Ten Albums: A subjective list

Last week someone asked to name my ten favorite albums and write a line or two about each. The hard part was I had less than an afternoon to do it.

Like all such lists the one I came up with is wholly subjective, and subject to change as life and listening go on. My one bit of disobedience was that I refused to rank them. (Regrets: having to bump Wang Chung's long-forgotten Points on the Curve and They Might Be Giants Flood.)

Bleg: What kind of a list would you come up with in a hurry?

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Top Albums (alphabetical by artist)

Common: Finding Forever - Despite all the guest stars and contributors, Common and Kanye West create something that is integrated and whole, at once forceful and majestic.

Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks - There are many peaks and valleys in the mountain range that is Dylan's career, but this really reaches the heights. He's at the top of his form here, no longer the former folkie and not yet the impressionistic pattern weaver he'd become.

Miles Davis: Kind of Blue - Ornette Coleman released "The Shape of Jazz to Come" the same year, but in many ways that title applies more accurately to this collection. This is one of the best-selling jazz records of all time and with good reason: superlative musicians working at the top of their form. (Also see/hear this NPR Jazz Profile on the making of KOB.)

Duke Ellington: Jazz Party - Most of Ellington's brilliant early-career work came before the advent of the long-playing disc and I don't think he ever came to fully exploit the format. Jazz Party is an exception. The several suites and longer compositions seem to work together. Guest stars like Dizzy Gillespie and Jimmy Rushing don't hurt either.

Glenn Gould: The Goldberg Variations - Specifically the original recording from 1955. A true blast from the past, the young Gould picks up Bach's work and blows away the dust and cobwebs of decades of polite deference. It's still a refreshingly brisk experience. (Also see/hear this remarkable film of Gould revisiting the same material in 1964.)

k.d. lang: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues Soundtrack - I remember watching this godawful movie in the theater and thinking, "I've got to get the soundtrack!" An impressive demonstration of the broad range of styles that lang and her collaborator Ben Mink are capable of mastering, everything from mid-70s groove to thrashy polka. What's happened to them in recent years is hard to say.

Yo-Yo Ma: The Bach Cello Suites - Dip in anywhere you like, the water is deep and satisfying. And I think this Yo-Yo Ma kid really as a future.

Willie Nelson: Stardust - Never a patient one in the studio, Nelson reportedly found the process of recording this album with Booker T. Jones a little grueling. The results are well worth it. It's also worth picking up the 30th Anniversary reissue for the versions of "Scarlet Ribbons" and "I Can See Clearly Now."

Prince: Purple Rain Soundtrack - The Artist Formerly Etc. has kept up an amazing productivity over the years, but I'm still stunned by just how tightly conceived and executed the music on this album is. Particularly the last four songs (formerly known as Side B). Once "When Doves Cry" starts, I'm there through "Purple Rain."

Cal Tjader & Eddie Palmieri: El Sonido Nuevo (The New Sound) - So maybe the title is a little grandiose, but the combination of Tjader and Palmieri is still at once hot and ultra cool.

Miscellany: Accordion Madness

"ACCORDION, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin."
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The sentiments of crabby Ambrose aside, here's a random assortment of vids featuring TNLD's favorite instrument.

Richard Galliano performing Piazolla's Libertango


A Tejano Accordion Summit: David Lee Garza, Flaco Jimenez, David Farias, Mingo Saldivar and Pete Ibarra performing at the Texas Talent Musicians Association's Tejano Music Awards show many years ago.


TMBG - The Statue Got Me High

Free: Ari Hoenig's Green Spleen

Word to the budget-wise: A free mp3 of drummer Ari Hoenig's funky-wah-wah composition "Green Spleen" is available here. Check it out.

It's from Hoenig's new CD "Bert's Playground" which dropped last month (on Dreyfus Jazz, a very cool French label).

