Emusic is not my beat, but I will fearlessly address something of no interest to anyone anyway.

"Gordon" does a much better job with emusic than I do, but here are some thoughts nonetheless:

One of the great things about emusic, which this catalog addition will irreversibly change, was the fact that you were somewhat limited in your choices. The fact that you had prepaid for the month or year meant that the money was essentially a sunk cost, and it allowed you to take chances that you otherwise might not have. With a $7.99 transaction cost, I would never have discovered a band like the Rural Alberta Advantage:



It's a lovely little indie debut - heartfelt, awkward, largely about failed relationships, growing old, and moving to a big lonely city. And it's an album that feels totally mine, because I stumbled across it on emusic and thought, "why the hell not?" It matched the number of downloads I had left for the month, and it was "use it or lose it." If they're competing for my attention with canonical things that I never got around to picking up - say, Neil Young, or Prince - I'm probably going to be more likely to spend those downloads on musical vitamins than I am on a wild gamble.

Of course, I'm blaming emusic for my own behavior here, but there was something really liberating about the emusic outlook, and the idea that you're choosing music from a slightly skewed catalog. The constraints were nice, actually, because it meant that I could be current on whatever pitchfork's flavor du jour was, and I could also get a little wacky:



Why the hell not, right? Plus, given the lengths of each track on the Lindstrom - Prins Thomas album, you were looking at a real deal. And this brings us to the other problem I have with the pricing scheme: Fela Kuti albums are no longer 2-4 downloads. Jazz albums - many of which are under 50 minutes in length and no more than 5-7 tracks - will cost the same as a 14-track, 65-minute long indie record. Theoretically. The upside is that, potentially, hip-hop albums will carry less of a penalty (given all the skits, non-musical tracks, etc.) A lot of these trends had actually started once emusic moved from downloads to credits, but I'm afraid that the move to actual dollar values will continue this trend. If a Fela Kuti album is 12 tracks, I'll look for a hard copy in the discount bin instead of getting it from emusic.

In which I push music!

This is really Gordon's terrain (wiredformusic!) here, but I've been known to make the odd mix here and there, and being in grad school has awakened all the angst of being in high school and college, which were my prime mix-making years. I'm still working on an econ/public finance type-mix, but here are a few tunes that have made my quant playlist. There are a few missing tracks (Luna's "math wiz"! Lala doesn't think I own it, but lala, you're wrong about that, just as you're wrong about the Silver Jews not existing, and about me not owning "Supra Genius" by Soul Coughing or "Fractions and feelings" by Malkmus + Jix.)

Without further ado! The quant mixtape! Comments below.

Count me in: Songs about numbe...

