Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy

Note: This is a long post. If you are looking for a discussion of the song, scroll down 15 paragraphs … or so. ;)

I think it was William Blake who once said that “those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.” Right on, I would say, but when you have spent some time contemplating the idea of passion in relation to your own life, perhaps Robert Sternberg said it best when he narrowed everything down to a simple statement: “Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.” If you add Seneca’s age-old observation that “it is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted”, what you have is not only a much more complicated idea, but also a pretty solid framework to go by.

I could write about this endlessly, but suffice it to say that it’s easy to see that three golden rules can be derived from the quotes above:

01. Be strongly passionate about at least some things and don’t let others tell you that you shouldn’t be.
02. Passion is never enough if it doesn’t develop into more.
03. Don’t allow harmful passions into your life. Continue Reading →

Shelly Manne & His Men at The Black Hawk

Recommending CDs is always a difficult affair. As soon as you say that some CD is desert island material for you, someone gets on your case, taking you to task for having said that, stating that the relative merit of this or that recording diminishes when taking other, more relevant recordings into consideration. On top of that, in jazz circles, one is always prone to be drawn into endless discussions with fans complaining that one is ignoring East Coast jazz when recommending a superb example of West Coast jazz, as is the case here. In the end, usually, everyone’s none the wiser.

If you read my site regularly, you know that I recommend recordings based more on a mostly emotional response. I do list some negatives here and there, but if there aren’t any, in my little world, I won’t try to come up with any. I’m also not all that objective because there are enough reviews out there that try their very best to weigh the pros and cons to give you a seemingly accurate description of a recording. That approach usually leaves me somewhat cold, although it does have its merits, because I want to read about what a recording did for someone. Is it music that resonates with a person and, most importantly, why did it have that effect?

Having said all that, the five CDs that comprise the complete reissue series of “Shelly Manne & His Men at the Black Hawk” are what I would consider to be some the best live jazz ever recorded. Whenever I’m asked why I like jazz and what jazz means to me, I put on any or all of these CDs. Considering the many thousand CDs I have, I’m often surprised that it’s really that simple. Continue Reading →

Eugen Cicero

When it comes around to music criticism, not much bothers me. One cannot argue about taste and one should try to live with critical reviews when they’re bad, just off or just badly researched. There’ll always be that one review that gets things right, negating – perhaps – those that botched things in the past.

With Eugen Cicero, things were and are different. To me he was doubtlessly a musical genius, a man with incredible technical abilities coupled with a great and definitely unique musical sensibility, brought about by a musical education that very few people had the opportunity to enjoy and yet, he was summarily trashed or politely ignored because he fused classical music with jazz at a time when it was easy to get lobbed into one basket with the Swingle Singers, Jacques Loussier and some lesser exponents of a school of jazz that has often been relegated to the living rooms of those that supposedly didn’t and don’t know squat about jazz. Continue Reading →

Les Trésors du Jazz

OK,OK, I’ll admit it. I just dislike compilations, usually. Yes, sometimes a single artist’s best-of compilation is all you could possibly want of one single artist’s output (and even twelve to fifteen tunes are eleven too many), and yes, every once in a while a compilation of different tunes from some period in music or showcasing a style one is interested in might be a good place to start.

Usually though, I dislike them because they attempt to do my job for me. As a collector, I almost always disagree with the editorial selection and I’ve all too often discovered that many of the tunes included I already had floating around my collection. On top of that, when it comes to jazz, I’ve gotten so tired of the recent flood of remix compilations of classic tunes and the policy of some major labels that limit the output for any of their artists to a steady stream of market-”safe” reissue compilations (just try to find some decent Cal Tjader reissues from Verve and all you’ll really find are, yes, compilations) that I decided to unsubscribe from, for example, Verve’s and Blue Note’s newsletters that lately have been trying nothing more but pimp the crap out of those useless things.

Then you have those “theme” thingies, you know, “Jazz for Lovers”, “Bar Jazz”, Jazz for the Bathroom”, “Jazz Standards that Absolutely NOBODY Wants to Hear Anymore”, and whatever else those labels can come up with. Dreck. Nothing but dreck. 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 →

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 →

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 →

Afterglow! Jazz Radio at Its Best

Although I’ve ripped a large part of my collection to various internal and external drives, mostly for backup reasons, I don’t listen to it much on my PC. Considering the time I spent tagging the mp3, mpc and flac files and organizing my wave and CD image backups, I think I’m wasting too much of my life away on this PC and digital stuff. The music is just sitting there, staring at me from a trillion folders, neatly tucked away, begging to be heard.

What I do instead is listen to Internet radio. Sounds stupid in light of the money invested into a pretty huge collection, but the reason is really very simple. I can never get enough of the stuff and I’m constantly on the lookout for new and old music I might like, recommendations, and discussions about obscure releases that I then try to uncover.

On top of that, I’m always on the lookout for soul mates who just seem to be on my wavelength when it comes to music, and this is where “Afterglow” comes in. It’s not so much that I’m fed new stuff constantly, but this radio programme is at the very top of my list simply because without fail, it showcases some of my favorite music and sprinkles the various playlists with music that I hadn’t heard before and which is then automatically picked up by my radar as it is flanked by music I already know and like. Continue Reading →