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Day 110. U2, Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Beach Boys and ‘Pulp Fiction’.

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Tonight I grabbed a stack of discs out of the car… ‘The Beach Boys Classics selected by Brian Wilson’, the ‘Pulp Fiction’ soundtrack, ‘Electric Ladyland’ by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and U2’s ‘Zooropa’. Yep – sounds like some music I would drive with.

‘Electric Ladyland’ – one of the best albums ever? I think so. One of my favorite aspects of the album is the way production quality changes from song to song, yet the album also weaves a mostly continuous feel (side breaks aside of course). Going from ‘Crosstown Traffic’ to the live ‘Voodoo Chile’ is an amazing job in production. The sound of the drums in ‘Gypsy Eyes’ leading into the guitar and bass riff is stunning. The R&B sound of ‘Have You Ever Been to Electric Ladyland’ is a brilliant contrast to the opening ‘And The God’s Made Love’ (which could have come out of the tape studios of Europe at the same time). And all this happens before disc two!

Side three of the LP (‘Rainy Day’ -> ‘1983’ -> ‘Moon Turn The Tides’) might be my favorite album side in rock and roll. The feedback sections are are beautiful. And the whole shape of the side is perfect. From the ambient smoky room coughs in ‘Rainy Day’ into the trickling of sound of ‘1983’ is a nice pulling together of a rock song – from sitting around in a room smoking with some friends into slick state of the art rock and roll. And then it dissolves again into a jam at first, then into sparks and flashes of sound. The side seems to create then destroy the rock song, and makes so much beautiful sound along the way. Then (if you are listening on LP), you turn over to side four and seem to start all over again with ‘Still Raining, Still Dreaming’. But from here on, it is blues and rock Jimi Hendrix Experience until the end. ‘House Burning Down’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’ and a second reprise for the album (the slight return of Voodoo Chile). This was the Experience’s third and final album… Hendrix would put together the Band of Gypsies after this, and would be dead shortly after that.

Technically, there are some amazing things done with this album. The exploration of what the tape machines in the studios could do is at the level of what John Lennon and Yoko Ono were doing with ‘Revolution 9’ on the ‘White Album’, but where most people couldn’t bear to listen to that whole song, there is little in the experimenting on ‘Electric Ladyland’ that would turn people off. He plays around with sonic space, moving sound around your head in ways that most composers are still trying to do as effectively and meaningfully. And on top of that, the songs rock. They are bluesy. They are ambient. They run a VERY wide swath of musical style to create an album that is engaging for pretty much its entirety. For a double album this is pretty astonishing. And that this keeps up over repeated listenings is even more phenomenal.

U2’s ‘Zooropa’? No, it isn’t ‘Electric Ladyland’, but it is a great album as well. I don’t know what I can say after talking about ‘Electric Ladyland’ that wouldn’t sound like I was being a downer about ‘Zooropa’, so I will just say one thing and leave it at that: ‘The Wanderer’ is a stroke of collaborative genius.

Tags: Greatest Rock Album Ever, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pulp Fiction, The Beach Boys, U2
Posted in Rock / Pop | No Comments »

Day 109. Ravel and Mahler (mostly with Herbert von Karajan)

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

So, more about Richard the loyal Tower customer. He once told me that he rated conductors by how he thought they would be in bed. Some of these rating were quite graphic and won’t be shared here, but for any given piece he would have a couple conductors that he thought would get the job done and others that he thought would leave you wanting. Almost always near the top of his list was Herbert von Karajan. And after a few required listenings in the classical room to this work or that work, I began to agree more and more. Karajan certainly had a way to shape phrasing, and certainly knew when to pause for a breath before continuing on… pacing quite often seems to be everything in Karajan recordings. And though he could handle the classical and romantic repertoire just about better then anyone else, I think it is also good that Karajan knew when there was area he couldn’t handle. The number of recordings of his that break into the 20th century avant-garde are few (his recording of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ is good to hear, only because you can really see how much of a problem even a great conductor can have with it). But with the 20th century works that grew out of late romantic works, he could be brilliant. His Debussy is very well done, same with his Sibelius and Richard Strauss. But the recording that I remember Richard suggesting to me above all else was Ravel’s ‘La Valse’. Karajan conducted the Viennese new year’s concerts a number of times, and he certainly knew his was around the Strauss waltzes like few conductors do. But his recording of the Ravel is stunning. And if there is a work that needs Richard’s ‘good in bed’ rating system, ‘La Valse’ is certainly one of them.