1. 4 out of 5 (Soul Coughing)
Few bands spent as much time counting or listing numbers as Soul Coughing. Accordingly, they are something like the patron saints of this mix.
2. One (Aimee Mann)
Pretty self-evident.
3. Don’t tell me to do the math(s) (Los Campesinos!)
Every mix needs token bratty Scottish indie punk. Work on your algebra and stand out in the rain! Plus, the title reflects that charming British locution of calling it “maths.”
4. The Calculation (Regina Spektor)
“Counted up our feelings / and divided them up even / and it called that calculation perfect love.” HAHA, nice try, liar. Multivariate linear regression is the opposite of perfect love.
5. Plus Ones (Okkervil River)
Ah yes, the plus one. Because this song is explicitly about all the things that got left out of other songs that enumerate things (97th tear, 100th luftballoon), I think of it as being about the error term.
6. If you don’t like the effects, don’t produce the cause (Funkadelic)
Funkadelic goes right to the heart of the matter, don’t they? They bypass association entirely and go right to causality. This must be a bivariate model since they don’t touch on interaction effects. I’m hoping that at some point we’ll get to hear George Clinton’s thoughts on multicollinearity.
7. 100% Dundee (The Roots)
In evaluating Dundee-ness, it is clear that the Roots will not tolerate even the smallest alpha. This song mentions sigma, assumptions, and the phrase “lyrically calculus in this arithmetic hip hop metropolis.” It therefore makes math seem much cooler than it is.
8. 6’1” (Liz Phair)
Clearly what’s going on here is that the break-up in the song has caused Liz Phair to reparameterize her height variable, and she’s found that the recalibration gets her an extra 11 inches on her height measurement.
9. 123 goodbye (Elvis Perkins)
Abacus of the rain! Calculus of pain! It’s all there, and it’s all true. Elvis Perkins has written a couple of gorgeous songs about the death of his mom – she was on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center in 2001. This is one of them.
10. My mathematical mind (Spoon)
My English lit mind does not see the breaks.
11. Neverending math equation (Sun Kil Moon)
Originally a Modest Mouse song. Love this cover. Google the lyrics because they’re good, and while Sun Kil Moon has this great mopey voice, he’s also completely incomprehensible.
12. Feelgood by numbers (The Go! Team)
Except going by numbers makes me feel bad. On the other hand, this song makes me feel decidedly good, so maybe you can feel good by “Feelgood by numbers.” Hmmm.
13. Two sevens clash (Culture)
Marcus Garvey predicted that on July 7, 1977, something epic or terrible was going to happen. The sevens would clash. The band Culture made this prediction famous, and the song was so popular that supposedly when the date rolled around, most of Kingston shut down. Schools, stores – all closed for fear of the sevens clashing. Nothing happened, but we certainly do put a lot of faith in numbers, don’t we?
14. 100% (Sonic Youth)
Much like the Roots’ uncompromising approach to Dundee, Sonic Youth will not accept any degree of alpha in their “love for dead roadie model.”
15. Casiotone nation (Soul Coughing)
Again, with the counting.
16. I wish I could go back to college (Avenue Q cast)
Because this is how Quant II makes me feel.
17. A day to God is 1000 years (RZA)
RZA takes on the delicate issue of scaling in data. Sure, it’s just a day to God, but it’s 1000 years for humans. Be mindful of how to interpret the coefficient on your time variable in this model because of thi scaling issue. And, bonus thematic tie-in: The Wu guys are five percenters, or at least use a lot of it in their lyrics. So, we’re back to Soul Coughing, the oroboros of quant music.
18. Count me out (The Del McCoury Band)
Yes, Del. Sing it.

RIP

Mark Linkous made a ton of beautiful music while he was alive. I remember driving through West Virginia about ten years ago and not being sure of what I was looking for. Listening to "Good morning Spider."

A few years later, I was seeing the Flaming Lips on the Yoshimi tour, and for the opening act, this weird guy came out and played a few songs by himself in front a weird projection screen. He wasn't announced before taking the stage nor was he officially on the bill, but by the second song I knew for a fact it was Mark Linkous. Everything I saw that night was consistent with the little that I knew about him - reclusive, shy, tentative. As the years went on and I heard more and more about him collaborating with fairly big names - Tom Waits and Danger Mouse, to name a few - I figured it was a sign that Linkous had realized he belonged, that he had peers, and I kind of tuned out.

The news of his suicide and the grizzly details are really hard to stomach. I rarely mean the phrase "rest in peace" literally, but I really hope Mark Linkous can.

ugh, john phillips.

For a while now, I’ve really enjoyed John Philips’ album “The Wolf King Of L.A.” – I’d even taken to using the opening track, “April Ann,” to wrap up singer songwriter-y mixes. But what the hell am I supposed to do with the allegations (none of which I’m inclined to disbelieve) that he raped his own daughter and forced her into a decade-long sexual relationship, even impregnating her? Ugh. Gifted artists that are flawed humans are fine with me, but I tend to draw the line at truly evil.

 

 

 

RIP.

Michael Jackson is in the hospital.

I admit that I have had long internal debates about how to prepare for the inevitable deaths of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and other such sad-bastard types. I have no idea what Michael Jackson tune would be playing if I were to sit down for a melancholy memorial glass of scotch in his name, though.

singer-songwriter kind of mood.

Have really been enjoying Elvis Perkins.



His biography is plenty compelling. Knowing about his mom makes this song borderline unlistenable - it's almost too much to take. [Since many of you might not click through - his dad was Anthony Perkins, of "Psycho" fame. Anthony Perkins died ("complications related to AIDS") several years ago. Elvis Perkins' mom was on the ill-fated American Airlines flight 11, flying from Boston to LAX on the morning of September 11, 2001.]

