Category: Music

As I write this post, I’m ripping the last of my J. S. Bach discs. I am going more or less, on this project to digitize all my music, in the same order as my discs sit in their cabinet: classical first, then jazz, world, folk, Christmas, and blues, then rock, boxed sets and whatever else is left. I’m actually alternating blocks of classical and jazz so that the library isn’t too overwhelmingly classical for the next month or so.

As I go through the process, I have the opportunity to ask myself questions. Like: why do I have four Anonymous 4 discs? Isn’t one of them enough? In a sense, the answer is yes: they all sound the same if you aren’t listening too closely. Though if I hadn’t kept exploring the group, I wouldn’t have found their sublime Miracles of Sant’Iago, which granted is still four perfect female voices singing Renaissance music but which has much more distinctive material to work with.

But yeah, I have a lot of discs. Why? Sure, I love music, but so do my parents, and they just listen to the radio. Why do I—did I, I guess—buy so many? I read a post recently that talks about the “acquisitive nature of men.” Maybe that’s it, or maybe that’s just a convenient shorthand.

I’ve also had an opportunity to gripe, yet again, about the metadata for classical discs in the Gracenote CDDB. While most jazz data is getting pretty good—even starting to include accurate composer and recording date info, if not lists of performers—I’ve found classical discs that put the name of the composer in the title track, or the piece name in the title track and the movement in the artist.

My preferred order is to use the Grouping field for the work title, as it’s done on the iTunes Music Store, then movement in the track title, performer in the artist line, composer in the composer line (gee, what a concept). Recording date goes in the Year field. I would love to have more dates to play with, but for right now working by composer gets me where I need to go there. To display the information, I made a smart playlist, which simply chooses all music with a genre of Classical, and customized the displayed columns for the playlist so that the order is Grouping, Title, Time, Composer, Artist.

Stats at the end of ripping the last disc of the Furtwängler recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: 9134 songs; 26 days, 5 hours, 24 seconds total time; 46.10 gigabytes. Of these, the cds ripped for the project constitute: 349 songs; 21 hours, 26 minutes, 27 seconds time; 5.81 GB. The whole library numbers include my existing library, and will probably grow dramatically until I get into the rock area, where I’ve already digitized much of the music albeit at a lower bandrate.

As a result of this past Tax-Free Weekend, I now have the hard disk space necessary to start digitizing all my CDs. (It’s a long story and involves a painful morning spent staring at the SBOD while trying to go over finances with Lisa, and my mentioning that moving my music files off my laptop would greatly free the system, as most of the slowdown appears to be in paging to and from the hard disk when there is very little free disk space. Also involves purchasing some wool carpets for the living room and stairs, but that’s a different story.)

I ended up with more of a solution than I thought, actually. The way I had been laying it out in my head, this was a two phase project with months of separation between the phases:

1. Move most or all existing music files off the laptop to an external drive; change the music folder location to the external drive; rip CDs losslessly to external drive. Music can be played as long as external drive is physically connected to computer.
2. Connect external drive permanently to home network, either by placing it in an enclosure that would allow for network access (turning it into NAS), or by connecting it to a new machine that would be connected permanently to the network.

Obviously there was potentially a large expense attached to the second phase, which is why I was delighted when Lisa found a gadget from D-Link that connects USB and USB 2.0 drives to the network via a 10/100 Ethernet cable. It now looks like my second phase is going to consist of taking the drive, once all the CDs are ripped, and plugging it into our hub.

The actual storage part was a 300 GB Maxtor drive and a Venus enclosure from AMSElectronics—previously recommended as a low noise enclosure with both USB 2.0 and FireWire support, and, as it happens, available off the shelf at our local MicroCenter.

I’ll post updates as I go through my collection. I can’t promise that my progress will be as artful or as quick as Fury’s—I’ll be lucky if I get more than five CDs ripped a night, at which rate my collection will be entirely transferred by Eastertime next year. I intend to take the opportunity to fill in performer, performance date, and composer information and cover art as I rip the albums, which (particularly for jazz discs) will probably take a long time.

But the first album I ripped using the lossless codec, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, went quickly—just as quickly as ripping to MP3 or AAC. The file sizes were in line with my estimates too, with the 9-minute-plus recording coming in at about 44 megabytes.

New mix, uptempo, newly available at iTunes (about 50%) and at Art Of The Mix.

This joke was current a few months ago—it was even in the chorus newsletter immediately prior to the BSO’s Mahler performance—but it bears repeating:

You’ve heard of the Mozart Effect, i.e., listening to Mozart increases one’s spatial IQ. BUT, have you heard of the …

LISZT EFFECT: Child speaks rapidly and extravagantly, but never really says anything important.

BRUCKNER EFFECT: Child speaks very slowly and repeats himself frequently. Gains reputation for profundity.

