I seem to have lived more lives than I expected. These days I tell myself that in life there are two kinds of people, trees and monkeys. I'm a tree for my family, but out in the world I'm a monkey. A flying monkey. So when I looked back at the top 15 albums in my mind that I wrote 10 years ago, I was thinking back. Now a new set of music has ripened and matured in my monkey mind and I need to account for that.
I remember Puck in the first episodes of MTV's Real World. For some reason I associate it with a gig I had down in Jacksonville's Baymeadows district. I stayed at Homewood Suites and ran down to the package store past the gatorholes for a fifth of Jim Beam Rye. The riff from Interstate Love Song was in my head the whole time. Then one day I heard Vaseline and discovered that it was the same band. I had to know more. The album was a revelation, and it seemed that every song was an anthem for dark parts of me. It went in and inverted all of my rock sensibilities. As time went on, STP was for me everything that was right with the new rock, a soundtrack for sections of empty highways on my desolate consulting missions around the country. Lady Picture Show was Cobb Parkway in Atlanta. Meatplow was a two lane strip of black ice in the dead winter cold of Columbus, Ohio. Down was me sitting in a rental car in an alley in Boston. None of it mattered to be timely. I went back and forth in time with it. When I read the release dates of the albums it all seems wrong, like they've existed long before in my mind. They're that deep.
The second best apartment I ever had was on the top floor of a walkup brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Seventh Avenue & Flatbush. I bought my NAD amp and my Infinity Speakers for that place. That place with the hardwood floors. With the eat-in-kitchen where I never cooked. With the french doors on the two bedrooms. With the exposed brick. Where the first fat fly of summer buzzed against the windowpanes with the clear view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. It took me weeks to finally make the D Train go away. It rumbled by spooking me into thinking another earthquake was happening. Especially at night. I went to the brand new Virgin Superstore in Times Square and the pleasant young man told me that he knew everything about classical music. He was so happy that I asked him. "Hum anything", he challenged me. "I'll tell you what song it is." I was embarrassed. All I could think about were the clips in the old montage from 'Hooked on Classics'. I declined. But I did know one thing. I wanted the Appassionata. For years after I first discovered Bach, Liszt, and Debussy there seemed to be no solo pianists I could find to match their purity. Of course I didn't know where or how to look and the first person that asked to be a guide was declined. I thought too much of the encounter. I believed he was flirting with me and saw me too deeply because this was music I truly wanted to experience and I was only on the very edges of it. I was me. I wanted to do it myself. I bought Barenboim. His rendition of the Moonlight Sonata, which I didn't know at the time, has been the reference in my mind ever since. Every night in Brooklyn, I went to sleep with that album in the Sony CD player. It is peace.
I was bored on the plane and I had an aisle seat. I don't like the aisle because I have broad shoulders and enough bad experience with food carts and my funny bone to think there might be a conspiracy against me in the flight attendants union. At least it wasn't a bulkhead seat. So I actually plugged my headphones into the inflight station and browsed through the printed program guide in the seat back pocket in front of my knees. Hmm, what's this? A new album, a featured album no less, by Bobby McFerrin. Say what? If you know me, you know that I think there are two great injustices in the music world and they cycle around Fishbone and Bobby McFerrin. I know Bobby McFerrin to be a musical genius. I knew it back from his Spontaneous Inventions album back when people were just discovering Whoopi Goldberg's surfer girl routine. Of course the world has been fixated on that one song that paid for his mansion, but I knew better, primarily because of Medicine Music. I was entranced by Bang! Zoom, and in many ways it had been thematic for my early married life in Atlanta. Kids' Toys is still the ringtone for my youngest daughter, and Friends is to me one of the most perfect songs ever made. But nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on that flight. Beyond Words. This is one of the most inventive and transcendent albums ever recorded. As I listen even in this moment, the phrasing is sublime and the melodies seem crafted to soothe. It is a daddy album. It is a jazz album. It is both subtle and magnificent with the perfect interplay of Chick Corea's piano, Bobby's voice, excellent percussion and the most righteously mellow fretless bass playing I have ever heard. All with no lyrics. It is the landmark in McFerrin's career - he has invented something new in jazz vocals as it perhaps was inevitable that he would. OK. So I'm a fan. And yes he went even further several years later with Vocabularies.