Turning the corner, we've got Jenn Grant, who, I currently enjoy as a culmination of what Feist, Beth Orton, and, why not, Norah Jones aspire to be. I dare you not to want to hear this on a rainy day.

Rainy day song...?

If you're looking for a fearlessly sentimental (and fearlessly produced! check out the studio orchestra!) song about growing "old (or more comfortable)" - as I understand the song is titled - check out this song from my brother. I listened to it about three times on my way into work this morning. I'm clearly biased, but it's one of my favorite songs from 2008.

PS. For those not familiar with yousendit.com, the link is good for 7 days from the date of this post. Get it now!

My corners are pretty bright. That's what happens when you're 31.

I'm happy that my 31st birthday landed pretty close to the release of the "Brighten the Corners" reissue. Owing to the Napa trip, I actually didn't get a chance to listen to it until this week. And in anticipation of the reissue, I had abstained from all but one song on this album for close to a year. (The one song is "Transport is Arranged," and that one ended up on a Baltimore-themed mix that I made this spring.)

The nice thing about this album is...that it's just so nice. Compared to Pavement's more abrasive sound, this is definitely the one that sounds the most mature and calm. That's also its downfall in a sense - that it's too pleasant to be anyone's favorite Pavement album. But it does contain a number of fantastic mid-tempo songs that feature some fine moments of Stephen Malkmus-isms. Through the distorted prism of his lyrics, you hear someone worried about aging, about finding a permanent place in the world. And if you don't agree, tell my why else would this album include a lyrics sheet for the first and only time in Pavement history?

Alex Ross has a great essay about rock lyrics in general and Malkmus's in particular here. My favorite moments on the album are the fragments of logic that emerge out of a seemingly light-weight moment. They cause you to re-evaluate the whole song - "Simply put, I want to grow old / Dying does not meet my expectations..." Malkmus declares in his quasi-aristocratic whisp in the same song where he confesses - or perhaps mockingly teases? - that he wants to cry when thinks about "the mental energy you wasted on these wedding invitations."

For all the sweet moments, there are some cruel ones - like the line, "this slap is a gift / because your cheeks have lost their luster." But there is, on the whole, a truly inviting warmth and playful spirit that inhabit the album (and the best outtakes, like "Harness Your Hopes.") I'm a sucker for Malkmus gently teasing the left - he sees elves though "the liberaaaaaaaaals claim they don't exist but I know they do, yeah," - and he complains about how he's "sick of being misread / by men in dashikis / and their leftist weeklies..."

The pure Pavement moments are the best. "One of us is a cigar stand / and one of us is an incandescent blue guillotine." No idea what that means, but when you get into the rest of that particular song ("Old to begin") you hear Malkmus repeatedly calling himself "old to begin / I will set ya back set ya back set ya..." This was as close as pre-Terror Twilight Pavement would come to a break-up song, with the implication being, I think, that one of the two people is about to be figuratively decapitated and smoked.

And I've always had a soft-spot for the cheekiness spoken-word joshing of "Blue Hawaiian" - which includes the meaning of aloha, warm thoughts about the definition of 'home,' and a great bit of self-referential wit: "If the capital's and it's followed by a T, then it's probably me!"

I was listening to "We Are Underused" this morning on my way in, expecting to hear in it the same snide commentary on being a hyperliterate over-educated affluent person whose gifts are going to waste in the professional world, when I heard the song in a different light entirely. The verses alternate between exhortations to thank the host for a great roast and droll commentary, in the stulted manner of polite dinner conversation. I had it all wrong - the "we" isn't a post-collegiate smart-aleck, and the people doing the under-using of the "we" aren't our parents' generation. The "we" is all of us, and we are underutilizing each other by engaging in soul-crushing dinner parties and polite banter instead of fully exploring each other's humanity. Maybe.

I should probably say something about the B-sides, but I won't. They're good. Prevous reissues of Pavement's albums have been successful because those albums sounds just as great now as they did then. The cool thing about this one is that an album that was only so-so at the time actually sounds great now.

And Malkmus was my age when it was recorded! Look at that. I just tied the whole thing up in a neat little package. I should change my screen persona to "no-unresolved-plotlines citizen."

Enough disjointendess for today. Till tomorrow, or some other day...

because I still feel like atoning for Taylor Swift

How good is this Townes van Zandt clip? The tears say it all.