WAGNER EFFECT: Child becomes a megalomaniac. May eventually marry his sister.

MAHLER EFFECT: Child continually screams — at great length and volume — that he’s dying.

SCHOENBERG EFFECT: Child never repeats a word until he’s used all the other words in his vocabulary. Sometimes talks backwards. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child blames them for their inability to understand him.

BABBITT EFFECT: Child gibbers nonsense all the time. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child doesn’t care because all his playmates think he’s cool.

IVES EFFECT: the child develops a remarkable ability to carry on several separate conversations at once.

GLASS EFFECT: the child tends to repeat himself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

STRAVINSKY EFFECT: the child is prone to savage, guttural and profane outbursts that often lead to fighting and pandemonium in the preschool.

BRAHMS EFFECT: the child is able to speak beautifully as long as his sentences contain a multiple of three words (3, 6, 9, 12, etc). However, his sentences containing 4 or 8 words are strangely uninspired.

And then, of course, the Cage Effect — child says nothing for 4 minutes, 33 seconds. Preferred by 9 out of 10 classroom teachers.

A few extras from Mangan’s Miscellany:

Schumann Effect: Child develops bipolar disorder.

Lutoslawski Effect: Child becomes expert craps player.

Berwald Effect: Child develops a huge passion, works at it his whole life, then falls into complete obscurity.

And a few more from The Llama Butchers:

Hovhaness Effect: Child grows to be very spiritual, attracted to Eastern religions. Also has pyromaniac tendencies.

Gluck Effect: Child will be brilliant but inconsistent. Probably will be a fortune-hunting party reptile.

Rossini Effect: Child will be lazy as hell but a lot of fun.

Bach Effect: Child will overawe you with the the depth of his self-expression and do a bang-up job balancing your checkbook. Stand by for a lot of grandchildren.

Lully Effect: Please keep child away from sharp objects.

And, finally, from The Muse at Sunset:

Meyerbeer effect: Child says wildly popular things which no one can remember later.

Chopin effect: Child coughs constantly.

Schumann effect: Child speaks in poetry, then tries to drown himself

Gesualdo effect: Child speaks cryptically, dresses in black, carries a bloody axe

Gershwin effect: Child tries to speak Ebonics, is never quite convincing

Hugo Wolff effect: Child speaks about the meaninglessness of life and the futility of love, then goes mad

Prokofiev Effect: Child speaks wildly and brilliantly, with a huge vocabulary. But… was he being serious?

Berlioz effect: Child takes opium and speaks REALLY LOUDLY

Debussy effect: Child can’t talk, but loves pictures

Faure effect: Child’s speech is too refined and elegant to be heard by coarse and insensitive persons

Henry Cowell effect: child speaks in clusters of words.

Harry Partch effect: child makes up all his own words.

Fred Himebaugh effect: All the child’s vowels have umlauts.

I’ve been in a conversation with Fury about tagging music. By tagging, I mean structured metadata rather than the collective slap-a-label-on tagging visible at Flickr and Technorati.

In the course of the discussion I looked up the ID3 site, the home of the standard tagging format used by Windows Media Player, iTunes, and just about everyone else. I was surprised in the list of standard tags in ID3v2.4 to see a few for which I have been hoping, including original artist, original release year, band/orchestra (hopefully a multivalued field!), etc. But the only Mac-friendly tag editor I’ve found that supports these fields is the Jaikoz Audio Tag Editor, which appears to be powerful but ugly.

So the big question is, when will someone come up with a way to add this extra information directly through iTunes? I for one would pony up a shareware fee for that capability.

It’s dangerous for me to read uao’s Sunday Morning Playlist reviews of musical styles on Blogcritics. I always end up with a long shopping list. True especially for a pair of playlists I found today: Paisley Underground and Jangle Pop. Any playlist featuring Opal and Guadalcanal Diary gets my attention, and the rest of the songs are intriguing even though I’ve heard none of them before. Good stuff.

The Cowboy Junkies started their career with an album of covers and haven’t done another such compilation since. Until now: their Early 21st Century Blues, originally available only from their website but being released by Rounder next month, features covers of anti-war songs in the Junkies’s trademark laconic style. If you’re like most listeners, this description will have you running in one of two directions: madly toward the disc or as far away from it as possible. Frustratingly, the disc contains plenty of material to support both those positions.

With an album of covers (even one, like this, that includes a few original tunes), the reviewer’s focus has to be the selection of material and whether the arrangements and performances bring anything new to the songs. On the first note, this compilation does well. The track list comes together in pairs, including Bruce Springsteen’s “Brothers Under the Bridge” and “You’re Missing,” the aforementioned brace of originals by Michael Timmins (“December Skies” and “This World Dreams Of”), a pair of tunes by ex-Beatles (George Harrison’s “Isn’t It a Pity” and John Lennon’s acerbic “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier”), and a few associated with Bob Dylan (the traditional “Two Soldiers” and Dylan’s own “License to Kill”); the traditional “No More,” Richie Havens’ “Handouts in the Rain,” and U2’s “One” round out the set. High points for material, then.

