Category: Music

The ultimate iTunes arbitrage experience is here. Consider Miles Davis’s Pangaea. Two 40 minute long tracks. Price on Amazon: $16.99.

Price on iTunes: $0.99 per track. That’s right, a buck-98 for the whole shootin’ match.

I think that the unexpected cancellation of the Lollapalooza tour could be the best thing to happen to music this summer. Proof? I get to see Sonic Youth at a small club in Seattle instead of at a big festival. And while their show at Bumbershoot 2002 was fantastic, the small club show should be a lot less…safe, certainly if their show on the Thousand Leaves tour that I saw at the 9:30 with Craig is any indication.

At ArtOfTheMix.com, my newest mix: Back It Up Like a U-Haul Truck. The title comes from the Jay-Z song “Change Clothes,” which somewhat improbably (if you take a look at the other stuff I listen to) is on the mix. What can I say? The Dangermouse remix got to me. Copies of the mix will be on the way soon to the usual suspects. (Also available in limited form on iTunes.)

Reposted after it mysteriously disappeared yesterday afternoon

On Thursday afternoon I was getting ready to write an obituary for Robert Quine, guitar hero who apparently killed himself last weekend, when I heard on KEXP that Ray Charles had passed away. Both will be missed. Ray Charles was starting to be in danger of being a living Mt Rushmore, so much a part of America through his constant TV appearances and patriotic performances (even well into his 70s) that people like me thought of him as a monument rather than a living musician. Hopefully this will be an occasion, past the mourning, to evaluate and appreciate his truly astounding artistry as well as his life.

Most of what I see on Google News is the AP release (which is identifiable for listing one of his best known songs as “What’dI Say” (note the lack of space—proving that even the best papers don’t copyedit wire feed)). Here’s the BBC obituary.

Regarding Robert Quine: as much as Ray Charles was a towering monument on the landscape, I think Quine was more influential for me personally through his boostership of the Velvet Underground and his truly seminal work with Lou Reed on The Blue Mask and with Tom Waits on Rain Dogs.

If it were just the new Cowboy Junkies, it would be a happy day; likewise a new Sonic Youth. But a new Cowboy Junkies, Sonic Youth, AND PJ Harvey???? Bliss.

Maybe detailed reviews will come later. In the meantime, let me note that “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” would make a great band name.

—And one other note. Of the two friends and bloggers that I met this weekend who gave me mix CDs, one made a mix containing the original version of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” and the other one had a 6:20 bluegrass hoedown cover of “Gin and Juice.” Who gave me the original? If you’re guessing Greg, you’re wrong. That would be my beloved one-quarter-preacher sister, keeping her mind on her money and her money on her mind…

I was thinking the other day about Elliott Smith again, how I really miss his music, and it got me to thinking. Sometime last year before he apparently killed himself, Elliott put a new 7 inch (45, for those not hip to the terminology) out on Suicide Squeeze, a label here in Seattle. I heard the song on KEXP one night and thought, Man, that sounds bleak. Anyway, in all the subsequent tragedy I forgot about the song.

Until last week, when it occurred to me to look for it. The album he was working on hasn’t been released, and the single isn’t available digitally. But it is available on vinyl still. So I ordered a copy of “Pretty (Ugly Before)” b/w “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free” from Suicide Squeeze. It arrived today and I put it on. It’s like a valentine from Elliott. Some songs, like “No Name No. 5,” that he recorded years before the incident sound a lot more suicidal and dangerous to my ears today than this last of his recordings. This one sounds energetic, but it sounds angry. And somehow that makes me feel better. Elliott didn’t go quietly. He went fighting.

You just have to hear this: Rodeohead. Mashing up, by my count so far, about ten songs from Pablo Honey all the way to Hail to the Thief. Complete with whistling sibilants, yodels, and killer fiddle lines.

Reuters: Elvin Jones of the John Coltrane Quartet Dies. While not a surprise (he played his last gig a week or two ago with an oxygen tank on stage), this is still sad news. For years Elvin was one of the most vital forces in jazz, and his powerfully propulsive drum style was a foundation for the John Coltrane Quartet’s sound—and for his own solo career.

I saw Elvin play in a small theater at the University of Virginia on February 19, 1993, at Virginia’s late lamented JazzFest (alas, this is the only web evidence I can find for the shows). I didn’t try to write down my impressions at the time, but I remember thinking that in a festival that was dedicated to Coltrane and swimming in jazz giants, he easily stole the show (and stole the set from Ravi Coltrane, the late saxophone giant’s son, who was playing with Elvin’s band). His physical presence—big, muscular, imposing—was secondary only to his musical presence. Without my notes, the best I can do is point to this description of Elvin’s playing, which squares pretty well with my memory of the set in Old Cabell Hall.