Hoenig is joined by a raft of top-shelf NY jazzheads: Chris Potter and Will Vinson on their saxophones, Jonathan Kreisberg and Gilad Hekselman on their guitars, and doghousers Matt Penman and Orlando LeFleming (not all at the same time, of course, he's not Ornette Coleman). It's a mixture of new compositions and standards run through a sensibility that Hoenig refers to as "Punk Bop" which explains thusly:

"As a kid, I listened to a lot of punk and hardcore music as well as metal, reggae, funk, hip-hop, house and pop... I wanted to incorporate all my influences in this band..."

Long live the multiverse.

More info at Ari Hoenig's website and/or Myspace page.

Bonus viddie: Here's Hoenig's quartet (with Penman, Jean-Michel Pilc on piano and Jacques Schwartz-Bart on sax) perfroming "SKA" at the Fat Cat in NYC.

Music to smash atoms by

A couple weeks back, I had the pleasure of attending the premier of The Atom Smashers at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. (I had this pleasure because my friend Clayton Brown is one of the directors.) The Atom Smashers documents three years in the lives of a group of physicists at the DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Lab (or Fermilab) in Batavia, IL, as they search for the Higgs boson, an elusive and for the moment purely theoretical sub-atomic particle (sometimes referred to as the God Particle), which promises to unlock the origins of the universe.

Clayton and his co-director Monica Ross turn what could easily be a geeked-out, yo-Poindexter snoozefest into a compelling and moving story by focusing on the people behind the search. Their search takes place against a backdrop of increasing cuts in US spending on basic science research as well as the prospect of the opening of an even larger particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland.

One aspect of the The Atom Smashers that works especially well is the score by Kate Simko. I bring it up in this ostensibly (some would say allegedly) musical venue to direct you to a pair of illuminating posts on the subject. Simko's short essay about composing the score appeared on the blog Modyfier (coincidentally on the same day as the premier). This prompted a post by Clayton on the Atom Smashers blog about how creating the score fit into the overall four-year-plus process of putting the entire film together.

The Tevatron (Fermilab's 40-year old particle accelerator) was a beautiful, ugly, advanced and primitive machine with percolating valves, hi-tech computers, rusting bolts, dirty concrete, gleaming surfaces, and a devious personality. What's more, it was located smack in the middle of a prairie, with native grasses and buffalo wandering around. We knew that somehow we needed music to reflect this crazy combination of unfathomable technology and raw nature. A tall order.

In the end, they nail it (and I was pleased to find that Simko had used an accordion, albeit "highly-effected" samples from one to achieve many of the effects). But don't take my word for it. A slightly abridged version of The Atom Smashers will air in November as a part of the PBS series Independent Lens. Check your local listings, dammit. Smashers is also being screened at festivals including the Vancouver International Film Festival last weekend and, later this month, the Bergen International Film Festival in Norway (try the herring).

And someday soon, you'll be able to buy yourself a copy. Stay tuned. In the meantime, congrats to Clayton and the crew at 137 Films. [UPDATE: Here's the link to buy a copy and support 137 Films in the process.]

(Image above pilfered from 137 Films.)

Viddie: Bag's Groove

For your Friday, an YouTube oddity. The great Milt Jackson rehearsing his eponymous tune in 1994 with a Hungarian Dixieland band. Even in a rehearsal room Bags is pure genius. (Stick around until the end and tell me whether it seems like Bags doesn't exactly appreciate taking direction from the helpful Hungarian.)

Groove on.

New to the TNLD Blogroll: The Jazz Session

Pardon the dust around these parts. I promise I haven't forgotten about the three of you.

This is long overdue, but I feel the need to plug The Jazz Session, a fine jazz blog with a great jazz podcast to boot. If I were ever to do a jazz podcast, I'd hope it could be half as good as the podcast that host Jason Crane does every week. Crane brings both knowledge and a genuine enthusiasm to the proceedings and generally keeps the conversation from degrading into arcane shop talk for experts. I'm still working my way through the archives, but recent interviews with Aaron Parks and Eddie Daniels have both been a treat.

Better git it in your feed reader.