FM Country

There are a couple of things you can usually say to a group of music snobs without risk of putting your foot in your mouth: one is to denigrate the 1980s phase of any artist whose career began prior to or ended after said decade (Miles Davis, Bob Dylan*, Elton John, Billy Joel, Bruce to a degree, etc.) The other thing you can almost always get away with is criticizing contemporary country while praising Johnny Cash, or Merle Haggard, or Hank Williams, or any number of other more “authentic” country musicians.

While it’s true that modern country is basically pop, I actually consider it a bit of a guilty pleasure. I enjoy thinking about the fact that there are people who professionally write songs for others – ghost songwriters, essentially. These are people who build songs carefully, with attention to detail, with the occasional bit of clever wordplay. The songs need to be well-structured, and they often have very formal bridges and solos. And a good one can be just as gratifying as a good pop song.

Three of my current guilty pleasures in this realm are Jamey Johnson, Taylor Swift, and Kathleen Edwards. Jamey Johnson writes dark stuff – his oft-quoted line is about how he had a wife and home but traded it all for “cocaine and a whore.”



Kathleen Edwards is Canadian and writes beautifully and honestly, with the occasional bit of wit: her song “I get the dough, you get the glory” has to be the only country song to mention Chateauneuf.



I only recently discovered Taylor Swift, convinced to give her a chance by Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent New Yorker piece on her. She seems like the real deal: she writes most of her songs. She’s got a great voice. The production on her album is good without being tacky. And she seems to relish playing all the roles available to her: seductress, bitter ex-, good friend, devoted lover. While anything produced in Nashville can get a touch saccharine very easily, none of the songs are outright offensive. The album has that great defiant attitude that you only get from someone who is young, talented, and knows it.

She had me from the opening song on her new album, named “Tim McGraw.” It’s a harmless song about a great summer fling. The rhymes aren’t that obvious, the chorus is generous and warm, and it had me thinking back to how Ms. Abstract Citizen was once fond of loudly playing Tim McGraw, back when we first met.

The second tune, "Just another picture to burn," opens with a bit that made me laugh out loud.

State the obvious,
I didn’t get my perfect fantasy
I realized you love yourself
More that you could ever love me
So go and tell your friends
That I’m obsessive and crazy,
That’s fine
I’ll tell mine
You’re gay

So, remember: Lyle Lovett is safe. Being into Taylor Swift? Totally edgy.^

*But not "Foot of Pride" or "Angelina." So help me God if you do so in my presence. In fact, let's just scratch Dylan from that list: you all should know by now that being into 80s Dylan is the new prog.

^Only applies to her first album, which I am two years late in hearing. The new one comes out...TUesday! And I probably won't get around to it till late 2009 or something, so, uh, stay tuned.

Only the river stared back...

I just am not getting sick of Okkervil River. Usually I gorge on a band and it ends up being a consumable, quickly digested and discarded. But listening to "The Stand Ins" for the first time today, I really did think that this Will Sheff fellow has done something pretty impressive, which is going from relative obscurity to a bona fide super-songwriter, in my estimation, on the strength of three albums. (Out of a number of memorable lines, I'm going with "you've got taste / yeah you've got taste / man, what a waste that it's all you've got..." or something close to that.)

And I know I've touched on this before, but while his style of songwriting is perhaps a bit affected, it's also surprisingly formal and erudite. It's dripping with references, and anyoneon who enjoys the careful development of literary themes should be able to sit down with their albums and the lyric sheet and just have a field day following the narratives, which are richly layered, full of details and knowing winks.

And Sheff manages to avoid fatuousness or obviousness. For all his apparent sincerity, the songs tend to be shrouded in ambiguity. For a good read, check out this pitchforkmedia (I know, I know) interview with him, which is sprawling and insightful. For a good listen, look below.

Meeting famous people is easy...?

John’s comment on the lifetime gigology thread made me start thinking about times I’ve met people I really admired.

A lot of people who know me at all know that Stephen Malkmus is probably one of my all-time favorite musicians and personalities. The Malkman is tall and thin; he’s smooth in an accidental way, and easily one of the most sardonic talents out there. In the geeky world of indie rock, Malky is an unabashed sports fan who loves to substitute the names of local athletes into his songs when performing live. “Baby C’mon” became “Gilbert C’mon” at the Black Cat in 2005; “(Do not feed the) Oyster” was “Do not feed Joakim Noah / Under the post…” in Chicago, and so on.

