ‘Acoustic Disc’ and were a great combination of styles and influences. Bluegrass, country, jazz and Dawg and Dead all seeped in together. A great example is the song ‘Grateful Dawg’ on the first Grisman / Garcia disc, in which both musicians seem to trade solos in the other musician’s styles.  Part of the joke seemed to be that they were really making fun of each others cliches while also building up a set of trading choruses in good old jazz fashion. Each seems to out do the other with each chorus, and while you can’t hear any chuckles in the recording I can only imagine how much they were laughing at each other during playbacks. If you ever get a chance to hear ‘The Pizza Tapes’ (also featuring Tony Rice) you actually get to hear some of this joking around and playful ribbing between everyone. To me, this confirms that these projects were lots of fun for all involved, and the music on these recordings really seems to capture that spirit. Some of the music also comes from old folk traditions, some from when the two played together in different projects in the early ‘70s, but it all reflects a great love of music and being musicians.

After Jerry Garcia died, David Grisman went through the tapes he had and put together a number of discs that reflected the days the two spent together recordings. In one set of liner notes, Grisman noted how special these sessions were, and how much he would miss having them. Luckily, they captured quite a bit. And one thing that I learned from these discs is how much better music is when the players are having a good time.

Day 128. Richard Strauss, Miles Davis Quintet, Saint-Saëns and Satie

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Tonight’s rips were a few discs of Saint-Saëns (mostly chamber music) some Satie, a disc of Karajan conducting Richard Strauss and a four-disc set of the Miles Davis Quintet (specifically his concerts in Stockholm from 1960, with a couple shows featuring the last few with John Coltrane and a few more with Sonny Stitt on tenor).

I picked up the Strauss disc while preparing to play ‘Death and Transfiguration’ in the orchestra at UC Berkeley. I hadn’t heard much Strauss  yet at the time, but playing the piece made me very interested in his work. The bass parts were pretty amazing, and the more I listened to his work the more I was amazed at his melodic construction. The lines would sweep over wide intervals, yet they would still be so operatic and dramatic. Bass parts that would move across two octaves in a little more then a measure! It was one of the times I remember seeing notes on a page, and not believing they could possibly be the correct ones. Until the moment we played them.

The biggest surprise to me though was the end of the piece, or rather the last 4 minutes or so of the piece (the ‘Transfiguration’ section). After violent, dark death throes and moments of resigned but dark calm, a huge C major chord emerges and fades away for the rest of the piece. Apparently, Strauss really wanted to write a piece that ended in C major. The preparation for this chord though, and the duration that it lasts, makes this unlike just about any other C major chord. The chord that just about any piano student learns first, one of the first that just about any musician learns, and probably the chord just about anyone would play if you asked them to play a major chord. I wouldn’t be surprised if it may be one of the most heard chords in western culture. And the idea that Strauss felt like he couldn’t end a piece (in the late 19th century) in C major hints at the feeling that such a thing was too cliche. The length of the chord and how it disappears though creates something more then a chord itself. It is stunningly beautiful because of what precedes the moment, and the way the spectrum of the chord dissipates is, for its time, a beautiful experiment.

The Miles Davis discs are an interesting way to organize a collection – find the shows that a group recorded in a city over the course of a year. It becomes even more interesting when that is a group in transition, coming off of experimental success, and falling apart at the same time. A year after ‘Kind of Blue’, the group has taken the approach that led to the album into the live arena. But Coltrane is about to take off onto his own (taking some of those ideas from ‘Kind of Blue’ to new extremes) and it will take years before Miles pulls together a group again that will have as much consistency and the ability to start exploring again as the quintet that created ‘Kind of Blue’. Sonny Stitt (in the later concerts) play great, but hearing Coltrane in the earlier set shows him taking steps and risks that will propel the rest of his career.

On the first track (‘So What’) as Coltrane begins his solo, it sounds like he misses something … perhaps he didn’t adjust his embouchure when he held down the octave key, or he misses a fingering in his quick melodic passage that causes there to be a strange break in the register. Something doesn’t quite speak right, and rather then pause and move on, he takes the sound that has been created and plays with it for a couple of choruses. After he has explored it, he goes on and shapes basically what seems like a second solo. His solos on these recordings get quite long actually, and are filled with exploring possibilities of small fragments or ideas.

