The Standing Room

Mic Check, Mic Check(Is This Thing On?)

Extra-blogospheric life has been a little out of control lately; hence the silence and infrequent updating of The Reading Room, &c. One project of several is forcing me to learn a new instrument--namely, a microphone. No need to go into detail at the moment, but suffice it to say that some interesting challenges arise when you discover that every vocal skill you've spent years developing and honing is not just useless but actually detrimental. Further clues can be found in the Amoeba stash below, collected during the Bang on a Can All-Stars' free show this evening. More free Bang music at the Marathon this Saturday at Yerba Buena.

Mel | Swingin' on the Moon | My Kind of Music | The Bethlehem Years | The Best of the Concord Years | Frank | Come Fly with Me | In the Wee Small Hours | Only the Lonely | Songs for Swingin' Lovers! | Johnny | Remembering Madison County | Lady Day | The Legacy (1933-1958) | The Complete Decca Recordings | Lady in Autumn: The Best of the Verve Years

Vingt Regards:XX. La préparation au voyage

There, all is snow and sleet,
Freezing rain, hail and wet feet.

After a decade of living in a place where 50 degrees is omg-it's-freezing- where's-my-wool-hat weather, I'm no longer sartorially equipped for these Winter Weather Advisory situations. All I can do now is hit refresh at weather.com to see what my chances are for getting out of SFO this evening. Thank goodness I made the time last night to rip the bags full of CDs that have been sitting around awaiting iPod transferral.

Recent acquisitions are too numerous to recount, but it should be noted that I've listened to Regina Spektor's Begin to Hope probably 40x this past week, Café Tacuba's Sino at least daily, and Andy Bey's Ain't Necessarily So (newly released 1997 live recording from Birdland) thrice since acquiring it 20 hours ago.

with apologies to baudelaire

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And so ends the Vingt Regards series, which lasted about a month and a half longer than I had expected. The original purpose was to force myself to post a number of short entries quickly, but this past month in particular was much fuller than anticipated. Finally, we return to our regular programming.

Vingt Regards / I. Strange Bedfellows / II. A New Era, Indeed / III. Hommage à Paolo Conte / IV. Hommage à S. Bar. / V. They Speak According to the Book / VI. Overheard in New York / VII. In Rotation: August 2007 / VIII. LA Phil's New Housemate / IX. Apples and Amoebas / X. Sunday in the Park with Bert / XI. Epilogue / XII. Taking Stock / XIII. De Quadratis Magicis / XIV. TSR's Guide to SF Elections / XV. Good Vibrations / XVI. Found Object / XVII. By the Blue Purple Yellow Red Water / XVIII. It's Macbeth in a Box / XIX. No Word from M. C—

Vingt Regards:IX. Apples and Amoebas

Another day, another pile:

Top to bottom:
Linda Ronstadt, Vols. I and II
Theatre of Voices, Litany for the Whale (Cage)
Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris, Western Wall | The Tucson Sessions
Tom Zé, Estudando o Pagode
Billy Bragg & Wilco, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II
M.I.A., Kala
Tashi, Quartet for the End of Time (Messiaen)
Stevie Wonder, Talking Book & Innervisions
Yo La Tengo, Prisoners of Love
David Sykes & the Harmonic Choir, Hearing Solar Winds
Theatre of Voices, In C (Riley)
Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane
Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (I seem to have lost my copy)
Air, Pocket Symphony
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison
Sigur Rós, Takk...
Johnny Cash, Love God Murder

A quick pitstop at Green Apple while waiting for a bus turned into an unplanned manic shopping spree. "I'm just going to get what I need at Amoeba and leave" turned into two hours of piddling about. When I was in DC, I had the distinct pleasure of finally meeting Devin Hurd of HurdAudio, and we shared our techniques for mitigating the damage at Amoeba: mine is to hang all of the cases off one forearm, and once I reach the bicep it's time for triage.

