music

[Jessica North]

These days my focus is on a heavier beat. Symphonic metal, or gothic metal tend grab my ear more often than not.

I'm right there with you Kyra. Symphonic/gothic really appeals to me.

[Kyra]

My daughter thinks I'm "So Cool!" because I like listening to some of the heavy metal stuff she likes. But as I said, my tastes vary. I only like some of her music, not all. Paula's hit the nail squarely on the head. I have to like it. It has to be pleasing to my ears, else it's just noise.

Hugs,
Kyra

[Anita]

I have always love classical, and continue to keep it on my radio most of the time. The reason that I gravitated toward hard rock and some metal was because the sound of those guitars was the closest I could get to "symphonic" types of music.

I find that I don't care to hear lyrics these days--at age 60, I'm not relating to much of what I hear. I've been there, done that, and I don't identify with much of it anymore.

But occasionally I get a reminder of what I once loved. I was at a jam session the other night, and some local pro musicians got up on stage and delivered some powerful songs. And one of them was "Wishing Well," a minor hit for the band Free. ("All Right Now" is their best known hit.)

"Wishing Well" got me through some hard times, and it was like seeing an old friend.

"Well you've always been a good friend of mine,
But you're always sayin' 'Farewell,'
And the only time, that you're satisfied,
Is with your feet, in the Wishing Well"

"'Everybody has a wish,
Everybody has a dream...
You got to dream, your own dream..."

I was crying by the end of that song, and my TG friend Fran, (also a hard rock guitarist), was very moved by it, too. "That was like being at an arena concert," she said. "I had no idea I'd hear something that good in this little club."

She and I are teaming up, and hopefully we'll be playing our own version of this song in a few months.

[Andrea Elise]

If it makes musical sense, has a musically logical flow, I will listen to that and enjoy it.

I do not consider rap as music. Not meaning to offend any, that is simply me. Country? Yes, but the older stuff, Johnny Horton, Johnny Cash, etc.

I listen a lot to Slacker.com as there is such a variety to choose from. My main interests lie in electronica and trance. However, there has been so much really good music done over the years that sometimes it is hard for me to choose any one genre over the other.

Andrea

[Anthony Simon]

My daughter thinks I'm "So Cool!" because I like listening to some of the heavy metal stuff she likes. But as I said, my tastes vary. I only like some of her music, not all. Paula's hit the nail squarely on the head. I have to like it. It has to be pleasing to my ears, else it's just noise.

Hugs,
Kyra

Yeah, but...

Talking Heads is my archetype of music I don't like but still has value. So from whenever they were current (80s) onwards I've known there's my sensibility, which likes some things - and other people's sensibilities. And the twain don't necessarily meet any place soon.

[Absaroka]

I listen to just about anything. I don't like gangster rap but some of the other rap is not so bad.

My wife and I have a way of evaluating what we hear. We'll ask each other "did you believe them?" It doesn't need to have anything to do with words. You can believe what Beethoven said for example.


All that aside I most like rock from the late 60's, blues, some jazz (not bebop which is too intellectual for me) and the more colorful "classical" music like Stravinsky and Resphigi. My two favorite artists, if I had to limit it to two, would be Carlos Santana and Duke Ellington. Alternatively I could say my wife and daughter.

[Anthony Simon]

All that aside I most like rock from the late 60's, blues, some jazz (not bebop which is too intellectual for me)...

I do kind of think of myself as an intellectual and there's no doubt there's an element of bop that articulates the intellectual side of the players. I, personally, find it the hardest of all Jazz to listen to - like there's a kind of wilful obscurity to it. As far as I can make out that has to do with its origins - it was like an antidote to swing - the archetypal "popular" Jazz form. But also there's a (before the term) "black pride" element to it, kind of proving that blacks could think when all the rest of the world thought they coudn't. But all of this is in the service, in my opinion, of a genre which is deeply expressive if you get past the difficulties.

But I'm pretty used to (my) intellectuality turning people off.

[Ralitsa]

I guess I like to think of myself as an intellectual as well, maybe I'm just fooling myself

So mostly I like to listen to the music that is really difficult, hence my attraction to bluegrass, and also classical and jazz. Most of what is popular doesn't seem to take a great deal of talent to perform, but if you've ever listened to Jerry Douglas play a dobro, or Scruggs with a banjo, or Glen Gould, Yo Yo Ma, etc. then you know you are listening to the best there is. I think my favorite recording of all is Beetovens Triple Concerto with Yo Yo Ma on cello, Daniel Barenboim on piano, and Yitzak Perlman on violin. Now that is simply amazing.

Right now I'm listening to Emmylou Harris, and she has just an unbelievable way of wringing every ounce of emotion out of anything she does.