There's a piano interlude between each of the cuts on this album that immediately takes me back to the days when my fiancee and I lived up near Grant's Tomb in the City. We had the tiniest of apartments sublet by one of the Urban Bush Women (thanks Christine) and it was a miserably hot summer. I had picked up the album back when I lived in Boston picking through the ruins of hiphop in the days of Jurassic Park. And there it was one complete with the Francophone edge of the Native Tongues, Lucien. And it got better from there. It was refreshing to hear the French approach to rap and I especially liked Democrat D's fricatives as well as the sad mellow of Moda et Dan. Of course MC Solaar was the standout. Some years later I found some comfort in Raggasonic, but this was the collection that kicked off my flirtation with Gallic hiphop. It lasted through a few singles later by Solaar, but Menelik and Lucien disappointed in the long run. This was the bright spot, and unforgettable.
There once was a videogame called Fez. It was a miracle of multiple dimensions. The game was highly anticipated and starred in a movie about indie game developers, unsurprisingly named Indie Game. The game was a smashing, although delayed success. I seem to recall it drove the lead programmer crazy. That was only the beginning. Its soundtrack was a simple marvel and introduced me to Disasterpeace who has gone on to relative fame. But there was a followup album named FZ: Side F that featured a collection of artists that rebirthed my love with electronic music. That included Solar Fields, Morusque, Monomer and my favorite Aaron Cherof. When I finally got around to Cherof, I was blown away, and so his album Anagnorisis has been in heavy rotation ever since 2013. It remains a standout among all of my new favorite electronic composers and DJs.
I got bored of jazz, you know. But I was overly into it for a long time. Obviously I loved the stuff that Miles was doing at the end of his life, and I have been a big fan of the Return to Forever crew, especially Stanley and Chick. Herbie has been a lifelong favorite and of course everybody lights a candle at the shrines of Coltrane, Monk, Basie & Mingus. There are several other dozens to choose from but everything new seemed to be a bit derivative of the best fusion and straight ahead. Truth be told I can put up with a lot of Bony James and contemporary smooth. But very little had gotten under my skin since the early 90s. Out of nowhere, really, came The Bad Plus. I was transfigured by the trio's coordination, by the drummer's prodigious fills and polyphony. It was frenetic and captivating. Their rock covers introduced me to songs I never knew - it had to be at least 5 years before I knew their rendition of Tom Sawyer was not original. (I have since put Rush in its appropriate place, I think). Flim, Velouria, too. All of their music had the energy and sophistication I forgot I was hungry for, and it was truly satisfying. I decided that Dirty Blonde would be my theme song - and I even wrote lyrics for it. The album that kicked it off still holds magic for me.
Jacques Loussier is one of the greatest jazz pianists ever. He did that French thing, take something old and make it new. They have said that Wynton Marsalis is one of those rare musical geniuses who is both a jazz and classical prodigy. It's true. But I think it is an even greater achievement to rearrange classical pieces that have been interpreted hundreds of ways for hundreds of years and make them jazzy in unpredictably clever ways that retain respect for the original. These are deeply inventive compositions he has put together with his trio, and it seems magical every time he performs. At least I am very convinced. It is almost impossible for me to decide which of his albums impresses me most, but I'm going to choose his interpretations of Satie. Because. I doubt even Satie could have envisioned his pieces so variantly played and I love the way he redoes them several times on this album. Taking nothing away from his performances of Bach and Debussy, this album is special because he renders them mulitple times, each with its own special flavor. For a long time, this has been my bedtime album.
Hiromi has saved jazz for me. Once again this is an amazing fusion of inventive style, prodigious skill, energy and sophistication that had me wondering why the Stanley Clarke Band's first album in 2010 was so extraordinary. I listened and listened but never read any liner notes. So I didn't really know it was her that made the difference. So I watched this video and knew that jazz was alive. What an outstanding trio. I can't say enough about this one, other than that the music is so excellent that talking about it is almost useless. You just want to listen to it over and over, and so I have. By far, I'd have to say my favorite song of hers is Labyrinth, although her play with Beethoven and Gershwin is fantastic. Watching her performances with Simon Phllips and Anthony Jackson is also a miracle to behold. I think only the Bad Plus synchronize in such fabulous ways, differently of course but spectacular. She's as much fun to watch as to listen - real passion on those keys.