It genuinely saddens me to know that people have generally moved away from listening to full albums. At the risk of sounding all High Fidelity, I still feel that settling in with a 40-60 minute statement from an individual artist is simply more satisfying than approaching music as a haphazard collection of tracks. Likewise, I really believe, as I have for years (long before mp3s!), that there's just something different about owning a physical album. Having a cassette dub of an LP was nowhere near as interesting as sitting with the real thing on the floor of the living room, turning the cardboard over and over in your hands. It's hard for me to understand how any music listener could not want to peruse the credits, read the notes and lyrics, memorize the song titles. Maybe I'm exhibiting signs of middle age; maybe I'm hoping against hope. But I'm convinced that serious music fans of whatever ilk will always search out that experience of  going somewhere, hearing the fwap fwap fwap fwap of people browsing through dozens of albums, and having the satisfaction of having one's arm weighed down with the booty of the day. Or perhaps I'm just being an ostrich.

In the meantime, I'm grateful to have Amoeba just down the street, where I can pop in looking for Messiaen and be surprised by The Go! Team playing a free show:

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Vingt Regards / I. Strange Bedfellows / II. A New Era, Indeed / III. Hommage à Paolo Conte / IV. Hommage à S. Bar. / V. They Speak According to the Book / VI. Overheard in New York / VII. In Rotation: August 2007 / VIII. LA Phil's New Housemate

A Case of Prince

It's hard to believe my last Amoeba run was four months ago, but perhaps reports of the death of the compact disc have not been greatly exaggerated. I mean, if I've stopped going to record stores and switched to downloading album after album from eMusic, surely the CD is not long for this world....

But today's impromptu excursion was triggered by a sudden uncontrollable urge to buy as many Prince albums as I could carry on my arm—probably due to listening to A Case of U about ten times a day, every day, for two months straight. Two decades of royalty were acquired in less than 10 minutes: Parade ('86, with a quaint note that says, "For best results, you should apply the same care in handling the compact disc as you would with conventional records"), Lovesexy ('88), Graffiti Bridge ('90, totally forgot Mavis Staples is on this), Diamonds and Pearls ('91, remember when people were fascinated by holograms?), Emancipation ('96, had to skip over those questionable early '90s), Rave un2 the Joy Fantastic ('99), musicology ('04), and 3121 ('06).

However, an otherwise successful and gratifying visit was capped with this inexplicable sight:

I'm sorry: someone actually SOLD their copy? What the hell's wrong with people?!?

Bonus discs: Cornelius' Sensuous, Tracey Thorn's Out of the Woods, Rufus's Release the Stars ('bout time, I know)

Restocking

Much of this most recent Run is of the "you mean, you didn't already have that?" variety, but sometimes it's hard to spend money on great stuff you've already heard when there's so much great stuff that remains to be heard. Then you get a gift certificate, and suddenly the purse strings feel a little looser... (with gratitude—you know who you are)

Brad Mehldau, The Art of the Trio, Vol. 3: Songs
Brad Mehldau, The Art of the Trio, Vol. 4: Back at the Vanguard
Brad Mehldau, Largo
Bill Evans Trio, Everybody Digs Bill Evans
Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air
Elisabeth Söderström, Sena Jurinac, Jenufa (SF Opera, 1980)
Robbie Williams, Rudebox
Crouch End Festival Chorus, Philip Glass: Songs from Liquid Days
Björk: Family Tree
Daniel Binelli, Borges & Piazzolla: Tangos & Milongas
Astor Piazzolla & Gerry Mulligan, Summit (reunión cumbre) (1974)

One night Luis Sierra, an Argentine friend living there at the time [Paris, 1955], and I went to hear the Gerry Mulligan Octet. We came out charged. We had a coffee afterward and right then I told him that something like that, but featuring the best tango musicians, should be put together in Buenos Aires. I finished my scholarship, said goodbye to Nadia [Boulanger], and returned to Buenos Aires with the urge to explode it all.

—Astor Piazzolla, in conversation with Natalio Gorin, from Astor Piazzolla: A Memoir

Os Runs da Amoebão

12 flights in 1 month has created a monumental backlog... When will I ever find time to work through my recently acquired stash of Brazilian music? Note to São Paulo visitors: it may not be Amoeba, but FNAC on Avenida Paulista was still worthy of one visit a day (on average).

