With all the year-end and decade-end reviews - most of them quite depressing, to fit the times, one supposes - I thought I would do something entirely different. The past ten years has been for me one of extreme pleasure as I discovered and rediscovered all sorts of music out there, got back in to seeing bands live, and generally celebrated my own particular obsession.
When the decade began, I was still not much in a musical frame of mind. Busy beginning a family, still settling in to life in the Midwest rather than the south, and only tentatively getting back in touch with the wider world, I had a hangover from my own belief that the second half of the '90's was a period when popular music really and truly, yea verily, sucked. Two events, however, were pivotal for getting my mind back in musical mode. First was Ken Burns' Jazz, which not only managed to tick off the right people, but present American's signature musical form as something beautiful and, most of all, accessible. The second thing that happened was, in 2001, I started DJing as a part-time job. The extra cash spurred a musical buying spree that focused my attention on what I'd been missing in my exile in the southland.
Jazz, as a piece of history, isn't without its flaws; it isn't without those moments that make one want to groan. While I appreciate the depth of understanding of the music that someone like Gary Giddins brings to the table, that Wynton Marsalis can offer, one would have liked other perspectives as well. I suppose an early review I read in The Nation is correct. At the time he began to assemble the documentary Burns was relatively ignorant of the style. He turned to a few sources to construct his narrative. In the same way that he managed to rely far too heavily on George Will (!!!) for his Baseball documentary which skewed the general narrative, so, too, the reliance on just a few secondary narrative sources created problems for Jazz. For example, the idea that Miles Davis decided to try his hand at using electric and even later electronic instruments in his ensembles solely because he liked Sly & The Family Stone, the money they made, and the women who threw themselves as Sly is not only small-minded, it neglects the possibility that Miles saw musical possibilities in what became known as fusion that needed exploring. His own initial experiments would blaze a trail followed by Weather Report, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, and even Pat Metheny in later years.
The summer of 2001 was a marvelous time for me. My younger daughter was born in June, always a way to mark a moment in one's life. I had just begun training as a mobile DJ, and with the extra cash I was earning, decided to celebrate by buying some new music. I rediscovered Dream Theater after nearly a decade of ignoring them and their development as a band; one of the offshoots, Transatlantic, was another. When Miriam came home from the hospital, I remember sitting in the living room and listening to their first release, SMPTe on the headphones with the newborn asleep in the crook of my left arm and four-year-old Moriah asleep in my right.
I also discovered, belatedly (of course, but better late than never) the Grateful Dead. The archive releases known as "Dick's Picks", originally two-track masters made from the front-house mixing board that the band listened to after each show, were relatively inexpensive, and while their quality wasn't marvelous, they were and are good enough to sit and enjoy. I was working third shift as night auditor at a small resort hotel and would pop a CD in to the computer, the volume turned down so it wouldn't interfere with me hearing a guest at the front desk or answering the phone, and enjoy from just after midnight until around five a.m.
I have been a member of the Musical Heritage Society since 2000, and have enjoyed many fruits and benefits - the entirety of Franz Schubert's sacred compositions, Mozart's Requiem, even a Ravi Shankar CD and the complete recording of Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, including some numbers previously unavailable. I found an excellent remaster of Bach's masterpiece, the B-minor mass, with liner notes that told the story of how Bach had assembled the piece from bits here and there composed through the years. Then, of course, there is Henry Purcell. If you haven't heard this British Baroque composer, you need to give him a listen.
I have ventured out past the barely-acceptable in to musical extremes both exciting and nerve-wracking. The Mars Volta and Ozric Tentacles, in particular, offer something new even when listening to something heard many times before. German prog-band Sieges Even has a unique sound, quite apart from all the Dream Theater and Euro-metal clones out there. Porcupine Tree is a band unto themselves, and as my concert experience this past fall proved, quite adept at blowing the mind of an audience.
Then there's Grizzly Bear. I am reminded of, by turns, the Cowboy Junkies and early Genesis, truly an odd mash-up.
Yet, as my forays in to the Dead show, I am not above appreciating something old. I rediscovered, by turns, Robin Trower, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush, Pete Townsend and The Who (and without doubt ny favorite song-writer continues to be Townsend), and Tom Waits (a little piece of heaven come to earth). While the rest of the world seems to be gaga over Lady Gaga, I am quite happy in my own little corner of the musical universe.
For all that popular music is dominated by producers layering in far too much sound, especially bass, over simple rhythms and highly-sexualized lyrics, there are options out there. Indeed, even as the music industry continues to decline as it stubbornly clings to a business model that has been irrelevant for well over a decade, there has rarely been a time when musical options were more exciting, offering pretty much anything and everything for the discriminating listener. Musically, this past decade has been one of excitement, innovation, and opportunity. Unlike the previous decade, the past ten years have been among the best, musically speaking, I can remember since the first half of the 1970's.
