Music Listening - February 2010

1. Lyle Mays Improvisations For Expanded Piano
This album of mostly improvised pieces was released in 1999, but had been recorded at the end of a Pat Metheny Group world tour to promote the CD "Imaginary Day". Recorded quickly, but assembled carefully in post-production, the concept behind the CD is explained in this interview, and the details of the tunes are explained here. The final effect is stunning, a collection of almost totally improvised soundscapes, melodies and harmonies from a man who, along with Josef Zawinul, has managed to merge acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments and create unique sounds to back up a singular and unique artistic vision.

2. Zawinul Syndicate 60th Birthday Concert
This took place in Vienna, in the presence of Zawinul's childhood friend Thomas Klestl, who had by then risen to become the President of Austria. I obtained this concert (probably it is the pre-FM tape) from Dimeadozen (as ever).
The concert opens with a version of what would later be released as Gypsy Part 2 from Zawinul's 1995 solo CD "Stories Of The Danube". This version appears to be a backing tape of orchestral parts over which Zawinul and and augmented band (including, for this tune, a horn section) play, although the sound mix is poor and some of the instruments in the Syndicate band (notably the bass) are almost inaudible. The structure of the piece, with its two main themes derived from earlier Zawinul compositions "Dr. Honoris Causa" and "Pharaoh's Dance", is in place, but there is a lot more complexity to the orchestration than the final released version. The piece ends gradually, with the orchestral parts dying away, instead of the massive climax of the final recorded version.
The other highlight of this concert is the appearance of John McLaughlin, who marches on stage with his acoustic guitar/guitar synth and proceeds to almost elbow Zawinul off the stage on a duet version of "In A Silent Way".

02.4.2010 • Music I'm Currently Listening To • PermalinkPermalink

One of those "aha!" moments

Listening to "Pharaoh's Dance" today from "Bitches Brew", I discovered that the out theme from the tune "Gypsy" on Joe Zawinul's "Stores Of The Danube" is in fact a theme lifted from the end section of "Pharoah's Dance", which was written by Joe Zawinul.
The theme is initially sketched in the correct pattern, but with different "out" notes by Miles Davis on trumpet starting at around 16:40 into the tune, and then he gradually evolves his repetition of the theme statement towards the note pattern used by Zawinul on "Gypsy". This shows that Zawinul borrowed from himself twice during the process of constructing "Gypsy" - part of the main theme is a reworking of "Dr. Honoris Causa", a tune that appeared on the Weather Report LP "I Sing The Body Electric".

01.29.2010 • Music I'm Currently Listening To • PermalinkPermalink

Music Listening - January 2010

Bill Evans "Consecration"
Recorded only a couple of weeks before his death in New York, I am listening to the two original CDs (Consecration I and II) originally culled from the week residency of the Bill Evans Trio at Keystone Korner in San Francisco. Evans, backed by Scott LaFaro and Marc Johnson, is in great form on the tunes, despite the fact that he was terminally ill (he would die of multiple ailments less than a month later).

Beaver and Krause "Gandharva"
I previously wrote about Side 2 of this album, recorded live in Grace Cathedral in 1971. You will never hear anything quite like this again...

The Doors "L.A. Woman"
The last album by the original quartet, which, like a lot of classic albums, sounds great even today, nearly 40 years after its creation. The title track, with the band augmented by Jerry Scheff and Marc Benno to create a sextet, is still one of the tightest long-form rock tunes ever. Like many of the Pat Metheny Group's tunes in the 80's and 90's, the rhythmic core pattern most of the time on this title track is the ride cymbal on John Densmore's kit. Densmore's tight, punchy drumming is the centerpiece of the tune.

01.25.2010 • Music I'm Currently Listening To • PermalinkPermalink

Up to 13470 tunes on the iPod...

Inching towards the magic 14000. Life is about to get very busy, and I have major issues with the stability of my home server, so the contents may remain static for a while...

01.24.2010 • Music I'm Currently Listening To • PermalinkPermalink

And once again the music industry shoots itself...and engages in revisionism

...after a woman is fined $2.4m for downloading...24 songs.
This is beyond ubelievable, even beyond unfucking believable. It is a self-parodying joke of a justice verdict. Much like the 999 year prison term, this verdict basically shows that the justice system is totally warped when it comes to assessing damages, and that both the jurists and the RIAA are a bunch of punitive, stupid fools.
At the same time, in this article in Ars Technica, a former music industry executive admits (sort of) that the music industry should have tried to co-opt Napster when it first appeared, instead of trying to sue it out of existence.As the article explains, there is a strong whiff of historical revisionism in his comments. At the time, the attitude of the music industry towards services like Napster was one of unremitting hostility. As the article explains:

Liquid Audio, for instance, was trying to launch a DRM-protected music service years before iTunes. As Liquid Audio exec Gerry Kearby tells the story, "One day in a moment of pure honesty, [a Sony rep] said, 'Look, Kearby, my job is to keep you down. We don't ever want you to succeed.' Some of them were more interested in experimenting than others, there's no doubt about it. But they were, in effect, buggy-whip manufacturers, trying to keep the auto at bay as long as they could."

So not much has changed then...despite the apparently greater willingness to embrace digital downloading, the industry is still pushing lawsuits against a woman downloading 24 songs. Talk about using a nuclear bomb to open a nut.
UPDATE - An appeals judge has inserted some common sense into the process by slashing the damages amount down to $54,000. This is still an absurd sum out of all proportion to the actual damaged caused, and it seems that the judge was unhappy with the verdict on a broader front:

Judge Davis wrote that he arrived at the $54,000 figure by tripling the $750 minimum, thus arriving at $2,250 per song. He wrote that were it his decision, he might have reduced it even further.
"It was the jury's province to determine the award ... and this Court has merely reduced that award to the maximum amount that is no longer monstrous and shocking," he wrote.

01.23.2010 • Music Industry • PermalinkPermalink