Non-Classical Music Listening Thread!

[aligreto]

Chris De Burgh: Spanish Train

[Todd]

Revisiting some choice cuts as sort of homework for Mr Stapleton's stab at that national anthem for the big game.

[Todd]

Balloon music.

[Operafreak]

Led Zeppelin IV

    Led Zeppelin

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Highway Star, Deep Purple live in Japan.
Perhaps one of the best compositions in rock music? Too bad the lyrics is silly.

[71 dB]

JETHRO TULL - ROCK ISLAND

I borrowed this from a friend. I haven't been into this kind of music much. This is well-performed stuff, but for my ears a bit boring and on the safe side. The tracks are very similar to each other with blues and folk influences and Ian Anderson's flute feels it tries to fit in to the music. At best this music contains some more modern feeling prog rock and synth music elements that bring much needed spice, but the tracks tend to fall quickly back to the safe blues/folk routines with the flute trying to fit in like harmonica in blues.

[SimonNZ]

RIP Burt Bacharach

[George]

[Todd]

Going local.  Small Million, Before the Fall

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

This Guy's In Love With You · Pat Dinizio.

[71 dB]

JEAN-MICHEL JARRE - EQUINOXE INFINITY

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head (Burt Bacharach), Aoi Teshima.

[Karl Henning]

JETHRO TULL - ROCK ISLAND

I borrowed this from a friend. I haven't been into this kind of music much. This is well-performed stuff, but for my ears a bit boring and on the safe side. The tracks are very similar to each other with blues and folk influences and Ian Anderson's flute feels it tries to fit in to the music. At best this music contains some more modern feeling prog rock and synth music elements that bring much needed spice, but the tracks tend to fall quickly back to the safe blues/folk routines with the flute trying to fit in like harmonica in blues.

I'm quite a fan of Tull, but I haven't bothered with this album.
Here's a track I've always loved:

[SimonNZ]

A really interesting 90-minute interview on the Ezra Klein podcast:

The Tao of Rick Rubin

"In his new book, "The Creative Act: A Way of Being," Rubin turns his philosophy of creativity into a manual for living. It is not, to be honest, the book I was expecting. It is less about music than mind states: awareness, openness, discernment, attunement to nature, nonjudgmental listening, trust in your own taste. It is at once mystical and practical, alive to the tensions of creation but intent on holding them gently. I found it unexpectedly moving.

We discuss how Rubin listens to new music, the importance of staying open to the natural world, the difficulty of appreciating art that's different from what you already like, the rituals that artists like Carlos Santana have when recording, why minimalist composers like Steve Reich are just as "extreme" as heavy metal bands, how Rubin helped Johnny Cash strip down his sound and revive his career, what it takes to level up your taste, the difficulty and gifts of awareness, the relationship between speed and art, how streaming culture is changing our taste, the kind of music that makes Rubin stop and pay attention and oh so much more. This one's a delight."

[Pohjolas Daughter]

A really interesting 90-minute interview on the Ezra Klein podcast:

The Tao of Rick Rubin

"In his new book, "The Creative Act: A Way of Being," Rubin turns his philosophy of creativity into a manual for living. It is not, to be honest, the book I was expecting. It is less about music than mind states: awareness, openness, discernment, attunement to nature, nonjudgmental listening, trust in your own taste. It is at once mystical and practical, alive to the tensions of creation but intent on holding them gently. I found it unexpectedly moving.

We discuss how Rubin listens to new music, the importance of staying open to the natural world, the difficulty of appreciating art that's different from what you already like, the rituals that artists like Carlos Santana have when recording, why minimalist composers like Steve Reich are just as "extreme" as heavy metal bands, how Rubin helped Johnny Cash strip down his sound and revive his career, what it takes to level up your taste, the difficulty and gifts of awareness, the relationship between speed and art, how streaming culture is changing our taste, the kind of music that makes Rubin stop and pay attention and oh so much more. This one's a delight."

Sounds like an interesting podcast! 

PD

[71 dB]

I'm quite a fan of Tull, but I haven't bothered with this album.
Here's a track I've always loved:

Thanks Karl. This is clearly much older JT than what I have been listening. It sounded promising in the beginning (nice percussion), but the track didn't really go anywhere.

