Category: Music

The CD Project proceeds apace; yesterday I finished ripping all my John Coltrane CDs to Apple Lossless format. As I looked at each disc in turn, annotating the files with session notes and musician info, I found myself drawn into memories of my self-education in jazz.

Growing up I listened to nothing but classical music until I was maybe 12 years old, when I discovered the Police—angry yet mannered, literate rock. At the time I wasn’t totally comfortable with the angry part, but I latched onto the mannered part. Listening to Sting felt rebellious but safe. A big part of that, particularly in the subsequent solo records, was the jazz influence. I decided I needed to learn more about jazz, and so I started at the logical jumping off point of Branford Marsalis, who at that time was playing with Sting.

Exploring jazz through Branford—a young player who was trying to establish his own identity but who provided few direct links back to the old tradition, simply because he generally only played his own compositions or a few standards—was difficult. But I liked what I was hearing, the interplay of the horns with the drums, and decided I needed to go deeper. By this time it was 1988 or 1989 and Bono was name-checking John Coltrane and A Love Supreme on U2’s grandiosely overblown Rattle and Hum—which naturally I also loved. (I was 16. Whaddaya want?) So I went out and got a copy of the pivotal Trane album.

I wish I could say that I was immediately blown away, but the truth is it took some time. There were things about the record that I thought were cool—the chants and the blazing solos on “Resolution,” made my hair stand on end. But I didn’t really get the modal melodies and couldn’t appreciate the extended drum solos at the heart of the piece. But I kept listening.

In another year or so, I was a first year at UVA, and shoring up my insecurity and loneliness with CD shopping at Plan 9. I desperately wanted to be cool and to be listening to things that no one around me was, and so I spent a lot of time spelunking throught the jazz racks, anchored to the few artists I knew anything about, which at that point consisted of Trane and Branford (and, somehow, Thelonious Monk—but that’s another story). I had no education, didn’t have the sense to start listening to jazz radio, so I used the copy on the back of the CDs to decide which ones to take home. This brought me to the Prestige and Fantasy releases (the so called “Original Jazz Classics”), which inevitably contained review capsules on the back cover of the CD with raves or claims of “instant classic.”

And that was how I came to pick up Lush Life: it was the Coltrane Prestige recording that had the highest ratings and the most stars on the back.

I took the disc back to the dorm and started listening. My then-roommate Greg was in the room and we soon were both listening: to the tremendous blown run that begins the album and “Like Someone in Love,” to the percussive experimentation of “I Love You” and the walking bass of “Trane’s Slo Blues.” And then the title cut, introduced by Red Garland’s piano followed by perfect choruses by both Trane and Donald Byrd. Partway through Byrd’s second chorus, Greg turned to me and asked, “How do you find this stuff?”

I wish I could have told him the truth, but I think I just mumbled something about being lucky.

I went on over the next few years to discover the rest of Trane’s work and to branch out into Miles, avant garde jazz, and the great blowing sessions of the 50s. I’ll be digitizing all of it in the weeks to come, but I think that none of the tracks will be as often as the five tracks from this set. I can’t even guess how many other versions of “Lush Life” I’ve found over the years (at least not without sitting in front of my home computer, though I can think of versions by Roland Hanna, Bobby Timmons, Joe Henderson, Duke Ellington (of course), and Johnny Hartman in a subsequent date with Coltrane), but this one remains the gold standard.

From Seattle, Samantha reports Mike Doughty + Death Cab + Lemony Snicket = goodness. To have been a fly on that wall…

The Great CD Ripping Project continues, after a brief hiatus while I was out of town on business. New totals: 108 albums, 1317 songs, 4:04:52:01 total time, 28.02 GB.

I’ve had to add a few new smart playlists to keep up with The Project. I still want to listen to all the music as it comes in, but the large lossless files won’t all fit on my iPod. So I’ve had to build a small Never Played playlist, limited to 100 or so tracks, to manage. I also built a smart playlist where “kind” contains Apple Lossless so that I could easily identify all the tracks that have been ripped as part of the project, and I could easily track my progress.

