0.8.0 - ....and all that Jazz (Week 8 Wrapup)
Pride goeth before the fall, however, so I am still just taking this one week at a time and not counting my chickens. This week also saw my lowest volume album listening day, where I only managed two new records, both during my commute to and from my office, so I am aware that my streak could get broken any time by life getting in the way. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. To be honest, I am also getting a lot of listening in this week because my insomnia bender is still very much in effect. Six a.m. is a weird time to be listening to new music, but it has helped me squeeze in more listening time that I might if I slept a regular human amount each night.
I did, however, manage to cover a reasonable amount of my listening this week in the previous two articles, and with the exception of a few outliers, this wrapup also has a nice theme for me to talk about, so we will cover off the stragglers before diving in to the meat of what else I've been listening to.
Last weekend Catherine's friend Laura, and her tweenage daughter Grace came to stay with us for a couple of days while en route further north for a different social engagement. I always enjoy talking to Laura, and I've met Grace only sporadically, but they were a pleasure to entertain and cook for. I made a cheesecake and galettes and we played games and talked, as we do, about music.
The last time I saw Laura was last year when Catherine and I were in London for the All Points East music festival; we'd gone for brunch, where I discovered that Laura really hasn't been to many live events, and certainly not recently; Grace had not ever been. I offered my services as a broker of concert tickets, as I've become a dab hand in securing them over the years - they just needed to let me know who they wanted to see. Laura wanted to see Coldplay. By convenience, not more than a couple of weeks after this conversation, Coldplay announced their upcoming shows in London, we figured out the dates that would suit everyone involved, and I set up my various queues to try and get tickets.
Friends, I failed. I'd managed to get Taylor Swift tickets (though to be completely fair, her ticket distribution system for The Eras Tour was the best and most fair mass-demand ticketing process I've ever seen); I'd got Billie Eilish tickets for my nieces. But tied to a single available date in their 9 night run, with unconstrained demand and needing four tickets, I joined the ticket waiting room 20 minutes before the tickets went on sale, and when I joined the actual queue I was behind 400,000 other people. it was not to be. But it told me one thing, which was that Laura liked Coldplay, so when I was selecting music for dinner and board games, this was an easy choice.
I'm no Coldplay fan. I don't have any particular ambivalence towards them, I just don't feel engaged by them in the way that other people do. A Rush Of Blood To The Head exists as (I think) the most interesting album in the Coldplay oeuvre; there are songs on here I'm happy to sing along to, and it makes excellent background dinner conversation music, so it suited the occasion nicely.
See also; Drops of Jupiter by Train. This is one of those bands I only really know one song by, and I can't tell you how I ended up hearing Drops of Jupiter. Normally I would blame an errant appearance on a Rock Band or Guitar Hero soundtrack, but it's not on the setlists for any of those games I played. However, I'm familiar with it through some form of cultural osmosis, and after dinner we started playing Ticket To Ride: Japan followed by Railroad Ink and as such, it seemed a good opportunity to deploy this extremely vanilla-to-the-point-of-vanishing inoffensive pop rock record.
I get very worried, as I have mentioned, about losing track of modern music. As such, when I get a chance to talk about music with people younger than me, it's a true blessing to my musical discoverability. In the continued conversation about finding Grace a band to go and see, I asked her who she was listening to that she would like to see. She namechecked TV Girl and Surf Curse, and two new names appeared in my mental playlist for Monday morning.
TV Girl I had heard of in articles/social media as someone the young people were listening to, but I didn't know anything about them. After the Charlie Puth incident last week, instead of starting at their debut album, I picked the album which featured their top streaming singles on Spotify, Grapes Upon The Vine. Based on a limited sample of one album, I can certainly see the appeal. I knew the 80's revival was a thing, and there's more than a little Thompson Twins and Gary Numan in there; as you know, I hate reductive comparisons, but this album felt like The Avalanches with the edges smoothed off, like Jurassic 5 if you replaced the raps with Phil Oakey from the Human League singing pop songs in a minor key. There's a more recent 2024 album that's sat in my queue now, but the relaxed atmosphere of the whole thing was a good start to a Monday morning.