And of course, the Malkster is a five-tool songwriter, a focused Dadaist storyteller, who can wring heartbreak out of the story of Jenny and Shawn (the Ess-dog), who try their hardest to make it but who can’t survive her move to Boulder for college. “Give it a day,” back in the Pavement days, uses Cotton and Increase Mather of “The Crucible” fame to liken the spread of Puritanism to a virus, one that ultimately infects the speaker of the song. Written in the mid-1990s, “Give it a day” anticipates humanitarian and political strife with lines like, “Years and years have passed / since the Puritans invaded our soul / just like those Arab terrorists you’ll never know…” and “The word spread just like small pox in the Sudan / the gentry cried, ‘Give it a day, give it a day…’” while a more recent tune like “It Kills” handles the issue of aging with a surprising level of maturity: “Nine times out of ten / I’m not the guidance type / I’ve been sitting on a fencepost for the brunt of my life / And now I need some time to find out what I feel / It kills...the time” and includes the chilling (to me) line, “There’s more to you than what you think and read.”

So, I have what Ms. AC teasingly calls a man-crush on the Malkster. Hell yes I do. So much so, in fact, that when he toured behind “Face the Truth” in 2005, I decided I would see him perform four times in four nights – in DC, Philly, Boston, and New York. To make a long story slightly less long, I had a chance to meet him in Boston – awkwardly, it turns out, in a men’s room, where I barely summoned up the courage to say anything of consequence to him. In New York, however, I found out early in the evening that I would be visiting backstage after the show, which gave me a whole night’s worth of time to agonize over what to say, how to behave.

The truth is, I completely blew it. Malk was even wearing his “Malk-a-tastic” shirt (a famous white tee that says “malk-a-tastic” on the back) and he was in a good mood. I’d imagined he might be difficult – after all, this was the man who famously dissed the Stone Temple Pilots and the Smashing Pumpkins in the space of a few seconds in the same song (more recently, he and Kim Deal of the Breeders seem to have some beef.)

We exchanged a few pleasantries, and I did my best to avoid a Chris Farley/Paul McCartney moment. He grabbed his laptop and was showing some of us pictures of his daughter. I told him I had just seen a picture of him at a gallery opening in New York, carrying his daughter in a papoose. I told him how much I enjoyed seeing the picture of him being a real, normal dad, and that the picture just seemed so wholesome to me. He seemed genuinely moved and thanked me, and that’s about as much as I remember. I actually had a few other acquaintances backstage, so we hovered and occasionally glanced over to see what the band was doing.

But what did I want, what did I expect? Did I want to talk about my fantasy baseball team? Be buddies? I have no idea. In hindsight, I think I probably was trying to be too hip, too knowing. And of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum is the exchange I had with Seymour Hersh in a Petco store, of all places. First of all, there’s the fact that, much to my surprise, I recognized Sy Hersh. I actually asked myself, “Is this happening? Am I really the kind of person who sees Seymour Hersh in a store, recognizes him, and then gets starstruck?” As he checked out, I said something like, “Mr. Hersh, I’m a big fan of your writing.” He looked startled for a second (startled to be recognized and fawned over?), and then graciously thanked me.

All of which comes back around to meeting Gillian Welch and David Rawlings - probably one of the nicest encounters I’ve ever had with any famous person (I would put the few minutes of conversation I had with Dar Williams as a close second.) For some reason, at that particular point in the night, Welch and Rawlings were sitting alone. My brother and I came by and I told them how much I enjoyed “Hell Among the Yearlings” – a dark album of guitar and banjo duets that deal with murder, rape, addiction, death, and other cheery topics. They just seemed so happy to hear that someone enjoyed their work. We actually had as close to a normal conversation as I’ve ever had with anyone whose work I admired that much.