I’ve also had more than one occasion to bitch about the CDDB, and more particularly, about people who mangle the data for classical CDs. One version of the rant is contained in this comment on a MacOSXHint. The hint claims to provide a good way to manage classical tracks, but instead actively encourages inaccurate data.

The worst, though, is people who use the Artist field to put the movement name and put the name of the work in the Title name. This is all over the CDDB. It’s driving me up the wall, because it’s taking me at least three times as long to rip a classical CD. I’m afraid if I import the tracks with bad data, I’ll never be able to find them to reconcile them again.

Well, it took two years, but Run-DMC is finally available in the iTunes Music Store as of Tuesday.

(One) day when I was chillin’ in Kentucky Fried Chicken
Just mindin’ my business, eatin’ food and finger lickin’
This dude walked in lookin’ strange and kind of funny
Went up to the front with a menu and his money
He didn’t walk straight, kind of side to side
He asked this old lady, “Yo, yo, um…is this Kentucky Fried?”
The lady said “Yeah”, smiled and he smiled back
He gave a quarter and his order, small fries, Big Mac!
You be illin’

Just got word from RL Burnside’s label, Fat Possum, that the late blooming blues musician passed away today in Memphis at the age of 81. Going from a hardscrabble life as a sharecropper and fisherman, he recorded for the first time in 1968 but didn’t make it into the public eye until his 1996 collaboration with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. A great bluesman and a great voice.

Because I’m obsessive and am going to lose the links unless I note them here:

• Micrographia: the Microscopy of Vinyl Records
• Shure M97xE High Performance Cartridge
• Stereophile: Tweaking your Record-Player
• Van den Hul: Turntable System Setup
• Audiophilia: A Beginner’s Guide to Cartridge Setup
• Audio Asylum Audio FAQ
• And, just for kicks, the Stereophile Complaint Form

Esta, who arrived on Wednesday evening for a few days of R and R, is helping me with a very important task: auditioning a new turntable. A coworker was looking to unload a circa 1983 Denon DP-45F that hadn’t been played in eleven years.

So far the results have been mixed. On the plus side, the full automatic action is smooth, and the sound can be quite good, even without the grounding strap connected. On the minus side, the unit is an inch or so too deep for our AV shelf, meaning I would need to do another cutout (if I could and still be able to lift the glass on the turntable). More damningly, the thing skips on brand new records. I’m not sure if that’s because it needs a new stylus, because it doesn’t like 180 gram vinyl, or what. I’ll play with it a little more this weekend and see if I can isolate the problem without shelling out the money for a new stylus or cartridge (which could be substantial, according to this thread).

It is a sweet looking turntable though.

Courtesy Doveman, here’s Dead Air Space, which appears to be a group blog by the members of Radiohead. So far: announcement of a studio session, during which the guys worked on songs entitled “Suits Don’t Fit” and “Pigsee” or “Pigs Ear.” Also discussion of the band’s time off in 2004 and an intriguing confession from Thom that “it has taken me a long time to get my CONFIDENCE BACK.”

Ripped in the last few days: about eight or nine PDQ Bach albums and a bunch of jazz (Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck). —Let’s read that back. Eight or nine PDQ Bach albums. Surely, as with the Anonymous 4 recordings, one or two would suffice?

To hear me tell a joke today (or to read this blog), one would never guess that I used to gather comedic material like a beetle collects dung. Bill Cosby, Allen Sherman, the Smothers Brothers… and the psychotic classical tweakings of Peter Schickele, professor of music at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

I remember getting about a third of the musical jokes. Mostly, though, I remember listening with my parents and their friends as they roared at the musical jokes—which they did get. And I think I wanted that laughter, or that attention.

So I memorized the album that we had (“Portrait of PDQ Bach,”) then chased PDQ through album after album, listening to such wonders as the oratorio “The Seasonings” and “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice: An Opera in One Unnatural Act.” And after a while, I stopped laughing. Either Schickele was running out of material, I was losing my sense of humor, or both.

But one weird connection in the last recording in my list (The Short-Tempered Clavier): playing piano in the title work is none other than Christopher O’Riley, better known (or perhaps more infamous) for his piano renditions of Radiohead pieces. Who knew?

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.