Another treat on the disc is a short radio interview with Coltrane, and the interviewer asks Coltrane about comments that his playing is ‘angry’. After hearing such long extended explorations of sometimes furious notes, you can see how on a casual listen it may sound hectic or filled with frustration. But Coltrane explains that he doesn’t feel like his playing is angry at all, and that he can’t really understand why others would say this about his playing. When I first got the discs, I went back and listened to the tracks again right after hearing the interview and can see how a very superficial hearing of his playing would seem angry. But I also really can’t place myself in the circumstances. I’m not a guy in an audience in 1960, much less a white guy in a possibly segregated audience watching black musicians on stage. At the time, hearing someone play with such such focused energy and intensity could be seen as anger. Hearing Coltrane say that he doesn’t think it is angry at all though shows how much he was focused on what he was creating with the group he was in. Not that he was ignoring the audience, but his primary concern was exploring the material that came to him and the group the moment it was happening.

The more I hear these recordings though, the more I feel like I am missing something by hearing them over and over again. Listening to them once is a treat. But going back to hear them a second time, to have that opportunity (while amazing) also makes these performances feel more permanent they they ever were. To hear these in the moment in 1960 when they were created was what this music was intended for. To hear it once 40 later is lets you imagine that moment. The hear it over and over again for 10 years starts to make it seem less spontaneous on one hand (I can even hum along on some of the solos at this point). So there is a special part of this performance that starts to disappear. But I also have the benefit of being able to see just how amazing the construction of these moments was, and how the musicianship of Coltrane, Miles Davis and everyone else in the group is pretty stunning. The more you hear it and become familiar with these fleeting moments of performance, the more you can appreciate the level of playing on these recordings. So on the one hand, the feeling that this is a ‘moment’ seems to disappear. But on the other, there is a level of appreciation that you can only get from repeated listening and learning affords us. The real question might be… is that trade off worth it?

Perhaps the fact that I’m asking shows that I need to see more live music.

Day 127. Nunes, Messaien, Lutoslawski, Pérotin and Leonin.

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

It has been a busy week, with the evenings filled with lots of odd and ends to take care of. Projects at work and some personal projects (including a website revamp and a piece I have ben trying to finish) have held my attention a bit in the evenings, and I will sometimes pop in a disc to rip, then forget about it.

One thing that is starting to slow the DAC project down is the old laptop that I am using to host and rip everything. It’s getting a little long in the tooth, and it is starting to show and it has had to work more this past year then it probably did over the three or four years before this one put together! It is an old PowerBook G4 (with the lid / monitor cracked off of it from a nasty fall at a cafe). It’s been a little 1 GHz work horse though… before the DAC project began, it served as a little web server for me and a few friends (which was fairly low traffic), so to suddenly be using its hard drive to rip CDs on a nightly basis (the original hard drive at that!) plus the CD drive has probably started to tax it some. Plus, it streams music to me quite a but now. There are over 1,000 CDs that the computer has ripped and now manages between iTunes here at home and Subsonic when I’m away. Over 300 GB of files are on the connected hard drive. In other words, for a machine that is 7 years old, it has done quite a bit since all this started in January. And the thing that is failing? I’m not positive, but I think something with the latest version of iTunes on it is weirding it out… I put CDs in, CDDB finds it, then iTunes kind of just drops it. I have to open Disc Utility to force an eject of the disc, then I pop it back in and it shows up just fine. This takes some time and attention where initially the ripping of CDs was rather mindless. The other thing that has slowed things down was the replacement of a 250 GB Firewire drive with a 1TB USB drive. The old computer only has USB 1, so things are just slower now.

Over the course of a few nights this week I finally finished up the Kronos Quartet box set, and also the last couple discs of the Dvorak symphonies set that Mira chose earlier in the week.

This afternoon Mira broke from her usual pattern and went for ‘pretty box!’ as she put it. She brought a CD of Emmanuel Nunes upstairs to me this afternoon and wanted to show me the ‘pretty box!’ and ‘hear pretty box music!’. After about two minutes of confusion, Celia finally turned to me and said ‘Daddy, this music is scary… do you LIKE this???’. The piece (‘Quodlibet’) for 6 percussionist, 28 instruments AND orchestra (weren’t the 28 instruments already an orchestra?) was a piece I looked at quite a bit while working on a doctoral exam topic on sound and space. Yes, I can see why to a five year old the music would seem scary, and it isn’t something I would normally put on for the girls. So I turned it off and and put on some Kylie Minogue (and there was much rejoicing).