Fare thee well, Elvin.

Weird to see so much music on 78s become newly available all at once. It appears that Boing Boing’s staff has been on a tear finding these sites. Witness :

• 78s2CDs.com, which appears to specialize in Gilbert and Sullivan and Alma Gluck (via Boing Boing)
• Vintage78.com, a site that will make custom tapes of the 78s of your choice (and also sells pre-sequenced CD samplers) (via Boing Boing)
• The 78 section of Open Source Music collection at Archive.org, which includes lots of old Appalachian, blues, and gospel 78 records that have been digitized
• And for bonus points an interview with Terry Zwigoff about “old time music” and collecting 78s. The site that hosts the interview, Old Hat Records, sells CD reissues, including the interesting sounding “Music from the Lost Provinces: Old Time String Bands from Ashe County, North Carolina and Vicinity” (also via Boing Boing)

Today’s listening comes courtesy of Cellophane Square, the excellent used music store in Seattle’s U-District about which I’ve written before. I grabbed a handful of really nice vinyl there Thursday, including today’s listening, the Beatles’ Help!. Judging from this guide, the record I got was not an original pressing—it probably dates from after 1976—but it’s still a kick to listen to the music the way it was meant to be heard.

Other finds included the Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, Get Happy!! by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and David Byrne’s Music from the Knee Plays, a soundtrack of sorts to a Robert Anton Wilson play that I don’t believe has ever been reissued on CD. In fact, as luck would have it, I have never heard any of these albums (except excerpted on greatest hits), so I’m in for some good listening if I ever get some time near my record player.

New theme mix, catalog number JHNCD009, “I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs.” Inspired by too many Friday nights listening to Shake the Shack on KEXP. It actually covers a lot of ground, from British dancehall comedy to Swedish drinking songs to country and western to the inevitable Tom Waits. Not sure how well it coheres but I’ve been sitting on it too long already.

CD copies are on the way to all subscribers. Others can purchase a subset of the songs on the iTunes Music Store.

Generally under-reported yesterday: some long out of print singles are now available on the iTunes Music Store. Specifically, the first 45 singles ever released by Motown. Hopefully this leads to more deserving out of print material being made available.

Moving quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous: I voted yesterday for KEXP.org in the Radio category of this year’s Webby Awards. Looking in some of the other categories, I came across weirdomusic.com. What sublime weirdness and wonderfulness: links to the MP3 archive at Ubu.com, including tons of readings by Burroughs, Bukowski, Plath, and even William Carlos Williams; to April Winchell Multimedia, featuring the broadest collection of just plain weird music ever (special favorite: “Keep Your Restrooms Clean, Men” by the Red Lion Gasoline Company); and to Dana’s Downloadable Album of the Month. Which, for (I guess) one more day, features Sheldon Allman’s Folk Songs for the 21st Century.

DC’s Fugazi is the latest band to make a deep catalog of their live shows available for purchase to their fans. It looks like even with only 20 shows, they’re already running into production difficulties. Small wonder, what with the killer pricing (two CDs for $10 for US addresses).

I’m not a huge obsessive fan, but I might have to cough up for a live version of “Bed for the Scraping.” There are some great reactions by more obsessive fans at Technorati.

I just used the new Party Mix feature of iTunes 4.5 for the first time. The first song was “Son of Sam” by Elliott Smith, followed by…“Sister Ray.”

Man, that’s some kind of party.

iTunes 4.5 is out, with support for lossless imports (via Quicktime 6.5.1), WMA import on Windows, music videos…and shared playlists. You can click any playlist in iTunes and publish it to the iTunes Music Store. You can also click any song title, album title, or artist and jump to the appropriate content in the iTMS.

I don’t have any good playlists on my work computer (mostly random shuffle things) but I have a ton at home, and will publish them in the store tonight. I’m curious to see how the feature (which appears to be called iMix) will handle tracks that aren’t for sale; probably it will just omit them.

Update: Behold, my first iMix playlist, a version of this mix. The difference is all the songs I listed as “missing” (i.e. not available in the iTMS). Vote for it, won’t you? I also noted looking at some other mixes that user submitted mix names get passed through the same profanity filter that song titles do, but that it appears to be possible to elude the filter by choosing your slang appropriately.