Swimming in the shallow end of the meme pool.
When not singing, parking or Amoeba-ing in San Francisco, The Standing Room has been known to toss a meme baton or two. So the current music meme visits this spare corner of the blogosphere...
Total Volume of Music on your computer?
On this machine I have personal and professional music stuff mingled together running the gamut from love to pay-the-bills filling up 33.2 GB with 68,979 files in 7,731 folders. If I include all the computers, removable hard drives and portable digital audio players in my life I probably close in on close to 100GB of ripped music. But the real treasures are the 670MB slices found on all the CDs piling up all over the place and the sounds that echo within undocumented recesses of my mind.
Last CD you bought?
I put in one last order at the Downtown Music Gallery just prior to packing everything up for the big move a few weeks ago. This included music by two composers observing their 70th birthdays this year: James Tenney and Terry Riley.
Pika-Don and Atlantis Nath deserve some serious raving in this space when I get a chance to give them a proper, focused listening.
Song currently playing?
No track running now. My head is still clearing from some scale exercises I was running through on a pseudo-just intonation E Flat Lydian.
Mornings at the gym have been the best time for zoning out on some ripped music. Some things that got my attention this past week:
Thomas Chapin: Nightbird Song. Chapin had a great range of tones on both flute and saxophones. His compositions are solid but it's the inventiveness of his solos and the quality of his unaccompanied improvisations that really impressed me this time around. Also, Mario Pavone on bass... the more I hear, the more I like.
Myra Melford: Even The Sounds Shine. chronologically, this recording was the first to feature Melford's longer, open-space improvisation compositions that really crystallized in the Same River Twice discs that followed. I love spotting the elements that give these pieces cohesion while still extending lots of room for Dave Douglas and Marty Ehrlich to really stretch out and do their thing.
This week I hope to sweat to these discs in my cue list:
Five songs that I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me?
I'm going to stick to a formal definition of "song" and focus on music with lyrics that represent a satisfying fusion of poetry and music to me:
1) "Don't Worry About the Government" by David Byrne and Talking Heads. Definitive recording from Talking Heads '77.
2) "Love in Outer Space" by Sun Ra. Definitive recording from Sun Ra: The Singles.
3) "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me" by Duke Ellington. Definitive recording from Knitting Factory: What is Jazz 1991, performed by the wonderful Jazz Passengers.
4) "Dream Keeper" by Carla Bley/Charlie Haden/Liberation Music Orchestra. Definitive recording from Dream Keeper.
5) "Postcard" by Chris Cochran. Definitive recording by Curlew on Paradise.
Five people to whom I'm passing the baton:
Paul Bailey, CelesteH, Daniel Wolf, John Shaw, and the delightful non-music blogger Echidne of the Snakes.
1 comment:
I /just/ saw this.
But I comment to say that there is a safari bug with the page layout when I view this post, so that the text ends up over the background images and is difficult to read. Works fine with firefox though. Maybe I should switch browsers.
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