After dinner, I went back downstairs with the girls to pick out more discs and Mira grabbed some Lutoslawski (which probably would have also bee scary) and Celia grabbed a stack of five innocent looking purple jewel cases that contained four discs of Messiaen’s organ music and a disc of music by Perotin and Leonin. Celia and I listened to the music from the early days of the Notre Dame Cathedral while reading about Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, and she loved it. I did too. I do find some enjoyment (and quite a bit of mental stimulation) from Nunes, Messiaen and Lutoslawski. And Lutoslawski and Messiaen have been highly influential in my work though… and I have lots more music from them to rip so I’ll have more opportunity to talk about both of them. But give me music from almost 1000 years ago, and my mind gets working on musical ideas for things that I am working on today, and I loved watching Celia relax into a book while listening to this music. It is nothing like what she encounters in her day to day life really, but it shows how something that has survived almost a millennium can still reach out to a five year old today.

Day 126. Dvorak.

Sunday, July 18th, 2010


Been a busy few days of summer projects (lots of painting!) while also working on some fun SuperCollider and iPad stuff. And some good running. I did continue working on the Kronos Quartet box set, but also brought Mira down for a pick the other night. ‘What should we take Mira?’… ‘A big one daddy!’ … well, there aren’t too many big ones left. Some Miles Davis, lots of opera (which escapes her view for some reason) and a couple other collections here and there, but she pointed at a box set of Dvorak symphonies conducted by Rafael Kubelik. Some great performances on those discs… Kubelik is one of my favorite. He seems to me to be often overlooked, as there were so many great conductors alive during his conducting years. I think his Dvorak recordings are probably one of the best. While I don’t find his Beethoven or Mozart that exciting, I think he really had a knack with late Romantic repertoire. His Mahler recordings are probably one of the best (though I was never able to find all of them on CD… I have them on LP, perhaps it is time to see if I can find them anywhere online… a box WAS released in 2000! … hmmm… maybe I better finish ripping the Mahler discs I DO have before I think about buying anything else).

Day 125. Kronos Quartet.

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Tonight’s choices were motivated more by something I wanted to listen to then anything else. For some reason I got the song “You’ve Stolen My Heart” in my head today (the original title is “Chura Liya Hai Tum Ne”). It is on a disc of music by Bollywood composer R.D. Burman that the Kronos Quartet put together with Burman’s wife, the amazing Asha Bhosle (possibly the most recorded voice in history with well over 12,000 recordings). And since that disc was next to other Kronos Quartet discs I grabbed those as well. Included there was ‘Howl U.S.A.’ (which isn’t as good as I hoped) and the 25 Years box set (which was as good as I hoped).

I have a strange relationship to the Kronos Quartet. On the one hand, what they have done for contemporary music is pretty amazing, even if I sometimes don’t agree with what they choose to perform. Actually, I usually don’t like what they choose to perform. They are amazing players and musicians though, and they have shown how music modern music can and should be performed, and they at times make risky programming choices like a new music ensemble should. The problem is, I’ve always felt like they have a ‘too cool for me’ vibe. And I do mean me personally. Like it isn’t a club I can be part of. I think much of this has to do with how record companies market them (even after thirty years, there is the edgier then anyone else feel to their releases). Like they know what cool is, and they are ‘letting’ us in on it… And I just realized what it is… they are like annoying record store geeks. In other words, what I hate about them the most is probably the part that makes them like me in some ways. ergh… not sure what I think about that (but then again, I’m a little tired… I’ll go over that thought more tomorrow).

Anyways – the Asha Bhosle disc is wonderful. But the 25 year set is a pretty special set of discs to me. The manager at the Tower in Berkeley when I left to move to Seattle (Jim) gave it to me on my last day as a going away present. He knew that I was hoping to go study music and composition (he studied composition as well at college on the east coast), and he thought that he should send me off with good music to learn from as well as enjoy. Jim and I pretty much always got along really well, but him giving me that set caught me off guard, and it really meant a lot to me. I have some of the Arvo Pärt on right now… music that at the time I thought was simplistic and empty. When I moved to Seattle, I couldn’t stand Arvo Pärt, mostly because so many New Agey people bought him. But when I heard the music on these Kronos discs, it started what has been well over a decade of getting to know his music. One of the first things I remember learning while listening to this is that music that sounds ‘easy’ or ‘simple’ is often everything but. Music that is written simply doesn’t last well. Music that sounds easy (or effortless) often takes work, and lots of it. As a result of this realization, it may not be too much of a stretch to say that these discs (which also include Astor Piazzolla, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich and Philip Glass among many others) showed me how much work composing was going to be. It was music that for some reason I didn’t take very seriously until this set was given to me. But Jim giving it to me carried some weight, and I realize now how seriously I took it.