But here was the trick – the CD of this recording was, in the 90s, long out of print. It also featured the Orchestre de Paris, and may have been the only recording he did with the group. I was able to find a vinyl recording a couple years later at Amoeba in Berkeley (oh Amoeba, I miss you so). The LP was in good condition, but the recording level was VERY low for the first part of the bass (the rumbling basses). But it wasn’t until about two years ago that I finally found a CD pressing during a trip to Copenhagen. This was one of three CDs or so that I looked for at every used record store I would go into, and after 8 or 9 years, I had finally found it.

It’s so good.

Also on the disc are good recordings of ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ and ‘Rapsodie espagnole’, but it is ‘La Valse’ that is the highlight. And it is damn sexy.

Also ripped tonight was lots more Mahler, including a few harder to find Karajan recordings (the 4th and ‘Das Lied von der Erde’). I have way too many recordings of the 9th and ‘Das Lied von der Erde’. But one find in the stack was the Herreweghe recording of ‘Das Lied’ with the Schönberg chamber version. Quite beautiful.

Tags: Herbert Von Karajan, Mahler, Ravel
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Day 108. Ravel, Debussy and Mahler.

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

After last night’s Pascal Rogé fun, as promised I searched for the other recordings of his that I have. The disc with the violin sonata took some time to find. It was literally the last place I looked in the back row of discs, at the bottom of a shelf. Didn’t find the piano trio disc yet though. Along the way, came across his Debussy London two disc set. And I also saw (by other artists) a number of Ravel chamber music discs, piano concertos, and scattered about, a number of Mahler symphony recordings. So I grabbed those for tonight as well.

The Rogé discs are on the speakers tonight though, in more ways then one. Celia wanted some different music for her room, and when I told her about ‘Mother Goose Suite’ she was open to Ravel. So the second disc of that set has been beaming through the house over her room monitor. The high notes are represented quite well. I ripped the disc with the violin sonatas first, and that has been on for a bit already. The disc features Chantal Juillet on violin, and Truls Mørk joins in for the violin and cello sonata. I forgot about the recording of ‘Tzigane’ on this disc which features a kind of prepared piano – the ‘piano luthiel’, which consists of an attachment to the harp of the piano that makes it sound like a cimbalom. Very cool. When this disc came out originally it was only available on Decca which, at the time, wasn’t available in the US. It’s presence was revealed to me by one of Tower’s regular customers named Richard who really knew his classical music (there will be a second Richard story probably tomorrow night… another disc I associate with him was in my ‘ooohhh… look what I found’ stack tonight). Richard regularly bought then returned discs to keep his library rotating, and since he usually bought more then he returned, we didn’t have too much of a problem with this at the Berkeley store. For me, the stuff her returned was always quite good, so from my point of view, we had good music to play once he brought it back. Anyways – Richard picked the disc up during a trip to Europe (I believe for a ‘Ring’ cycle) and let me borrow it. I brought it back to him a week later and was visibly sad to give it up again… but I imagined that since it was on Decca, at some point it would be released here in the states on London. About a week later I saw the release of it announced, but it wouldn’t be coming for another six months! I told Richard about it and that I was excited it would eventually be coming in, and about a week later he brought it back to the store with a post-it note on the disc saying ‘Don’t postpone the pleasure! I’ll get another soon for myself.” I still have the post-it note in the liner notes… it really was a very nice thing to do, and it is still one of my favorite discs that was ever given to me.

