Swanksalot's Orchestra and Solipsism

Six would be a lot though

or see here if it gets pulled
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/12/blast-from-the-past-bill-oreilly-gone-wild-drops-f-bombs-on-the-set/

Lists are really the bane of a reviewers existence. Not only can you spend your whole day compiling lists of best so and so, and then defending why Artist X should be on the list but not Artist Y, but then some other reviewer drops a slightly different list of greatest Jazz albums, for instance. A morass of conflicting opinions and options. David Remnick of the New Yorker contributes his top 100 Jazz albums which would be a pretty excellent place to start a music library with.

While finishing “Bird-Watcher,” a Profile of the jazz broadcaster and expert Phil Schaap, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of a hundred essential jazz albums, more as a guide for the uninitiated than as a source of quarrelling for the collector. First, I asked Schaap to assemble the list, but, after a couple of false starts, he balked. Such attempts, he said, have been going on for a long time, but “who remembers the lists and do they really succeed in driving people to the source?” Add to that, he said, “the dilemma of the current situation,” in which music is often bought and downloaded from dubious sources. Schaap bemoaned the loss of authoritative discographies and the “troubles” of the digital age, particularly the loss of informative aids like liner notes and booklets. In the end, he provided a few basic titles from Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, and other classics and admitted to a “pyrrhic victory.”

What follows is a list compiled with the help of my New Yorker colleague Richard Brody. These hundred titles are meant to provide a broad sampling of jazz classics and wonders across the music’s century-long history. Early New Orleans jazz, swing, bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, free jazz, third stream, and fusion are all represented, though not equally. We have tried not to overdo it with expensive boxed sets and obscure imports; sometimes it couldn’t be helped. We have also tried to strike a balance between healthy samplings of the innovative giants (Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coltrane, etc.) and the greater range of talents and performances.

[From Online Only: 100 Essential Jazz Albums: Online Only: The New Yorker]

I won't bother with all one hundred, but here a few of my favorites on this list

"The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings" (Louis Armstrong)

"The Essential Bessie Smith" (Bessie Smith)

"Money Jungle" (Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus, Max Roach)

"The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order" (Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli)

"Handful of Keys" (Fats Waller)

"Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve" (Charlie Parker)

"The Complete RCA Victor Recordings: 1947-1949" (Dizzy Gillespie)

"Bitches Brew" (Miles Davis)

"A Love Supreme" (John Coltrane)

"Mingus Ah Um" (Charles Mingus)

"Saxophone Colossus" (Sonny Rollins)

"The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings" (John Coltrane)

"The Köln Concert" (Keith Jarrett)

Bhairavi - Hari Prasad Chaurasia - Shruti Sadolikar

only viewable in my nightmares. Sorry.

Is this enough a reason to get a Blu Ray disc player? GTA IV and Neil Young too?

[Neil] Young said he tried to do the project on DVD, but users couldn't watch the high-resolution video and listen to the music at the same time. With Java and Blu-ray, the content can be updated and offer the best viewing and listening experience, as well as great navigation and design. "Storage is the only limit," Young said, and recommended the Sony's PlayStation 3 as the best way to view his project. Users will be able to download any archival materials, which are automatically assigned to their place in a chronological time line, Young said.

[snip]

Larry Johnson, of Shakey Films (which works on all of Young's films), said Young had the concept for his latest project on paper 15 years ago. About two years ago, they put the footage all together and waited for the Blu-ray HD-DVD fight to end.

"We are cramming the disc full with every feature we can," Young said.

They started off envisioning it to be something like a video game, a "3D tumbling experience through time," he said. "You could see the history of the world and other great performances through time. It would be a nice thing to do. Hopefully we will get this approach done, but by the time we are halfway through, it will morph."

"The recording business as we know it is changing. As an artist I try to remove myself from the business," Young said. "I steer myself away from that...the commerce of distributing music will work itself out."

He added: "We are trying to give them quality whether they want it or not. You can degrade it as much as you want, we just don't want our name on it." People are taking music and doing whatever they want with it, he said. "The laws don't matter. These are people in their bedroom doing what they want. It's the new radio."

Young said you can't be "scared or paranoid about trying to survive." Sure, when the digital revolution came along, it was "like getting hit with icepicks." Now, he said, the ice is tiny, maybe a little like snow.

That said, he's clearly not a fan of MP3 quality: "Putting on a headphone and listening to MP3 is like hell," he said.