Day 124. Stevie Wonder.

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

I grabbed Stevie Wonder’s ‘At The Close Of The Century’ tonight, a four disc set that came out, well, at the close of the last century. I don’t think I quite realized that these discs were ten years old until tonight. Then I thought ‘what has Stevie Wonder done in the past ten years? I know he has paid for Pres. Obama, but other then that, I couldn’t think of anything. Then I wondered what radio station would play any new Stevie Wonder. Of course it isn’t like I listen to much radio but I suddenly started wondering what is going on with Stevie Wonder and, if he put something out today, would it be 1970s Stevie Wonder or 1980’s or??? Of course, Stevie Wonder was never really an innovator. His work in the 70’s was great, but it was what a lot of people were doing in the 70’s. He was just doing it really well. Same with what Little Stevie Wonder was doing in the 60’s. In the 80’s he wasn’t innovating necessarily (though the vocoder solo in ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’ could be seen as a bit cutting edge at the time, it just sounded like a soft-rock version of ‘Frampton Comes Alive’). Though I am sure a number of people like what Stevie Wonder did from the 80’s on, but I don’t think Barry’s joke in High Fidelity is too far off: “Rob, top five musical crimes perpetuated by Stevie Wonder in the ’80s and ’90s. Go. Sub-question: is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter day sins, is it better to burn out or fade away?”

Growing up, I heard more of 1980s Stevie Wonder then I did 1960s or 70s. It wasn’t until I was at a friends house in Berkeley that I heard ‘Talking Book’, ‘Innervisions’ and ‘Songs In The Key Of Life’. It was really the first time I heard classic Stevie Wonder and heard it at a loud volume. I didn’t go to many parties, and never really did, but hearing Stevie Wonder played at this volume in a house full of people still strikes me as making lots of sense. Not that it was raucous or anything. It was a mellow party of people just sitting around listening to music at a loud volume. ‘Superstition’ is a great song to hear sitting around with a bunch of people. But so is ‘I Believe’ and ‘Visions’. Tamiko loves Stevie Wonder as well. When I brought it up tonight to play a bit, Celia didn’t look too interested (after all, the box doesn’t look THAT interesting, especially to a five year old). But once ‘Master Blaster’ came on, both her a Mira perked up and started dancing a bit. Of course, Tamiko was trying to get them to eat their dinner and it was a bit distracting. But I think both of us enjoyed seeing the two of them dancing to Stevie. Going back to Barry’s question from High Fidelity, I came up with one of my own: “If I play 1970s Stevie Wonder for my children, am I in any way obligated to continue the musical exposure to include those later day sins?”. I’m not going to worry too much about that right now… for now we’ll just put on music to enjoy along with a hot July.

Day 123. Bud Powell.

Friday, July 9th, 2010

While the blog posts have slowed down, the ripping hasn’t. But as I dig more and more into the back shelves as well as a number of discs that I have picked up to fill out parts of a collection (for instance, my Idil Biret Chopin discs which are quite good but don’t really hold a special place in my mind) I was finding that I just wasn’t that into writing about everything. Not that the choice discs in my collection have been exhausted – there are still quite a few left. But since most of those were on the visible part of my shelves, it stands to reason that fewer and fewer of those discs are left. I still want to rip them all, just don’t feel a want to talk about all of them.

So there has been some Chopin this week, some more Faure and finally some Bud Powell. In terms of listening to jazz, I came to Bud Powell kind of late. Mostly because I was usually more drawn to horn players. But within the last five years or so, the pianists I have finally gotten around to listening to (Bud Powell, Andrew Bird and Mal Waldron for example) have all given me a much deeper appreciation for the piano in jazz. Though it is not as though I didn’t have some appreciation before. It’s just that it was always in the context of other players. I came to Red Garland and McCoy Tyner through John Coltrane, and I like Nat King Cole’s piano playing, but you really pay attention to his singing. I did start listening to Thelonious Monk pretty early on, and since I really liked him, if I wanted to put on some jazz piano I would put on Monk. So much jazz piano seemed to take the idea of playing as fast as possible (Dizzy Gillespie once said bop was his way to play music so fast that no one else could keep up) didn’t quite fare as well on piano. On trumpet or saxophone playing a single line as fast as possible works well. On piano it can (and often did) become cacophonous. So finding piano players that did play impressively fast bop yet seemed to really focus so much on a melodic line was, for some reason, a surprise. It really shouldn’t have been… but I still remember putting on my first Bud Powell disc and being surprised how melodic his music was. And how interesting the chord voicings were. Most of all, it seemed like there was an aspect of bop I had never noticed, and I was hooked all over again.