I fear I am going to be reductive again about Surf Curse, but in a less kind way. As I go through this exercise, I've started to establish some Core Truths which come to light when you listen to a whole lot of albums. I'm going to officially codify this as the Your First Love Truth; Magic Hour features a collection of emo rock songs which you could do a blind taste test with Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday and The Starting Line from last week and struggle to distinguish them. I guess there's always going to be a market for adolescent girls to enjoy sad boys singing about romance and feelings with some loud guitars, and Surf Curse do exactly that in a way which meets the standards required for success. If you heard this album as your first exposure to this genre of music, you're always going to think it is special; they are Your First Love.
I thought this was going to be a quick wrap up and now I've written eight paragraphs on four albums. Hopefully I can restrain myself a little as we move on.
This is a collection of true stragglers, stuff I put on when I was lacking inspiration or just needed to make a quick decision. Margaret Glaspy was a recommendation from my friend Paul and his daughter Lizzie (of which more below), but didn't fit the theme of the others. This album slotted firmly somewhere into the Ani DiFranco <> Sheryl Crow spectrum of guitar-led, slightly country tinged singer/songwriter albums that I enjoy. She's got an interesting poetic lyrical delivery that I found enticing, and I ended up playing Emotions and Math to Catherine because I thought she would dig it too - she did.
Throwing on Kick Up The Fire, And Let The Flames Break Loose was a real five-second decision; I needed something to listen to as I commuted to work - Interpol had been my go-to for that, but I couldn't justify a third Interpol album in two weeks, so I sat in the driver's seat looking for inspiration. Having listened to See This Through And Leave last week, this at least completed all the CTC albums I am likely to listen to. I really, really love this album, and wish I'd found a way to spend more time talking about it, but nothing had come to mind. A great breakup album, I've felt every emotional drop of The Same Mistakes and Talking To A Brick Wall and Blind Pilots, the later of which has a really great music video/short film if you enjoy those sorts of things.
This is the second time I've just thrown on a Ben Folds album to fill a space in my listening schedule, and the second time I've picked the wrong one (I have a pending Ben Folds recommendation for Rockin' The Suburbs I've been trying to fill). I think Songs For Silverman is the best of the Ben Folds solo albums, and when I do a Ben Folds 5 retrospective and wrap up the actual album I've been recommended, I'll talk about it more there. Landed exists as one of the most beloved songs in the entire Ben Folds solo canon, and with good reason.
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Last of the stragglers here before we cover the main theme. Sometimes, I'm on the spot to put something on without immediate inspiration. Sometimes, you're setting up a game, and your partner is in the kitchen and won't stop just singing the guitar riff from Sunshine Of Your Love over and over again for no reason and the decision is made for you. Disraeli Gears is really Sunshine Of Your Love and Other Songs. Clapton can obviously play blues guitar pretty well, but there are moments on this album which feel like they ran out of ideas eight songs in and then just recorded 20 minutes of them messing around in the studio to fill the rest of the run time. Prior to the washing up, while cooking Catherine had been listening to a radio interview where some opera singer was covering Handle With Care by The Traveling Wilburys and I was trying to listen to what Catherine was telling me about cooking times and oven temps while trying to identify the song which was being warbled to death on the radio. For the sake of my own sanity, I put this on while Catherine and I were playing board games together to get the mental taste of the cover version out of my mouth. Obviously Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 is a modern classic, it reinvigorated the careers of Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, cemented the post-Beatles legacy of George Harrison and propelled Tom Petty further into the limelight. Jeff Lynne was also there (sorry Jeff Lynne, I really like your Armchair Theatre solo album, I'll be nice about you then). If you have any reverence for any of the artists listed above, you owe it to yourself to listen to this album if it has somehow escaped your notice.
This is how I met my friend Paul, American emigree-in-exile, theoretical math professor (a professor of theoretical mathematics, not a theoretical professor of mathematics, for clarity), jazz afficionado and extremely canny card game player. When we were both massive fans of the Android:Netrunner card game, we would meet up and play against each other at local events, and share early morning and late night car pool rides to and from tournaments within 60 or so miles of our home base in Sheffield. When I met Paul, his eldest daughter was a mere infant; his youngest, merely a concept. But more than a decade has passed now since we first met, and we still find time to see each other (more sporadically than might be proper, but we both have complicated adult schedules) and keep in touch.