The Rogé Debussy is quite well done, and just playing a few tracks tonight was fun. The other discs were a couple of Klemperer Mahler symphonies. The Mahler 2nd (a live recording) is just damn amazing. And the recording of the 9th is still one of my favorite recordings of that symphony. The beginning is just about perfect… pulsing and dying at the same time, until finally the spring of life finally comes out of the strings playing the first melody. Just beautiful. Also in the stack is the soundtrack to ‘Un Coeur en Hiver’ featuring all Ravel chamber music. And for a soundtrack, the performances of the pieces on the disc (the trio, violin sonata and violin and cello duo) are great. It might actually be my favorite recording of the trio and IS my favorite recording of the duo.

More tomorrow as I keep working through the stack of fun…

Tags: Debussy, Mahler, Ravel
Posted in Celia, Classical | No Comments »

Day 107. Stravinsky, Ravel and Josquin.

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Some Ravel, some Stravinsky, some Josquin. The Josquin is a disc of motets, another with some of his music played on viols. The Stravinsky discs are a Philips ‘Two-fer’, CD re-issues of usually pretty good older recordings that were priced two-for-one. The two discs cover his ‘Symphonies and Concertos’, the stand out being Igor Markevitch’s recording of the ‘Symphony of Psalms’. Great performance and recording. I first got to know this piece by playing it at UC Berkeley (as part of an all Stravinsky program) and, compositionally, it comes to mind quite often. In some ways the work is quite classical (as Stravinsky would do at times). The opening chord and the melodic material between them has a bit of an echo of Beethoven, if not in content and color, but in how repetition and time are used. The violin concerto recording is also very well done, with Arthur Grumiaux on violin. Grumiaux is one of my favorite violinists in general. His Bach recordings are phenomenal, and his Stravinsky is right up there as well.

The Ravel disc is also a two-fer, but in the Decca / London version (the Double-Decker). Funny how classical music used some of these marketing schemes. Again, the performances are amazing… in this case, it is Pascal Rogé’s complete Ravel piano pieces. This is, and has been, one of my favorite discs for some time. Ravel is one of my favorite composers, and these discs are a big part of what got me into him. So much shimmer in his music… wonderful use of register and texture. These discs offer great performances of these works as well. They are older recordings though, a bit quiet, and could probably do with some clean-up. But one thing the background hiss caused me to do with these discs is not play them too loudly. And the funny thing is, it is because of this technical flaw that I actually started to listen to most of my classical music at proper volumes. There should be dynamics that allow the performance to go from a whisper to a roar. And while there is tape hiss in these recordings, it is better then having to deal with the compressed dynamics that so many digital recordings offer now. The piano is quiet on the Rogé discs when it is supposed to be quiet, and it is quite loud at other times. The recordings benefit as a result, and if you grab these yourself and find that the sound is sometimes very soft, that is probably because it should be. My suggestion would be to start the third movement of ‘Gaspard’, and find a comfortable (but loud volume), then don’t touch the knob on your stereo. Just enjoy the full range of sound and color on these discs.

More on Rogé and Ravel later – possibly tomorrow. Now I want to dig up his recordings of the trio and violin sonata… both are LOTS of fun as well.

Tags: Josquin, Pascal Rogé, Ravel, Stravinsky
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Day 106. Jane’s Addiction, The Lively Ones … and much more.

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Tonight’s rips were mostly a blind grab from the front and back of the shelf… Jane’s Addiction, Jamiroquai, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Annie Lennox, The Lively Ones and Lester Young.

The Lively Ones disc ‘Greatest Surf Hits’ is mostly a compilation of covers of other surf songs with a couple originals thrown in. Lots of reverb, some tremolo, and great tunes. The Lively Ones had a sax player in the group which always made them stand out for me. My main gripe with this CD (and all their CDs, most of which I haven’t purchased yet) was the fact that they were all direct reproductions of the albums. There 12 songs on the disc (standard for US albums in the ‘60s) and it totals 28 minutes. And there are six albums of theirs to buy, and even a few years ago these were full priced. Now – I think this music is rad. I love surf music, and The Lively Ones were one of my favorite bands out of this genre. But 6 discs totally less the three hours of music for $16.99 or $17.99 a pop (and still as full priced $9.99 albums on iTunes)? With minimal work to needed to transfer them to CD? I realize they aren’t going to sell a lot in the first place, but at prices like that, they definitely won’t. It is good to see that they are on eMusic at least, so I imagine I will finally get to grab the rest of the discs. But it is pricing / marketing like this that really is still surprising to me about the music industry. Feels like robbery sometimes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I could find downloads of this somewhere on the internet… yet this has been a path I have avoided for the most part. And something I am proud to say that I have avoided.