And the funny thing is, it was an album cover that made me pick up my first Bud Powell disc (shown above). First – it is a classic Blue Note cover, wonderful filtered pic of the artist. But it is the kid looking over his shoulder that really caught me. The album was recorded later in Bud’s career, when medication for schizophrenia (after a couple of mental hospital stays) has started to slow his playing down. The title of the album (“The Scene Changes”) hints a bit at the poetics of the cover. He knows he is the old guy, and that the younger ones are coming in. There is still a respect for him of course, but he knows that he is on his way out, and it is important that he passes whatever he can on to the younger generation. Blue Note has so many great covers from this period, but I think this one may be the most beautiful one they ever did.

Day 122. Faure and Tchaikovsky.

Monday, July 5th, 2010

“Why did Tchaikovsky only write three symphonies? And why did he start numbering them at 4?”. I don’t know why Tchaikovsky’s first three symphonies get such little notice. Number two is quite good actually, and while one and three aren’t the sixth symphony, they aren’t that bad either. I imagine part of the reason is because he has so much good orchestral music that ins’t the first three symphonies that they just get skipped over. Plus, 4-6 fit neatly onto two discs. Kind of a ‘Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Symphony Hits’ of sorts. So – there are lots of collections of 4-6, and tonight I am ripping one of them (the Karajan / Berlin two disc set on DG). Also up for tonight are a stack of discs of Faure piano music, including a Pascal Roge disc that goes back to Tamiko’s apartment on Arch St. (so – more memories of open windows letting in Bay Area fog with piano music on in the background).

There actually aren’t too many discs that fit into this category by the way. For one, I had at this point in life, very little money to spend on CDs. I was paying for community college at the time, and had just moved to Berkeley and was renting a room in a house (that mostly just stored my stuff since I was mostly staying at Tamiko’s). Also, at the time I had a CD rack that held only 240 CDs, so that was pretty much all I owned, and most of those were on the rack in the room I rented. So when I come across the ones that did make it to her place, they stick out pretty clearly. At the time, I was working at the Tower in Concord (often until about 1 in the morning) and getting to her place probably around 1:30 or so. Tamiko was often still up doing homework, and we would put something quieter on to wind down for the night. Now that I think about it, we were usually up until 2 or 2:30 pretty regularly that first year I lived down there, and we would be up by 8am or so for 9am classes.  Anyways, we had pretty good set of romantic piano music and some jazz to fall asleep to, and at the moment I’m thinking that might be a good thing to revive. Again, nostalgia and music can really go well together. Maybe we even have that old CD player boom box in the garage somewhere … hmm… At least the weather here in Tacoma right now would be co-operating. 60 degrees and some clouds rolling in on a July evening. Almost Bay Area worthy.

The Tchaikovsky recordings, like some other sets I’ve ripped in this project, actually get better because of it. While I still find ways to work the nostalgia of flipping over an LP into my daily conversation, I have never romanticized the notion of changing discs. And while symphonies 4-6 DO fit onto two CDs, they don’t fit nicely. Usually, the fifth symphony is split between disc one and disc two in these situations. While I would NEVER suggest that these should have been put onto three discs (raising costs, use of materials, etc.), I do know that I haven’t listened to the fifth symphony as much as I have listened to the fourth and sixth. I love that this problem is remedied with moving everything onto hard drives. A playlist can be however long you need it to be. Where CDs took us into the 74 minute (then 80 minutes) limit, now the limit is the size of your hard discs. No more need to break up works across discs. Operas can play straight through… and I can listen to Tchaikovsky 4-6 without interruption.  Amazing.

While typing this all up, I also decided to try out iSub for Tamiko’s iPod Touch. Looks great. Don’t think we need the old boom box, we’ll try streaming Faure onto the speakers tonight!