When I went out looking for recommendations, I deliberately targeted people I knew had musical interests outside of my own particular sphere on knowledge. There are several people I think who are wondering why they didn't get a request for recommendations, and it's only because much of what I suspected I would get back from them are albums I would have got around to anyway. With Paul (because, obviously, we have talked about music), I was expecting a heaping helping of modern jazz recommendations. What I was not expecting was for Paul to be typing his recommendations with his daughter looking over his shoulder, so what I have in my set of Paul recommendations is now categorised as 'Paul & Lizzie' instead. The majority of the nine albums above came as part of those recommendations, with a few of my own choosing which fit what ended up being the theme of my listening for the rest of this week.
So, with my gratitude to both Paul & Lizzie, lets dig in.
Without wanting to out my tastes as 'basic', I love a good verse-chorus-verse; I love a song in a major key in 4/4 with a beat I can dance to - and obviously, the pattern-recognition-centric parts of our brains love those things too. There are reams of music theory about resolved chord sequences and building structure and expectation in songs which tells us what most of us instinctively know; there are ways to construct pleasing musical compositions which slide through our rational decision making centres and wrap their tendrils around our emotional core.
So, when super-producer Max Martin knows exactly how to write a pop song that overwhelms and shuts down your rational thought, and uses that formula to make mega hits for Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, P!nk, Ariana Grande, Ke$ha, and many others, how do you stand in contrast to that? What makes an artist decide to ignore or break all those rules? How do you make sure your audience is paying attention?
You make albums like these.
Julian Lage's Love Hurts is, I think, the archetype of what people expect when they hear "this is a modern Jazz record". I've dipped in and out of some modern jazz for my own reasons (see Snarky Puppy below) and there's definitely some kind of unwritten rule that every modern jazz album has to include several re-interpretations of more well-known modern pop and rock songs, layered together with original jazz songs. It's like that phenomena where everyone's YouTube thumbnails all had to include a picture of the content creators face looking like they were suddenly experienced an unusual bout of diarrhoea at the exact moment the photo was taken. Somewhere, some music executive told every jazz group "put some reinterpretations of other songs on there, you will sell better" and so, they all do. Because I am a contrary soul, I enjoyed the non 'pop' covers on this album (which I understand are jazz standards or other 'known' works, just not known to me) far more than the crowd pleasers. He wins some points for opening the album with a song from the Eraserhead soundtrack though, but overall this is too low key to really stick with me.
By contrast, The Bad Plus and their These Are The Vistas was much more my speed. In truth, I've been pre-conditioned to enjoy them because I came across them through Paul a few years ago, and have dipped in and out of their catalogue of songs in the past when I have been in an exploratory mood. By contrast to the acoustic guitar mellow introspection of Julian Lage, The Bad Plus inject all their songs with percussion and energy, hurtling you ever onwards towards the next track at a breakneck pace which demands that you hold on and just enjoy the ride. Jazz can be a challenging medium for the modern consumer of popular music, but These Are The Vistas and the rest of the songs of theirs I have listened to may make you feel many things, but boredom won't be one of them. While this album has their cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit as the obvious hook, the cover of Blondie's Heart of Glass on here really goes places.
We Like It Here is another modern jazz album, this time of my own selection. I came across Larnell Lewis and the jazz group he performs with, Snarky Puppy, through a series of videos on the channel I take my drum lessons through, Drumeo. I was impressed enough by watching his drumeo performances to seek out his live performances, and from there, to this album, which breaks the mold by not having any covers, just a series of instrumental modern jazz performances which, when I am in the right mood, are a great soundtrack to an afternoon in the kitchen, or an evening with a bottle of wine. The musicianship on these songs is extraordinary, and I particularly love this video of Larnell watching videos of other people trying to cover his Snarky Puppy drum performances.