[aligreto]

Agnetha Fältskog





Nothing here, songwriting wise, is of a high standard and this will be culled from my collection. I really do feel that she missed the quality of songwriting of her previous band colleagues.

[George]

[KevinP]

So I'm an old blues guy from the Southside. I'm open to new artists but won't deny that I'm hard to please though I'll maintain that I always *want* to be pleased. I just find them usually so respectful of the genre that they sound stilted. There's a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't problem here: if you try to expand on what the blues can do, you come off as inauthentic, and if you don't, you're just recreating museum pieces. Either way, you're criticised.

And along the way, many new blues singers miss one of the most important things. Time was, a blues artist did a specific style, like Howlin' Wolf doing Chicago blues, Profesor Longhair doing New Orleans piano blues, etc. With modern newcomers, you get an album that says, 'Here's my Chicago blues' and then 'Here's my New Orleans number,' 'This one is this album's soul blues song,'  'Now I'm going to pay tribute to B.B.King,' 'Here's a piano/vocal duet like Bessie Smith,' and 'Now I'll be accompanied by an acoustic bottleneck guitar,' etc. Not every young blues artist falls into this post-modern approach, but it's an all-too-common pitfall. The great artists of the past didn't record albums that were travelogues of the various regional takes on the blues. They did their own approach.

I don't blame any particular artist. This is just what the blues is today: codified. Even Koko Taylor's last album kind of went this route, though the songs weren't quite as disparate as I'm describing here.

So all of that is the backdrop to mention some albums I've been listening to.

I've had Beth Hart and Joe Bonamassa's Black Coffee since it came out and I like it a lot. I love her singing in that she's really living the words and in that she has a very unique and powerful vibrato. The album also manages to sidestep the problems I've described above. There's a unified sound to the whole thing, largely because of Bonamassa's guitar and the fact that this is very much a duet album (vocalist and instrumentalist, each with their own, strongly developed voice).



Nonetheless, I wanted to hear her without him, in a less overt rock setting. Enter this album:



This one speaks to me more directly. I wouldn't call it a 'blues album.' But like a very select handful of singers (Etta, Billie, Janis, etc.), even when she's not singing the blues, she's singing the blues. And that's what makes this album work. She doesn't need to rely on tired guitar riffs to signal 'blues'.

Anyway, I would recommend both albums.

Okay, next singer. Whereas Hart has been recording since the 90s, Ina Forsman really is a newcomer. I bought two albums on spec, which turned out to be her first (2016) and third (and most recent), not counting collabs. They're very different albums. The first is very much a blues album, but one that does fall into the traps I described above. She has an amazing voice though, one that manages to be somewhat silky and somewhat smokey at the same time. Vocally, this is a very good album, but I'm let down by the tour guide approach.



The other album, however, is brilliant. Like the Beth Hart solo album, this one doesn't try to be a blues album. To quote the Amazon editorial review: 'She no longer relies on formulas that have worked for the last 50 years, but trusts in her very own vocabulary for the nocturnal atmospheres of her big city songs'. (Saying '50 years' is understating it, incidentally.) It's also not a jazz album. And contemporary vocal jazz, I'm afraid, suffers from much of the same problems as blues: the way you convey that you are, in fact, a jazz singer is to include a couple of the same old tired 'standards' for proof.

But as I said, this isn't that. One of the customer reviews I saw on Amazon dismissed it as a Las Vegas show, which is why I bought both albums, only to find I completely disagree with that person. While I would not compare her voice or vocal abilities to Nancy Wilson's, I would say there's a similarity in the aim. Wilson rarely recorded out-and-out jazz albums, and her approach was consistent no matter what context the producer situated her in. Wilson generally aimed at a pop market without pandering to it. She recorded what she recorded, and if you liked it, great. I would place this Forsman album (All There Is) in that neighbourhood. She wrote and sang what she wanted to sing. Classic pop, jazz, blues and soul are there in every song. You either meet it where it is or you don't.

[George]

And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets so crowded that you can't look out the
Window in the morning?