Of course, digital and multitrack recordings in the '80s didn't sound so great either. The sound was shallow, he said. Now, he said, audio quality is climbing, though he still makes all his recordings in analog. "I plan to dumb my analog to the higher level so masses can enjoy it," he said.

[From Neil Young rocks JavaOne | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com]

The AP adds

Rocker Neil Young plans to release his entire music archive on Blu-ray discs, a sign that the discs' capabilities are building appeal among musicians as well as movie studios.

[snip]

The first installment of Young's archive will cover the years 1963 to 1972 and will be released as a 10-disc set this fall on Reprise/Warner Bros. Records.



Young said the archives will be released chronologically and include some previously unreleased songs, videos, handwritten manuscripts and other memorabilia, in addition to the high-resolution audio that Blu-ray technology is known for.



Fans can download more content like songs, photos and tour information directly to the Blu-ray discs as the content becomes available.

Fruit Of The Vine - Jim White

"Johnny B. Goode: His Complete '50s Chess Recordings" (Chuck Berry)

Can't go wrong picking up some Chuck Berry, iffen you don't already have some. The blueprint of a thousand songs is chorded on these tracks, and even fifty years later, they still sound good.

Chuck Berry didn't invent rock and roll, but he may very well have invented rock'n'roll. His songs fueled and inspired the likes of Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Who, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and just about anybody in his wake who picked up an electric guitar. In the invaluable rock doc Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, we watch in awe has Berry puts Keith Richards in his place with just a single angry glare, and watch in double-awe as Richards takes it. After all, the Stones guitarist, like countless other musicians of his generation, knows he owes virtually everything to Berry, and has admitted as much, so he gives deference where deference is due.

Berry's as worthy of hagiography as any rock legend, but he's not yet ready for a eulogy. In fact, Berry's 50-plus year career has been marked by one constant-- forward motion. Indeed, Berry's far too stubborn a man to ever give inertia the chance to slow him down, and he still spends a considerable amount of time on stage for an octogenarian. As far as the studio goes, however, Berry hasn't released a new album since 1979, and even then his songwriting had been in steady decline since the early 60s. His last (and sole number one!) hit, a live version of the juvenile novelty "My Ding-a-Ling", was released in 1972.

One perverse but still appropriate way to view Berry's erratic (or non-existent) output over the past three or so decades is as further validation of the enduring strength of the first decade of his recording career, especially the productive, world-changing last five years of the 1950s collected on the self-explanatory Johnny B. Goode: His Complete '50s Chess Recordings. It was on Chicago's Chess imprint that Berry would change the blueprint of popular music, and it's on this 4xCD collection that we can revisit the fruits of his labor.

[Click to read more of Chuck Berry: Johnny B. Goode: His Complete '50s Chess Recordings: Pitchfork Record Review]

If you want a smaller sampler of Berry, check out the Great 28.

"The Great Twenty-Eight" (Chuck Berry)

A Town Called Amen - Jim White

See Ya Later Katman, whoever the hell you are…

Another portion of this mural
www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot/2452459080/

Probably the first or second restaurant I ever ate at in Chicago was formerly located in this spot. They didn't have this cool sign though.

this still moves me, after so many times

reflection - guess where?

sun reflecting on steel waste in a decaying dumpster

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Miró

well, sorta

An underpass in the West Loop.

This year's Immigration reform march / Haymarket / May Day rally is passing one block from my window.

May Day, 2008
Hate to say it, but best viewed large:
www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot/2456708635/sizes/o/

They've been there since at least the early 90s, business must be ok…

Life and Death under one roof

Absinthe visions

Unfortunately, this is my personal experience as well. Oh well.

The long-cherished idea that absinthe, an anise-flavored alcoholic beverage with a history of use by artists like Van Gogh and Picasso, is or ever was hallucinogenic might have met its death by data today.

German scientists put old bottles of the substance to the test and found that the liquid is 70 percent alcohol (140 proof) and 0 percent hallucination.

"All things considered, nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome 'absinthism'," the researchers wrote in an open-access paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

[From Sorry, Absinthe Trippers: Scientists Say You're Just Really Drunk | Wired Science from Wired.com]

Bonus, Wired used my photo to illustrate the article.

Rich Kid Blues - The Raconteurs

yeah, yeah. Tangentially inspired by this thread/photo
www.flickr.com/photos/andrerabelo/70458366/

(found via Kottke)

Or in other words, if I like the photo, even if it is technically flawed, that's important too, yadda yadda.