The Joggers, The Dismemberment Plan, and The Weakerthans are not Modern Jazz, in case there was some confusion; but they each belong inside this topic of discussion because their musical choices, from dissonant and deliberately atonal melodies to unusual time signatures and unconventional song structure work to subvert expectations and keep their audiences attention on what they are doing. Having been shown the path to correct popular song composition, each of these bands takes their math-rock boots and wanders off the path, across the lawn and into the dense underbrush, and expects us to follow.
I feel bad covering these three albums in a couple of paragraphs, but they definitely felt like variations on a musical theme when I listened to them in sequence. Reconstruction Site felt the most close to conventional, in the same way that the moon is closer to Earth than Mars is; With a Cape and a Cane felt more deliberately whimsical, but as has been established my tolerance for whimsy is limited and it didn't quite sit with me. Emergency & I however, landed right in the goldilocks zone of interesting and weird and different; I'd heard the band name before and just assumed they were some kind of Thrash Metal band (I made the same mistake with Death Cab For Cutie for a long time); my preconceived notions have been appropriately punctured, and if there is any band from these three I'll go back to and do some more exploring, it's probably another Dismemberment Plan record. For what it's worth, I am certain I am doing all three albums a disservice by listening to them only once and making a snap judgement on them, but I have a quota to hit and that's the name of the game this year. Sorry, ladies and gents of these bands.
I did feel slightly pleased with myself when Paul recommended Fergus McCreadie's Forest Floor and I was able to tell him I'd already listened to it. Every year when the UK based Mercury Music Prize nominees are announced, I try and make a point to listen to all of them. There are only 12, so at my current rate that is like 2 days tops, though usually it takes me a couple of weeks to get through them all at least once. I remember listening to this album driving back from a hotel in Wales in the way back home, and enjoying it as an abstract kind of soundscape; the Jazz version of Peter and The Wolf, except the plot is "Nature exists and forests are cool". My recent listening confirmed that my memory is correct, and if you're a Tabletop RPG games master, and you want some ambient music for your arboreal adventures, this would make an excellent choice.
OK, I've put off talking about Ys as long as I think I can while giving myself an opportunity to end this review on a high note. On a podcast interview, I heard my friend Matt say that he'd spent some time listening to music other people told him was cool, or good, and it took him a while to interrogate rather than accept that, and that change in perspective changed his relationship with music. Ys did that for me. There was a time in the mid 2000's when this album came out and everyone I knew in the music space declared it a work of unadulterated genuis. My former brother-in-law would not shut up about this album, singing it's praises to all who would listen, and it ended up on every end-of-year list that I read. I spent much of the latter part of 2006 wondering if I was the victim of some elaborate, highly orchestrated and global prank to me make feel like an idiot. I tried so hard with this album, I've listened to it in the car, with headphones on, giving it my full attention or in the background letting it wash over me. Everyone says it's an amazing album, why then does it sound to me like someone occasionally dropping a collection of percussion and string instruments down a flight of stairs while someone doing a bad impression of Bjork is forced to recite LiveJournal entries while being subjected to increasingly painful and elaborate tortures? There's something fundamentally at odds between whatever this album is offering others, and what I can extract from it. If this is your favourite album, if this is some kind of credibility measuring stick for you, I'm sorry, and I'm really happy that you enjoy it. I'm not saying that you're wrong, or your opinion is invalid; please afford me the same courtesy.
Is listening to Kind Of Blue cliche? When real Jazz fans hear that you like Kind of Blue and havent listened to anything else, do they roll their eyes while your back is turned? I'm certain there's some element of that out there, but it remains the first real specifically Jazz album that I sought out as an adult, and have chosen to listen to multiple times. Cliches become cliches because they exemplify the idea they are trying to convey, and nothing to me exists as more of a paragon of 'classic' Jazz than this album. I'm not a Jazz expert, obviously, but I like to think that a willingness to engage with the cornerstones of all musical styles and genres is what can elevate our interest in the art of music, and broaden our understanding of what is possible. If you've never listened to a Jazz album on purpose before, make this your homework, twenty people reading this blog. You might learn something.
