Specter of Reason

Many people say that "Livery Stable Blues" was the first jazz music put on record. That was in 1917, by a group of white musicians who called themselves the Original Dixieland Jass Band. However, Wilbur Sweatman, a successful African-American composer and musician, made a few jazz recordings several months earlier, near the end of 1916.  Wilbur Sweatman (1882-1961) You can hear one of Sweatman's 1916 recordings ("Down Home Blues") as well as Dixieland's 1917 recording of "Livery Stable Blues" near the top of my Spotify playlist, "JAZZ ~ An American History (1913-2022)."   It contains over 1,700 songs, ordered chronologically, covering every year from 1913 to 2022. The whole thing is over 170 hours long.  Here is a spreadsheet with detailed info . Scroll down for an embedded preview of the playlist. The list started off as a way for me to expand my own experience of music, and to fill in gaps in my knowledge of jazz history. My aim was ult...

I'm pretty happy with a couple of recent piano improvisations I've recorded.  The most recent is an impressionistic improvisation reflecting on the life and death of Anne Frank.  I just finished rereading her memoirs (though it's the first time I'd read the "definitive edition," which is an expanded version of the one I'd read a decade or so ago) and a reflection at the piano felt appropriate.  What came out is pretty dramatic.  I can picture scenes from a movie to go with it--black and white, snippets from Anne Frank's life before going into hiding, a popular, charismatic schoolgirl; then going into hiding, a plaintive cry, but it doesn't overwhelm her; she keeps her vitality, but cannot ignore the threat outside; internal and external tensions build, then find sudden resolution in her romantic love for Peter, which extends to a joyful appreciation of nature; but it is ultimately unfulfilling and uncertainty ensues, leading to the chaos and panic ...

A new piano improvisation entitled "Rustling Leaves."

Two days after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I found myself improvising a melancholic interpretation of Jingle Bells.  I recorded three takes before the moment passed.  The mood and style develop over the three pieces, making them seem like three unique elements of a set, and not simply three versions of the same thing.

I often qualify the music I post online, saying I'm still rusty, that it works well enough despite the imperfections, and so on.  Not this time.  I'm completely happy with these two recordings.  (Actually, I don't have any problems with  the last one I posted , either.) These were both recorded on the same day.  The first is an improvisation which develops into something meant to conjure the spirit of McCoy Tyner: Second, an original composition I'm calling "Serenity Junction": If you're paying attention, you'll notice that the first recording is actually based on the opening of "Serenity Junction."

My first video performance, and it's by no means flawless.  But it's the best I can offer for now.  A short improvisation followed by an imperfect rendition of Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu:

A short improvisation with unexpected weirdness. It's an unusally busy time at work, and will remain so for the next month and a half; during which time I also need to finish my masters thesis.  So I have no time for other intellectual pursuits.  I still have a little time for the piano here and there, so . . . I might make a regular weekend thing out of these music uploads, classical, jazz and otherwise.  We'll see.

I'm relearning lots of classical music I used to play.  I'm a bit rusty, but a lot is coming back to me quickly.  Today I recorded myself playing Chopin's Minute Waltz . . . twice.  The two recordings are very different, but maybe work in different ways. Take 2: Take 1: I plan on recording and uploading lots more Chopin and also some Mozart and Beethoven, when I have more time to polish them.  Maybe some Liszt eventually.  It'll be a while before I try to tackle any Prokofiev.

Here are two self-made music videos I've just uploaded to YouTube. I've gone the last five or six years without a piano.  I finally got one a couple weeks ago, and today it was tuned.  Hence the first video.  I often play classical, but today I was in a jazzy mood.  (I recorded this using the memo function on my iPhone. The background noise is courtesy of my daughters.) The second video is a bit unusual for me.  I got an iPad last year and experimented with Garage Band software one weekend.  The recording on this video is the result.  I tried to spice it up with photographs I took in America, Poland and Czech Republic between 2005 and 2006.  (btw, I never got around to trying to do more with Garage Band or any other music software, and I'm not so eager to try again, but I enjoyed making this.)

Adam Yauch was an inspiration, and I hope he remains an inspiration after his death.  The CNN obituary features  a video from 2009 , when Yauch and Ad-Rock announced that Yauch had cancer.  And--and this really gets me--Yauch apologized to his fans for having to cancel shows.  He was sincerely sorry.  The man had just found out he had cancer, and he was getting ready to go into surgery, and he apologized with humility and good humor.  The world needs more such people. I remember going with my mom to pick up my older sister at a Beastie Boys concert during their controversial  Licensed To Ill tour in the mid-80s.  The concert wasn't quite over when we arrived and I was able to catch a glimpse through the doors of the Sunrise Music Center in Sunrise, Florida.  It was wild to my pre-teen eyes and ears.  I was an instant fan. Looking back, their beginnings were certainly immature and irresponsible, even though their music was in...

In honor of the esteemed artist, here are some aural and visual moments in the life of Don Van Vliet, who died on Friday. "Bat Chain Puller," live on French TV in 1980: Here's "Electricity" and "Sure 'nuff 'n Yes I Do," live in Cannes, 1968: Now some album cuts. Here's "Moonlight On Vermont" and "Pachuco Cadaver", my two favorite songs from Trout Mask Replica (1969): Here are a few songs from Capt. Beefheart's most underrated album, Bluejeans And Moonbeams (1974), which shows a completely different side of Beefheart. Some say he was selling out, but I think it's one of his best albums. First, here's "Observatory Crest": Allmusic.com says that's one of the two good songs on the album, and says the rest is basically crap. They say the following two songs ("Pompadour Swamp" and "Captain's Holiday") are the worst to bear the Captain...

It was about two years ago when I realized that many of my favorite albums were released in 1974, the year I was born. King Crimson's best two albums, Brian Eno's first two solo albums, two of Queen's best albums, my favorite James Brown, Roxy Music and Herbie Hancock. The list goes on. Inspired to learn as much about the music of 1974 as I could. I foraged for months, turning up some wonderful rarities and overlooked classics. To share some of the fruits of that labor, I've compiled a list of notable albums (posted below). (A live version of Brian Eno's "Baby's On Fire," with Eno on vocals and synthesizer, John Cale on piano, Olie Halsall on guitar, Kevin Ayers on bass, and Robert Wyatt on percussion.) If 1974 was not quite the end of a musical era, it was a transformation, an explosion of vast and diverse areas of musical inspiration. Maybe people hadn't come down from the high of th...