Django Reinhardt's Birthday Random Ten

1.Samuel Barber--Vanessa - Act 3: Sc. 2 - For Every Love There Is A Last Farewell

2. Johnny Adams--I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone

3. Max Roach--Body and Soul

4. Canada--Beige Stationwagon

5. The Kinks--Cricket

6. Aeoliah--Follow your star

7. Brewer & Shipley--Ruby On The Morning

8. John Moulder--Freedom

9. The Purcell Concert of Voices--Pray for us, thou Prince of Pes

10. Michael Blair, Marc Ribot, Don Alias, Elvis Costello, Henry Threadgill, Art Baron, Greg Cohen, Bill Frisell & Francis Thumm--Weird Nightmare [ from Hal Willner's Weird Nightmare: Meditations On Mingus]

and 11: Pérotin--Mors [performed by Theatre Of Voices}

To identify the less-known: John Moulder is a Chicago Area jazz guitarist of thought and skill who has played with Paul Wertico (Pat Metheny's drummer.) This cut is from Trinity, an ambitious and spiritual suite that succeeds just about everywhere. Canada is an Ann Arbor, MI folkoid group currently running around trying to find purchase on the bidness's slippery slope. And Aeoliah is one of the NewAgeist of NewAge groups, actially trying to get music to heal boils and scurvy, I think. Sounds nice, though.

What migh look just look like another wildly all-encompassing Random Ten, actually holds a series of special inclusive moments. It's one of the benefits of age, I suppose: I've actually had time have a long series of fannish delights, where if someone picks up a record/disc with an inquiring tilt of the head, you can leap up and say, "Oooh! Let me tell you about them!"

A lot of people of my age still find it astonishing that Brewer and Shipley's One Toke Over The Line ever got any airplay at all, let alone become a (minor) hit. WE used to listen to Tarkio Road with one of John Prine's illegal smiles all the time. They had this odd habit of singing in unison most of the time rather than the seemingly required conventional thirds and fifths. It worked, though: two slightly different, but equally earnest voices modulated against each other, getting away from that folk-singers projecting tenor that was in the air so much then. They had great arrangements (Guest appearances by Jerry Garcia!) and even attempted epic (for then) 7 minute songs, like an adaptation of Jimi Hendrix's adaptation of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. They also were really good at jewel-like little love songs like this one. Brewer and Shipley? Let me play that for you...

My almost fanatical devotion to the Kinks was much greater and longer lasting, exceeded only by my brother's obsession, who has taken a sacred vow to collect every Kinks cover version in existence, whether it's from a Japanese metal band or whatever. This is from my favorite period, when they were on RCA and putting out concept albums, Like Preservation, Soap Opera, and my fave, Schoolboys in Disgrace. (This is from Preservation Act 1, which is a close second.) Concept Albums! Critics quailed and yearned annoyedly for nice little hit singles. No no no. Rob and I were were charter members of the Brtian Wilson Is a Goddamn Genius club, but we also belonged to the And The Same Goes For Ray Davies cadre, a smaller group but equally dedicated.

In the years when I, pallid academic, was hell bent on becoming a Medievalist with a capital D, I delved deeply into Early Music , and found it good. It was a strange partial thing: Iwas already spending as much money as I could afford on various popular, prog, and experimental stuff--and so my exposure was almost completely from the Joseph Regenstein Library's record collection. They could only be listened to in listening booths, which are the world's worst place to listen, exceeded only by music theory classrooms. But the selection was broad and deep, and I could soon pick out the difference between Gregorian and Ambrosian chant.

It's kind of amazing how thin the record on this is: Pérotin is only known as a chapter heading. Absolutely nothing is known, not even if. So much of what is recorded involves ambitious speculation, that you can't really say 'this gives me a picture of life back then!" But that was part of being a medievalist: we were in the Space Age, with vast  catalogues of knowledge--and yet the Middle Ages had huge swaths of blankness. The effort to get even a peek into that period was one of those pleasures and challenges  of scholarship one would thing almost vanished in this modern world.

And there's not just Opera, but 20th Century Opera. After I became a convert and became a Type 2 Operagoer (1: dazzingly dressed rich people; 2: shabby opera buffs) it seemed almost unfair to leave the lush old-growth forests of Puccini and Mozart for the alkali flats of Berd and Penderecki, but, well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. I still can't sit through Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, but the good news is that most composers who turn to opera tend to be more traditional, or at leat those who don't believe in Serious Music's Steadfast March Away from Melody, Harmony and Structure. Barber is, of course one of the few modern Serious Guys who have actually composed a Popular Fave. And I like Vanessa a tremendous amount A not-already-known story (unlike Antony & Cleopatra, Ghosts of Versailles, or Nixon in China) gives it a life in my ears, and with Barber, beauty is beauty and passion is passion. Most people know better than to pick up an opera box set at someone's house , and so I don't tend to play operas for even the best of friends. I would, of course, so beware.

In each of these cases, it's not just getting a better survey of Music and Culture and History and all that. I do that--a lot--and spend a fair amount of time going 'interesting!' and 'ah-hah..." But that, at the end of the day, does not really seem to be the best way to sit around with music. It's far more fun to get stupid with a genre, a performer, or a band, and lose your perspective and throw your head back.