There are a number of other people whom I admire, whom I would love to meet – Gilbert Arenas probably tops the list at this point, with a number of close seconds. But I still can't answer the question of why I want to meet them. What do I want to get out of it? It’s not a natural situation, and the psychological power imbalance is so severe that I’ll end up feeling like an idiot no matter what I do or say. So why do I want to put myself through that again – because trust me, I’ve kicked myself a number of times for not being more “myself” when I was backstage with S-Malk in NY…? I don’t know. Maybe I hope to witness another exchange like the one I did between Brendan and D-Mac, which got me a cameo on Wizznutzz. And, as I often do, I'm hapring on the negative: after all, there is that giddiness, that excitement, when you get to stand in front of someone whom you greatly admire - it's immature and juvenile and totally authentic. Now if I can just try not to shank it so badly next time, maybe I'll have one less thing to regret in life.

Lifetime gigology

As close to a complete list of every concert I've ever been to as I can come up with. Also, notice the frenetic pace when I was younger - how did I do that?... and how I've moved to something like a trimester system in the past few years...

Young and in Rio:
Caetano Veloso / Chico Buarque (Sambodromo, RJ)
Faith No More / Maggie’s Dream (Maracanazinho, RJ, 1992)
Hollywood Rock 1992: EMF, Jesus Jones, Seal, Living Colour, Titas, Paralamas do Sucesso (Sambodromo, RJ)
Titas – 1992, ???, RJ
Roxette / Supla – Sambodromo, 1992

[Moved to the US]
Faith No More/Helmet (Bender Arena? Late 1992 or early 1993)
Belly/Radiohead (October 1, 1993)
Shudder to Think / Soul Coughing (Jan 1994? [This was Soul Coughing’s first show outside of New York])
Jawbox (March 1994)
HFStival (May, 1994): Pavement, Rollins Band, Counting Crows, Cracker, Violent Femmes, James [RFK Stadium, DC]
Hum/Verve (Old 930, 1995)
Course of Empire / Machines of Loving Grace (Old 930, 1995?)
Nine Inch Nails/Marilyn Manson – (Baltimore, fall 1994)
Soul de Quem Quiser (RJ/RJ, spring 1996)
Chick Corea/Roy Haynes/Kenny Garrett/Christian McBride/Josh Redman/Wallace Roney – Remembering Bud Powell (June 1996)
Soul Coughing/Trans Am (summer 1996)
Dar Williams (summer 1996, old Birchmere)
Tori Amos (Wolftrap, VA, August 1996)
Bluegrass Sessions Band [at least twice ] (1999 and 2000, Birchmere, VA)
Sam Bush band (1998? Birchmere, VA)
Lyle Lovett (small acoustic band; opener: Alison Krauss and Union Station, pre-Douglas) - March 1997 (US Naval Academy)
Lyle Lovett (Summer 1997, Wolftrap)
Phish – 7/21/97 (Virginia Beach), 12/5/97 (Clevaland), 12/28/97 (Landover, MD)
Shawn Colvin / G. Love and Special Sauce – Wolftrap, VA, August 4 1997
Ben Harper (March 9, 1998)
Soul Coughing (May 1, 1998, Oberlin College)
Seldom Scene [at least twice] (Birchmere, VA - once was March 13, 1998)
David Grisman Quintet (July 13, 1998, Birchmere, VA)
Salif Keita, Baaba Maal (Kennedy Center, summer 1998)