And part of the reason I am thinking about music theft is because of the Jane’s Addiction. About a week into working at Tower, I remember a couple kids acting strange over in the Pop/Rock and Soul racks, and I noticed that the other clerk was lazily keeping an eye on them. They left without buying anything, and when I went over to where they were, there it was. An empty longboard box for ‘Ritual De Lo Habitual’. My first stolen disc. I hadn’t heard Jane’s Addiction yet, but noticed with a grin that track 5 was ‘Been Caught Stealing’. Well – these two guys weren’t. But it made me wonder how good the music must be for someone risk getting caught stealing it. So I picked it up. And it is pretty good. I became mild Jane’s Addiction fans because a couple other kids thought it was good enough to steal. Of course, as my years at Tower would go on (and I would even spend a couple years working loss prevention) I would find out that it wasn’t just good music people would steal. There was also stealing of bad music, stealing out of boredom, stealing out of the challenge of it and stealing to support habits. All of which I saw, and all of which I tend to think about when I put on this album.

Tags: Annie Lennox, Jamiroquai, Jane’s Addiction, Lester Young, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Lively Ones
Posted in Jazz, Rock / Pop | No Comments »

Day 105. David Grisman.

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

I have mentioned once before (when talking about Django Reinhardt) that the cover of David Grisman’s album ‘Hot Dawg’ freaked me out as a kid. Sharp, angular, metallic bodies contorted around instruments make up the cover. It looks cold, and I remember thinking that this was a picture of people that had somehow been frozen into these forms involuntarily. Apparently as a kid, I was worried about being frozen into a form involuntarily. This probably came from some bad movie where a stop-motion Medusa turned men to stone, or some other magical evil… I can’t really remember. But I DO remember that David Grisman cover sitting in front of my dad’s records and those figures seemed to give me a cold scary stare. There is some irony here though, since the music on the album is highly influenced by jazz, bluegrass and folk music. Stephane Grapelli makes a guest appearance for a recording of his and Django’s ‘Minor Swing’ (the version I associated with the song until well into my teenage years). The opening number ‘Dawg’s Bull’ starts off with a quick pulse from the violin that slowly build up to the whole group playing some amazingly fast music. In unison. Very clean…

Now that I know the influences of this music much better, perhaps there isn’t such an irony to the cover art. This is 1970s jazz, a time period riddled with the cleanliness of fusion and the death of the 50s and 60s bop->hard-bop->out there jazz transitions. Not that the free jazz solo ever sold enough albums to be ‘replaced’ by another step in the evolution of jazz, but if John Coltrane had been alive during the time of Weather Report, I’d be curious to see how different the styles of jazz would have been. Probably not much different, and with recording technology (with multiple tracks and takes) became better it was probably unavoidable that jazz, as with rock, would move towards a similar slick recorded presentation. And though I still like ‘Hot Dawg’ quite a bit, and am amazed by the playing on the disc, the freer, looser feel on David Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label is the sound that I imagine he prefers. I wonder if ‘Hot Dawg’ recorded in the mid-90s would have sounded different. Little grittier, a little earthier.

Recordings are of course simply a record, not necessarily of a moment captured in time anymore, but possibly of many moments mixed together to get a performance that the artist wanted others to hear again and again. That’s hard to do. And as critical as I can be of what seems like a feeling of coldness on the part of ‘Hot Dawg’, I also have an image in my mind for some reason of listening to it in a dim room with just a fire in the fire place, and my dad laying on the floor and listening to it. Over the speakers, with the crackle of wood (and the snaps and pops of the vinyl) it probably sounded warmer then the CD I know have. And as long as I don’t think about that cover, this homey warmth is still the memory of this album that I have. No matter how many takes it took to record it.

Tags: David Grisman
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Day 104. Kempff (playing Schumann and Brahms).