Chico Buarque de Hollanda: Os Primeiros Anos (3 CDs)
O Choro e sua História (3 CDs)
Encontro dos Mestres do Choro (1977 live concert)
Altamiro Carrilho: Choros Imortais no. 2
Zeca Baleiro: Baladas do Asfalto & outros blues
Raimundo Fagner & Zeca Baleiro: Daqui Pra Lá De Lá Pra Cá
Baden Powell: Live à Bruxelles
Warner 30 Anos: Baden Powell
Warner 30 Anos: Tom Zé
A Arte de Jorge Ben Jor
A Nova Bossa por Jair Rodrigues
Bruno Morais: Volume Zero
Kraftworld: Brazilian Tribute to Kraftwerk
Fernanda Porto: Giramundo
Martinho da Vila: Ta Delícia, Ta Gostoso
Zélia Duncan: Intimidade
Zélia Duncan: Sortimento Vivo

In other news, it sure is nice to finally return to singing after being away from it for more than a year.

Back West

A morning of sweet tomatoes at the Ferry Bldg + an impromptu Amoeba Run with The Divine Miss N— = a welcome return to the quotidian

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The Hilliard Ensemble: Tenebrae (Gesualdo)
David Krakauer: Bubbemeises: Lies My Gramma Told Me
RIAS-Kammerchor: Martin & Messiaen
Matthew Herbert: Scale
Singcircle: Stimmung (Stockhausen)
Bill Evans Trio: Waltz for Debby
Van Dam, Upshaw/ Nagano: Saint François d'Assise (Messiaen)

Comedy Tonight

The reward at the end of yet another long day:

Buncha Ligeti (natch)
Buncha Sinatra (Columbia years)
Buncha choral stuff (Marshall, Berio, Pärt, Harrison, Kyr)
Kanye's Late Registration (finally)
Feldman's Three Voices
Vivica Genaux's Arias for Farinelli
Jamie Lidell's Multiply Additions (the only new CD of the lot)

and, the greatest treasure of all, the culmination of years of digging through clearance bins:

Michael Bolton singing Vesti la giubba, Che gelida manina, E lucevan le stelle, and, of course, Nessun dorma! $2.99 has never yielded so many laughs.

Amoeba Run: Silver Lining and Ruby Slippers

Maybe LA isn't so bad after all.

Sr. A-, a musician of significant skill as well as my gracious host and companion for the weekend, had ne'er been to an Amoeba of any persuasion. This I deemed a travesty that needed to be rectified.   

We had a mere 1/2 hour to spend, en croute as we were from the Griddle Cafe to Disney Hall. Jessica, you will be pleased to know that at Amoeba one can acquire an entire library of Korngold discs in under 30 minutes. As for me, $37 yielded:

Jessye Norman, Les nuits d'été / Shéhérazade
New York Voices, Sing! Sing! Sing!
Vivica Genaux, Bel Canto Arias
Perfect Harmony: The Vocal Ensembles

and...

Judy at Carnegie!

Driving down Sunset Blvd. with the top down in a red Porsche singing The Man that (sic) Got Away along with Judy Garland—can there be any more appropriate lead-in to two hours of Steve Reich?

Will Return by...

Thanks to everyone for all your kind words, both in and out of Blagueville. I am a few short hours away from flying off to rejoin the clan for a week. It's going to be a long night. Thank goodness I'm still working through a couple recent Amoeba Runs:

RCA/MET 100 Singers, 100 Years (6CD set) - had eye on for forever
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Turangalila (Messiaen)
Julius Eastman: Eight Songs for a Mad King (Davies) - wow
Jessye Norman: Richard Strauss Lieder
Philip Glass: Songs from Liquid Days
Matmos: A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure
Jamie Lidell: Muddlin Gear - omg, last track
Meredith Monk: Our Lady of Late
Meredith Monk: Songs from the Hill / Tablet
Alison Krauss and Union Station: Lonely Runs Both Ways
Kaija Saariaho: Prisma
Boards of Canada: Geogaddi
Eighth Blackbird: Fred
Gerald Finley: A Song—For Anything / Songs by Charles Ives
Michael Gordon: Decasia
Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel
Salamone Rossi: The Songs of Solomon, Vol. 1 / Music for the Sabbath - people need to be singing more Rossi

Bonus tracks, courtesy of Mlle B-:

Mocky: Navy Brown Blues
Ezekiel Honig: People Places & Things
Tosca: j.a.c.

Blog archives here, del.icio.us archives here, all the Whos in Blagueville here. Back when I'm back.