Performances and arrangements? Well, each of the numbers, with one exception, sound like a Cowboy Junkies song. That’s not necessarily a knock, just a note that most of the album is firmly in familiar territory with the familiar vocals of Margo Timmins anchoring the usual multi-instrumental crew in the background. This doesn’t always make for arrangements that bring new things to songs. Case in point: “Two Soldiers,” which despite a full band and a narrative gender switch brings nothing to the song that Dylan didn’t bring out in his version on 1993’s superlative World Gone Wrong.

Then there’s “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier.” The band’s website notes, “We set up a drum loop and jammed away. After it was all over we realized that there was a definite hip-hop motion to the loop so we invited a friend of ours, Kevin Bond (aka Rebel) to write and record a rap, based on the themes that were driving the songs on the album. We then dumped the whole mess in Jeff Wolpert’s lap and asked him to make sense of it.” Oddly, the experiment mostly works. The interaction of drums and bass in the loop is a little too reminiscent of O.P.P., and the rap is a little shocking when it starts, like walking through an Appalachian forest and coming across a tricked out Escalade. But Michael’s distorted guitars, Rebel’s rap, and Margo’s vocals play off each other building to a hypnotic climax. It’s actually a lot of fun.

Other highlights on the disc include “Handouts in the Rain,” a fine take on a beautiful song, and “Isn’t It a Pity,” which must be Harrison’s most covered song. In this recording, it’s apparent why, as the soaring final choruses finally succeed in bringing Margo’s voice out of the comforting blanket of the low alto range and bring some real passion from the band.

So: the album is uneven, yes, and flirts dangerously close to Starbucks territory in some of the less inspired moments. But for “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier” and “Isn’t It a Pity,” it’s definitely worth checking out.

One last note: the timing of an anti-war album in 2005 would seem to be too little, too late. But part of the favor done by this album is to remind us that war is both human and all too omnipresent. What might have seemed trite, if timely, in 2003 feels a bit more universal in 2005. And sadly the album’s message is even more relevant two years later.

You can read more about the album, listen to the tracks, and buy it from the Junkies’ site. Also see the Blogcritics interview about the album with Michael Timmins by the fine folks at Earvolution.

(Also posted at Blogcritics.)

Back in 1996, when Eva Cassidy died, who would have predicted that she would be #5 on the list of Amazon’s top selling musicians in their first ten years in business? She beat out Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones; she also beat the Dave Matthews Band, Josh Groban, Celine Dion, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Sting (whose “Fields of Gold” she memorably covered on her best album, Live from Blues Alley).

Number five. Wow. Go, Eva. Not bad for a little white girl from the DC suburbs with the biggest voice you ever heard.

Incidentally, I think I first heard Eva’s music on a tribute show on the late great WDCU. Too bad that her fame came too late to lift that station.

Boston Globe: Levine, Mahler triumph at Tanglewood. On the positive side, I can be assured that, unlike other groups in which I have sung, our concerts will almost always be reviewed. On the other hand, all our preparation, hard work, and ultimately ecstatic performance was summed up by the reviewer as:

The music is so tightly wound that it explodes — it lasts 25 minutes or so, but it passes like a flash of lightning, a noisy one. Levine and his orchestra, the soloists, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the American Boychoir fired it like a cannon — it was noisy and exciting, it was hectic, and the temptation to scream offered by the vocal writing was not avoided.

Ah well. I can only hope they were talking about the soloists, not us.

Funniest moment of the night: One of the sopranos, who had the most sublime vocal line of the night, delivered it from high above the shell for dramatic effect. When the applause came, due to some misunderstanding—or worse, some mishap—she never came down, and there were three bows taken for the rest of the soloists before Levine realized she was still up there and waved up to acknowledge her contributions.

Least funny moment of the night: I had hoped that, since it had rained the whole week, it would stop for the performance. And it did, but only about half an hour before curtain, and it rained more or less continuously on us all the way home.

This recording of Elvis Costello on Marian McPartland’s long running jazz interview show will surprise only those of his fans who haven’t been paying attention. For the last 20 years, Elvis has made a career of confounding expectations and sneaking popular music and standards into the unlikeliest of places. This latest recording, featuring EC singing a mix of standards, ballads, and a few of his own tunes and discussing his career with the indefatigable McPartland, is the purest fruit of his long labor in the vineyards of the American songbook.