I think one of the best things about being such a flathead as I am, so subject to the enjoyment of just about everything, is that you don't know what you don't know. That is to say, if there's a lot of things you can enjoy without getting bored, you will always have another opportunity to discover something wonderful you just haven't gotten around to yet. For me musically, that has meant Glenn Gould. As many times as I have ignored the award winning documentary about him, I should have guessed that he was phenomenal. And I have been in a lifelong quest for the perfect solo piano artist. I can remember first hearing in my college apartment bedroom Andre Watts playing live Listz Transendental Etude #10 so ballistically he popped two strings on the piano. I can still hear the KUSC announcer saying '..and survive it did.' Yes it stands as probably the greatest piano performance ever in my mind and experience. But actually the recorded album, which I eventually purchased, did not meet a very high standard of production. But this is about Glenn Gould. I can remember literally spending an afternoon holed up in a San Francisco hotel room watching the documentary of his second recording of the Goldberg Variations with commentary describing the difference between the newer 1981 recording and the original 1955 version. Astounding. As wondrous as all that is, it has been the French Suites that has captured my imagination. Am I heading down that corridor towards chamber music, after all that Prokofiev? It may be so. The French Suites stands out. It may be that his Scriabin gets me in the end, but for now it is the French Suites.
Steve Coleman and I have a very troublesome relationship. He represents the oversophistication of jazz that has made it fun for musicians and theoreticians, but not for listeners like me. A funny story is that my brother, who used to be a sound engineer, was a friend of Steve Coleman's original pianist Andy Milne. I knew about Milne because he ran clinics in Leimert Park at the World Stage, but I didn't know he had played for Steve Coleman. So I went to see him play at the Mondrian for the debut of his new album Forward to Get Back. My brother couldn't make the gig, but I spoke with Andy after the show. I said, I really like your music. I told him that it reminded me of Steve Coleman without the pretense. He cracked up. Ha ha very funny. Anyway, Steve Coleman did release what I say is one of the greatest rap albums of all time. Steve Coleman & Metric Tale of 3 Cities. Dude. I still don't know who the rappers are because I don't care. I expect that the golden age is over and my expectations and tastes have moved on, but damn when I was holding on the the last breaths there are two albums that stand head and shoulders above the rest. This is the first. Well I may as well mention the other which is Aphrocubist Improvisations from the Broun Fellinis, but that's going a little bit too far back dealing with a hiphop thread that is mostly dead. Nevertheless, more than even Buckshot LeFonque, A Tale of 3 Cities is the stand out, last stand standard of the most righteous genre of hiphop, serious lyrical force backed up with funky jazz. This is the last and greatest, right here. Get it if you can find it.
There is one last thing to say here and I'm not exactly sure how to say it because on one hand it is very conventional wisdom to say that Radiohead is one of the greatest rock bands ever. And it is also quite conventional to say that OK Computer & Kid A represent them at their most mindblowing and transformative. On the other hand, I like the reggae dub versions of these great songs, for the most part, better than the originals. This album, in addition to being a straight out genius arrangement, holds the distinction as one of the very last CDs I ever went out of my house to shop for. I recall the hybrid store out on the Santa Monica Promenade that let you pick and choose a dozen mp3s and they burned you a disc. But I had to have this entire record. It also bears mentioning that Vitamin String Quartet also Vitamin Dub has done a strikingly awesome cover of Just which is a favorite song of mine to play loud challenging the powers of my subwoofers. Radiodread's version of Airbag had been my daughter's favorite song ever, so it also has to be one of mine.
Nathaniel Rateleiff is, outside of Nancy Wilson, my favorite vocalist ever. I discovered him about 6 years ago. I looked around, bored, for critically acclaimed independent new music. The last time I did that, I found Coldplay. So I was batting 1000. The album cover caught my attention so I gave it a shot. OMG. To this day, I still haven't puzzled out the actual lyrics to half of his songs, but every time I have, it has been rewarding. His music is like nobody else's. It's like bluegrass, but not. Like country but more like western. But that voice. I've never thought I'd seriously consider the genre of 'singer songwriter', but his stuff gets to me. Like an abstract cryptogram of the heart, of suffering and of persistence. Like the souls of Modest Mouse with no need or desire to be stars, but the love of the music just comes through, haunting, vivid, like a bright red rash on the face of a hobo who just fell out of a moving boxcar. This is soul music. Soul music I say. Like Bill Frisell on a lonely day.
That's about it. To include more is to go beyond writing about the personal and into more generic music criticism, which I think I've indulged for the last time right here. So let's see. Here are the honorable mentions. Love Stories by Frank McComb, Treat Me Right by Eric Sardinas, Chant Down Babylon the Bob Marley covers by hiphop artists, Dub Chamber 3 by Bill Laswell. Real Enemies by D'Arcy James Argue. All kinds of stuff by Squarepusher, Tycho, Boards of Canada and Big Giant Circles, Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse, Crystal Planet by Joe Satriani and various musics by Gorecki and Elgar.
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