Louis White, Jr, Willie Dixon, Arlo Guthrie (National Mall, summer 1998)
Phish – August 8, 1998 (Merriweather, MD), August 9, 1998 (Virginia Beach), November 13, 1998 (Cleveland), 12/28/98 (NY/NY, 12/29/98 (NY/NY)
Indigo Girls (August 10, 1998)
Phish - July 9, 1999 (Merriweather, MD), July 10, 1999 (East Camden, NJ), December 15, 19999 (Verizon Center, Washington DC)
Tony Trischka’s World Turning (February 6, 1999, Montgomery College, Rockville)
Maceo Parker (April 30, 1999)
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings (June 22, 1999, Birchmere, VA)
Soul Coughing (August 2 and 4, 1999, Recher’s and 930 club)
Alison Krauss and Union Station (with Jerry Douglas); opener: Tony Rice/Peter Rowan – (Birchmere, VA, August 21, 1998)
Caetano Veloso (Warner Theatre, July 15, 1999)
Paul Simon and Bob Dylan (Nissan Pavillion, July 16, 1999)
Tom Waits (Beacon Theatre, NY, September 24, 1999)
David Grisman Quintet (October 6, 1999)
Greg Brown (October 8, 1999)
Josh Redman quartet (spring 2000, Blues Alley)
Maceo Parker (January 21, 2000)
Yo La Tengo (930, February 25, 2000)
Luna, Black Beetle, Long Goodbye (March 25, 2000)
Aimee Mann, Michael Penn, Patton Oswalt (June 21, 2000)
Luna, Elf Power (July 7, 2000)
Charlie Haden Quartet West / Ravi Coltrane Quartet (summer 2000)
Steve Turre Quintet (summer 2000)
Bob Dylan, Phil Lesh, and Friends (July 29, 2000)
Christian McBride Quartet (September 2000)
Phish - July 3 and 4, 2000 (East Camden, NJ), September 15, 2000 (Hershey, PA), September 17, 2000 (Merriweather, MD)
Aimee Mann, Michael Penn, David Cross (2001?)
Lake Trout (April 27, 2001)
Trey Anastasio Band (July 28 and 29, 2001)
Spiritualized (October 23, 2001)
SM + Jix (April 5, 2001)
Sam Bush Band and Jazz Mandolin Project (January 25, 2002)
Mingus Big Band with lecture and q and a with Sue Ellen Mingus (April 19, 2002, Department of Commerce building)
Tony Rice unit with Dan Tyminski (Birchmere, VA summer 2002)
Wilco (930 Club, October 15, 2002)
Caetano Veloso (November 20, 2002)
M.Doughty (Black Cat, February 27, 2003)
Flaming Lips with Sparklehorse (surprise opener) (April 20, 2003)
SM + Jicks (May 11, 2003)
Built to Spill (August 2003?)
Wilco (DAR, June 30, 2003) (opener: Sonic Youth)
Radiohead with SM/Jix (August 20, 2003)
Dismemberment Plan (September 1, 2003)
Belle and Sebastian (October 28, 2003)
Super Furry Animals (February 11, 2004)
Broken Social Scene (March 25, 2004)
Tortoise (April 24, 2004)
Pixies (December 8 and 9, 2004)
Phish (August 14 and 15, 2004, Coventry, VT)
SM + Jix (June 4, 5, 6, 7, 2005)
Sufjan Stevens (September 27, 2005)
Dar Williams (October 1, 2005)
David Grisman Quintet (October 21, 2005)
Broken Social Scene (October 26, 2005)
Super Furry Animals (November 8, 2005)
Benevento/Russo duo with Mike Gordon (December 27, 2005)
Belle and Sebastian (March 5, 2006)
Indigo Girls (Baltimore, fall 2006)
Joanna Newsom (November 17, 2006)
November 4, 2007 - Caetano Veloso
November 18, 2007 - Broken Social Scene presents Kevin Drew
april 2008 - okkervil river / new pornographers
may 10 2008 - swell season
may 18 2008 - radiohead


