On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 13:07, Patrice L. Roussel wrote:
Be careful Joseph, you are loosing your avant credibility :-).
In fact in your top ten, what was really interesting was the fact that they were all mainstream, not even one record that could be called experimental.
Yeah. I find that I'm listening to less "experimental" CDs these days, and rarely listening to improv discs more than once. Much of it is that I'm working in a record store where most of my listening is to mainstream stuff. I'd like to spin more classical and jazz, etc, there, but there are a few hurdles: for the most part, we can only play stuff for which we have gotten promos (since we're not allowed to open discs to play them), and which we have in stock. With the high ambient noise in the space from the air conditioner, escalators, and the like, we're also effectively limited to stuff with a narrow dynamic range, which rules out most classical, as well as much jazz, since, for example, bass solos are effectively silent. And there's a practical limit to how grating things can be without driving away customers: while we spin a lot of earlier Coltrane, for example, his solos on the live "A Love Supreme" on the recent double-disc reissue of that were too much for many to take. And I'm becoming increasingly interested in hearing and doing music that reaches people emotionally, rather than having most people nod their heads in confusion and say that they found it "umm... interesting". I find that while I've gotten a lot of somewhat edgier stuff, I'm not getting around to listening to it. I have several recent Cage CDs, as well as Rzewski, Art Ensemble, etc, that I grabbed the moment I saw them but are still sitting unplayed. The one non-mainstream record that I've been grooving on most this year is Stan Getz's "Focus", which I discovered through a track from it on "The Definitive Stan Getz" which we have in playstock. But that was a reissue, so it didn't show up on my list.
Patrice (wondering what Joe has against Christina Aguileira).