If you’re unfamiliar with the format of McPartland’s show, which is typically interview material alternated with a joint performance between host and guest, the chatty bits between the songs may throw you. For those who prefer not to hear the chatter, the songs are thoughtfully on separate tracks. It would be a mistake to skip the interview, though, as Elvis discusses his early influences (his dad the jazz musician, his mom’s record collection, British R&B singers), his approach to performing, his early 80s collaborations with Chet Baker, and other bits of interesting ephemera.

How about the songs? The performances are clean: I don’t think Elvis has ever turned in a purer rendition of “My Funny Valentine” than on this disc, his Little Jimmy Scott-esque vibrato on the final phrase notwithstanding. “At Last,” which Elvis dedicates to his dad who performed it many years ago, is understated and touching, as is “The Very Thought of You.” He takes a turn to the darkness with “Gloomy Sunday” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is” (and notes in an aside to McPartland, “I can make ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ sound dark—I’ve had this face for 48 years now, there’s nothing I can do about it!”).

Of the EC originals on this disc, the closer (“I’m in the Mood Again,” from his underrated North) is the better performance. With Elvis playing “composer’s piano,” the melody is effortlessly spun into a gentle reverie that, to my ears, betters the album performance. Alas, no such luck with “Almost Blue.” McPartland hangs back a little too far and the flow of the piece is lost; I also miss the coda of the piece.

To my ears, the highlight of this disc is “They Didn’t Believe Me,” a forgotten Jerome Kern jewel from 1914 that sings in this version. It narrowly bests Elvis’s other recording of the song with the Brodsky Quartet, available only on a promotional sampler from the Juliet Letters tour.

Based on the chronology of this session (Elvis mentions he’s in the process of recording North), this recording was made around the time that his relationship with Diana Krall began. The performances show it. This is a man in love, and the performances of these ballads benefit from it: gentle, sensitive, and optimistic in a way that is unusual in EC’s massive catalog. Highly recommended.

(Also on Blogcritics.)

My first Tanglewood rehearsal is over. Yes, already. We had a brief piano rehearsal with James Levine, who went over a few potential trouble spots in the Mahler, complimented our tone, and wished us a good evening. Completely unlike what I had anticipated based on my past experiences with famous conductors. Where Robert Shaw always gave an impression (amplified, to be sure, by his various ailments) of desperately contained passion and fury, and Sir David Willcocks was acerbic, dramatic, and understatedly witty, Levine strikes me as brisk, unassuming, and subtle.

I came away from the first rehearsal better understanding what I had started to gather from the first few rehearsals of this piece: nearly everything that I have done for concert preparation before has been work. This is making music.

Blogging will be intermittent this week (I know myself too well to say it will be light). I am currently in Pittsfield, MA, getting ready to head over to Tanglewood for my first rehearsal there with James Levine.

More notes to come. (Ba-da-bum.)

I’m reluctant to give the Funky16Corners blog any more press, especially after it got well-nigh BoingBoinged into non-existence last weekend. But the music he posts—MP3s of funk, R&B, and soul 45 sides from the 1960s—is just too good not to rave about. The author, Larry Grogan, takes garage sale hopping for vinyl and turns it into something beautiful. And he is apparently also involved in a group blog, Funk and Soul, covering much the same ground.

I was going to write about my own garage sale vinyl experience from this week (a bunch of 80s sides—about a jillion early Elvis Costello albums, a David Byrne 12″ from the Catherine Wheel, the Cure’s Japanese Whispers, Big Science—along with Bob Dylan’s debut and a few tasty jazz recordings), but Larry has put me to shame. Perhaps I’ll be able to give my finds their proper due later today.

According to his web site, überproducer and occasionally brilliant ambient-roots solo artist Daniel Lanois has regained ownership of his first album, Acadie. It’s available from his site as well as from eMusic.

Lanois seems to be focusing some attention on his solo career after a long hiatus, punctuated only by his uneven 2003 release Shine (I liked the track “Fire,” which I included on my 2003 mix cd A page I was meaning to send her, but Lanois-does-reggae can only be described as a disappointment). He also released an instrumental album this week called Belladonna. I’m listening now; it strongly recalls the early 80s instrumental work that he did with Brian Eno and Harold Budd, which is in my opinion a Really Good Thing.

Boing Boing: Weird Tales covers 1923-1942 gallery. When I read this post, I immediately thought about the album Weird Tales by alt-country supergroup Golden Smog. I wondered: did that mean that the oddly evocative cover of that album was derived from the magazine?

A little spelunking through the cover archive found the answer. Golden Smog’s album cover is based on the cover of the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales, and is an illustration by Margaret Brundage for the story “The Vampire Master” by Hugh Davidson. (The Golden Smog album cover hides the bat head on the woman’s mask.) No word on who in Golden Smog was the pulp fiction fan, though.