No ticket stubs but luckily others remember them - mostly from 2004 to 2006:
Ted Leo & the Pharmicists (opener: Mary Timony)- Black Cat, Washington, D.C.
Q and not U- Fort Reno, Washington, D.C.
Animal Collective- Black Cat, Washington, D.C.
The Go! Team- Black Cat, Washington, D.C


Bands that I saw in high school a bunch of times:
Fugazi, Jawbox – St Stephen’s
Neptune’s Daughter
Rise
Twisted Fish/Undertow
Pain of Life
The Human Condition
Tuscadero
Frodus
The Skavacados
Etc.

Miles: The Complete Cellar Door Sessions

The band pictured above, plus John McLaughlin and Airto Moreira, is possibly one of the great unsung jazz-funk-rock combos of all time. "Unsung" is a funny thing to say about any Miles Davis group, but (a) Miles was very good at juggling underdog-ness with bravado, and (b) this core group is only really associated with one Davis release - Live-Evil. That changed last year when "The Complete Live at the Cellar Door Sessions" came out. I'm a bug sucker for most of these Miles re-releases. I have a lot of the albums up to the mid-70s, and though I've pored over them exhaustively, I still find new material listening to these sets. This one, much like "The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions" set, really seems to capture something unique about process.

"In A Silent Way" is known for being, possibly, the quietest jazz release ever. It's like a still lake. You can practically hear every musician hesitating before disturbing the silence during the session. Miles is known to many, unfairly, as a trumpet player, and he was a great soloist. For how much his music changed over the years, it's worth noting that every phrase Miles played in his cheesy 80s groups is a phrase that he could have played in 1957. His playing style hardly changed over time, and I think that is largely to his credit. What made him astute and relevant in the late 1960s and early 1970s - the time during which jazz was struggling for relevance - is also probably what makes most of us cringe when we listen to his 1980s catalog. He was a man of his time, wholly given to whatever might have been the vicissitudes or merits of the decade in which he was recording.

What he rarely lost a knack for doing was assembling great talent and working those motherfuckers, as he might say, until the music happened. To draw a very tenuous analogy, just as Madonna is able to come out with a new album that bites whatever is popular using the best producers that season, Miles was able to draw from rock and funk groups when he sensed that jazz no longer had the ears of the street. If you were good enough, and you came up, it was just a matter of time until Miles sunk his fangs into you and got some of your energy into his group. He might or might not need you afterwards, but you were still grateful. As is the case with Dylan, I think you have to respect the singular, autocratic nature of his vision. Michael Henderson, the bassist pictured above, had been playing with Stevie Wonder. Miles simply came along and plucked him from the group. Courtesy of EDS aka the Black Rider, I heard a great story about Miles and Bill Evans, but I'll save that for later or will yield the mic to EDS at a later date.

Back to "In A Silent Way." Having read his autiobiography and listened to his music for a long time, I knew that it was often the result of a long and arduous process. I was both frustrated, and I guess a little relieved, sometimes, that we didn't get to see the process, just the final product. I mean, hearing an alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches" on the Miles and Coltrane Columbia set was a profoundly unsettling experience for me, because the version on "Kind of Blue" features so many moments that rank in my all-time favorite musical moments: Adderley's and Coltrane's solos; Bill Evans gentle "solo" (it's not fair to call something that breathtaking a solo); etc. Hearing this other version almost felt like being told that, I don't know, my real parents weren't my parents. It's being confronted with an alternate version of a thing that seemed, to me, to be so firmly entrenched in the real world that it had no alternative but to exist in that form.

The cool thing about the "In A Silent Way" set is that you can literally hear the band getting quieter and quieter with each successive take. At least that's how I hear it. I imagine Miles after every jam shaking his head, and trying to convey the sense to the rest of the enormous group convened for that session that there was still too much, too much going on. When, at the end of three long discs, you finally get to hear the versions you know so well, it is indeed a revealing moment, because you can tell you have arrived, and you imagine (naively) that all the other musicians there knew it too, especially Miles.

The "Cellar Door Sessions" is a night-by-night chronicle of four nights at the now-defunct Cellar Door (which used to be in Georgetown, I'm told, on M Street, close to the Key Bridge) in December 1970. Cool fact for me: it includes my birthday, though I was still not among the born at that point. Anyway, the first four discs chronicle Wednesday through Friday and they are impressive: we get a kind of skeletal funk, and we can hear the band growing in stature. But according to Miles, something was still missing. So he called his friend, guitarist John McLaughlin, that Saturday morning and asked him if he could join the band that night. McLaughlin hopped a train and made it down to DC in time to play a good portion of the night with the group. Mind you, it's not like McLaughlin had been practicing with these guys or anything. But the result is something truly incredible: he shows up for the second set and the band, which was already playing at a high level, suddenly explodes. Everything just crackles at once, and the group becomes sharper, meaner, fiery. I have to assume that Miles knew he finally had the sound he wanted.

What's puzzling is that this was released as a bit of studio wizardry - Live-Evil is a composite of the 6 discs, and it's not linear. It sounds, in hindsight, like a bit of a funky mess, to be honest. It's a good product, but this and the "In A Silent Way" set have both convinced me that, sometimes, you do want to see the process and not just the finished product. While the "Cellar Door" set diminishes "Live-Evil" as a product, it seems fair to point out that "Live-Evil" was always an artificial product and that what we've been given instead is a more genuine end result, even if it does take up six cds instead of two.

There's lots more to be said about Miles, but I'll save it for when I get around to owning the complete "On the Corner" sessions.