Jan Johansson

Have you ever heard of “Jazz på Svenska”, “Jazz på Ryska, “Musik genom Fyra Sekler”, “Spelar Musik På Sitt Eget Vis”, or maybe “Den Korta Fristen”?

No? Well, join the club of several million other people who haven’t either.

Jan Johansson, that elusive musician from Sweden who recorded these and many other LPs before his death in November of 1968 at the age of 37, has not been forgotten, but he’s still largely unknown in most parts of the world and if one didn’t know better, one could call him one of the world’s best-kept secrets. Looking at a site like “Last.FM” though, you don’t need long to see that he’s around, more so than ever perhaps.

I do have to admit that I have no recollection of when Johansson entered my music collection. I have absolutely no idea if I bought the first of his recording myself or if someone gave it to me as a present. All I do know is that it took me some years to actually discover the sheer beauty of the music. For reasons unknown, the music slumbered in my collection, somewhere in the back of some long shelf, and for years I don’t think I heard any of it. With some degree of certainty I can say though that I probably got the first LP and put it away without listening to it (no idea why). That’s the only explanation. Got it, put it away. Had it been different, I would have remembered the first time I heard it. Continue Reading →

The Demise of the Record Store

I’ve often said around these parts that collecting music also incorporates something of a haptic experience. Collectors that I know don’t only go for the music, although it is certainly the central aspect of their endeavors. Some collectors get off on special packaging and exclusive collectors boxes, others are wild about cover design, label discographies and liner notes. No matter what, there’s more to it than the music itself.

Because, in retrospect, I have really been collecting music more or less from the time I first came into contact with it, I also know that actually touching the object of desire, turning it around in your hands and analyzing its various parts used to be an important part of the purchasing process. Many of the LPs and CDs I have were also not planned purchases, but spontaneous purchase decisions that were influenced by the object itself rather than a mere description of it.

All of that has changed. Continue Reading →

Organissimo

To be quite honest, I used to hate the organ. When I was a kid, we had this neighbour who liked to open up his windows in the summer and blast out this insanely irritating organ muzak for hours, scaring away just about any approaching summer breeze that had managed to survive its journey across the German-French border. It was one of those German guys, 150 kilos and all, who played one of those entertainment organ thingies, noodling through a trillion standards that he managed to reduce to the most nerve-wrecking basics. The only thing missing – and he got none of that in our neighborhood – were a large number of sufficiently drunk Germans in “Lederhosen”, clapping along as offbeat(edly) as possible. If you’ve ever been to the Oktoberfest, you know what kind of people I mean. Continue Reading →

German Shelf System ‘max’

Note: This product is no longer available. Ther company now produces a rack system called “Rio”, which I will post about in the near future.

Continue Reading →

A Love Supreme

I don’t know about you, but I’m a stubborn listener. If you have as much music as I have, you sometimes buy a recording because someone you trust or many other people have recommended it … and, upon listening to it for the first time, you actually wonder about some people’s sanity. You sit in front of your speakers, dumbfounded, trying to figure out why anyone on this planet would rave about this particular recording. You hate the singer’s voice, you think whatever is pouring from your speakers sounds like industrial noise pollution or, worse, it just doesn’t touch you at all. Nada. Zip. No emotional response.

This happens to me again and again and my reaction is usually the simplest of all: I file the recording away for later perusal. Usually, recordings I just dislike upon first hearing them get about half a year of shelf life before they see the light of day again. Continue Reading →

Moratorium

Well, I didn’t think it was ever going to happen, but it did. I ran out of space. After reshuffling and realigning my collection over and over again, every spot is filled up. I’ve reached 45 meters plus. There are plenty of options, but at the end I decided to go for the radical one: Continue Reading →

It’s Snowing on My Piano

A Christmas album. Of all the CDs and LPs I have, the grand total certainly having passed the 5000 items mark, it just had to be a Christmas album that has stayed at #1 of my all-time best list, ever since it came out. You have to read this properly, so you get the importance of that statement. I have close to 44 meters of neatly arranged music, I have downright eclectic taste, I’ve been known to switch my listening habits on a whim, radically, and everyone who’s ever been to my place knows how freakishly broad the musical range they’ll be subjected to can be. “It’s Snowing on My Piano” is still in the top spot. After 8 years of its existence.

A Christmas album of all things.
Embarrassing, really.
And, it gets worse. Continue Reading →

The Age of Mediocrity

I’m beginning to sound like our parents. Mine never really complained about what I was listening to, but it was often apparent that – despite being open-minded about everything I tormented their ears with – they thought I had gone off my rocker when I was blasting Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other (to their ears) loud and obnoxious music out the speakers (at full volume, naturally).

Because of my upbringing in a family that listened to the broadest musical range possible, I was always willing to give just about everything a chance, and I’ve followed many a fad and have heard the oddest music available at any given time, but these last years, if not this last decade and longer, I noticed that I have basically gotten sick and tired of about 99% of the music being published. You just have to have a look at my collection that seems caught in a time warp, in permanent lock-down, to actually see the effect.

I can’t really pin-point the time when I basically stopped buying new music or keeping new music I had bought, or the day I basically threw my radio out the window, shut the various music video channels down permamently and stopped reading the more widely-circulated music mags, but it did happen, and it happened for a reason. Continue Reading →