I haven't posted much lately, which always makes me feel both lazy and that I must post something pretty good to make up for it. This is not that pretty good post. Instead it's some nonsense about music. Sorry.
I recently visited St Louis and doing so got me thinking about driving across the country, and what music I would listen to if I did that. I'm thinking of a playlist made up of ten blues albums, ten jazz albums, ten folk albums, ten country albums, and ten rock'n'roll albums. Within each genre I'd like, within reason, to approximate an ideal of two albums by each of the best two female artists, two albums by each of the best two male artists, one compilation, and one album by someone else. And the idea is to emphasize classics, so nothing of merely historical interest and nothing too recent. All artists should be from the USA.
What's likely to happen is that I don't ever do the road-trip but do create and listen to the playlist. So I'd like it to be good.
If you have suggestions, e.g., for specific albums, feel free to make them here.
Sounds like sort of an American road trip counterpart to "Desert Island Discs", since, in addition to repaying close and repeated listening, and immunity to loss of interest, they should have a personal emotional resonance, or at least the ability to evoke it.
ReplyDeleteAs far as suggestions are concerned, I don't know much about folk or country, but what about pop music that's not rock (or rock & roll), e.g., Michael Jackson's Off the wall, or Rufus and Chaka Khan's Street Player, or Abba?
But I found it interesting to consider the question of who are the "best" female jazz instrumentalists, of which we yearn for more? I would offer, e.g.: 1. Joanne Brackeen, piano (e.g., Take a chance); 2. Regina Carter, violin (e.g., Paganini: After a dream); or 3. Geri Allen, piano. (For the vocalists, I would suggest Betty Carter, Sara Vaughan, Ella.)
Do you want the "best" artists or the "best" albums? (I use scare quotes because I'm sure you don't want the most popular or the critics' choices, which I, for one, never like.) E.g., for Miles, Kind of blue is so often played, but for a road trip I would suggest Miles ahead. Coltrane, Monk, Bill Evans are a must.
JPL
Thanks! I have wondered about pop or soul or R&B. Perhaps I should combine them into one additional category. In the US, R&B seems to be what in the UK is called soul, while in the UK, R&B means middle aged white men in tight suits playing The Who covers in a pub. Not my thing at all. But a strictly US pop/soul/R&B category could be very good, I suspect.
DeleteAs far as personal emotional resonance goes, this will be more a case of the ability to evoke it than of already having it, since I aim to listen to stuff I don't already know. So Ella Fitzgerald might be out, unless I can find albums I haven't heard before. Which I probably can.
And as for the best artists or albums, I am looking for some mix of most popular, most critically acclaimed, most representative, and personally appealing to me. So it's tricky. Thankfully none of it matters, but it's fun to think about.
So far I have one Bob Dylan album for the folk category, but I'll also take your suggestions into serious consideration.
As part of the process of finishing my book, I've been re-reading your old posts on music and my own comments on them. Here's one post where I put off commenting at the time for so long that I finally let it drop, but better late than never.
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The restriction to albums is a bit problematic, as the dominance of the album occupies such a short proportion of the history of recorded music. The record industry as we know it started in the 1890s, but the idea of the album as an artform basically only dates from 1967 and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper – which was the first LP of popular music to a) include the lyrics on the cover, and b) omit the scrolls between individual tracks in the vinyl, implying that it was meant to be listened to in one go. (Although the LP format itself was launched in 1948, and the word "album" is even earlier than that: it originally meant a photograph-album-like contraption enclosing 3 to 6 singles, which had started to be popular from the 1930s onwards.) In the 21st century, the album has again ceased to mean much at all, as so much new music is initially released in dribs and drabs on streaming services and only collected into "albums" after the fact.
Of course if compilation albums are allowed, that changes the terms of debate: the very first jazz album I'd recommend, for instance, would probably be The Golden Age Of American Popular Music: The Jazz Hits.
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The confusion about the term R&B has a banal explanation: it was coined in 1949 as the term for a particular market segment of the US music industry – that of blacks – to replace earlier terms such as "race music", "ebony" and "sepia", which had come to sound quaint and/or racist. Ever since, in the US it has meant whatever music the black population there is currently both performing and buying in quantities at any given time.
In the UK by contrast, the term came into wide usage as part of the rock group boom around 1964, the year the Rolling Stones had their first number one hits and the Who released their first single. And it's been locked into forever meaning R&B-in-the-US-sense-of-the-term of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as performed by anyone, including the white European groups for which it was the springboard.
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DeleteAt first I felt like saying "what, no classical" but then I thought I'd knock you for a loop precisely by drawing up a list of ten classical albums (from the LP era). A "mix of most popular, most critically acclaimed, most representative, and personally appealing" such as you requested:
1. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, American Piano Music (1844–69) (Amiram Rigai) (1979)
2. Charles Ives, String Quartet No. 1 (1897–1900) / String Quartet No. 2 (1913–15) (Juilliard String Quartet) (1967)
3. Carl Ruggles, The Complete Music Of Carl Ruggles (1919–58) (Michael Tilson Thomas, Buffalo Philharmonic) (1980)
4. George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue (1924) / An American in Paris (1928) (William Steinberg, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra) (1960)
5. Ferde Grofé, Grand Canyon Suite (1929–31) (Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra) (1955)
6. William Dawson, Negro Folk Symphony (1934) (Leopold Stokowski, American Symphony Orchestra) (1963)
7. Aaron Copland, Billy the Kid (1938) / Statements for Orchestra (1932–35) (Aaron Copland, London Symphony Orchestra) (1959)
8. Harold Shapero, Symphony for Classical Orchestra (1947) (Leonard Bernstein, Columbia Symphony Orchestra) (1954)
9. Morton Feldman, New Directions in Music 2 (1951–57) (various performers) (1959)
10. Lukas Foss, Studies in Improvisation (1959) (Lukas Foss, Improvisation Chamber Ensemble) (1961)
Sorry, all male, it was a sexist world. I don't know enough contemporary classical to recommend ten female US composers.
Thanks, Tommi!
DeleteClassical is definitely out, I'm afraid, at least for now.I find that when I listen to it I have to turn the volume up high to hear the quiet parts, and then the loud parts are VERY loud. So it doesn't go with traveling. I like your suggestion for a jazz compilation album though.
Well, this is not a problem with someone like Morton Feldman, who's the quietest composer in history, to the extent of this being a well-worn cliché about him. You have to turn him up to hear anything at all. Gottschalk's piano music also doesn't have much dynamics, it's basically piano jazz but doesn't sound like it because the blues scale hadn't been invented yet.
DeleteOr alternatively you can always simply drop the requirement to travel. (Right now, of course, you're probably having to drop it whether you like it or not.) That said, another way of ensuring sufficient diversity could perhaps be to travel, but to listen to music originating in the parts of the US through which one travels: Chuck Berry in St. Louis, Dylan in Minnesota and so on.
I'm not traveling now, it's true. I might have to look into Gottschalk and Feldman though. Thanks for the tip.
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