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Tonight’s rips were a 5 CD ‘Original Masters’ DG collection of Wilhelm Kempff recordings from the 1950s. I love Kempff’s playing, and this set is nicely done (from mostly mono recordings, they sound superb). Most of the set consists of Schumann and Brahms, but the last disc contains three Beethoven sonatas and a smattering of transcriptions (including some Bach, Couperin and Rameau). His playing in these earlier 50s recordings is a bit more forceful (especially his Schumann Symphonic Etudes… they are amazing). The set also brought me another recording of the late Brahms piano pieces, probably my favorite music that Brahms wrote. Like late Beethoven, there is quite a bit of room for a great interpreter. I have a later recording of these works by Kempff as well, and the differences can be pretty astounding. Just little touches here and there bring different voices to light, or make the piano resonate a little differently (which counts for quite a bit in many of these pieces where harmonies are broken apart and even smeared across the changes of bass and probably harmony). These pieces certainly share some of the tonal break down that Wagner had been experimenting with, and the tonal ambiguity at times looks ahead to Stravinsky in some ways.

The end of the 11th ‘Symphonic Etude’ by Schumann just played, and I had to back it up. The last couple of notes in the melody were some of the saddest I think I have ever heard. Not quite gasping, or resigned. It just seemed to quietly give up and almost fall apart. The dynamic Kempff plays at the end is a physical one. It sounds like he is pressing the keys so lightly that the note may not even sound. He slows down unevenly, and it is beautiful. The perfect lead into the more youthful, almost heroic beginning to the last etude.

Tags: Brahms, schumann, Wilhelm Kempff
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Day 103. The Pixies, Nico and John Coltrane.

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Tonight was just me randomly grabbing a few things off the shelf that were stacked up… among the discs were a couple of Pixies discs, Nico, and the Special Ultimate Über Edition of John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’.

The Pixies I mostly associate with the end of high school. Tamiko and I saw them open for U2 in Sacramento right before they broke up. I got into them more after seeing them. ‘Bossa Nova’ is perhaps part of the darkest album that I relate to my senior year of high school, a time where Tamiko and I had our most ups and downs (actually – mostly downs), my hair went through multiple colors, and my mood was often moody. ‘Bossa Nova’ fits into the mold pretty well. For some time, this dark horse of an album was my favorite Pixies disc until times got happier and ‘Doolittle’ took its rightful place at the top of the Pixies mantle. Not that ‘Bossa Nova’ doesn’t still have some good tracks, but it is just harder for me to get into the mood to hear Black Francis scream ‘Rock Music’ then it is to throw on ‘Hey’.

I have two Nico discs (not including my Velvet Underground collection). The first is ‘Chelsea Girl’ which Nico didn’t particularly care for herself. She says:

“I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! … They added strings and – I didn’t like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute”

On the one hand, I feel bad that she didn’t like the album so much. But all the things she is complaining about is also what I think makes the album so good. The second disc, a collection that contains a few tracks from ‘Chelsea Girl’, ‘Peel Slowly and See’ and more of her later work is only really strong because of those initial tracks. Both times I have listened to that disc, I’ve just gone back and put on the originals instead. Sorry Nico – I think the producers knew what they were doing. I can understand how she must have felt hearing the end result though, and I wonder why she allowed it to be released. Or maybe she didn’t have a choice?