[Anthony Simon]

I guess I like to think of myself as an intellectual as well, maybe I'm just fooling myself

Ahhh, we're all fooling ourselves to some extent, dear...

So mostly I like to listen to the music that is really difficult, hence my attraction to bluegrass, and also classical and jazz. Most of what is popular doesn't seem to take a great deal of talent to perform, but if you've ever listened to Jerry Douglas play a dobro, or Scruggs with a banjo, or Glen Gould, Yo Yo Ma, etc. then you know you are listening to the best there is. I think my favorite recording of all is Beetovens Triple Concerto with Yo Yo Ma on cello, Daniel Barenboim on piano, and Yitzak Perlman on violin. Now that is simply amazing.

I'm rather perverse in this in that I don't really listen to music, primarily, intellectually. I just go "do I like this?" or "Has it got content?" - both of which are felt-type things. With a lot of other stuff (like films for example) I could eventually tell you why I like something (i.e. give you intellectual rationale for why I like it) - but with music I can't really do that.

But I remember years and years ago when I did a light show and was trying to develop this project. Like I had an idea for a particular bit of music which was supposed to be like a blues, but not quite. I told this to a friend of mine (keyboard player) who was a good musician and a bit original. Him and another two guys once had a go at realising it (just for a few minutes). One of them (a guitarist) got the idea, but the other (a bass player) kept trying to make it go into a standard blues. So it's not so much music that's difficult that I respond to, but music that has that extra special little edge, that sets it apart and makes it different.

Right now I'm listening to Emmylou Harris, and she has just an unbelievable way of wringing every ounce of emotion out of anything she does.

She is great. I also like Sandy Denny, who is in that kind of vein, only from a (British) folk rock point of view and, from Jazz (and obviously not a vocalist), Bill Evans.

[Edit/P.S. I can sort of see where you're coming from from the difficulty point of view in that I need something to give my brain a really good workout. The stuff I do, from that point of view, tends to be rather active, aggressive, even masculine - I mean that is my most masculine bit, my intellect. Not very masculine, by the standards of this society.]

[Absaroka]

Music that is really difficult can be fun to listen to but it needs something more. For example I had a recording of Urbie Green playing Flight of the Bumblebee on the slide trombone, and it was impressive, but the truth is that Flight of the Bumblebee just doesn't really work on the trombone even when it's played at the right speed with all the right notes.

Anthony your'e right about the roots of be bop. At one point folks like Dizzy Gillepie were quite blunt about the fact that they set out to make music that would be so challenging that lesser musicians would not be able to copy it. I listen in awe to folks like Dizzy and Bird, who played improvisations which when I have the transcriptions I can't play after a month of working on them. I can't even figure out how someone managed to transcribe them. But it's fun to try to play, even if not my favorite thing to listen to.

As an aside as I was typing this I thought of the term cover version. Nowadays folks refer to any band doing someone else's song as a cover. But it used to be a very insulting term. A cover version meant that little more than the record cover changed, a white singer doing virtually the same version of a song previously issued by a black singer. Serious musicians did not do covers, they did their own unique version of someone elses song.

[Anthony Simon]

Yeah, Absaroka I really agree with you about the necessity for uniqueness. And you can take that critique wider, I mean in a way a lkot of modern musicians seem to be constructed of bits of old artists from the past without anything new added. I mean it's all very well played, sung, produced, whatever - but so what?

On the Jazz and difficulty issue, I have to admit that I came to Jazz as a "difficult" music. I remember coming home on a train with a guy who played rock guitar (I did lights for a rival amateur band). He said that he hoped, one day, to be able to play Jazz - and I said I hoped to be able to listen to it. Both of us considered it difficult music (to play or to listen to) but at the same time, and because of it, potentially deeper music.

I've been listening to it so long I've kind of forgotten how hard it was for me to start with.

[Paula G]

Surely the point of all art ( as long as you consider music to be art rather than entertainment) is to comunicate, if the composer / performer deliberatly makes his art inaccessable then they are failing in the first essential of communication. I firmly believe that music is art, that music can comunicate in ways that other art forms cannot, however I can't help feeling that some modern composers / performers are so far up themselves that they forget that some of actually might want to play and listen to their music.

I firmly believe that some of the best contempory music is being written for films, computer games, and more strangely Wind Bands, a lot of contempory orchestral music is ust inaccessable @*$%

[Absaroka]

Anthony from a guitarist perspective much of rock has 3 7th chords in the whole song, while a lot of jazz might have 7 different chords with all sorts of alterations to the extensions in 2 measures, followed by 3 new ones the next 2 bars.

Carlos Santana said that jazz is an ocean, rock and roll is a swimming pool and that he is currently hanging out in a lake. I'd imagine "classical" music being the Pacific to jazz's Atlantic.