‘A Love Supreme’ is easily in my top 10 albums. John Coltrane (as anyone who has read this blog probably knows) is easily one of my top 10 favorite artists. At the moment, it is hard to think of another album that would top it actually, but this is a fault of my own brain. Whenever one of my favorite albums comes to my mind, it tends to mask out the others that it would compete with. My mind just draws a blank about what could compete with it, and as long as I keep this brain problem in mind when thinking about my favorite albums, I will avoid saying something foolish like ‘this is my favorite album of all time!’. But there are certainly worse things to say in one’s life then ‘A Love Supreme’ is the best album ever made. It IS a masterpiece, recorded by THE Coltrane Quartet by Rudy Van Gelder. For decades, it existed only as the four tracks that make up the album, and I remember finding a bootlegged CD pressing of the single performance of the suite. I paid $40 for it, and was blown away at hearing the piece so differently. The live performance (now included in a cleaned up form on this two disc set) is from a festival in Antibes. It is just as beautiful. In some moments, even more so. In a couple of points, the playing pushes the performers to the max, and there are moments where some aspect falls apart. Coltrane runs out of breath, or the moment just gives McCoy Tyner a moment of pause. These ‘mistakes’ though are beautiful. They show these performers attempting to bring together this masterpiece in a live context, and it sounds so emotional. Those moments are their humanity, and when it comes down to it, it is humanity that this music is about. ‘A Love Supreme’ came out two years before Coltrane died. He had been through a number of hells, and had come through them a deeply spiritual and emotional man. The poetry that accompanies the work and the love that he describes couldn’t possibly have been played straight in performance, and I remember being struck when I first heard this recording how appropriate all these moments were. They made the work even more powerful. I’m so glad there is this other performance that was captured, but even more glad that there aren’t any more. A polished live performance could ruin the beauty of the one that does exist. And I’m not sure that the perfection that exists on the recording deserves to be anywhere else but on the studio one.

Tags: John Coltrane, Nico, The Pixies
Posted in Jazz, Rock / Pop | No Comments »

Day 102. Bach and Nancarrow.

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

I’ve spent a couple days getting through a couple of box-sets picked out by the girls. Mostly it has been a busy few days, and I’ve also been trying to stay away from the computer a bit more this weekend. So – this will be a short (though still overdue) posting.

The two box-sets were: Davitt Maroney’s excellent performances on harpsichord of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (with the Art of the Fugue and the Musical Offering thrown in) from Harmonia Mundi, and the Wergo 5-CD digital recordings of Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for player piano. Kind of a pre-piano / post-piano combination.

The Bach of course is such a standard in piano repertoire and practice, that it can be hard sometimes for pianists to think about the differences between their instrument and the one that it was written for. While the most common instrument that is thought of from Bach’s time is the harpsichord, and performances of the ‘48’ on that instrument are the most common, it isn’t out of the question to hear these works also on organ or even lautenwerk. But on harpsichord, the lack of a wide dynamic range for single notes – and the focus on texture and multiple voices for creating changes in dynamics – is usually much more clearly heard. Fugues get louder as more voices enter. The C-minor prelude from book 1, with it’s two voice continuous 16th note texture that eventually thins out to basically a single voice followed by dense chords and rapid melodic flourishes. The dynamics here come from the number of notes sounding at any one time and their orchestration, and on the harpsichord these changes to texture are quite dramatic.

The Nancarrow studies come about well over 200 years after the Bach works, and as a body of work is just as significant. The works were composed on the piano rolls themselves as Nancarrow punched holes into the paper, having measured out horizontal space as time, and calculating where the pitches he wanted needed to be punched. This liberation from both the pianists hands and the written mensural notation led to all sorts of interesting manipulations that were often based still on compositional concepts from Bach’s time and earlier. Canons are especially prominent, though they may be well outside the reach of a single pianists two hands. And they may also go through transformations that would be difficult for a human reader to comprehend, especially in respect to time. Time intervals are stretched and contorted, sometimes accelerating according to the laws of physics rather then the subdivision of the beat. And like Bach, where the popular dance music of the day often influenced some of the form and content of the Preludes in the Well-Tempered Clavier, the influence of jazz and boogie-woogie piano playing appear in Nancarrow’s works.

When I first came into contact with the player piano studies, I actually remember seeing a light-bulb go off in my head. The idea of time being measured in distance rather then simply as divisions of a measure seemed so intuitive! Our system of rhythmic notation suddenly seemed so restrictive to me! And once this occurred to me, my thinking in electronic music also greatly changed. Time and music could have pulse, and it could also disappear. Like pitch, intensity and any other musical parameter, rhythm too could be dynamic when it is thought of as a portion of time rather then just the division of a measure. It still surprises me how simple this approach can seem, and how complex the results of it can be.

Tags: Conlon Nancarrow, J.S. Bach
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Day 101. It’s A Beautiful Day, Beethoven.

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

I spent most of last night working on a recording while ripping the Alexander String Quartet recordings of the complete Beethoven Quartets. So, blog writing took a back seat. Still have a couple of discs to do tonight, and I also added in two albums by It’s A Beautiful Day, both the self-titled first album and ‘Marrying Maiden’.

Around the time I was starting to work at Tower (almost 20 years ago!) my dad had placed a special order at the Tower on Watt Ave. for the first It’s A Beautiful Day album with ‘White Bird’ and ‘Hot Summer Day’ on . He had the vinyl of the album, but he had also heard that a CD of it had been made on the label ‘SF Sound’ which, ironically, was only available as an import. Randy Mendonza (who was the Tower regional manager, akin who I would later learn quite a bit from) found a way to get it for him. To say that he was excited would really be an understatement. The label had all sorts of other stuff as well from late ’60s SF, including Moby Grape’s albums and Quicksilver Messenger Service. I saw ‘Marrying Maiden’ come into the store as an import shortly after I started to work at Tower, and he was just thrilled to get it. It was a strange period… here was my dad, tracking down music that he already had, but was searching for it to get it again on the still somewhat new medium. As CDs now look to be on life support, it blows my mind that these albums are available now to get within minutes of searching. eMusic, iTunes… probably even as MP3 downloads from Amazon. Pretty stunning to see how CDs – the medium that would store music in pristine digital form FOREVER! has, already in 20 years, pretty much been replaced by the online database. And while things still do ‘go out of print’, I also wonder when such a notion will finally be a thing of the past.

The reason I threw these onto the computer last night though was because another friend of mine got his subsonic server also up and running, and I noticed Quicksilver Messenger Service on his library. He had gotten it from his dad, and I asked if he had heard It’s a Beautiful Day. He hadn’t, and within 10 minutes it was loaded onto my server, ready to stream. Pretty mind blowing to me that musical conversations, now with online examples, can happen so quickly (through Facebook chat no less).

The Beethoven quartet recordings with the Alexander Quartet is my favorite overall set. The group made this repertoire their sole musical activity for a number of years, and would tour with the Beethoven quartets to be played only by memory, at the request of the audience. They would start the concert by taking a poll of which early, middle and late quartet to play, then play them. This is so ideal on many levels. One the one hand, they obviously know this music at the level where they don’t need to look at the page anymore, and there is something pretty amazing about a chamber group that can truly pay attention to each other, creating a true musical conversation. Second, they were mostly supported in this by San Francisco State University where they were the quartet in residence and held chamber music workshops (workshops that I imagine produced some very fine chamber music musicians). Third, they were able to make a living by playing repertoire that is rather well-known and well-played, and the difference in their playing really stands out (the recordings have some astounding musicianship in them). Finally, to be a performer of this music and to show up at the gig and ask the audience what it wants to hear – AND have the audience be able to tell them. Wow.

The group has expanded its repertoire in the past decade or so, performing more of the classical repertoire as well as works even well into the 20th century. The other recordings of theirs that I have heard give the sense of a group that really relies on all the players to guide the performance. Their Mozart ‘Haydn’ quartets are beautifully done. But it is their late Beethoven that is really some of the best recordings of any music that I think I have heard. The A minor quart (op.132) is otherworldly. If you ever happen to see them coming to your area for a performance, make sure to get a ticket, and ask for it.

Tags: Beethoven, It's A Beautiful Day
Posted in Classical, Rock / Pop | No Comments »

Archive for June, 2010

Day 110. U2, Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Beach Boys and ‘Pulp Fiction’.

Day 109. Ravel and Mahler (mostly with Herbert von Karajan)

Day 108. Ravel, Debussy and Mahler.

Day 107. Stravinsky, Ravel and Josquin.

Day 106. Jane’s Addiction, The Lively Ones … and much more.

Day 105. David Grisman.

Day 104. Kempff (playing Schumann and Brahms).

Day 103. The Pixies, Nico and John Coltrane.

Day 102. Bach and Nancarrow.

Day 101. It’s A Beautiful Day, Beethoven.

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